Like I said, it's not bad, it's just that the investigation aspect, which is really the lynch pin of the whole quest, is really abstracted. A bit more so than would be my preference.

My FLGS did our Fellowship events tonight (Nov. 19) since we had events the proper weekend and the 19th was when all the pre-registered players could make it. We had two groups.

One group had really well-tuned decks played by experienced players, and easily solved all the problems that MatPP presents (massive threat increases with limited threat reduction, powerful enemies, and location flooding), and it still took them almost three hours. They eventually realized the trick with Village Stable and used it to pull out Suspects (since Hideouts still have a trigger while in the victory display), and murder the Suspect before they became a threat.

My group of four, on the other hand...other than myself, every player was relatively new to the game, and did not have a firm grasp of even the basic rules; two of the three had very ill-tuned decks on top of this (the third used one of my well-tuned ones, after I showed him how it worked). While I absolutely love teaching new players—I frequently run demos for all the FFG games that have a presence at my FLGS, such that my store owner would personally vet me for my Flight Crew application—it's a bit annoying to have to do it at an event, since one is expected to at least have a decent grasp of the game if one is attending an event. Anyhow, our game took nearly five hours. We got location flooded super early into the game, such that most of our fighters had to quest instead, and we'd have to pull shenanigans to survive the enemies that did come out. While I figured out the use of Village Stable upon the first one being revealed, we never had enough breathing room to trigger it's Response. The game was tight enough as it was (with the staging area frequently beginning the quest phase with 20+ threat!) without a Suspect or Hideout screwing us over. In hindsight we probably should have sucked it up, but we ended up winning when a lucky Investigation gave us the answer to Whodunit. With no Suspects in play when we finally advanced to 3B, we immediately won.

This quest is actually pretty fun in hindsight, and has a pretty decent replay value, since while the quest is "solved," the encounter deck is aggressive enough to add tension for a number of plays to come. I'm looking forward to adding this to our groups rotation of quests.

@Caelvasius - when you make the accusation and advance to stage 3, shouldn't the set aside suspect and hideout be added to the staging area?

Yeah, sorry, I forgot a step in my rundown, since I used "we immediately won" to stand for "we didn't have to try hard to win at that point.". Sorry for any confusion.

We traveled to the newly added Chetwood Campsite on the turn it was revealed. Next turn we quested hard, with the player running my well-tuned deck dropping most of his one-shot quest buffs to make sure we explored it. One of our players had a Legolas/red!Aragorn combo deck, and had a Ruffian in play with him with an Ambush attached. He popped the Ruffian via Ambush during the first action step of the Combat Phase, engaged Wolf-pelt Jake with Aragorn's ability, then played an Unseen Strike followed by a Quick Strike (targeting a -3 defense Jake with a +7 attack Legolas), all before Jake ever had a chance to attack. Granted, the player had some advice from me on how to properly execute the criminal, but the original idea was his. Kinda proud of him for pulling that combo straight out of his heiny. He was having trouble keeping up with the normal enemies (especially the surprise attacks by Greenway Footpads tapping out most of his defenders before the actual combat phase).

We had our event in Slovakia yesterday. Seven players split between three tables. All three groups were victorious after all, the quest was really enjoyable and I'm looking forward to playing it with my group.

I was running a Elrond/Merry/Pippin Ent deck, my friend ran Loragorn/Spiritfindel/Frodo - and he pretty much saved our bacon with Loragorn's ability + Desperate Alliance and Thrór's Map. Also while we have missed the Suspect, we were sure about the location. Fortunately, we had no problems dealing with two Suspects. The table with three players was running a slight variation of three starter decks (with extra copies added from the second core set) - Tactics, Spirit, Lore. At the last table, a guy was running some kind of Elven deck with Ents and I don't have a clue what was his girlfriend's deck.

Loragorn's limit is tied to his controler.... I've never thought of that...