Continuing with my solo progressive journey, I've now played through The Black Riders saga expansion. I see why this is a popular box which gets high marks. The quests were interesting and did a good job of evoking the books. Well, except for Merry slaughtering ringwraiths single-handed lol. Most importantly, the quests were just the right amount of difficult. They were challenging but didn't leave you wanting to pull your hair out.
Since I'm playing by order of release (mostly), and the Saga boxes are so spread out, I didn't think it made much sense to play this in campaign mode, so I just played them as straight up scenarios. Once I play through the rest of the Saga expansions this way, I'll go back and play it as a campaign. These scenarios weren't really that hard, I imagine they get a little more difficult when you play through them as a campaign.
Which brings up a question:
From what I gather, the idea of a campaign is to keep the same heroes. You can change them, but you get penalized a threat point IIRC. But it doesn't seem true to the books to just keep playing Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Frodo all the way through the end. There are other characters that get introduced. So does each expansion box let you start over with new heroes, or how do they handle that? Does the campaign split in two when Sam and Frodo go to Mordor? I guess I could wait to find out, but I'm curious.
Next up the PoD Stone of Erech, then the Voice of Isengard cycle.