I just got Descent and my group loved it. Can we play SoB effectively without any other expansion. I know the "technical" answer is "yes," but I'd like people who play a lot to weigh in. If I need another expansion to really get the most out of SoB, which one?

Thanks!

Yes, in fact you shouldn't have any problems playing without any other expansions. One of the complaints some players have is that RtL/SoB don't use the other expansions well enough

-shnar

facie said:

You'll have a few spare bits (monster cards you don't have minis for, for example) but all of the important aspects of campaign play are playable with nothing more than the base game.

As Shnar said, some people feel that the campaigns don't use enough of the other expansions, so things like new traps and new terrain tokens are woefully unrepresented outside of the expansion they came in. That not a flaw in SoB so much as a result of FFG's strategy of making each expansion stand-alone. Without having the other expansions, you probably won't even notice that absence.

The question you should probably be asking is "what kind of campaign do I want to play?" Sea of Blood is, unsurprisingly, a largely marine adventure. Battles take place ship-to-ship and you need to land on islands before proceding to dungeons. A very nautical experience, which is great if that's what you want. If, however, you want a more traditional land-based adventure, you might want to look into Road to Legend instead. Updating the RtL rules to reflect revisions in SoB is relatively easy by using the online pdfs of all the rulebooks, if outdated rules are a concern for you.

Very helpful responses. When you land on the island in SoB, does it convert to more traditional dungeons? In other words, do you get the best of both worlds?

Thanks again for the helpful response.

Yes, in fact, so far I'd say the split is about 70%-30% for land-dungeons to sea-adventures. Even though you move around in your boat from dungeon to dungeon, the only time you actually fight in it is when you have an encounter, which is a random chance to have between dungeons. The primary aspect of the game is to go into the dungeons, not have ship encounters, so they don't come up very often.

We started an SoB campaign last game session and the heroes went through two dungeons and no ship encounters yet. We'll see how much of a factor it really is as we go, but I'm guessing it's only a minor part of the game...

-shnar

Additionally, the first level of the "Island" dungeons is a special uber-huge outdoor map (the opposite side of the Sea map), with the hero's ship anchored at the far end. The heroes have to jump off their ship and deal with whatever bad guys the island has to offer, and level 2 and 3 are played just like standard dungeons (albeit much much smaller dungeons than you are used to in a vanilla game).

One of the jokes at our table is that after the map is laid out, someone looks down and says "this looks pretty straightforward, I give it half-an-hour, tops". (As long as all hell doesnt break loose, they are generally 20-50 minutes per level, with about 10 minutes of level setup).

Yeah, but the island map isn't really "ship combat". That's only in encounters, and it's possible to go the whole game without having any (though doubtful, since you'd at least want to encounter an Lt or two).

-shnar