Hey, guys. I own the base game along with the Altar of Despair and Road to Legend expansions. On page 16 of the ROTL rulebook there's a chart detailing the threat cost of reinforcing the various monsters in the game.

My question is: there are several monsters listed in that table that don't make appearance in any of the encounters(Chaos Beasts, for instance.) Does it mean that the overlord can never use/summon them in encounters? What about lieutenants without minions- can they ever call monsters to their aid?

Additionally, I wanted to ask about the movement of large lieutenants in encounters. How do they move exactly?

Thanks in advance for your help

Reinforcements are based on the LT, not on what appears in the encounter. An LT can reinforce from among those thing he has as minions, IIRC. There may well be some creatures that never appear as minions to any LT, but perhaps they were still included on the list for the sake of completeness. An LT without any minions would not be able to reinforce as I understand it.

Large LTs move like all large monsters. Yes the water can get in the way sometimes, you'll want to be careful about that.

As an aside, why do people seem to be abbreviating it "ROTL" more frequently these days? Nothing personal to you, I just find it a curious way of abbreviating Road to Legend that seems to be gaining more popularity than it ought in my mind.

No idea, its has always been RtL to me and I will resist any change.

Big Remy said:

Hear, hear! Unite, brothers, 'gainst the tyranny of newness and illogicality!

James McMurray said:

We have to keep the movement underground though, because rising against "newness" and "illogicality" would prevent any new Descent expansions since both those words can be used to describe Descent.

Thanks for the reply, Steve-O. I guess since the game lends itself easier to modding/adding new content, the developers just wanted to cover all bases with that chart.

As for the "mis-abbreviation" thingie, I was just mimicking others.

I also wanted to know: when the trapmaster power card is in play, do trap cards grant the heroes additional power dice to negate the extra damage that is inflicted on them?

zealot12 said:

No. Trapmaster increases the damage but does not give additional chances to reduce that damage.

mahkra said:

+1. Trapmaster only boosts damage dealt, nothing else about the trap. Unless the trap card said something like "roll one power die for each wound inflicted" then the damage prevention would not scale up. (BTW, as far as I know, none of the trap cards in the game say this. =P)