Finally I got all expansions including Chains that Rust and last sunday we started to play Heirs of Blood campaign me as OL

I will try to post here session reports about each encounter we played, including my thoughts on encounter etc. Maybe this will be interesting for someone, any advice about deck building and tactic are welcomed

Hero Setup:

One Fist - Beastmaster

Logan Lashley - TreasureHunter

Ispher - Apothecary

High Mage Quellen - Geomancer

At first I was really troubled about this pick. OneFist Beatmaster form the very start gains BYR attack dice with reach. Latter I decided that he is not this scarry because of his limitation to 1-hand weapon

Logan TH and Quellen as Geomancer are classic and promiss great loot and battlefield control

Ispher as Apothecary feels ok, I dont sure what to expect of him aside of great healing

OL deck:

I chose Basic 2

OneFist has 2 Int and 2 Awareness so Blinding speed and Mental Error will work fine.

Grease Trap will work great on Quellen with Awareness 2

and Mimic for Treasurehunter. Great

As plot deck I chose Cursed by Power without any particular reason, just wanted to try it out, you know, for fun =)

Summary of play sessions:

Acolytes of Saradyn - OL won. Got 4 threat token + 2 for win. Heroes got 150 gold (3 search tokens).

At shop phase they bought Crossbow for Logan (lucky!)

Siege of Skytower - OL won. Got 3 threat token + 2 for win. Heroes og 75 gold (3 search token) and treasure Bloodscript ring

Nothing at shop phase

Acolytes of Saradyn.

In starting hand I got Mimic, Grease trap, Blinding Speed, Sign of Weakness.

I placed goblins far enough from heroes

Heroes idea was to place summon stone on 21A tile to block nonwater passage (circle on the picture), so that my goblins should destroy stone in order to reach 9A tile.

On the picture green arrow is stamina movement and red arrow is Grease Trap movement. High mage removed stun and placed summon stone, his stone attack missed.

After this failed turn his fate was sealed, and he never left that space.

Ispher rushed torwards the wounded clergy. Logan looted first token and rushed to the next token on 11A tile.

One fist spawned his wolf and went to 21A to help Quellen kill the goblins.

On my first turn Qullen was KO by goblins, stone was destroyed, and I blocked him with my 2 barghestrs so that OneFist couldnt res him with one action.

One of my goblins rushed to the 9A but pesky wolf killed him next turn. My another two bargestrs closed to logan a little bit and used howl in order to drain some stamina from him.

I positioned them to block entrance to 4A tile. So that my future Mimic could hide from Logan behind them.

After that OneFist killed minion barghest with 2 attacks but couldnt reach Quellen, and Quellen made stand up action. Logan Spawned mimic on 11A , instead of attacking mimic used his 3 move points to run behind barghests, after that Logan moved closer to barghest for some reason (he wanted to die perhaps ). Ispher gave logan a poiton but generally he was useless because he tried to stay close to wounded clergy and all his attacks were miss due to range.

After they divided each of them became easy prey. In next several turns I killed each of them and gained 4 trheat tokens.

Summary:

I think this Quest is great because it plays on heroes greed. They wanted to loot as much wounded clergy as they could, but because of this Ispher was useless for several turns. And they decided to loot everything at once and thats why Lohan run to another part of the map. So they fell one by one

Grease Trap play was game winning, High Mage was knocked out several turns in a row after that, so as OneFist on his next turn. And Mimic survived through whole encounter and cause serious damage to Logan. Achievement unclocked! =D

Maybe they should have run together at once, killing everything and leaving clergy for the later part. I dont think I could have stopped them if they moved together.

OL Deck:

I got Raven and Scourge (Chains that Rust new class) familiars for my 2 XP. Raven because its my favorite card in game and Scourge because I wanted to try it out. (and oh yes he is AWESOME, more later)

We are doing the last quest in this campaign this coming saturday, and when I'm done I will write a review if I get the energy.

Why? Because I think this is by far the most imbalanced campaign in the Descent universe. It has nearly killed my enthusiasm for the game, which is very sad. I finish this campaign only out of courtesy to the play group, before taking a long break to play Imperial Assault.

But I'll save my rant for later! Hope you'll fare better.

we played SoN previously and our heroes won every single quest except introduction and ... a finale.

OL didnt do anything genious or particulary outstanding and cheesy, just some smart casual play and he won that quest easily, thought we were geared up into space

so everything is possible, good luck to you! Come and share with results)))

shop step was a disaster, they draw a Crossbow, and scraped just enough gold to take it. Like Logan TH was not terrible enough =\

so now they have 0 gold.

Quellen the Geomancer gained StoneToungue - one more stone, 3 mp and grey defence die for them

Ispher the Apothecary gained Concotion - suddenly his damage output is quite formidable

Logan the Treausre Hunter gained Survey - cause he likes to know what to excpect in loot deck

Plot Deck : I bought Masques and The Dark Mark. Masques give ability to make one hero attack to miss before dice rolled, once per quest, for 1 token. Dark Mark in short give a possibility to cancell damage dealt to one hero in order to make another particullar hero to suffer 2 damage.

Deck : summon Raven and Ties That Bound. Last one feature new servant - Scourge . You need to exhaust this card when non servant monster is defeated to place Scourge in its place.

Siege of Skytower

As open groups were chosed Harpies as invading force and Reanimates as support force. Harpies simply for their fly and flock abilities to move faster across water and to pass throught summon stones in case heroes block the way. Cause now they can have 2 Summon Stones. Reanimates were choosen to make free Raven summon and also I planned to overrrun heroes together with harpies on the second turn. I thought heroes would rush to control room, but no

Here is the map after setup:

Heroes decided to wipe spiders first and thus placed themselves close to the Spider Nest. Also from the very beginning they agreed that most important for them is to loot as much as possible and to kill Alric Farrow.

Logan looted first token and got the Treasure as the very first card! it was a BloodScript ring (+2 health - 1 willpower and terify on surge). Strangely enough High Mage dashed to the left to loot another token.

In my opinion that was a huge mistake, they should have rushed to the control room and clear all Reanimates, but alas

In my first turn I spawned Raven from master Reanimate. Minion Harpies thanks to Flock reached the central room. I decided to move Reanimates closer to the heroes and dealt some minor damage to Geomancer. So now I blocked control room entirely. Scourge and what left of spiders did some minor harassment to wolf familiar and summon stone. Alric and Belthir took a flight to the right wing.

Map after first OL turn:

And then heroes made the same mistake once again, they decided to split efforts. Lodan and Ispher used all their stamina to close up with Alric and damage him. Logan even used his ulti and made 3 attacks, one of them missed. In total he dealt 9 damage.

OneFist continued to disloge my poor spiderlings, thought quite unsuccessful. High maged summoned another stone and repositioned himself to the Spider Nest and blocked my Reanimates with both of his summon stones.

Alric Farrow was in trouble thought he would not admit it, so Belthir decided to rescue him and took another flight to left wing of the map. Leaving heroes alone. At the same moment new arrived goblins rushed to the right wing. My plan was to drag Logan with that Crossbow away from the castle so I decided to bite him with goblins. And it worked - heroes decided that Logan should go and slay newcommers and possibly loot few more tokens. And the closest loot token they left for Ispher wich is weird move to say the least.

I guess that happened because it was very late and none of us could think clearly and we play with timer so some hectic moves and mistakes happened all the time that day.

Meanwhile with few lucky rolls Spiders KO Geomancer and blocked him from OneFist.

Map after OL second turn:

Heroes discussed what to do until the timer run out, and after they were forced to stop discussion OneFist suddenly decides that harpies is top priority targets and he have to carve a path to them throught the body of Reanimates. So he leaves space near Master Spider, suffers fatigue and due to Scourge ability Logan Lashley suffers fatifue too. Then OneFist makes attacks and kill one Master Reanimate. I resummon Scourge to its space so that Harpies are still out of LOS. With his second attack OneFist kills minion Reanimate called Boris.

As you can guess on the very next turn Reanimates and harpies surrounded him and KO. And he used his heroic Feat wich can lead to a disasterous chain kill of my low hp monsters, so I played Masques and forced him to miss. I also move sir Alric closer so he could leave map next turn. He also blocked OneFist body from Ispher

So Harpies and Sir Alrick were one turn away from winning the game with help of Blinding Speed. Heroes focused on killing Sir Alric. Plan was that Ispher revives OneFist and OneFist makes 2 attacks and kills Alric. So Ispher using Cocncotion kills a Reanimate that block his path to the OneFist body and... Scourge once again reapears to block his path. With his last action Ispher tries to kill Alric, but undead knight is too strong.

Map after Heroes last turn:

Monters lingered just long enough to earn threat tokens for their master and after that they breached the citadel.

Scourge was awesome in that particular situation, created a lot of problems for heroes. They only gained 75 gold and were not able to buy anything during shop phase, also I gained 4-1 tokens from this, 2 EXP, and 2 relics - total win.

On the other side in afterplay discussion heroes agreed that this was the last time when they split so much. Together they can wipe any monster group in single turn. Damage-wise they are really strong.

On my side I really liked this map, so far HoB feels great. Quests are interesting and have multiple conditions wich is nice addition.

What quest should I pick next Baron Returns or Arizzon Archive, what do you think (if anyone read this lol =D )? And what deck to build, should I go Soulbinder or maybe invest in other classes?

We are doing the last quest in this campaign this coming saturday, and when I'm done I will write a review if I get the energy.

Why? Because I think this is by far the most imbalanced campaign in the Descent universe. It has nearly killed my enthusiasm for the game, which is very sad. I finish this campaign only out of courtesy to the play group, before taking a long break to play Imperial Assault.

But I'll save my rant for later! Hope you'll fare better.

Plz don't forget to do this.

So far I've read only very positive opinions about HoB, I'm very interested to hear reasons why people don't enjoy this campaign.

Edit: Nevermind, I misunderstood and read the quote wrong.

With Acolytes of Saradyn: Looking at the map, the hero strategy should mainly be at first to get to Tile 4A while killing as many goblins as possible. Once the Goblin spawning tile has been secured, the heroes can pick off any spawning Gobs while they start hunting down the Barghests. Greed does play a factor in this quest, you are right.

Seige of Skytower: This quest is hard to win regardless, but your heroes did make the mistake of not securing the switch room. Eventually the heroes can get overwhelmed, which is why it's a Siege. But all they really need to do is fight while knowing when to retreat.

We are doing the last quest in this campaign this coming saturday, and when I'm done I will write a review if I get the energy.

Why? Because I think this is by far the most imbalanced campaign in the Descent universe. It has nearly killed my enthusiasm for the game, which is very sad. I finish this campaign only out of courtesy to the play group, before taking a long break to play Imperial Assault.

But I'll save my rant for later! Hope you'll fare better.

Plz don't forget to do this.

So far I've read only very positive opinions about HoB, I'm very interested to hear reasons why people don't enjoy this campaign.

I´m having a hard time thinking that somebody who really disliked HoB for balance reasons would like any of the other campaigns, tbh.

I hope to be wrong, and I really don't want to judge anybody on anything, but it's very likely that somebody has had a bad experience of the campaign, or at least some of the quests in it, and therefore the campaign sucks overall, following that logic. I will preface my future response to this explanation by warning that some players have expressed or left the impression that people should have the core expectation that the game should be just balanced at all levels, quest, campaign included. Now we can pretty much agree that people really don't want to start a new quest thinking they have no chance of winning it, obviously. Truth is, you can win ANY quest, but the variance in difficulty will always vary between the two extremes. Why? Because the heroes have one configuration, itself being the combination of many factors, and the overlord also has his/her own configuration. Access to a monster monster type can make a quest much easier. Access to a specific shop item can also make some quests a lot easier. The array of possibilities is what is balanced in this game. You lack AoE effects? Buy Blast effects. You are vulnerable to a particular ability? Go around it or buy an item that makes you stronger against it. The list goes on.

It's an asymetrical game, so you can never really quantify balance or fairness between the sides at instant T of a given campaign. The tools for the job for each side are radically different. You can of course quantify the number of wins and losses, but you cannot ev en compare Hero XP with Overlord XP. It really has no equivalence.

So yeah, the game is NOT balanced in that regards. It is a game of affecting the scales, at all times, really. It's a game of ping-pong, I buy an OL card to be better at something, then the heroes buy cards to be better at defending themselves against it. Heroes buy crazy weapons, then I use a specific monster type against it due to immunity to some of this power creep.

More often than not quests look balanced once you´ve gone through the quest objectives and the players (including the overlord) are positioning themselves. Some few quests feel unbalanced, because an earlier decision or purchase made the quest lean towards one side rather than the other. That's part of the game.

Then you can lose badly on a dice roll. Or a card draw. That sucks. But that's luck. Just be prepared for these situations where you think you can pull off something and fail miserably at it based on sheer bad luck.

EDIT: updated my text to get rid of the ridiculous "variance will invariably vary"

I'm right now designing a campaign myself and try to figure out how to balance the whole thing. It's really tough and you basically have to rely on assumptions like average damage per attack and average speed and so on. Therefore, a single item (weapon or armor) may change a lot for the heroes while the Balance of the Overlord depends more on the monster groups available. For some quests, Golems may be a game breaker for the heroes.

I haven't played HoB myself yet, but both the quests and rewards seem quite ok and I borrowed some ideas for my campaign. In particular, I like that both the heroes and the OL get a relic as a reward in some quests (in contrast to the Shadow Rune).

So, I would really like to hear from Sidious78 why his experience was so bad. Quest design? Rewards? Snowball effect? With rumor quests or pure? Thx in advance.

We are doing the last quest in this campaign this coming saturday, and when I'm done I will write a review if I get the energy.

Why? Because I think this is by far the most imbalanced campaign in the Descent universe. It has nearly killed my enthusiasm for the game, which is very sad. I finish this campaign only out of courtesy to the play group, before taking a long break to play Imperial Assault.

But I'll save my rant for later! Hope you'll fare better.

Plz don't forget to do this.

So far I've read only very positive opinions about HoB, I'm very interested to hear reasons why people don't enjoy this campaign.

Me too.

I´m having a hard time thinking that somebody who really disliked HoB for balance reasons would like any of the other campaigns, tbh.

I hope to be wrong, and I really don't want to judge anybody on anything, but it's very likely that somebody has had a bad experience of the campaign, or at least some of the quests in it, and therefore the campaign sucks overall, following that logic. I will preface my future response to this explanation by warning that some players have expressed or left the impression that people should have the core expectation that the game should be just balanced at all levels, quest, campaign included. Now we can pretty much agree that people really don't want to start a new quest thinking they have no chance of winning it, obviously. Truth is, you can win ANY quest, but the variance in difficulty will invariably vary between the two extremes. Why? Because the heroes have one configuration, itself being the combination of many factors, and the overlord also has his/her own configuration. Access to a monster monster type can make a quest much easier. Access to a specific shop item can also make some quests a lot easier. The array of possibilities is what is balanced in this game. You lack AoE effects? Buy Blast effects. You are vulnerable to a particular ability? Go around it or buy an item that makes you stronger against it. The list goes on.

It's an asymetrical game, so you can never really quantify balance or fairness between the sides at instant T of a given campaign. The tools for the job for each side are radically different. You can of course quantify the number of wins and losses, but you cannot ev en compare Hero XP with Overlord XP. It really has no equivalence.

So yeah, the game is NOT balanced in that regards. It is a game of affecting the scales, at all times, really. It's a game of ping-pong, I buy an OL card to be better at something, then the heroes buy cards to be better at defending themselves against it. Heroes buy crazy weapons, then I use a specific monster type against it due to immunity to some of this power creep.

More often than not quests look balanced once you´ve gone through the quest objectives and the players (including the overlord) are positioning themselves. Some few quests feel unbalanced, because an earlier decision or purchase made the quest lean towards one side rather than the other. That's part of the game.

Then you can lose badly on a dice roll. Or a card draw. That sucks. But that's luck. Just be prepared for these situations where you think you can pull off something and fail miserably at it based on sheer bad luck.

I should write that review.

I've been playing with the same play group all along: Shadow Rune campaign -> Labyrinth of Ruin -> Shadows of Nerekhall and finally HoB. I won lots of quests during all of those up until HoB as the OL, and the finales were insanely close raced. I don't care if I win or lose the campaign/quests, really, as long as I stay competitive and make the others sweat. That's pretty much the OL role, anyways.

But HoB blew my fuse. The "snowball" effect took away the possibility even to put up a worthy resistance.

Anyways; we finish this on saturday. I will write a review with examples etc. I would love input. Hell, I might learn something!

one short question regarding the OLs here:


if scourge or raven flock is on the battlefield...am i allowed to still summon them again? and decide that the current token of scourge/raven is simply discarded?

maybe i overlooked sth in the rules, but couldnt find it so far

thanks for answerung !

Ridiculously great, you mean.

one short question regarding the OLs here:

if scourge or raven flock is on the battlefield...am i allowed to still summon them again? and decide that the current token of scourge/raven is simply discarded?

maybe i overlooked sth in the rules, but couldnt find it so far

thanks for answerung !

Yes to both questions.

sadly campaign was never finished due to IRL problems...

Thank you for the play reports

4 hours ago, Vancheng said:

sadly campaign was never finished due to IRL problems...

=(