We just finished our first campaign of RtL. We have a few questions that we could not find concise answers to.

1) Dungeons: When traversing from a level of a dungeon to a new level does the overlord keep any of the following?:

a) Threat?

b) Current cards in his/her hand?

c) Powers?

2) Under dungeons it says that the OL reshuffles his deck and draws a hand of 3 cards for each level.

a) If you keep your hand and threat, do you get 3 more cards to add to it for the beginning of the next level? Or just keep it at draw 2 / turn.

3) Am I right that if I buy one purple treachery, any time that the heroes encounter one of my Lt. that I get to spend treachery points to build my hand?

**** The scenario I created was ridiculous. I had the spider queen, with Slaggoroth in play. I had 3 purple and 1 green treachery. So, with the purple I bought:

2 Poison spike trap cards (1 point each), and took the normal 2 spiked trap cards (1 point gets me 2 white cards). The 1 green point I used to take (danger and dark balm, both from the standard deck).

So, the spider queen makes trap cost 1 less and adds 1 damage. Slag, starting with trap master makes the traps one less and do 2 extra damage. So, encounters with Lt. would be discard danger and I could drop 4 pits doing 5,5,7,7 damage on the heroes first turn (granted, 0-1 blank on average). The heroes could not overcome this strategy and as they fought to push the Lt. out of cities, I just keep adding more treachery and making the opening move quite ridiculous.

I would further enhance this by having 2 Lt's travel together. The first one would burn traps, spread around damage of the treachery cards and then flee. The 2nd Lt then gaining the advantage of a full treachery hand immediately following.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Zenlor said:

1a. Yes 1b. Yes 1c. Yes

2a. This is at the start of the dungeon itself, not each dungeon level. Essentially when on the next level you gain your 4 threat/turn and draw 2 like normal.

3. Yes

You are correct in how treachery works. Many people say Slag is probably the hardest Lt. to play against. Seems like the OL is playing very smart.

Zenlor said:

Yes, but keep in mind that both encounters are seperate.

My point being if the first Lt. flees it results in a party victory. The party the gets to collect its loot for a party victory, the first Lt. gets sent back to the OL's keep. Then the party gets a party recovery before the second encounter and then the second Lt. is encountered.

party recovery only includes fatigue, not wounds

duhtch,

Thank you for the answers. That was our assumption, but we wanted to be sure.

King,

We took care of the separate encounters correctly and the party victory. I do have one question regarding party recovery. It says after encounters, parties recover fully. I breezed through the book again, Do Heroes recover fatigue whenever they hit the overland map? It was very clear that this happens after encounters, but not so much after a dungeon. We assumed it was intended to be linked to the overland map and give the heroes full fatigue at the end of each encounter or dungeon.

One other question we would like confirmation on:

1) Two Lt. in the same city at the start of the week allows the OL to place 2 siege tokens in that city, correct (one for each Lt. executing a siege order)?

Whenever the party returns to the overland map they recover full fatigue. Ispher and Red Scorpion also recover full wounds.

Yes, 2 lieutenants = 2 siege tokens (though the city can't have more siege tokens than its defense, so the second lt's action might be wasted sometimes.

I have won 3 times my players so far before they hit the silver campaign and now i play as a player against the spider queen and really things look pretty gloom since with the beast upgrade there is no way in hell you can pass through the shield of razorwings if you don't have a divine retribution dude with 2 CT and now that i see this thread also i would think that the encounter with the slag will be very bad. Anyway we have a team with the runemaster with acrobat (the runner, we would like the Divine retribution but i got burned to the ground), Kirga with born to the bow (haven't even drawn a magic weapon yet unlucky i guess), Battlemage with vampiric blood (with crystalize and blast which do squat against soaring upgraded razorwings, still no breath even though it would not help alot) and the amazing Tahlia with unmovable (the only shine of hope that also does squat against soaring). Tahlia is pretty unkillable since she hits 6 armor with Unmovable and has also the skull shield for traps but of little help against soaring razorwings. I have played plenty of campaigns as overlord and i know that if you put 2 razorwings from the start to block the way to the LT is kinda gameover if you don't have the firepower to bring down the razorwings. Anyway even the hell hounds will do a big amount of pain as the heroes rush to push the LT as their upgrade is ridiculous. The hellhounds from non existent (pierce 2, blue + yellow do no damage at all) to a serious threat since they get now blue+green with pierce 3. Anyway i have run the scenario many times and even with a lucky location draw (a location that doesn't doom you to TPK like howling cannyon, or the tainted forest) it seems unlikely to impossible to win it even with no treachery at all. I knew that the beasts are the best upgrade in the game but this is border line ridiculous. I am heavily leaning towards the idea that the RTL is heavily in favor of the overlord if you don't add TOI feats. And i think i should consider that for our next campaign.

Drglord said:

Which category is best depends on which Avatar you pick. Eldritch are generally considered "the best" over all, but obviously a beast-oriented Avatar will get more mileage out of beasts.

As far as the game being heavily weighted for the OL, I don't think that's true. It is true that the Copper campaign level favours the OL, but it's equally true that the Gold level favours the heroes, if they can survive that long. Try taking the exact same hero party, the same Avatar, and use the rules for starting at the Gold Campaign level. See how that goes and then let us know if you still think the game favours the OL.

In a situation like this, the heroes probably want to avoid LT fights whenever possible. Try to get someone the acrobat skill to so they can bypass the razorwing wall when it crops up and generally use Blitzing to accumulate CT and advance the campaign towards Silver ASAP. Copper geared heroes will be at a disadvantage, but Silver geared heroes should stand a better chance at survival.

Remember the big picture. If the heroes live to do dungeons, they will fail. This is why it's an ADVANCED campaign. Dungeons exist only to provide gold and CT to keep things moving on the overland map.