Hello

does someone know if there is a new descent expansion in program for the next future?

any news on it? Campaing or vanilla or vanilla with campaign stuff for RTL?

thanks a lot all info would be really appreciated

Nothing official has been announced. Common wisdom says the next expansion will be vanilla, possibly with a jungle theme to bring in the heroes from Zanaga, but nothing has been said one way or the other. I'm sure any future vanilla expansions will have at least as much AC content as Tomb of Ice did.

I second the question. It has become quit quiet around Descent lately...

Maybe they are waiting to see if a hero side can win a SoB campaign before going ahead with Descent?...

I mean, if I ran a gaming company and some of my game designers made a game impossible to win for one side, I'd think twice about entrusting said designers with a follow-up...

Come one, someone win a campaign please... Have the OL play it nice, bend the rules, cheat - whatever it takes...

Started SOB campaign with some very exp players. I believe they have a sporting chance at beating me. SOB isnt that broken. I would like to see an expansion where the heros go through a city and have to go building to building advancing up or down floors instead of dungens. they could make decisions on weather to enter a room or not. Something along these lines would be cool.

I hope it is a vanilla set using Mist of Zanaga figs. I think they look really cool!

i much rather like to have a comprehensive and thought through rulebook. maybe some balancing would be nice too.

eNTi said:

I've said this before, but the Road to Legend rulebook was a comprehensive and thought-through book when it first came out, incorporating everything that had been published up to that point. It still had flaws, due largely to the fact that they were trying to write everything anew without completely invalidating the previous material in the process. Sea of Blood in theory should've been the same; everything concerning aspects that existed in previous expansions was pretty well done, but it looks like there were too many new aspects being introduced for an aquatic campaign, so on the whole it's not that impressive.

At this point, I think the only way they could write a clean, sensible, fresh rulebook is by publishing a second edition. A second edition, mind you, that is not necessarily designed to be fully compatible with everything in the first edition, because adding that restriction is how they got Road to Legend in the first place.

I mean, look at what Antistone has done with Enduring Evil. It's a phenomenal rewrite, very sensible and well balanced, but even that involves printing a whack-load of new cards and it isn't compatible with existing quests. Considering FFG themselves have said that designing new quests is the most time-consuming part of a new expansion, that's not something to shake a stick at.

I don't know what FFG is planning for the next expansion, but I take the silence to be a good thing. The game is far too popular to stop now, we all know that. I prefer to think this means FFG is taking their time and making sure the next expansion will be a solid entry. Whatever they have planned, I would prefer it take a little longer and be amazing than get cranked out now and be crap.

I would like to see a Ship vs ship expanision for SOB, 4vs4 with 2 OL's or something along those lines...

Steve-O said:

I too would like a comprehensive new rulebook, but I think the chances of that are very low. I hope that you are right Steve-O, and that this long silence means they are taking the time to ensure the next Descent product is done well. I also would be very happy to wait longer, but have a good finished product instead of a quickly churned out piece of garbage.

Steve-O said:

That's not entirely applicable. The Enduring Evil was designed to rebalance the content while keeping the rules virtually untouched; I'm not sure it tells us anything about the difficulting of rewriting the rules while trying to hold on to content. Even if it does, updating existing quests to a new standard of balance probably takes less time and effort than writing entirely new ones, especially if you were the one who wrote the original version.

Also, the quests were probably not the most time-consuming part of making The Enduring Evil , and I'm not entirely sure what Kevin Wilson's statement about quests being time-consuming to make actually means. Obviously, one would expect a single quest to take a lot longer to make than a single hero, or a single card; but the game needs more heroes and cards than it needs quests. The quests-to-other-content ratio of Descent's expansions is much higher than the base game, though...so even if quests take the largest chunk of design time in an expansion, they might not in a second edition.

It's also possible that Enduring Evil quests take less time to make, because the monsters are balanced to a consistent and relatively simple standard, which makes it easier to construct a fight of approximately a given difficulty without extensive playtesting. And it's also possible that Enduring Evil quests just take less time relatively because I spent more time on the other components than FFG does. Hard to say.

In any case, the time required for me to develop a solid quest seems to be dominated by playtesting, not design (I think I generally spend less time creating the first draft of a quest than it takes to play it once). And you can playtest quests at the same time as other components, at least to a certain extent.

Antistone said:

Fair enough. I don't have the time or inclination to attempt a similar project myself, so I'm working from theory here rather than practice. I defer to your experience in having written such a thing.

Not sure how relevant this is to the current discussion, but I think when Kevin Wilson originally gave the answer about development time taken up by designing dungeons, he was talking to someone about the possibility of releasing smaller card only expansions for Descent similar to Runebound. They were hoping that they could get "dungeon packs" or something of that sort that had bunches of new RtL dungeon levels that incoporated content from other vanilla expansions.

I believe he then stated that the most time consuming process of the Road to Legend expansion was designing all the dungeon levels, which may be more plausible since there are so many levels in Road to Legend (40 I think?). I think that may be what his statement grew out of, due to the large amount of dungeon design going on in the Advanced Campaign expansions. That is just the way I remember hearing about it though, I could be way off.

Kartigan said:

It would be about freaking time if they did that!

How come they're able to issue dozens of expansion decks for Runebound and all they can come up with for Descent is sea themed campaign?

What's next, Balloons in the Clouds?!?! Heroes jumping from clouds to clouds catching coins and slashing spiked turtle? That would be nive, no?

Please, it's a freaking DUNGEON CRAWLER !!!! Give me DUNGEON STUFF !!!

iam said:

I believe the answer to that question is the same answer that was just given. Designing all the dungeons was the most time consuming part of RtL. Runebound card expansions boost gear and add new monsters. If you want card expansions that add new treasures, that would probably be easy (although I imagine the power level of such cards would get rapidly out of control.) If you want card expansions that add more dungeons, that would be too much time to be worth the (presumably cheap) cost. There's also the question of the quest booklet since the dungeon cards don't have everything about a dungeon on them.

It's also worth noting that they seem to have stopped production of card expansions for Runebound. At least, there haven't been any new ones in a long time and the older sets are getting ridiculously hard to find nowadays, implying there is no reprint forthcoming. Perhaps the company's business model is shifting away from so many small micro-expansions.

Steve-O said:

To be honest with you, I don't really care about RTL... But more treasures, skills, OL cards, shop items would be nice... They could also easily incorporate fun variants with new types of cards, the same way Runebound does/did it. A spell deck with new rules for magic users would be a nice addition!

New items don't need to be more powerful than existing ones, just looking for some more variety here, it would add a lot to the whole thematic experience of descent.

Cheers