Hi,
Last week we finished a RtL campaign and wanted to try SoB.
I would consider our group quite experienced, as we played nearly every weekend during the last year (first standard Descent dungeons, ocassionaly adding Addons (ToI, WoD, AoD) and later the RtL campaign) .
The new SoB adventure started as follows:
OL chose the Mistress of Serpents as his avatar and the Shadow Queen quest.
The initial 15 OL xp were spent on the siege upgrade (town resistance reduced by 1)
The Heroes had a bit of bad luck with the first dungeons last level (got wiped nearly two times) and the first week ended with (26 (H) - 28 (OL)).
Second week OL got the Questupgrade "A new order" preventing the heroes form buying pots. Heroaction for this week was trainig i.e. buing a second skill for everyone from the Homeport.
Third week OL gets the avatars special Lieutenant (considering its card exactly near a city with an original resistance of 3, now reduced to 2)
This is where we stopped playing, because of some questions that arised.
First: From the description above: do you see anything that was played against the rules? Because this setup seems quite unfair or at least very hard to fight for the heroes, as at least one city will be razed before they even arrive to stop the lieutenant, and even when they get there they won't have any shipupgrades to fight seabattles effectivly.
This leads to the second question concerning seabattles with lieutenants.
From the rules and other threads here I understand that that special Lieutenant, as it has no ship, may be placed anywhere on the edge of the seamap. As the map is 33x27 fields (if I remember right..) the OL could just start the encounter defensivly by placing the lieutenant as far away from the Revenge as possible and wait for the heroes to come closer stacking up on threat tokens. If the heroes don't act the OL will just farm away on even more threat tokens round after round, so the heroes are forced to come closer.
When the Revenge or the heroes are close enough to pose a threat to the Lieutenant the OL should have enough threat tokens to just charge by them and wait on the other end of the map.
As we couldn't find any rules allowing the Revenge to reverse the direction it faces or to "sail backwards" this would force the heroes (of whome none has the swim ability, and only one has the "Swift" skill) to move to the lieutenant through all the deep water fields, using up a ton of either health or fatigue pots, which they can't stock up reliently because of the "new Law" card.
From this I don't see any chance the heroes could survive the lieutenant encounter. Have I missed something in the rulebook? Or are these encounters really ment to be THAT tough?