Ok, so can somebody give me a description of the Road to Legend expansion? I tried to skim through the pdf manual and I might as well have been reading Babylonian scrolls. It seems MUCH more in depth than standard Descent, which is all I have right now. Also, I want a gradual progession of complexity as I get the expansions. Which should I pick up first with this in mind? Thanks.

About gradual progression of complexity, except for Road to Legend, all expansions don't introduce new basic elements to play - it's more, modifications, tweaks and more of everything (treasure, traps, tile types, monsters, and heroes). So there's no strict order in which they have to be bought or played.

• T reasure - you'll find new toys for the heroes in all expansions, but Well of Darkness also has quite some "bugfix" cards that replace the ones in the core game. The earlier expansions fill more "holes" of unavailable skill/range/strength combinations in the shop items and quest items, too. Only WoD has many more relics, and ToI has one. Oh, and every expansion except RtL introduces a new kind of potion.
• Monsters - all expansions have about as many monsters as the others, with different focus, and special abilities to go with them. All of them are fun and add variety to the game - swarms that get boni for multiple monsters attacking, or the Ice Wyrm that can swallow enemies.
• Familiars - a few of them come with every expansion, through skills and heroes and (with ToI) even treasure.
• Quests - the later the expansion, the less quests go with it - WoD has 9 IIRC, AoD has 8 or so, ToI has only 6. On the other hand, ToI also has some dungeons for use with Road to Legend (see below).
• Treachery - this system for customizing the overlord deck is explained in all expansion's rulebooks, save for RtL (where a simplified version is introduced instead that can be used if you have none of the other expansions). Additional cards go with the system, and as with treasure, the more expansions you have the more variety there is. AoD, WoD and ToI all have unique treachery cards. Treachery values for the original Descent's campaign are included, so the expansions can be used from the onset.
• Floor types and traps - moving walls with AoD, lava and ice and mud and way more floor types with all expansions.

Unfortunately, many of those things are only used in their native expansions, since every expansion is meant to build up on just the base game and not its predecessors - so you'll have to play custom scenarios to use them extensively all at once. Of course, custom scenarios are great fun too (but can often be unbalanced). Nevertheless, treasure is useable everywhere, and monsters and traps work via overlord cards everywhere.

There are some things that are unique to some expansions, too:

• Dark Relics - cursed and evil treasure that can't be dropped until the hero dies, use up inventory space (or even hands) and stop the hero from using abilities he likes to use. They are introduced with AoD, just like Dark Glyphs (who are corrupted in various ways).
• Feats - finally, something for the heroes: They come with ToI, feat cards that are drawn into each hero's hand when activating glyphs and then can be used for one-shot things, kinda like the overlord's hand of cards. Useable in all scenarios.

I'm sure I forgot one or two things, but that's the basics.

Finally, Road to Legend . This expansion is very different, in that it does introduce a new kind of terrain (outdoor terrain) and trees, but mostly has its focus on the advanced campaign - which, basically, is a whole meta game underlying the dungeon crawling, where the overlord gets to try to follow his evil plot and, in the final fight, even has a (at least in theory) climactic last battle with the heroes. Basically, it changes the entire setting of the game (large campaign instead of loosely connected dungeons), introduces a way for both heroes and overlord to grow in power over time (like, skills can be trained in cities), changes the encounters themselves (making them somewhat random, but still connected to stories and, what's more, embedded in the big campaign) and also changes some ways the dungeons themselves work (concerning treasure and the town, mostly).

RtL then doesn't actually have dungeons like the other expansions do, nor does it introduce new monsters or heroes, it focuses on that advanced campaign only. It does come with 40 dungeon floors and 20 or so outdoor encounter floor plans and special maps for rumours and overlord keeps, so there are tons of maps, it's just that there's no real standalone way to play them.

Thanks, this kind of description should be in the FFG's product description of the game, somewhere. This really helps in deciding which expansion to get next. I'll get them all, eventually...

haslo said:

Nicely covered.