This is an AAR for a game of Descent we started with a few guys. I'll update
this as the campaign progresses.

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First session

The Overlord was a somewhat experienced player, 3 new players. We had the maps
set up for 4 players, but one player couldn't make it so we played the fourth
character as a party. We had:

Me: Warrior / Beastmaster as Grisban the Thirsty
Person 1: Mage / Necromancer as Shiver
Person 2: Scout / Wildlander  as Laurel of Bloodwood
Person 3: Healer / Apothecary as * (absent)

We were playing the base game and Labyrinth of Ruin + Shadow of Nerekhal +
Oath of the Outcast (H&M) expansions

Tutorial mission

Objective: Don't let Overlord's goblins escape the map, kill Mauler the Ettin

This went about as it was intended: The players learned the mechanics, got a
tiny bit of loot, defeated the Overlord. Nothing to write home about. Mostly,
as new players we learned to fear the goblins amazing ability to pass through
ourselves, and took this lesson to heart.

With the loot we bought new boots for the Wildlander (Elven Boots).

First encounter of Fat goblin

Objective: Rescue 5 pumpkins! A little known fact is that the creator of this
map also worked on World of Warcraft quests

We continued to the first encounter of the Fat Goblin with 4 characters / 3
players + Overlord. We got pretty severely beaten here. The overlord used
merriods and goblins: Merriods spawned right in front of us, blocking the path
to the pumpkins. Our strategy involved doing anything to get the fastest
characters in our party to hold the pumpkins as fast as possible, sacrificing
the positioning on the slower characters. We managed to kill one of the
merriods on our first turn and two of the characters managed to get to the
farm.

Due to a mistake in remembering that large monsters occupy only one tile while
moving and then expand, we did a big mistake as the players: We figured we'll
use the beastmaster's wolf + the necromancer's zombie to block the
reinforcements at the entrance, but as the enemies were able to move
diagonally, we ended up locking the beastmaster + necromancer at the entrance
area. This essentially meant the faster and weaker characters had to fight the
goblins alone at the farm. At least we lucked out and got a treasure chest
from a loot, and from that the Light Hammer.

The Overlord was pretty ruthless and farmed a ton of cards by killing us.
Eventually we managed to get all the characters to the farm, and cut our
losses by getting some loot and rescuing one pumpkin. RIP.


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Second session

We played with 3 heroes as the healer was absent again.

Second encounter of Fat Goblin

Objective: Kill Splig, the Fat Goblin, before he can escape

The Overlord selected the Shadow Dragon, spiders and goblins. The shadow
dragon was placed in the room behind the spiders. Due to the pumpkin mess, the
fat gobbo had 18 health.

The game ended up being a pretty close call. The shadow dragon moved in to
join the spiders and all of the map was essentially fought in the first room
of the map as the shadow dragon utilized the now-feared tactic of blocking
tiles and passage. The shadow dragon got some pretty nasty fire damage on us.
As the beastmaster my mistake was being adjacent to the dragon, which forced
me to get shock on my rolls, which didn't happen. Most of the damage to the
dragon happened by ranged attacks.

The Overlord found the objective token on the 3rd interrogation and got the
gobbos to the room with the shadow dragon, which finally had the courtesy to
die after an extended struggle. The Overlord had demonstrated to us in the
past two encounters that the most powerful tactic in the game is to block
passage, and we used this against the Overlord. The scout did some amazing
damage with the once-per-encounter and killed the smaller gobbos as the fat
one used the meatshield ability. The Overlord hit the beastmaster with a
knockback, and pushed the beastmaster in the room where the shadow dragon
starts in.

After a while, with some ruthless path blocking, the fat gobbo was alone and
the mission was almost certainly ours, so we decided to use the knockback from
earlier to our advantage and looted some stuff with the beastmaster. We killed
the Fat Gobbo and won the encounter.

Overall the Overlord was going for a pretty risky play, but RNG wasn't in
favor. For example, he used a double move with the fat Gobbo intending to run
past our roadblock, but RNG decided the roadblock remains.

With the loot we bought Immolation for the Necromancer.

Masquerade

Objective: Check the masked party-goers and find non-monsters to increase your
chances of finding Lord what'shisname after the encounter finishes.

The moment this mission was explained to us, we figured this was a bull
RNG mission. Holy ****.

The Overlord chose a shadow dragon and Razorwings. Our strategy was to kill as
many of the enemies as fast as possible to minimize the number of objective
tokens the Overlord can check. However, fearing shadow dragon, we figured to
nuke the shadow dragon as fast possible, mostly made possible with some new
skills and items we got. On turn 1, with some pretty good rolls, the dragon
died, however not before 2/3 of the heroes were immobilized by one of the
million cards the Overlord farmed on us in the previous mission. The only one
capable of movement was the beastmaster with his fantastic 3 movement. Due to
a misunderstanding with the rules the wolf moved twice and reached the
razorwings. Apparently familiars can only move and attack once, not twice.

On the Overlord's first turn he found 2 of the 3 objectives and started
heading for the escape. We attempted to block the passage, but since only the
slowest of our characters were available we had a hard time achieving this.
With not much else going for the encounter, the overlord escaped with the
vampire lady and ended the mission as all monsters were dead. We resued 1/3 of
the objectives by default.

The die roll had a 50% chance of succeeding, and it landed in our favor.


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Third session

Wildlander was absent, but apothecary was present. The game was played with 3
heroes.

The second encounter of the Masquerade

Objective: Kill Serena before she can escape.

In the second part of RNG Quest, the Overlord placed spiders to block the
initial door. On turn 1, we cleared out the spiders with some pretty good dice
rolls and opened the first door using the Beastmaster, as he had 5 strength
and was the best character for the job. In the second room the Overlord placed
yet another ******* Shadowdragon. We initially got some good damage in, but
couldn't kill it on turn 1.

The enemy hero (lieutenant?) Serena opened the 4 first doors on first try, out
of 6 total. As a post-game discussion it was agreed that in this map if the
Overlord didn't successfully open the first door on his first turn, the heroes
would have easily won. In a way this was the previous map's RNG bias reversed
for the first turn, but with some unlikely dice rolls, the Overlord ran away.

The game ended up being largely the heroes attempting to carry the fat
beastmaster with his 3 movement to the next door, but unfortunately we had no
way of regaining stamina for those extra moves. The Overlord failed one
attempt to open the doors, that being the 2nd last one. After Serena got
through the first 3 or 4 doors, we were about ready to cut our losses and
simply loot as much as we can. With some luck we got the valuable loot items.

Disregarding all this, the map was a pretty close call: After having split the
party in the second room where the Overlord can spawn enemies (Ettin!),
the beastmaster got to the final door and would have been able to hit
Serena on the next turn. Unfortunately, Serena opened the last door and
got away.

With the loot we bought a shield for the apothecary.

The first encounter of Castle Daerion

Objective: Light bacons on fire, don't let the Overlord kill civilians

The Overlord selected yet another Merriod in the area near the hero entrance,
and a pack of beastmen. As heroes we intended to barricade ourselves in the
house in middle of the map and use the heroes to block enemy entrance in
there. This is the map where we really learned that even though we spend 20
minutes planning a turn the Overlord can still play a card that we didn't
predict and the whole plan falls in shambles.

In this case we opened the house and move the civilian in there, blocking the
Merriod using our characters. We were feeling pretty good about this plan
until the Overlord played one of those mind control cards and casually walked
one of the characters acting as a barrier away. After this the merriod
strolled in the house and started butchering the civilians.

The game developed into a situation where 2 civilians were dead and the rest
were wounded in the central house. The merriod was at the center of the room
keeping all the heroes at the southern end while the beastmen were at the
northern end. In this situation we were pretty certain of defeat, but after a
way too long thinking phase we found a way to get out of this situation and
kill all the enemies with a pretty complicated series of moves with all the
characters. We split the party, advancing to the bacons in the other half of
the map while keeping the last wounded civilian safe in the house by blocking
the other entrance in there.

We managed to save one of the civilians and got two bits of loot. Due to the
map having been going for such a long time, the Overlord had somehow gathered
a fearsome hand of Overlord cards. The next session will probably be a pretty
hard one due to the 3 lost civilians and these cards.


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Fourth session

It should be noted that this session was played on a tuesday evening and people
were rather restless towards the end. It was decided Descent is better for
weekends when people don't have early mornings.

We also had a full complement for 4 players this time.


The second encounter of Castle Daerion

Objective: Rescue lord what'shisname

This map seemed pretty hard in the beginning. Perhaps if we had rescued a few
more villagers we could have done a better job, but let's say that even then
it would have been unlikely for us to win this map.

As heroes there was little strategy involved in our play - our goal was to
breach through the initial wall of monster (2x shadow dragons) and quickly
reach the target. This started in a way that pretty much doomed the rest of the
map, considering we rolled 4 critical failures in a row. This was kinda bs.

We dealt some damage to the first shadow dragon, but ultimately the wall of
enemy prevented us from moving at all.

We also used the apothecary's heroic feat early on to browse
through the Overlord's impressively sizable deck, and removed one of the scary
ones. We left a particularly nasty one in the deck: The card that removes all
stamina from one hero and all heroes adjacent to him, upon moving in a new tile.

The Overlord used this on the beastmaster (did he?) as we moved in to attack
against the shadow dragons, preventing the wolf spawn.

After an extended struggle the heroes were still stuck in the starting area
while the Overlord was mauling the lord what'shisname with shadow dragons,
ettins and zombies. We lost the map fair and square without coming even close
to winning it. This was about as one-sided as any map we've had so far. The
massive 4 and 6 tile sized figures blocked our passage for the entire game.


The intermission

Objective: close 3 portals, don't allow Overlord to capture the objective.

This map was pretty large and our mistake was playing it after we noticed how
large it was. It got pretty late and the heroes simply wanted to go home and
lost interest in the game.

The Overlord selected shadow dragons, bane spiders and carrion drakes. Our
initial plan was to split the party in two and close two of the portals at
the same time, but we abandoned this plan when we learned the carrion drakes
fly and can pass through us. We instead decided to send two heroes closing one
of the portals while two heroes protected the objective. We decided to first
close the portal at the western side of the map with the beastmaster as that
had the highest chance of success with 5 strength. However, we also wanted
to block the shadow dragons with their 6 tile figures from blocking us, so
the defending heroes moved on to handle this problem.

With some luck, one of the shadow dragons died and the apothecary managed to
close the portal. This resulted, surprisingly, in a new enemy lieutenant
spawning and butchering the apothecary. Meanwhile in the south the necromancer's
skeleton had been lost, and the wolf in the west had been killed while the
bane spiders blocked passage. The wildlander had moved south and managed to
quickly close the portal.

Ultimately, the game developed into a situation where carrion drakes were
sitting on the objective and only the beastmaster and wildlander were capable
of acting at all. With some lucky rolls we managed to post-pone the end a bit
by killing both the carrion drake and bane spider masters, but this only
prolonged the game as the Overlord killed the beastmaster with an overwhelming
force and prevented us from grabbing the final objective.

Of note in this session is that one of the players forgot he had a shield
purchased. Essentially he rolled all defence rolls with only half the dice
he could have used. Derp.

We discussed the game at length with the Overlord and other players. Something
that we fail to understand is how OP the large monsters are. In what scenario
would the Overlord ever choose any monsters except the massive ones that have
tons of HP and expansion? There is a ridiculously broken tactic with the large
monsters where the Overlord starts a move action, moves so that he remains
outside the adjacent tiles to a hero, then expands from that tile so he's next
to the hero (but not considered adjacent), then attacks. This allows the
Overlord to avoid such hero traits as Shiver's extra move cost. The only case
where small monsters would be more useful is missions like the Fat Goblin 1
where multiple enemies zipping through heroes have more use than blocking
passage.

Another issue is that our party is not all that great: The necromancer is,
bluntly put, next to useless. As we didn't really know the game when we
built our party we made some bad choices. The corpse explosion on the
necromancer hasn't ever been useful as the Overlord only uses the large
monsters which don't give adjacency tiles. With the beastmaster I wasted
my experience on the wolf giving the brown defence die for adjacent heroes,
even though that brown die is all but awful. My beastmaster character is
also so slow that most of the times he manages to reach the enemies the
battle is already over. The apohecary might be useful if the Overlord
ever actually dealt damage to us. Most maps tend to be damage races
to the objective tokens and heroes are ignored. The only character that
tends to be overall useful is the Wildlander.

We'll see how things change in the second act!