My group is just short of advancing to Silver level and we were thinking about mixing and/or substituting several cards from the overlord decks from Well of Darkness, Tomb of Ice and Altar of Despair. I know the SoB rules allow for treachery upgrades but we would really like to add some of the environmental effects (ice, mud, corrupted terrain), spawned monsters (a Golem would be nice) and traps.

My question is: would the addition or substitution of of 10 - 15 overlord cards from the expansions significantly unbalance the game? That certainly is not my intention and my card choice would not be driven by a desire to get an advantage. It just seems a shame to have all the expansions but not be able to use them fully.

Marximus said:

If the OL cards aren't treachery they should already be in the OL deck.

Of the Treachery cards, Frozen Path is the only one that adds a terrain type and is actually rather powerful at the right time and place - I definitely wouldn't allow adding it in without having paid for the Treachery upgrade!

I might allow spawned monster treachery cards to be added, provided that they were only the least upgraded level of monsters. So no adding a Golem if you have upgraded Eldritch etc. But definitely only the 1 Monster Treachery Cards (+Golem, which is badly miscosted) and not for any monsters that already have spawn cards in the deck.

Trap wise probably only Drugged Darts (even though it is costed as 2 treachery) would be reasonable to add IMO. Most of the others are too powerful by far, and/or don't fit your description of wanting to add in more variety.

In summary I donl think there is enough 'reasonable' variety cards to make it worth your effort of doing any of this, sorry.

You might be better off just havin a house rule that allows the OL to change one prop per dungeon level with one other prop of the same size (possibly creating a table of your own design giving prop spaces 'points values' so the replacement prop need no be the same size if it is 'weaker'). You might giv ethe heroes one veto per level of which prop gets changed, maybe?

I've also heard of people playing that when certain monsters die they leave behind various terrian effects. Shades Fog for example or a Lava Beetle Lava. That might lead to some interesting tactical considerations to (since the OL may want to think about where the "best" place for his monster to be killed is), but it might be unbalancing as well. Perhaps roll a power die or something to determine if it leaves the afformentioned terrian behind so it isn't guaranteed.

If what you want is to use expansion material in an advanced campaign which wouldn't otherwise be used, you might like the optional changes to the Road to Legend dungeons I made a while back. The purpose was to try to imagine what Road to Legend would have looked like if the designers hadn't been instucted not to use any exapnsion material, and to give every expansion prop/obstacle/effect at least a token appearance (thematically wherever possible). In effect, over half of the dungeons ended up being a bit jazzed up and there was a boss for each of the 25 monsters instead of the 12 original ones.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=4&efcid=1&efidt=17579&efpag=0

Annoyingly the forum won't let me go back and edit it as I remember there were a few changes... changing the Dragon's lair to a Frost Wyrm's Lair, for example was pointless as I recall... putting multiple priests into The Summoning was an accident waiting to happen... but I think the others all worked and made for a much more interesting campaign.

I have intended to extend this to the Sea of Blood dungeons and had some ideas on several of them when I looked at them, but have never really had the time to do it thoroughly.