Hi, me and my friends started a capmaign (our first, we are descent noobs) and couple of questions came up:

1. Burn ability - Just to make sure: hellhounds breatch attack does not have the burn ability? From one side it would make sense as it does kind of fire damage. On the other hand the moster card does not say anything about burn ability. So how is it exactly?
2. Steering of ships: from the rule book I dont see any way of actually turning of the ship (changin the direction of the ship, not just moving it right and left). Is this even possible?
3. Gathering conquest tokens: Players get conquests only by exploring the map and by defeating the dungeon level master (encounter leader). They do not get conquest tokens from activating glyphs and such?
4. Gathering conquest tokens: OL gets conquests only as a) week passes, b) razed cities per week; c) killing heros?

Thanks in advance

An additional question:

When heroes finish completely a dungeon by exiting the 3rd level by the teleportation tile then where do they appear? My logic sais that they appear at the dungeons location on the world map. But on the other hand I cant seem to find the rule in the rulebook that would specify this.

Specifically I found in the rulebook a statement on pg 15: "Heroes returning to a town after exploring a dungeon or island during that week do not get to "visit" the town".

The above would imply that whenever a dungeon is finished the heroes end up in their hometown instead where they actually were on the world map. Which is strange.

maamets said:

Correct. Apparently a hell hound's fire breath is not hot enough to reliably ignite flammable materials without an accelerant. Alternatively, since dragon's breath (which does have Burn ) has been described as being similar to napalm, perhaps the criteria of the Burn ability are somewhat more demanding than simple fire. That's some food for thought if you still care about logic (Descent will breed that out of you eventually =P)

Bottom line: Hell hounds do not have Burn . This is not a mistake on a card.

maamets said:

They do get conquest for glyphs as normal, and they get CT if they open a chest and don't roll any treasures. IIRC, the AC rulebook says that all rules from the main book are still in play unless explicitly contradicted by the AC rulebook. This is just one of many reasons why it helps to be familiar with the base game before you start playing AC.

maamets said:

He also gets CT for cycling the deck, if I'm not mistaken.

maamets said:

The heroes can choose to reappear at the dungeon location or at their home town. If they choose to return to town, they may not take a Visit action in the same turn. I'm too lazy to go look for a page reference, but that's how it works in RtL at least, and so far as I know this detail hasn't been changed in SoB.

To answer question nr.2: No, turning is not possible for any ship in SoB.

Thanks for the answers.

Hellhounds are fine:). I did not notice burn abilities on other monsters so this is why I asked. I guess I totally missed the dragon monster card.

If turning is not possible then how exaclty is ramming happening? I understand that on some encounters or locations the starting ship positions are predefined. If this is the case then ramming can only happen on some very specific areas? We have not had a see encounter yet, so this is why I am asking.

If heroes can get CT from chests and glyphs then this is kind of overpowered - a general dungeon should generate about 27 CT/EXP for the heroes:

1. 1 from exploring a new site
2. 8=2+2+4 per dungeon level leader
3. 9 because 3CT per each glyph activation
4. 3 CT per chest and usually there is one chest on each level.

That is a lot. Taking into consideration that our OL averages to 2 playerkills per dungeon level and that usually the lower threat cost heroes die then this averages to 12-16 CT for OL which is significantly lower than what players will get by default. Is this intentional? I dont see an OL killing high threat heroes every turn or every second turn - this is not possible. Of course I have to say that our group is very tactical and this brings the amount of playerkills down.

In the original Descent players could get CT from chests only if the quest specifically said for the given chest marker identificator. In SoB there are no chest identificators used. instead you through 4 black power dices and players get a treasure item for each blank rolled - no CT for players or threat for the OL. Or did we misinterpet the rule?

If I remember correctly the OL receives only threat from cycling his deck - no CT there. the whole CT affair is very poorly described in the SoB rulebook. Bits of information are thrown around articles.

Read the rulebook carefully:

page 20

"If a chest is opened and no treasures are found , the heroes receive one extra conquest token."

So they don't gain 3 CT every time they open a chest.

The OL gains 3 CT each time the deck is finished. I cannot find it, but I am sure of it.

On the other hand, the heroes could win 20-25 CT, but the OL should be able to gain the double of that amount. In our actual game, we have 110 and the OL 180. I have never seen the heroes party winning, and I have played a lot . With 25-30 CT, an OL can upgrade his monsters to silver, and he will kill the heroes much easier... In general, SOB is very unbalanced respect RTL.

Thanks for the rule clarification. These CT exceptions have slipped my attention.

From your experience how often OL gets a player kill in SoB? My reasoning above was that to reach 30+ CT per dungeon the OL would need to get a kill almost each round or on each second round and this is unlikely (15 times to kill 2 valued heroes). Specifically because of the limitation of spawning in a dungeon level - one spawn per dungeon level.

maamets said:

I think that you should play it, and later you can think about it The heroes can gain aprox. 5-6 points per level, and the OL can kill 2-4 times the heroes -or even more if the heroes have bad luck or play incorrectly!-.

i am taking it easy on my group in SOB and am almost 100 XP ahead of them, this with Kirga and his special anti spawn area of effect and boggs the rat in play. i averaged 23 conquest per dungeon while the heros got roughly 15. this was all before adding in TOI monsters and feat cards. normally we do not add new stuff in the middle of a campaign but they needed it badly.

i have also sacked 3 cities and have been rolling on a stubborn one for 6 turns now. i am using the dark queen story line. i have been able to get an upgrade almost every turn since the heros entered their first dungeon. i am not going to purchase the upgrade that allows me to sack dallak as we want to try running till they meet my avatar. i continually am winning encounters with TPK and they are unable to reach my LT's to stop them from sacking cities.

while i have two heros that i get no conquest for at the moment and the other two are currently only worth one to me i still go after the squishy wizzard and kirga even though he is outfitted with the best armor and a shield because i can slow them down the most. i do not even directly target them for kills but just to bog the rest down. in most of the levels we have played runners are worthless to the party and i can make it so difficult to get through an area the team gets split up and i can pick at least two off per level. they usually have no problem killing off a level leader even with the extra armour and wounds per level, its the bottlenecks i can achieve that is their downfall. the cage in one level helped, the river in another, it is quite a brutal thing.

this has all changed however with getting further along in silver, now we are on the verge of gold and i have gotten almost ten conquest, and we are just begining the third level of a roumor, at -3 per hero kill. i froisted the tank, which usually is a worthless thing, destroying two silver melee weapons and his silver armour.

when we finish this campaign we are going to sit down and try to fix the mechanics of this expansion to make it more playable. it might turn out though that all we get are the tokens and extra levels to add to RTL.

gran_orco said:

Hi,

5 or 6 CT per dungeon level for heroes makes total sense.

But I can not image OL killing more than 2 players per level. The reason is that OL is limited to a number of monsters per level. Specifically OL is limited to what mosters are originally in that level and to one spwan. The only thing heroes have to do is massively use guard actions and virtually no monster can surprise them and OL will eventually run out of mosters because of the spawn limitation. Especially if the group constists of 2 mage types, one range type and one melee type character. The average dam output of the heroes is enough to easily one or twoshot regular monsters before they even get close.

So this brings me to the question that if I actually have understood the spawning rule correctly: only one spawn per dungeon level if that level consists of only one area?

Regards.

No, you obviously have not understood the rules for spawning correctly.

There is no limit on the number of spawns in a given level, the only limit is one spawn card per turn.

Of course you have to use the reinforcement marker which makes spawns beyond the first pretty expensive, threat-wise. But it happened very often (at least in my games) that I spawned twice or even thrice in a level.

Hi Parathion,

Thanks for clearing this up. I totaly missed the rule that I can flip the reinforcement token back for 15 threat.

Now it makes more sense.