Maybe a clue for new expansion?

By Straangeer, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

Bubble burst. These appear to be heroes originally intended for The Chains that Rust which were canned.

I mean, I suppose it's possible they could resurrect these for some sort of expansion but I honestly wouldn't get my hopes up :-/

To be honest, I gave up expecting new physical content for the game. Life goes on.

38 minutes ago, leewroy said:

To be honest, I gave up expecting new physical content for the game. Life goes on.

Yup. Note that these hero images were discovered in Nov 2016. That's a year ago plus. With no announcement of any kind in that time, it seems safe to say these heroes were scrapped. Why or from what expansion, we may never know.

1 hour ago, leewroy said:

To be honest, I gave up expecting new physical content for the game. Life goes on.

They should crowdfund another expansion... Or allow someone else to develop one. The community would undoubtedly embrace such a project.

Edited by Charmy
21 hours ago, Charmy said:

They should crowdfund another expansion... Or allow someone else to develop one. The community would undoubtedly embrace such a project.

Sounds a good idea!

Do we really need crowdfunding for that?

An expansion usually includes new classes, heroes, items, conditions, monsters and a couple of quests. I am not sure if we really need more map tiles at the moment.

The community already developed:
1. A large number of new classes
2. At least 3 high-quality custom campaigns
3. Three great new search card decks

The community would need to:
1. Convert the remaining CK heroes or develop new ones
2. Develop 2-5 monster groups
4. Develop 2 conditions
5. Develop some new items
6. Find a common theme and adopt an existing custom campaign e.g. Zaltyre's Weapons or War
7. Do playtesting
8. Set up a project for printing all cards and a booklet (e.g. at printerstudio) and identify appropriate minis for heroes and monster groups (e.g. from reaper bones)

And voila, we got us a new expansion for D2E.

Edited by Sadgit

It seems more or less certain at this point that FFG is not going to produce another physical Descent 2.0 product, so I'd definitely be down for at least one community expansion.

I'd be happy to help with playtesting or contributing to such a project. Producing assets (e.g. cards and minis) that precisely match the appearance of the real Descent content so that it looks like it seamlessly fits in would be a challenge though.

And none of it could be monetized of course. Even without any kind of monetization I wonder if FFG would allow it.

Edited by Charmy

I agree that it would be a big project.

However, having used components from printerstudio before I am not concerned about card stock quality. With the variation of miniature size in the last H&M packs compared to the base game, I am not concerned about that, too. Reaper Bones miniatures are cheap and do have similar scales as the latest H&M pack heroes.

Edited by Sadgit
32 minutes ago, Sadgit said:

The community already developed:
1. A large number of new classes
2. At least 3 high-quality custom campaigns
3. Two great new search card decks

That's amazing! Could you please also provide the links to all that material?
Thanks

A bunch of classes have been posted on here and the BoardGameGeeks forums. However, in my opinion most of them wouldn't be the greatest candidates for a professional expansion.

Some of them directly crib assets and ideas from other properties (for example I've seen a Druid class which is basically the World of Warcraft Druid, complete with Tree of Life). Others are very underpowered or overpowered, with not enough compelling build choices. There haven't been too many I've discovered that would cleanly integrate with the rest of the game.

Also when it comes to new classes, I think it'd be especially great if they were developed with an eye towards having strong synergy with some of the seriously underplayed and underpowered heroes in the game. For example, a class with skills that trigger special effects when carrying or consuming potions would make a character that easily discovers potions like Ulma Grimstone more compelling.

This would be a great opportunity to dust off those minis and get them on the table instead of the usual suspects like Astarra, Mok, Syndrael, etc.

Edited by Charmy

lucaster, also worth mentioning is the pinned thread at the topic of this forum, "Index of Useful Links". It has links to just about all of this stuff (and much more).

11 minutes ago, Zaltyre said:

lucaster, also worth mentioning is the pinned thread at the topic of this forum, "Index of Useful Links". It has links to just about all of this stuff (and much more).

Not really. Hybrid classes, search decks, Silken Threads and Ascension are missing. But I guess any2cards will take care of that soon :)

Now wait a minute ... I am suppose to maintain a thread I started way back when, when even FFG themselves can't seem to bother to maintain their own product (and they are paid to do so to boot) ...

Oh alright ... give me a day. :P

Edited by any2cards

At the request of Sadgit, who politely pointed out my short comings of maintaining the Index of Useful Links (I *will* get you), I have added additional custom content to said Index of Useful Links.

If anyone else has anything they thing should be added, PM me. Thanks.

Right - we should make use of these heroes in case FFG never do. It's already a plan for my epic questline to use the 1e best bits FFG haven't given us for 2e and things hinted at for 2e that we've not seen yet such as these four heroes (at least not yet, but they 'have stuff' *smiles semi-optimistically*) including the 1e lieutenants with a few tweaks where needed. I'm working on some big stuff myself so hang on to your Descent kit and watch this space!

But just a thought- were these discovered FIRST in Nov 2016? Seen mention of them before - but I've just had a thought triggered by the date mention, so searched the Runewars Miniatures news- the first RM news item was 5 August 2016:
https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2016/8/5/runewars-miniatures-game/

The RTL app released on Steam on 1 June 2016

If I'm right that The Chains That Rust is the most recent boxed expansion, introducing hybrid classes, this was promoted in the news from circa June 2016

More recently as I've said we've had some other Terrinoth games and upcoming materials (such as the Genesys sourcebook- could be a useful reference book for this and other Descent creations)

Maybe my earlier optimism was right after all and rather than abandoning Terrinoth FFG have focused on areas other than Descent for a bit as I'd wondered (although the demise of Battlelore raises some alarm bells, unless they return to that with a new edition, Battlelore's a great game to say goodbye to and had some nice expansion kit too- some of is figures like the Banshee and Great Dragon were outstanding), the timing of these events suggest FFG have had a lot of Terrinoth on their plate for the last couple of years.

I have to say FFG's logic doesn't quite add up always and seems hard to fathom sometimes- investing so much effort in Terrinoth and the RtL app contradicting situations such as abandoning (it seems) Battlelore and not updating the quest vault for Chains which would be a fairly easy task (negatives) yet at the same time things like the really high quality of the Runewars Miniatures and making the Terrinoth book the first sourcebook for Genesys (positives), it does seem a bit Jekyll and Hyde- taking good care of the Terrinoth product lines on the one hand and not caring about them perhaps enough on the other. They've not been too good at updating the website either- bits of it have the old broken Runebound link now it's Terrinoth category-wise, and the Descent 2e description is now quite dated- 'nearly ten years' is now 'over ten years' so that's not been updated in a while!

But then 1e 2005 / 2e 2012 if BGG is correct, did all these other projects bring up ideas for the game that maybe didn't work with 2e putting 2e on hold, or did they just mean there wasn't time left while these were being developed/launched? I've already suggested a possible planned gap for new D2e product as another explanation- so as to keep the focus on RM and other new Terrinoth products. Or is it a case of 3e 2019? Although a 7 year gap between 1 and 2 doesn't mean FFG sticking to that for 3 and a 3e being announced would worry me a lot (two thoughts, not wanting to fork out for yet another version unless it's really good indeed to justify the outlay, and if we didn't get all of 1e in 2e then how much of 2e won't work with 3e?)

So yes, with so much uncertainty about what FFG will do next for Descent (I've kind of given up trying to second-guess this), we could fan-create what we most want just in case we never get it or get something different, even if it might be awesome different :)

I'm still playtesting my Legacy of Timmorran campaign, but after that I'd like to try and put together a campaign using only a few expansions.

Originally, I wanted to use Mists & Chains for the theme and Chains' sweet tiles, but a year + later and there are no Chains tiles in the vault.

I then thought about lair and labyrinth or lair and nerekhall, but I've run into some vault glitches which also haven't gotten a response from support in over 6 months.

Lack of vault support is a real hurdle in developing new (campaign) content. It's a bit discouraging.

If it is just the Quest Vault that is the problem, why not just photoshop the remaining components in there after you have done all that can be done in Quest Vault? I can easily do that if you send the incomplete pdfs.

Edited by Sadgit
2 hours ago, Sadgit said:

If it is just the Quest Vault that is the problem, why not just photoshop the remaining components in there after you have done all that can be done in Quest Vault? I can easily do that if you send the incomplete pdfs.

Sure, that's a great idea. Quests still have to be developed (they're not just sitting done and waiting to be put into the Vault).

It's mostly that the vault has been something I've been waiting on.

On 3/14/2018 at 5:34 PM, Charmy said:

And none of it could be monetized of course. Even without any kind of monetization I wonder if FFG would allow it.

Community expansions completely exist, the thing that I found super shady was porting Shadow Rune over to valkyrie. I would have gladly helped with that if I wasn't too worried about getting sued to go anywhere near it.

We might have to run some of the ideas past FFG's legal dept, it seems they've been quite helpful with other fan projects (allowing use of artwork and so on).

FFG even have an alternative SR quest on the vault when The Shadow Rune is no longer out there (it was when this was published)... https://tools.fantasyflightgames.com/descent/htmlpreview/73/

Shame they couldn't have put the missing SR quests on there....

Edited by Watercolour Dragon
Vault reference