Hammerdal said:

Sweetheart Stats:

Silver: Move 4, Life 50, Armor 7, Attack: Red Green Yellow Silver Silver

Gold: Move 4, Life 100, Armor 9, Attack: Red Green Green Gold Gold

Sweetheart has Swim, Ironskin, Unstoppable, Reach, Pierce 5 and Grapple.

Sweetheart may only Grapple one hero at a time, but all attacks Sweetheart makes against that hero are automatically aimed.

Upgrade (Captain Bones only): Death Head (13)

All your normal (i.e. non-master) skeletons gain the ability to explode. They may do this at any point during their activation for free, dealing one red die of damage (ignoring armor) to all enemy figures in adjacent spaces. Skeletons that explode are instantly killed and cannot be prevented from dying by any means.

Lorien said:

Hey, they fixed the grammar from the Knight skill! Unless that's a paraphrase.

Lorien said:

Wow, looks like they actually learned their lesson from Swallow! I specifically predicted they wouldn't, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. I'm a little mystified why they decided to put that caveat on this skill but not Ran's Mark, though, especially after removing all the healing runes from RtL.

We still have this weird terminology problem where to "suffer" a wound and to "sacrifice" a wound somehow mean exactly the same thing (despite the fact that one implies you're gaining a wound and the other implies you're losing one), but they can't really fix that in an expansion.

Lorien said:

I think this mechanic would get old really fast. Presumably you can cherry-pick skills as in RtL, so I assume you only buy these skills for your runner, but I think I would still get really frustrated to be unable to use my skill for long periods of time, especially if the reason is that I didn't happen to be the hero in a good position to tap the glyph.

I sympathize with wanting to be able to create cards with powerful effects but longer recharge times than one turn, but I thought that doing it based on areas or glyphs was already a little shady; doing it based on which hero activates the glyph just seems mean, especially when you know the heroes are going to manipulate their skill line-ups to get around that whenever possible.

Yeah, the whole "you and only you" thing is going to suck, especially since in RtL at least there was one glyph per level so three in the whole dungeon. I guess it will cut down to a degree always sending some high speed/fatigue runner in to hit the glyph. That's going to suck with RWA if you aren't paying attention. Get her to close and there goes the chance for resetting a skill.

Or give the Rune Witch the skills that only activate once every flip. The only good one is the potions one. The rest are Ok-ish.

Lorien said:

Captain Bones is remarkably silly.

Tell us more! .... More!

Interested in anything you feel like sharing, but if you need a prompt, how about:

More Skills?

Other Treasures?

Those treasure map cross things?

Changes to Rumours?

All about islands?

All about sharks/squids?

Something about the other avatars?

blah blah blah

Antistone said:

I'm sorry, you're right. Ran's Mark has the same caveat as Koll's Mark: Losing these wounds cannot be prevented by any means.

Somehow this last sentence was eaten by the forum software... although I should try to blame Sweetheart for it...

I don't want to spoil too much to keep the fun when you open the box... although I'll take a closer look at what I think could be interesting to share...

When you have collected 4 treasure map parts, you can travel to a Buried Treasure Spot (yellow X on the map) and draw 1 of the 5 treasure cards at random.

The possible treasures that you can find are:

- 2500 gold

- 5000 gold

- Choose and take any 2 cards (other than "Treasure Cache") from the treasure deck

- Choose and take 1 available skill for free and give it to one hero. The skill costs no coins or XP to learn

- Rogers' Lucky Doubloon (Ship Upgrade): All heroes aboard the Revenge receive 1 bonus power die or power die upgrade when manning any ship's station or firing any cannon

An island is just like a dungeon with 3 levels, with the one exception that the first level is played on the island map (with an entry to the deeper dungeon levels on it)

Holy crap, a free skill?!? Nice!

What are the Treasure Map parts? How do you get them? Are they rewards for the bottom of a dungeon (giving heroes *real* incentive to go to the third level of a dungeon)?

-shnar

Antistone said:

Agreed. Reading these card details, I'm a bit worried that there won't be enough glyphs to activate to make them worthwhile. Unless maybe this is another way for them to try to counter the blitzing technique...

-shnar

shnar said:

How does this counter the blitzing technique? Doesn't blitzing normally involve activating glyphs quickly and keeping time in dungeons to a minimum? That would tend to make these skills more powerful (relative to other skills), because there would be fewer combat rounds between when they got recharged...wouldn't it?

I guess for the sprinter. A lot of our blitzes don't get that 2nd Glyph (i.e. the heroes go through the first level and then abandon, deeming the 2nd level's glyph is too far away to even try for it). If that were the case, it /might/ be a counter?

Either way, I don't entirely like it

-shnar

Plus if they didn't put something in there about those skills refreshing after ending/fleeing a dungeon, if you do the standard 1-2 level grab and run blitz you'll end up entering a dungeon with multiple skills unusable. If their intent is to try and kill the blitz, then maybe it will work. I'm trying to reserve judgement on it, but my gut impression is that its a bad system.

The only person I'd consider putting these on is Astarra, and even then the two we've seen aren't great. Captain doesn't allow for guard orders (which is a good thing), but it's cost to refresh makes it nowhere near as useful as Leadership. Pierce 10 and aimed is nice, but again, if you're only using it twice a dungeon or you're being forced to open yourself up to a death to refresh it, I'd rather just get Born to the Bow and have the benefit at all times.

Big Remy said:

I'm still not seeing why that would happen only with a blitz strategy and not with...whatever the alternative is.

Antistone said:

You are right, it doesn't just effect only a blitz strategy, but it definitely has a huge impact on the blitz strategy. Mainly because blitzing relies on having one guy with high speed, high fatigue and low CT to do a Run action, grab the coins, spend fatigue to keep going, drink a fatigue potion, grab a chest and activate the glyph. If he dies, he dies. So unless all the skills that require the "you and only you activate a glyph" condition are on that guy, it defeats the purpose of doing a blitz. The result is that your movement through the level gets partially dictated by who needs to activate the glyph to get their skill back, not by the best strategy.

I mean, Pierce 10 and Aimed is great but only being able to use it once a level at the most, more likely one a dungeon? To me that's a pointless skill.

Eh, just stack these skills on *one* guy and make sure he's the one activating glyphs, and you get awesome abilities useable every dungeon level

I'm still curious about the treasure map. Sounds like they added an extra "reward" for completing an Dungeon, a corner of a treasure map. Once you have the four, you go to an X and get an extra bonus. *That* sounds like a good counter to blitzing, real incentive to want to clear out a dungeon...

-shnar

Antistone said:

With the word "sacrifice", that caveat is redundant anyway. It's just there to prevent abuse by people who don't master English well enough.

When you sacrifice something, you give it away. If you prevent your own sacrifice, you haven't given it away, so you can't get the reward.

As an example, let's say you have an imp on your wrist that prevents you from losing money: it puts your money back into your pocket every time you are going to spend it.

You go to a local store and you want to buy a beer. The moment you hand your money to the store owner, the imp puts your money back into your pocket, i.e. prevents your loss of money.

Guess what? You don't get the beer.

Antistone said:

"Suffer": it is inflicted to you.

"Sacrifice": you give it away.

None of these terms imply that you are gaining a wound.

In natural spoken English, if I suffer a wound, that means that I am now wounded, i.e. I have a wound in my body that wasn't there before. My total number of wounds has increased.

If I sacrifice something, I give it away, and don't have it anymore. My supply of whatever I sacrificed has decreased.

In Descent, to suffer a wound means that a token gets removed from your character sheet. Which would make sense if they were "health" tokens or something. But they decided to name them "wound" tokens, even though "wounds" are something that you normally don't want to have. This makes the terminology unnecessarily confusing.

But, as I said, they can't really fix that in an expansion.

Antistone said:

I agree. It confused me! I only had the wound tokens in mind in my reply above, not the logical fact that when you are wounded, you gain a wound.

Antistone said:

They could at least do it in a FAQ, by declaring "We hereby put an end to our evil plot of confusing players by naming stuff the opposite of what it actually is, and rename the heroes' wound tokens health tokens."

For the people interested in integrating stuff in RtL:

I got the expansion too (and 3 promo dudes) at Essen. Looks to be better balanced though I am a bit dissapointed at the lack of rules integrating the balance changes to RtL. Really like the less powerful hero abilities, will see if they can be used in the other campaign. Same goes for the +1 fatigue upgrades. Also like the treasure map things... though I do need to find a place to put X-es on the old campaign map.

Still have to take a good look to all the new dungeons and rumours. I do know that it is nonsense that all the rumours can be integrated in RtL, one of the gives a ship upgrade as a reward. The game does give the impression they spent more time in balancing and adressing complaints about stuff like dungeon blitzing.

If work would stop getting in the way, the module I'm working on ( here and here ) might be a good supplement for treasure maps in RtL, especially if rules can be worked out to play both boards at once (something I'm going to try and work out once I get the game).

Any idea now that the game is in the consumer's possession when the rulebook will show up?

Scy800 said:

If you're referrring to the Q&A's section on integration, it's talking about using the RtL rumors and dungeons in SoB, not the other way around. I haven't seen all of the rumors and dungeons from RtL though, so can't say for sure that none of them mention something that wouldn't exist in SoB.

Scy800 said:

Wait, THREE PROMO DUDES?!? What came out at Essen?!? Pics please!!!

-shnar

These were Nara, Tobin and Jonas, three of the usual suspects. And they were not for free, they were sold in a Character Pack including figure, Descent sheet and Runebound card for 3 Euro each.

Why can't they just release that character pack for general release? (Ok, I know there are reasons, some of which might even be legitimate, but I want more toys, dammit!)