Ok, so I looked at The Mists Of Zanaga and I'm now wondering will we get a new expansion for Descent? With those new minis and jungle adventures?

How about the desert or snow maps? What about the avatars? Currently the 10 avatars use stats from monsters in the base Descent. Another campaign expansion would require another expansion for the monsters for the avatars.

I'm sure there will be a new expansion in due time. Jungle theme is certainly a possibility. Whether or not we'll see the same heroes is a bit up in the air though. Certainly FFG has been big on recycling the same molds into other games in the past and I would be surprised if that practice is completely finished. On the other hand, the last two Terrinoth additions featured all new heroes and, from what I've been hearing, also included crossover hero cards for other games int he universe. That seems to imply they're going a new route where everything gets new heroes and the associated cards for all games are packaged in the one release they come from.

Like I said, though, I'd be surprised if they were done recycling heroes forever.

There's also two or three more Advanced Campaign potentials if FFG continues borrowing from RB expansions for their overland maps, although I would expect the next expansion to be vanilla. They seem to have been alternating AC and non with expansions since RtL's release.

I'd love to see some mini expansions like they did with Runebound. Not full blown boxed sets, but just more treasures, heroes, overlord treachery cards, skills, and the like. They could even have new monsters with rules one how to include them (i.e. 1 gibberling = 2 skeletons, 1 spider, or 1 beastman; while you get 2 gibberlings for a sorcerer).

There's enough maps out there already that a $9.99 box of stuff that's useful all the time is going to be much more palatable to my wallet than a $69.99 box of rules and adventures our group is unlikely to get to unless we play every week for a year.

James McMurray said:

That's a pretty cool idea. If we're talking strictly normal-based monsters, they could probably fit 1 red and 2-3 white in a box the same size as the RB card expansions, along with new spawn cards. Other small box card expansions with treasures, treachery or more would also be cool.

Small hero expansions that include one or two new heroes along with hero cards for all the Terrinoth games would also be keen. That one's been suggested before, I think.

I would like to see a new expansion for Descent, or at least perhaps a revision. Specifically, a breakdown like this:

1) The consolidated rules for Descent in one book, with all errata and some FAQ in place to clarify everything. This could be a stand-alone book, or could be a paired book with the dungeons for all the current expansions.

2) A box set of just tiles. These could be the 'snap together' kind, or I'd prefer a set where you can just slide them up against one another, so they're easier to put together and take apart without having to worry about peeling artwork. Make them double-sided for twice the fun, making 'dungeon' and 'surface'. Sell these as individual sets, so players can get more tiles and dungeon bits for their game.

3) Stand-alone monster sets. More monsters, you choose what kind of monsters you want to get, and they come with 4 white and 2 red. This way, there's always the means to get monsters for your games. They also come with spawning cards appropriate to the creature type.

4) Stand alone cards. A set for each profession, as well as an overlord deck. The overlord deck has the bare bones you would need, and can be expanded on through buying the monster sets.

5) Equipment cards. A set of equipment card, plus an addition set of magical artifacts (gold, silver, copper), so you can add to your deck.

This way, when they want to do an expansion, they can release a new pack for the overlord to get. New heroes can come out as a hero set, new monsters can come out as a stand alone, new cards can do the same thing.

Tashiro said:

This I would like to see, for the rules anyway. I don't see much point in reprinting the dungeons though. Either you have the expansion a given dungeon comes from, in which case you already have a copy of it, or you don't have that expansion and therefore will almost certainly be missing certain components you need to play that dungeon, which were included in the expansion itself. None of the vanilla dungeons in the box expansions were horribly broken or misprinted, that I recall. There were a couple minor errors that have been addressed in the FAQ, but nothing that necessitates a new printing of the dungeon.

The only dungeons that could use a reprinting are the Compendium ones, and they've been addressed with their own errata already.

Tashiro said:

Certainly an interesting idea, although I'm not sure I would buy them. All the existing dungeons were built with the number of tiles you get in the game and respective expansions (barring a couple SoB snafus) so you'd only really need extra tiles to make your own dungeons with. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you. =)

I'd be surprised if such tiles weren't the same kind of interlocking tiles as those already being published, though.

Tashiro said:

I'm definitely on board with the idea of small card/mini expansions like these, although I'm not sure I'd want them to replace the box expansions completely. There is something to be said for buying everything in one box, too. =P

I wouldnt mind seeing a box set of the lieutenants in plastic form, or some molds of the avatars. Ive made due in some respect by buying D&D minis indidvidually and painting them up to fit my purposes

Dapper Dan said:

As I understand it, plastic minis need to be mass produced in large quantities to be cost-effective at a reasonable market price. This is the main reason they branched out into metal for the LTs figures in the first place. They did so because they couldn't guarantee that everyone who bought Descent would also buy the LTs, so they couldn't afford to bank on plastic selling well enough.

I'm very disappointed. No new stuff at this GenCon for Descent. Probably this means no stuff at all for Descent in 2010.

It's the first time this happens, since Descent was created: 2006 WoD, 2007 AoD, 2008 RtL and ToI, 2009 SoB, 2010......NOTHING AT ALL!!

Now the questions are: would FFG continue to invest in Descent? Would our beloved Descent become an old, abandoned mine?

FFG MUST answer these questions...for respect to all the Descent fans spreading all over the world!

TheHunterBoy said:

I highly doubt that Descent will be finished just like that. We've been seeing a lot of complaints regarding quality/production value (ie: SoB maps that need more tiles than we're given, etc.) but it seems like people are still buying the expansions. As long as sales stay up, I'm sure expansions will keep coming.

Perhaps they've decided to skip a year in order to make sure the next expansion gets playtested a little more thoroughly though. As much as I love Descent, there is certainly room for improvement in terms of map design and rules writing. I'm willing to wait a little bit longer if FFG is trying to step up those things. Besides, my wallet could use a little break anyhow. =P

Steve-O said:

I really hope your correct about them taking longer so they can playtest the next expansion and use some quality control for the components, rules, and dungeons, but somehow I seriously doubt it. What I'd really love to see is Descent version 2.0, hopefully that utilizes all the old game's expansions and base. Maybe as an updated rulebook or something.

The problem with that is that if they made it available through PDF like they usually do their rulebooks, there would be very little profit in it for them since you wouldn't have to buy it to have the new ruleset. I wouldn't mind if they didn't make it available in PDF though, I'd gladly shell out some cash for a serious overall of Descent's ruleset in order to fix a lot of broken things.

Kartigan said:

As far as an updated rulebook that uses all the same components, they've actually recently done exactly that for Tannhauser. If they decided to do something similar for Descent, they'd probably use the same strategy as Tann - namely the new rules would be made available for sale in book and pdf form, but they would not be posted for free the way the current rules are.

I for one would gladly pay $10 or so for an updated and clarified rulebook for Descent, but I would also want some assurances that the new rules are in fact better than the old. Descent doesn't exactly have a great track record for clear and precise rules. While I'd love to see that fixed, I'd also want to know it's fixed before spending more money on it. I'd probably wait on a couple other customer reviews before I went ahead and bought it.

Of course, there's also the issue that no small amount of rules text is printed on the cards that are used during play. Can't really rewrite those in a PDF - asking the fans to print their own cards is certainly possible, but highly unprofessional, IMHO. In the case of Tannhauser, all the text actually was separate from the existing components, so that wasn't really a concern.

Steve-O said:

Steve-O, I really hope you're right. My only fear concerns the arrive of the newest Terrinoth's products: in the FFG plains they would eclipse the old ones, such as Descent, leaving us only the little pride of some new character to add-on at our collection of Descent minis, along with its appropriate reference cards... Personally, I deeply dislike this scenario.

Descent represents a great resource in the world of the fantasy dungeon-themed board game of all the times, and I really think it would become better and better with each new expansion. At now is an awesome game, but it can still grow more and more. So: I really hope you're right.

Gotta admit I found it dissapointing that nothing new was announced for Descent. I think it needs one last vanilla expansion!

I'd also love more quest books, but FFG pretty much said that was not likely to happen again.

I'll be really dissapointed if they do yet another campaign expansion rather than truly expanding the game via tiles/monsters/cards via a vanilla expansion.

Purely from an activity stand point - you have to think they would be hard pressed to not release more content?! Maybe?

This is the second most active forum on the FFG site - with regards to board games - obviously a lot of it has to do with discussions of rules... But - I would be really curious to see the total sales of the game itself... with regards to the other Terrinoth based games. We know they aren't abandoning the Terrinoth universe - having DQ just/almost out built on it - so hopefully that is good news in some respect.

I just HOPE like crazy it doesn't get relegated to only the "6 new heroes if you buy this game" thing that we are getting with DQ. Once is fine - but if that will be the only way to get ANY new Descent content - I will be sorely disappointed.

SoylentGreen said:

Purely from an activity stand point - you have to think they would be hard pressed to not release more content?! Maybe?

This is the second most active forum on the FFG site - with regards to board games - obviously a lot of it has to do with discussions of rules... But - I would be really curious to see the total sales of the game itself... with regards to the other Terrinoth based games. We know they aren't abandoning the Terrinoth universe - having DQ just/almost out built on it - so hopefully that is good news in some respect.

I totally agree with you.

But it just seems that, for merchandising reasons, at the present time FFG would effort other products, the more recent ones. Since 2005, DJitD became greater year by year, and this is, sadly, the first year without Descent expansions at all. That's the reason why I think they're actually heading somewhere far from our beloved Descent....

I really hope they made an U-turn on this way, as soon as possible....

Well, I sure hope that a new expansion is in the works, but I still got to catch up on the other expansions. I only own two of them: Road to Legend and Altar of Despair.Gonna buy Well of Darkness next to get a bigger treachery deck and expand my choices for the RTL campaign. Tomb of Ice will follow later.

The only FFG game I own all expansions of is Arkham Horror(excluding the most recent one). Another fan favorite, apparently, judging by the activity on AH's message board, and well, I'm a big fan too.

Descent has enough content already! I think we'd all rather see a RattleSnake expansion.

SoylentGreen said:

I'm sure they want to release more content, it's just a question of coming up with new stuff that's worthy. Thus far Descent and RB have been dancing to the same tune for inspiration, but I don't know how much longer that tune will fly. There's also the quality control issue I was mentioning before. If that's the reason for the slow down I wholeheartedly support the decision.

SoylentGreen said:

I'm sure Descent is the highest grosser for the moment. The only one that might be close to it is Runebound, but the forum there seems less active in general. Runewars is too new for its sales to be anywhere near Descent's right now, and DQ isn't even out yet, so.... Preorders, maybe? =P

Drakon is a fun little game ostensibly part of Terrinoth, although it doesn't really have any connectig flavour - just the same hero models as WoD. As part of the Silver Line it's obviously proven itself, although I get the impression that the target numbers for those games are generally smaller than the epic boxes anyway.

SoylentGreen said:

That would be tantamount to not releasing anything new in my books. When I say I expect there will be more someday I am not including random hero cards in other products as "more." Don't get me wrong, I love the idea as a means of distributing hero cards for the various games, although I don't know how popular it will be among customers who don't already own the other games.