I believe quite a few older post have asked how people enjoyed SoB, or if the game is broken, and many other questions that involve someone actually finishing a campaign of it. My group finished our first ever campaign together and are halfway through copper level on my first ever RtL campaign (some of my group have played RtL before).
The goal of this post is to get response comparing the two or to help people decide if they want to get SoB. Keep in mind this is anecdotal evidence at most.
Summary of What Happened:
The original overlord went on vacation two weeks in, and between my brother and I, we overlord depending on availability, Even with our dissociative personality disorder Master of the Hunt, the overlord won in mid silver with 5 cities razed. The heroes where behind by 20 CT for most of copper before the game was blown open at silver. The plot was the "Dark Queen" and the plot upgrade which doubled the cost of weapons and allowed no potion buying was devastating.
Encounters:
In the typical negative forum talk, this was the most cried about change from RtL as the ship combat was declared broken by some people. In honesty there are mostly right. Yes all the stuff you read about Siren sitting across the board and Darkwing being a jerk are true, but minor compared to what I'm about to mention. Due to the random entorage of baddies and random terrain, as much as we wanted a cool naval battle, it was hard to start one when to two do not match up. Generally, we saw the naval encounters more as a chance for the overlord to kill a few heroes while the heroes' goal was to escape. I heard that RtL encounters early on are like this too, but in my RtL the heroes keep successfully avoiding encounters.
Dungeons:
Although the island map is annoying (our group describes it as "it's 'Nam, *****"), the dungeons are better if you like a challenge. Compared to my RtL, these dungeons are more cramped and more challenging. Most importantly, the scaling of the bosses work as when the party first hit silver, the bosses were still...well...bosses.
Map:
For those who have not seen it, the SoB map has the cities much farther apart. I was very shocked when I set up the RtL map that some cities had only one trail between them. Also the philosophy on secret trails have changed. In RtL secrets are around the hub of cities and generally allow access to more dungeons. In SoB secrets are shortcuts as they link places more efficiently and you do NOT have encounters along them.
Presentation:
Although a very minor part of gameplay, the record sheet for SoB looks cleaner. For once the overlord should have about the same number of CT as heroes and the whole Divine Favor really helps this out. In SoB, the overlord was generally 20 CT ahead and the heroes were definitely feeling the gap. In my RtL I, the overlord, am about 20 CT behind currently and I feel like I'm completely out of it. I have seen posts claiming the overlord should be at least 50 CT ahead of heroes in copper RtL to even stand a chance.
Confounds:
This is based off my personal experience and my group is only in its second campaign. I have not finished a full RtL campaign. The hero selection for our RtL is better (Tahlia, Grey Ker, Thorn, Runehand) compared to our SoB (Corbin, Ispher, Red Scorpion, Astarra). We had the anti-undying staff in SoB and they were some bosses in SoB where if they could "undie" t would have been much uglier.
