Probably a dumb question but here it is anyway...

As an example, I'm about to play The Hunt Begins in "The Hunt for Gollum" quest. The Setup instructions state "Reveal 1 card per player from the encounter deck, and add it to the staging area."

What if a treachery card is one of those two cards revealed? (Evil Storm in this case, which is pretty much guaranteed to have no effect at the beginning of the quest when player threat total is low..). Do you consider that card "added to the staging area" and then immediately resolved and discarded? (Probably...). Or since the instructions specifically state to "add it to the staging area", would you (a) immediately resolve the treachery card and draw again to replace that card to satisfy the "add it to the staging area" requirement. Or, (b) just ignore the treachery card and draw again until you have two cards that would remain in the staging area? (I doubt it.....but am not completely sure). Thanks in advance!

When doing the setup Treacheries do count and you process them just like you do during play. Yes, some of them have no impact early on.

From a rules perspective, the instructions are telling you to reveal a certain number and attempt to add each to the staging area, but that part is irrelevant for Treacheries and so that part basically fizzles, but you have still done the Reveal for the requisite number of cards.

If it wanted you to ignore treacheries it would say so explicitly.

If it wanted you to keep revealing until 'one per player' cards were in the staging area it would say that, instead of just specifying the number to reveal.

Yes, that certainly makes perfect sense. Thank you for the response!

Honestly, this is one of the things that really highlights the "luck" aspect of the game (unlike Bilbo, I was not born with much of it at all). Sometimes you'll luck out and get cards like The Necromancer's Reach or Despair in the opening draw. Other times, you get Caught in a Web (potentially devastating early in the game, when you don't have allies to help share tasks) or Old Wives' Tales .

1 hour ago, JJ48 said:

Honestly, this is one of the things that really highlights the "luck" aspect of the game (unlike Bilbo, I was not born with much of it at all). Sometimes you'll luck out and get cards like The Necromancer's Reach or Despair in the opening draw. Other times, you get Caught in a Web (potentially devastating early in the game, when you don't have allies to help share tasks) or Old Wives' Tales .

This is certainly true in earlier quests (and often the opening reveal was the most important part of early quests), but recently they seem to have shifted to either fixed set-ups, or ones in which the players choose (1 different location/enemy per player). I've found that this has made scenarios considerably more consistent. Assault on Osgiliath, to be fair, can be gamed on this, but many others it just serves to emphasise player choice.