my friends and i recently bought Descent, and we are looking to purchase RTL this weekend to try the advanced campaign. we all read the RTL rules on the website so we are ready to play once we get the box, however we got into a minor argument concerning the "Special abilitys" listed at the bottom. for example, Necromancy is Listed both in the Rule book at the bottom under "special ability's", as well as being listed in the corresponding city in which you need to purchase the skill. we know that Necromancy was introduced in Altar of despair.

our question is, would it be Legitimate to use this ability (and other listed ability's in RTL) without the AoD/corresponding expansions?

If any of the creatures use the ability, then yes. The skill, I would say no until you buy AoD, but that's not to say you couldn't house rule that these skills are available and create your own versions of the card.

-shnar

RtL and SoB do not come with any of the skill cards from any of the other expansions. So unless you'd like to make up cards and house rule them, you can not have the characters learn those skills.

I wouldn't do it, unles you also plan to mock up some proxies of the overlord cards and minis, since the benefit of new skills like Necromancy is balanced by the addition of monsters like Dark Priests. Just giving one side the benefits of an expansion breaks the balance.

I agree with the others. While it may certainly be possible to find the wording of these skills online and then use them, it's not exactly fair to the OL for the heroes to get benefits from an expansion that he doesn't. I think it's fairly clear that the game wasn't intended to be played this way. The expansions can be added in but don't need to be, maintaining FFG's policy of not making one expansion dependent on another. If you're going to use anything from AoD, then you should use everything from AoD, and that really necessitates owning AoD.