Hey everyone.

So! We RtL'ed it up tonight and started afresh in honour of my recent WoD and AoD expansion aquisitions! New heroes were selected, the frontlines were drawn, the Sorcerer King was randomly pulled and, to top it off, I selected 'Obsidian Shackles' as my evil and undoubtedly nefarious plot!

Now enter the first dungeon...

Is it me, or are just one or two of the opening dungeons an absolute ***** for the heroes to wade through? Take this for instance:

Dungeon 17. Bag of Bones.

I can safely say the heroes got absolutely pummelled. Yes! I admit that I kind of skele-swarmed them and picked on the easy targets. But frankly, when I can pull 20 conquest practically out of my back side, and they get away with a shoddy four (one for finding the dungeon, and three for a lousy portal activation) where does that leave the players?

I mean aside from one small dice throwing incident they took it in pretty good part. But they were forced to retreat after having their tender areas handed to them on a silver platter.

And speaking of which, a question for those in the know! It says on the card that good Old King Janius is turned in to a nice bone heap when he dies, forgoing the undying ability. This is fine! So in essence, the players pick up this bone heap, relay it to the sarcophagous (spelling?) and dump him inside to lay old kingy to eternal slumber. But then it goes on to say that in the very next Overlord turn, king-face revives (I'm assuming on full health as per the undying ability unless I'm mistaken about that) and simply runs off five spaces in the other direction cackling like a skeletal loon.

Of course the heroes could have surrounded him, set up guard action and given him a thorough twatting in a malicious series of interrupts before carting him off at a leisurely pace after my thorough defeat. But to be honest, this whole set up seems a little harsh for a copper level party just starting out with zero treasures.

After tucking their tails between their legs and fleeing, the heroes then decided to try another dungeon. This turned out to be :

22. The Citadel.

So they've got to kill a fairly weak sorcerer to get the red rune key, and move on. Now bear in mind I have the Sorcerer King as my Avatar, so I get 10 free threat at the start, with +1 every OL turn which comes out as a constant stream of five. But low and behold, I also have the dark prist spawn in my hand. What was I to do?

As you might expect, mage-pants flees north through the doors and I spawn my dark priests. The heroes have a couple of turns cautiously approaching the first 'yellow' area so as not to get twerped by a ghostly giant's fist doing their faces in. Then I simply flip my spawn counter back open, and spawn some Ferrox to further reinforce my position.

Now... Had they attempted to fight, again they would have been totalled. In the end, I left the southern area a bit exposed so they nicked the gold pile, activated a portal and scarpered. Another measly four conquest to them.

Now, is this typical of all copper level RtL dungeons? Or did I simply draw two particularly bad dungeon levels to get under way with? Their notable lack of a ranged party member caned them somewhat, but still... I don't have the experience to draw from to know whether this was a defining factor, or whether they were simply unlucky. (Yes they had magic, but no ranged support)

I'd be very interested to know what you all think, and some clarification about the Dark Relic cards in AoD would be most welcome too. Cheers! - Chrome.

Chromatism said:

1. Bag of Bones. RtL can be very different. My heroes at copper level breezed this level taking no losses. Guaranteed they had a lucky combo of characters / skills / equipment, and my skeletons were copper, but all I did was last 2 turns, scored I think a couple of wounds on someone and then everything was dead. The character with 5 movement, did a run action, spent lots of fatigue and King Janius was killed and put into a box before I could do anything. Of course, with your group, you did this level right at the start with no treasures, so I can see how it may have played out differently - but are your heroes playing correctly?

Good tactics my group found were to go on guard 90% of the time. So turn 1, they all choose the ready action, move in a bit and then go on guard. In the first OL turn, the guard orders trigger and the heroes kill some things. Then in the heroes turn, they do the same thing, they choose ready. They move a bit with fatigue, then have an attack, then go on guard.

At the end of the level, they move onto the portal space and place a rest order, so they are fully refreshed for the next level. With these tactics, they did very well. Of course, my group also had Landrec with Spiritwalker and Staff of the Grave, so my copper monsters were dropping like flies. In fact, they had 1 ranged, 2 magic and only 1 melee, and the average damage output per attack was easily able to kill any copper monster. So you can see how I lasted all of 2 turns.

Ruleswise, yes the card needs clarification. We ruled it that unless his bones are placed into a sarcophagus, he revives. If his bones are in the box, he doesnt revive. The only thing that makes sense.

2. Dungeon 2. Again, I'd have to question your heroes tactics. They might be playing it very well, and you may just have been lucky with card draws / dice, etc. Sounds like they did the right thing on dungeon 2. If you didnt kill anyone, they got 4 XP and some coins and you didnt get anything. However, thats another dungeon they cant go back and revisit.

Do you have more info about your party - characters, skills, equipment? They should now have enough coins to go shopping at Tamalir and purchase 2 copper treasures. That might help them a bit. Odd that they didnt choose a ranged character too. That may have been a mistake

Bag of Bones is pretty straitforward IME. And it doesnt need a rule - once you put the Janius-Bonepile in the crypt you can search the crypt, removing it, and there is no bonepile for his figure to replace. (Unless this is one of the FAQ ones I've forgotten).

Speed is life in Descent I believe. Less turns = less threat and more importantly, less cards drawn for the OL. You did draw two or the largest dungeons early, But I would have gone hard at teh second - you can;t get anywhere without going through the yellow areas so accept it and get stuck in. If the OL uses up his threat on a few Giant attacks on single characters then he isn't using it on good cards. SLowing down just plays into his hands.

But yes, most dungeon levels are pretty hard for a beginning party with no upgrades and no treasures. But tight play should be able to get a party through most first levels with only 2-3 losses max.

And Sorcerer King with his Threat bonuses is the hardest opponent to begin with. I think he's pretty rubbish once the heroes have powered up a bit, but there are no easy first levels with him early on, the way there often are with other Avatars.

Well, ranged characters with town equip suck; also, in the base set, only one ranged character has three ranged dice (Silhouette). But they do make good runners!

As for RtL dungeons - the difficulty of the levels varies widely depending on party composition, skills drawn and the dungeon itself. Some are not difficult with almost any party, some are outright nasty. The biggest problem is that they do not scale well with increasing Hero power.

Ahah! I seem to have written my querie about King Janius badly.

I'm aware that he basically dies when he's placed in to the coffin. I was questioning the ruling that if he's not in coffin after he's been 'boned', he simply revives on the very next OL turn, turns someone into a pincussion and THEN runs away cackling

And yes... the players were playing a very cautious game to be honest. I'll come back with their gear and who they are just a little bit later on. They are all most intelligent blokes (and blokette) I RP with on a regular basis, so tactics wise they were attempting to be slow and purposeful (which is a left over from DnD table topping I assume) rather than being speedy with it.

I even made the comment to them that if they had focussed all their efforts on to Janius from the start they would indeed have probably one come turn two or three. But the general concensus was I was talking bollocks and trying to lead them astray. I wasn't intending to use reverse psychology, but that's the way it worked out.

Not to mention they also became heinously unlucky. Old Battlemage Jaes missed with a (I think) blast attack three times in a row. Then when they had pulled their acts together, it was down to 'Conan' (The Barbarian guy from WoD) to strike the killing blow and begin the relay to the coffin... I'm 'ashamed' to say I played the dodge card at this point, and forced a miss which screwed their whole tactic up. Yes Janius died on that turn, but they didn't have the manpower to transport him, so as soon as their turn is over mine begins and kingy runs shooting his bow off in victory celebration!

And... yeah! The second dungeon. To be honest, I think I went hopelessly soft. Reinforced the path to the second level so lethally I had a momentary brain fart and somewhat forgot about the portal in the south. A tactical error on my part, though it was half way due to the fact that I didn't want them to give up on the game.

Anyway! I'll come back with the characters and what-not later, and let you know. Cheers!

Xandria said:

Sorry! Didn't mean to leave you out of my post up there. So it sounds like an even mix of bad luck of the dungeon draw and uneven player tactics mostly then. Though I have to admit, the lack of any sort of runner hurt them when it came to tackling Janius.

Thanks for your reply!

Okay! Now that I'm up and about. A run down of the heroes with the starting equipment I can actually remember:

1) Battlemage Jaes - Quick Casting : Blinding Light, Chain Mail. (To my knowledge this hasn't yet changed.)

2) Nanok of the Blade - Earth Pact : Axe...

3) Tahlia - Weapon Mastery : Axe, Chain Mail.

4) Landrec the Wise - Vampiric Blood : Immolation, Wizard's Robe.

Additionally, Jaes and Nanok were double teamed to one of the players just to make up the four heroes. Also, all the heroes began the game with one health potion each after spending a little time in Tamalir. (Not any of them have used it yet...)

Then came their skeletal arse whupping, followed by the finding and purchase of copper treasures. They started to look a little more health, as follows:

1) Battlemage Jaes - Quick Casting : Blinding Light, Sunburst, Chain Mail, Health Potion, Fatigue Potion.

2) Nanok of the Blade - Earth Pact : Knuckle Dagger (cp), Falcon's Claws (cp), Health Potion.

3) Tahlia - Weapon Mastery : Shillelagh (cp), Plate Mail (cp), Health Potion, Fatigue Potion.

4) Landrec the Wise - No change.

Poor old Landrec eh? The lack of fatigue potions at the start was probably a huge oversight. But there's no escaping the fact that this party is SLOOOOOW. Though I must admit there's quite a bit of fatigue to go around, so it shouldn't have been too much of a problem.

But anyway, let me know what you think.

First of all, I'd house-rule that once in the sarcophagus, Janius is dead and doesn't pop up to bother the heroes anymore, despite the unclear ruling.

Second, yes, they lack a runner, and Nanok with his fatigue and speed will have to fill in for him.

Third, Nanok didn't draw a good fighting skill? Why earth pact?

A grand question!

Though the best answer I can give is that we were using the skill set-up rulings on page 8 of the RtL rulebook.

And having just reread the rulings from the manual, I missed the fact that they could draw a fourth skill card from a deck of their choice. Though considering Nanok draws at the very least two melee cards, quite why Earth Pact has been chosen is beyond me! Your guess is as good as mine.