Spoilers for the the second mission in Guardians of the Abyss: The Night's Usurper, Agenda 1a

If you've already made your way through The Eldritch Gate before you advance Agenda 1a... do the Brotherhood Enemies still spawn? Playing now, we resolved Act 2a the end of one round, placed the 6th Doom on the start of the next mythos phase, which means the Brotherhood goons and Xzharah spawned at A Dream Betwixt and we got worked.

I figure there's no way they don't spawn and the odds of that happening are pretty bad... but I thought I'd ask anyway! We're playing GotA standalone and have gotten pretty lucky so far, so... that draw felt bad but I suppose we were due. 😛

We had that exact situation happen today as well.

I believe the way it works is this: You still resolve the spawn instructions on Agenda 1b (each player, in player order, spawns a random set-aside Brotherhood enemy engaged with them, then if there are any remaining brotherhood enemies, they spawn in empty locations furthest from the Expedition Camp), so each player spawns one of the Brotherhood enemies engaged with them. Then, the remaining Brotherhood enemies, if any, fail to spawn because there's only one location in play and it isn't empty and so they don't have a valid spawn location. Those enemies that fail to spawn are removed from the game, because they are not part of the Encounter deck and cannot enter the Encounter deck or discard pile (since they are double-sided cards).

As we were playing 2-player, this meant that we had 3 hard-hitting enemies all engaged with us (then we drew one of the Shantaks right off the bat as one of our encounter cards). Thankfully, I then succeeded on three consecutive Storm of Spirits plays and wiped out everything except Xzharah...

Something that is a bit more ambiguous is: What if you managed to activate the text on A Dream Betwixt before the Agenda advances? At that point, there would be more locations in play, which potentially would be valid spawn locations if they were empty, but it would be impossible to determine which would be the "furthest from the Expedition Camp" since the Camp is no longer in play. Thankfully, the FAQ has us covered (more or less):

Quote

"Can a location with no valid path to my location be the “nearest” or “farthest” location from my location? Yes, but only if there are no other eligible locations with a vaild path to your location. If there are other locations with a valid path to your location, the nearest or farthest of those must qualif y as the “nearest” or “farthest” to your location"

It's not quite the same situation, but this does make it clear that if there's no way to determine nearness or farness because there isn't a valid path (in our case, because the location in question isn't in play at all) you can still proceed. Since no location in play has a valid path to the Camp, the players would be free to choose which of the eligible locations (in play and empty) each of the remaining cultists would spawn at.

Thanks for the post.

This was the second thing we played after Night of the Zealot, so our decks / pairings were suboptimal. We were mainly kicking the tires on different characters and figured it'd be fun to do it in something longer than a one shot / shorter than a whole campaign even though we knew we'd likely get waxed. We won the first mission by the skin of our teeth somewhat surprisingly and were doing better than we'd expected before that turn of events dropped the hammer.

Still a good time.