Hello everybody.

As you probably know by now, some of the game designers original cards were discarded during the game production to mantain the amount of cards per expansion. The most kown example is the "lone wendigo" card which is mentioned in the ToI rules but does not appear in the game. A second example was the mace of kellos, which was mentioned in the WoD FAQ but did not appear until the AoD.

So I'm trying to know what other cards could have followed this fate and to add a home brew version of them so that they can be added to the game. In addition, some cards that would combine 2 or the 3 vanilla expansions (WoD, AoD and ToI) could be added. For the moment I have the following posibilities.

OL CARDS:

*Lust: After the other 6 sins this last one must exist. According to the other sin power cards progresion, this one should cost about 20 threat. I still don't know what it could do. Maybe give a penalty to heroes that enter spaces adjacent to other heroes.

*Kobold horde: There are 2 copies of elite war beastmen party, legions of the deads and spider nest. The second copy was added in the AoD, so a second copy of kobold horde couldn't be added (there are many lost cards in AoD btw). So why not adding it now.

*Spell of blinding: Similar to spell of fire/ice/binding... This one would deal the daze token to the figures. I wouldn't add a spell of poison because it requires damadge to be deal, spell of bleeding doesn't seem logic (a magic spell that makes you blead without touching you?) and spell of curse is too pwerful.

*Eruption, Swampy dirt, Smoke curtain, Watery grave and Lands of the dead: Trap cards that would add lava, mud, fog, water and corrupted terrain to the board. The effects of the water one are difficult to see, as no hero is ever supposed to sufer a penalty for entering a water space (indeed, they can rarely enter them). The other ones would deal fire tokens, substract movement points or simply appear in a very unconvenient place (OL choice). The fog and corrupted terrain ones would allow the OL to place more than one tile, as they don't have any immediate consequences.

TREASURE ITEMS EXISTING SERIES:

If you haven't noticed, most items follow a pattern. However, the AoD took some cards out of some series (the web and the breath series lack their gold treasure). Then the ToI created some strange weapons that allow the heros to roll more dice than normal (leviatan, ripper...) but have some side effect. Again the series are incomplete here. My idea is to finish the following series:

*Leviatan (add the silver treasure)

*Ripper (add the gold treasure)

*Falcon's Claw and Cone of fire (add the shop deck item and the gold treasure)

*Morning Star (add all the treasure levels): It would have sweep in silver and its off-hand bonus would include sweep in gold.

*Screaming Eagle Staff (complete it from the shop to gold): It would go from a weaker version of suburst (with breath) to a bolt weapon.

*Lifedrinker and Mirrorshield (Add a gold treasure, but NOT a cooper treasure)

*Red robe of kellos and Star of Kellos (Add a silver treasure, but NOT a cooper treasure)

NEW TREASURE ITEMS:

Now, to balance the ammount of weapons of each type of attack some ranged and magic ones must be added. In addition, I think there is place for a couple of extra cursed items. These ones are from my creation, but I think they would fit:

*Boomerang series (from shop to gold): This ranged weapon would be the partner of the morning star and the screaming eagle staff. As the others, it would be pretty weak, but it would have something to compensate it. If you kill a monster with a boomerang and there is still some range and damage left, the boomerang continues flying and hits a second target with its remaining damage.

*The death pact series (from cooper to gold): Similar to the leviatan and the ripper, this rune would allow the user to roll more dices than usual weapons... but it would take one wound from him (or maybe one fatige, I don't know yet). And it's a rune, so no heavy armor allowed. It grants much power but it has a cost in life, so it is a pact with death.

*The vial of fire / alchemy bomb series (silver and gold only): This would be the ranged equivalent of the life drinker and the star of kellos. It would completely ignore the enemy defence (even if it has ironskin), but it wouldn't deal much damage. This could break the game in RtL, so I may consider to just ignore X points of armor (even if the target has ironskin).

*Golem armor (a cursed cooper item): "Armor, cursed. +3 armor. You have ironskin. You cannot equip runes and your speed is reduced to 3." If there is one cursed weapon of each type, and one shield, then why not an armor? Sure, Ironskin is really powerful, but it's still possible to beat, and after all, all the cursed weapons (and shield) are really powerful.

*Summon (a cursed silver item): It would allow the user to roll 4 dices in a morph attack. It is a rune and it's cursed. I still have to think about the surges effects because I want it to be very powerful but hard to control. So something like dealing "random" effect tokens looks a good idea, but how to randomice that?

FEAT CARDS (ideas needed for prolonged actions):

Finally, don't you have the feeling that 17 is a very strange number of cards for a deck? And have you noticed that the wizzardy feat deck doesn't have a "second wind" while the other two have? And have you counted how many cards are there in each deck? I'll tell you: fighting and subterfuge decks have two sets of 3 cards, fouf sets of 2 cards and three sets of 1 card, while the wizardy deck has two sets of 3 cards, five sets of two cards and one set of one card. My gues is there were going to be 20 cards on each deck (just like the skill decks, right?).

But rather than trying to figure out what the missing cards were going to be, how about combining them with the prolonged actions? After all, prolonged actions rarely serve any purpose, and that makes 3 skill cards pretty pointless. If each feat deck has a reasonable amount of cards that allow the hero to do a prolonged action to get something there will be some point in that whole page of the rules in AoD. I don't have many ideas here so I would like to ask you, what do you think a prolonged action + a feat card is worth.

As an example I would add on card like this. "Play after declaring a ready action when you are adjacent to a corrupted glyph. You may do a prolonged magic (2) action to change it into a normal glyph. This action is disrupted if you lose any wound or move, and it may not be started again. If you change a green glyph into a normal glyph, you also recive the 2 conquest tokens that were denied when activating that glyph."

Any coments or ideas?

Oh, I forgot the series of rings. In AoD 3 ring items were added:

A ring of protection (shop) that increases defense, a ring of freedom (silver) that allows to spend MP when "grappled" or "webbed" and a knight's ring (gold) that increases defence and maximum wounds and adds a MP. Odd that there is no copper item in the series, and no, the ring of quikness does not belong to that series. It goes with the elven boots and the wings of regiroth.

I supose the extra ring would increase maximum wounds and (maybe) maximum fatige. Or maybe, it recovers one wound per turn, but that seems a bit too much for a copper treasure (Ispher and Red Scorpion are worth more CT than normal because they have that hability already).

This seems like you want things to be very symmetrical. Which is fine, don't get me wrong. I'm not sure some of these concepts actually ever existed, it may be a stretch to assume they were. Like the Morning Star. It was added to serve as a strong off hand weapon out the gate to presumably buff the option of dual wielding since it mathematically behind two-handers.

Things like the absence of a Lust card stood out to me as well, but conceptually it seems a bit more difficult to create a sensible power for. I also totally know what you mean by the patterned growth from many shop items up through their similar gold versions. To me it seemed likely something they purposefully diverged from.

The other thing to consider is over bloating the treasure decks. The more cards that are in each, the less likely a specific card is going to turn up. There are 44 copper treasures, 44 silver treasures and 35 gold treasures all total.

You are right to belive that certain items do not belog to any series. The mirror shield and the life drinker seem to be standalone objects. I didn't figure this out until I started with the calculations. It seems that when in the AoD they decided to cut down the item cards (and that is quite obvious to me) they selectively chosed some items to get out and then added some standalone items. Why? The reason seems to be in the item balance.

For every 4 weapons there is 1 armor (aproximately).

For every 8 to 9 weapons there is 1 shield. This one changes from one expansion to the next but the number is between 8 and 9.

The number of total treasure caches (cooper+silver+gold) is the average of weapons of each kind. That is if you add all the weapons among the three deks and divide the number by 3 (to get the average of mele ranged or magic weapons) that same number is the number of treasure caches.

The "other" objects are a bit more tricky. The core game and the AoD come with a lot of them while the WoD and the ToI add just a few. In total there seems to be 1.8 weapons for each "other object"

In addition, the main difference between the deks is in the treasure caches (one more in cooper than in silver and one more in silver than in gold) and in the "other" objects (the greater the deck value, the fewer other objects).

All these numbers are aproximate, but they provide a good reason to cut some series and add alone objects. They help keeping the balance.

I have counted 44, 40 and 35 cards on the three decks, that's a total of 119 cards. After some math, I understand that adding all these series while keeping the balance, would mean to have a total of 162 cards. That's 36% more, which is too much. It seems I'll have to reduce the number of cards. It's not that I care about a certain card appearing or not, but adding a third of cards made by me would probably change the game completely.

Anyway, I still think most of the objects were designed as part of greater series.