I've been planning to get SoB for a while now, but have sort of held off because I feel that it will make all the aspects from RtL obsolete. I have spent quite a bit of money on all this, and was hoping to somehow incorporate the two.

Other than the basic dungeons being added to the dungeon deck, has anyone else taken a look at the map and tried to work out probabilities for overland encounters. I'll admit, I'm not sure if doing this would somehow mess up the dynamics, but If I could at least have land-based encounters as well as sea based, it would be an enormous relief.

I've drawn up a number of tentative probabilities for encounters using a system like that in RtL, with areas closer to the cities often being less likely to yield encounters. However, I don't know if this will work properly, and was wondering if anyone else has created such a system, or some other work-around, to allow use of all those nice outdoor tiles and make the lieutenants land-based as well, perhaps?

It seems like the only reason there are no land encounters was because they didn't want to reprint all those tiles. Perhaps with a little tweaking it will work? Anyone?

Personally, I think they are giving the heroes a break by not having land encounters. The advantage of travelling by sea is that the heroes can cover the map much faster than by land, however, the risk or pain, injury, death, or worse is waiting behind every squall and underneath every wave.

I'd considered the same thing. I was going to offer it as an option to the Heroes when we start up the Sea of Blood campaign. It's there choice whether they accept it or not, but if accept a given ruling, it'll be in play for the whole game.

Materials not to hand, but here are my loose notes for including RtL stuff into soB.

Land Encounters. Treat all land trails as 2 dice roll. In Copper, all trails are green / blank. In Silver, yellow / surge, in gold red / enhancement. The Guide and Staff of the Wilds become available as purchasable options, but will only work on Land Trails.

All Tamalir purchases are available for Dallak. The Heroes are not advised to purchase them - especially as one of the plots closes Dallak and Dallak isn't a port, so can't be the Home Port - but they can do so if they really want to.

RtL Avatars. All start in the middle dungeon on the trail of the Eastern island. (North of the one that leads to Gray Vale) Farrow and chums are available. First Farrow costs 10 Conquest and must be purchased before the others, others cost as normal. If unable to fly, they can't cross the ocean. If able to fly, can cross ocean and use Secret Trails, but can't use Maelstrom (except for Der Heizelhod) OL must raze +2 Cities to win by razing, due to proximity to cities on Eastern Island.

OL upgrades. No duplicates of Seige Engines or, if playing the Titan, the one which increases Speed. (In fact, not too sure about Titan at all, given his potential Armour = 15/19 vs Pierce. With the massive Conquest bonus HP in SoB, he could be almost unkillable in the final combat.)

That's more what I was looking for. I can understand how things might get a bit hard to calculate or perhaps mess up some game dynamics, but I'm sure if handled right that RtL can be incorporated somehow. I like the idea about using a different die and icon in each age, it really simplifies things and limits tacky add-ons taped to the board as trail markers (plus it was hard to incorporate a good system that balances gameplay)

As my screename suggests, there's no way I'm overlording (is that a word?) as anyone but the Sorcerer king, so getting them to work somehow is a must. Just knowing that land battles and things won't ridiculously mess up gameplay is a boon. Regarding lieutenants however, I was wondering whether giving them boats would be a problem. I'm not entirely sure how it all works yet, and I have the feeling that if the new lieutenants can only cross water that there may be problems with allowing the old ones to cross both water or land. Perhaps purchasing boats with threat? But I have to read up on the new rules before figuring anything out yet.

I was thinking about allowing the talamir upgrades be bought for any city on the map, but limited to the total ammount of upgrades regardless of where you choose to upgrade. I may reconsider seeing as some cities are just begging to be exploited using this kind of freedom, but I may try it out anyway just to see if it works.

There are a number of other parts of the game I'm hoping to incorporate (and I'm not above needlessly complex homebrews if need be!). I'm interested to see if there are any more ideas out there that people have thoght of (or used) to get more out of RtL in SoB.

Land Encounters. Treat all land trails as 2 dice roll. In Copper, all trails are green / blank. In Silver, yellow / surge, in gold red / enhancement. The Guide and Staff of the Wilds become available as purchasable options, but will only work on Land Trails.

I don't think there are enough red encounters in the deck to support having that many of them in the gold tier, though I don't hve the deck handy to actually count.

All Tamalir purchases are available for Dallak. The Heroes are not advised to purchase them - especially as one of the plots closes Dallak and Dallak isn't a port, so can't be the Home Port - but they can do so if they really want to.

This one makes it look like the overlord is getting a lot of goodies and the heroes are getting screwed. Dallak is perhaps the worst city to tie them to. If they're being ported over, they should either apply to the home port or the city they were bought in.

RtL Avatars. All start in the middle dungeon on the trail of the Eastern island. (North of the one that leads to Gray Vale) Farrow and chums are available. First Farrow costs 10 Conquest and must be purchased before the others, others cost as normal. If unable to fly, they can't cross the ocean. If able to fly, can cross ocean and use Secret Trails, but can't use Maelstrom (except for Der Heizelhod) OL must raze +2 Cities to win by razing, due to proximity to cities on Eastern Island.

RtL lieutenants are too much IMO. Even if the overlord has to raze 7 cities, the Sea of Blood lieutenant rules are based around the idea that you'll have few lieutenants and that those lieutenants are limited in movement. Also, that lieutenants only flee one space in SoB is needed because the overlord desperately needs to keep them alive. If he's got access to 3 more of them, it goes from being a balancing move to making it impossible to actually stop a siege.

OL upgrades. No duplicates of Seige Engines or, if playing the Titan, the one which increases Speed. (In fact, not too sure about Titan at all, given his potential Armour = 15/19 vs Pierce. With the massive Conquest bonus HP in SoB, he could be almost unkillable in the final combat.)

I'd say no duplicates at all. They're essentially copies of the same card, not completely new resources.

City Upgrades is one of the ideas I'm toying with for the Doom Advanced Campaign and think it would work for Descent. You just need some kind of indicator that city-x has upgrade-y...

-shnar

Actually, I'm more interested in finding a way to play Sea of Blood...without the poster/sea-map..

I'd like to use the dungeons and the board-map(map that is like RtL) and when moving between points have some kind of encounter table for land/dungeons to explore. Maybe some randomized "encounters at sea" that you don't actually play out...they just happen depending on dice rolls.

Unless someone comes up with something like that, I have a feeling I'll get it and just use the dungeon cards in RtL. How many new dungeon cards is there anyway?

There are 30 dungeons and 10 rumors, and of course Avatar levels and Island levels.

-shnar

Doesn't the Torbe Albes map have encounters on the rivers? It it does (not looking at the map right now) then you could use the sea encounters from SoB. Just an idea.

The RtL map has encounters on the rivers. They could be incredibly dangerous though, since I doubt any band of heroes would want to spend money and xp on ship upgrades when the encounters are few and far between.

Land Encounters. Treat all land trails as 2 dice roll. In Copper, all trails are green / blank. In Silver, yellow / surge, in gold red / enhancement. The Guide and Staff of the Wilds become available as purchasable options, but will only work on Land Trails.

I don't think there are enough red encounters in the deck to support having that many of them in the gold tier, though I don't hve the deck handy to actually count.

Possibly, but this way at least the challenge scales with the game. There are plenty of encounters that are Green/Yellow/Red like Lost and Wandering Merchant.

All Tamalir purchases are available for Dallak. The Heroes are not advised to purchase them - especially as one of the plots closes Dallak and Dallak isn't a port, so can't be the Home Port - but they can do so if they really want to.

This one makes it look like the overlord is getting a lot of goodies and the heroes are getting screwed. Dallak is perhaps the worst city to tie them to. If they're being ported over, they should either apply to the home port or the city they were bought in.

How? The Overlord gains nothing from this, so how can it possibly be in his favour. The players have an option to upgrade on of the towns. They don't have to take it and if they won't be any the worse off than they are now. If they choose to take it up because it suits their current situation, so be it. Applying the upgrade to the Home Port essentially applies it to all towns except Dallak (which isn't a port) and would be too much.

The reason I suggested Dallak is that it seems to be the capital and there needs to be some manner of tracking the upgrades between games. An alternative option - and one I think I like better on reflection - may be to only allow them to upgrade with one type of each town once and track it in the Items section and apply it to the city they were bought in. The downside - if you bought the upgrade you won't be able to store items in that town without choosing to destroy the upgrade first.

RtL Avatars. All start in the middle dungeon on the trail of the Eastern island. (North of the one that leads to Gray Vale) Farrow and chums are available. First Farrow costs 10 Conquest and must be purchased before the others, others cost as normal. If unable to fly, they can't cross the ocean. If able to fly, can cross ocean and use Secret Trails, but can't use Maelstrom (except for Der Heizelhod) OL must raze +2 Cities to win by razing, due to proximity to cities on Eastern Island.

RtL lieutenants are too much IMO. Even if the overlord has to raze 7 cities, the Sea of Blood lieutenant rules are based around the idea that you'll have few lieutenants and that those lieutenants are limited in movement. Also, that lieutenants only flee one space in SoB is needed because the overlord desperately needs to keep them alive. If he's got access to 3 more of them, it goes from being a balancing move to making it impossible to actually stop a siege.

Agreed. But the special RtL lieutenants ought to be avaialble in some fashion, just like the SoB have special Lieutenants. The flying ones (White Death, Die Heizlhod?) won't pose a difficulty. It's the ground based ones that cause problems, cos they don't have any ships assigned to them, so what happens when the Hereos encounter them at sea? Draw two cards til you get two shiops and then choose one of those? Maybe the Avatar should start near the city on the left with the Dark Spies ability.

OL upgrades. No duplicates of Seige Engines or, if playing the Titan, the one which increases Speed. (In fact, not too sure about Titan at all, given his potential Armour = 15/19 vs Pierce. With the massive Conquest bonus HP in SoB, he could be almost unkillable in the final combat.)

I'd say no duplicates at all. They're essentially copies of the same card, not completely new resources.

Maybe. Some cards are more dangerous in duplicates than others. I doubt two Toughnesses are going to be much of an issue.

Thanks for your feedback. These notes are all just - well notes - at the moment, I'm sure with a little though we can suss out how to make the most fo the resources furnished in RtL.