Hi guys,
I am planning on starting a new descent campaign. It will be my first. I have only played descent 4 times previously with two different groups and only on the first two quests of the "Journey's in the Dark". I have always played the overlord (I generally play the DM in D&D as well so its a natural fit). I liked the game so much that I grabbed all the expansions and the quest compendium. Now I was wondering if anyone had used (or could recommend) particularly good maps/quests from any Descent product that I could use during the campaign instead of the random ones provided.

Just thought that some of the quest based ones may be better designed than the random 3 floor approach and would like to include them. But having not played anything beyond the first two I have not the experience to pick and choose beyond ones that sound mechanically cool.

Thanks in advance.

solomani said:

From the '3 random maps' comment I assume you mean an Advanced Campaign (RtL or SoB). Vanilla campaign rules are not really campaigns.

Standard quest maps are not at all in any way suitable for playing with the advanced campaign. Do not use them unless you have made a major overhaul of the entire game.
The 'random 3 floor' approach uses levels specifically designed to be used this way within the Advanced camapign game engine. The balance of monsters, the bosses, the starting/no-starting areas, the distribution of chests and glyphs, the lack of potions, all are different from vanilla by design and using vanilla quests will mess things up completely in subtle ways you won't comprehend unless you are an experienced player.

That said, you still can, just don't complain if things don't work well or you feel the balance is messed up.

solomani said:

I think that's pretty little experience if you're intending to go for the Advanced Campaign. People usually complete all 9 vanilla quests before they move on to Advanced. One of the BIGGEST reasons why is because once you start an advanced campaign, you're most prob never going back to vanilla descent. (And imagine all those wasted and untried quests) Secondly, I strongly recommend you be a player too. The best Overlords know both sides of the coin, and they can completely understand how a player in a Heroes Party would think AFTER they become one themselves.

solomani said:

Worst. Move. Ever. You asked for recommendations on good quests to play? Here's your answer: Any quest that is not featured in the quest compendium. Nah kidding, but its **** close to the truth.

solomani said:

You should stick to whatever is originally intended for RtL such as the 3 random levels. There's a reason why they're shorter than the norm. You will find that if u use any quests from vanilla set, u'd end up playing for a few years on a single campaign. Literally. (Advanced campaign dungeons usually last 1 hr. Norm quests can go up to as long as 7 hrs. Considering u play average of 200 hrs for the current advanced campaign. You will need 200 x 7 = 1400 hrs to complete it if u use dungeons from vanilla and you-name-it.)

Lastly, I will like to recommend a special mod made by Anti-Stone called The Enduring Evil.

The link is here: www.mindflare.com/enduringevil/

This is something in between the advanced campaign style and the vanilla set style.... well, sort of.

solomani said:

As you may have picked up from previous responses, this isn't a particularly good idea. =P

For one thing, the vanilla "quest-based" dungeons are much bigger than three of the randomly drawn cards put together. The first two dungeons in the base game are rather small compared to the average, you see. This may not sound like such an issue at first, but consider this: The advanced campaign was designed - on purpose - to take at least a month or two to play, start to finish, using the little random dungeon cards it provides. If you replace each dungeon the heroes enter with one of the vanilla dungeons, it will increase the playing time exponentially.

The Advanced Campaign comes with a save game mechanic to let you tear down the game and rebuild it later for this very reason, however, this save game mechanic cannot save in the middle of a dungeon. Considering how much time it takes to play a vanilla dungeon, you might well find yourself only able to play one dungeon per session. So the OL would move, the heroes would move, and then a dungeon. See you guys next week! Effectively making one game week take one REAL week to complete, depending on how often you and your friends can meet to play. Under those conditions it might well take a year or more to play the campaign.

Now, assuming you and your friends have the time and the frame of mind to do that anyway, you should also keep in mind that each vanilla dungeon was designed to be a one-shot. If you plug them in completely unmodified then your heroes will have gold treasures by the end of the first dungeon, which will grossly unbalance the rest of the campaign. At the very least you'll need to institute a house rule that all chests in a dungeon match the current campaign level, and even that probably won't address all the balance issues that may arise. - Come to think of it, once you get up to Gold level, a dungeon full of gold chests will be ridiculously game breaking. Your heroes will be swimming in so much gold treasure they'll basically have their pick of the deck to optimize their potential, and the money they make selling the leftovers will get them all teh training and skills their greedy little hero hearts desire. =P

You'll also have to figure out ahead of time what to do with Artifacts. You won't have seen those if you've only played the first two vanilla quests, but you have the cards to look at if you own the game. Imagine letting someone have Soulbiter for even half of the campaign and you can see why this is a bad idea.

I'm not going to tell you what you should do to have fun with the game, I'm just trying to illustrate a couple of reasons why this idea may not be as good as it sounds at first blush. If you're one of those who approach Descent like it's an RPG, you probably don't care about nixing any chance you have of winning as OL, but if you'd like to actually have a fighting chance, like the rules say you do, then you might want to consider playing without any house rules at least for a little while. Figure out specifically what you don't like before you go changing things you haven't fully explored yet.

Wanderer999 said:

That's not necessarily true. I myself am strongly considering going back to vanilla for a while after having played RtL the last few times we pulled this out. Each version of the game has it's own charms. RtL and SoB are useful for venting your desire to see the heroes progress continuously over the course of a long story arc, but once you've got that out of your system, there's a certain "popcorn dungeon crawl" enjoyment to having a one-shot adventure that ends after a solid 4-5 hour play session.

Obviously FFG sees continued potential in both game styles, otherwise Tomb of Ice would've been an advanced campaign too.

Wanderer999 said:

I'll disagree some here as well. I for one had never played Descent before playing RtL so I had zero experience playing before jumping in and I did fine. 3 of the 5 guys had played before so they helped the rest of us some.

As long as experience levels are close between OL and heroes, or you don't have an expereinced OL out to win at any cost vs. inexperience heroes, the advanced campaign is fine as a first play. It definitely throws more rules challenges at you, but those are going to occur no matter what set(s) you own.

Thanks guys. I'll err on the side of caution and just use the base rules for the first run through. Appreciate the feedback.

Having said that any particular quests from the base game and expansion stand out?

I have some good recommendations for the vanilla set:

Quest 4. Most interesting quest IMO. You get to carry a princess around, and there is risk of her dropping and letting a monster carry away.

Quest 7. Best quest ever... for the players. This is purely because of the heavy odds against them. The achievement is great if they do win.

Quest 9. Most balanced quest in my opinion. The final battle can be very epic (as was in my case) when the last boss can kill with one hit, and he has Undying.

I would definitely suggest that you "put on the brakes" with Road to Legend until you have at least a few more "vanilla" quests under your belt with the play group that aren't the first two. The first two quests are very "introductory" in my opinion. I recommend playing the JITD quests with the treachery rules from WoD and AoD and get comfortable with Treachery- Treachery is your friend in RTL for sure. I also agree that you should have a go at being a hero and have one of the hero players try being the OL- just to get a feel for what it's like to be on the other side of things.

There's enough going on in RTL that it REALLY helps to have everyone in the group familiar with the rules from the base game before taking the plunge- it will keep downtime to a minimum. Also, print out some of the Descent Hero and OL player aids from www.boardgamegeek.com- they are invaluable tools to have at your fingertips.

I really want to play Descent now....