Gollum hero. Yes. For some time, he sincerely helped Frodo. I would make him a Spirit hero with some sort of a tradeoff card text.

Wose allies. Yes, again. Maybe some set of neutral ally cards, represented by Woses. Or even spread across spheres like Drummer in leadership, Hunter in tactics, Pathfinder in spirit and etc.

What wierd things would YOU like to see in this game?

a drunken ability such as

Event:

Drunken Courage

cost 0

action. Hero gets +3 of all stats

Hero cannot ready or perform actions for the next round

I wouldn't necessarily call it "weird", but after some time I wouldn't mind seeing another sphere, and not just a saga sphere that doesn't extend beyond the saga.

I wouldn't necessarily call it "weird", but after some time I wouldn't mind seeing another sphere, and not just a saga sphere that doesn't extend beyond the saga.

I'd bet that down the road we'll see more spheres. I'd also like longer quests that maybe go beyond the current max threat level of 50

Two words:

zombie hobbits

Two words: zombie hobbits

Throw him off the bus!

Edit:

I forgot the rest of my post.

First, yes I would like to see a smeagol hero come late into the trilogy saga.

_

Personally I would love to see a mechanic to play off and reward you for playing at high threat. If any of you ever played the old Army of Two xbox games, there was this great idea of aggro. Basically the more attention you draw to yourself the less the other player was noticeable. It was a great mechanic that actually made the other team member practically invisible at some points.

Would love to see a similar themed mechanic here. After all isn't that exaactly what aragorn gandalf and all of rohan and gondor were doing while frodo sam and smeagol were going secrecy?

Two words:

zombie hobbits

You touch my heart!!! Zombie-hobbit. Ha ha ha!!!

This is really good joke man!

100%!

A bunny sled attachment for Radagast

Ok, this is more seriously:

I think it would be cool if we had a box in which we could play for the other side. Find these hobbits, lead an orc army, ravage Ithilien, make intrigues against your allies.

Tom Bombadil. What's more weird than him? A GenCon pack would be ideal -- it wouldn't have to mega hard, just flavourful (and mad as a barrel of monkeys).

Personally I would love to see a mechanic to play off and reward you for playing at high threat. If any of you ever played the old Army of Two xbox games, there was this great idea of aggro. Basically the more attention you draw to yourself the less the other player was noticeable. It was a great mechanic that actually made the other team member practically invisible at some points.

Would love to see a similar themed mechanic here. After all isn't that exaactly what aragorn gandalf and all of rohan and gondor were doing while frodo sam and smeagol were going secrecy?

Isn´t that kinda represented by enemy engagement cost?

If you have a threat of 42 and your partner plays a secrecy deck and has threat 16, you´re pretty guaranteed to engage all enemies over your partner (he is seeming almost invisible to enemies).

As for player cards that can only be played at a certain (high) threat level for a lower cost (kinda like a reverse secrecy) might be kinda fun. If it´s done properly theme-wise.

I’d love to see a core set on the Sauron side, followed by expansions & cycles just like the normal game. One could have “villains” as a counterpart to “heroes” and have a deck of evil themed cards, with evil mission type of quests fighting against the free peoples.

Some villains could be like boss characters already in the encounter deck as there are not so many named evil characters other then then Witch-King, Khamul, Saruman and a hand full of Orcs. How would you like to play as Ghulat or Dru-Buri_dru for example?

what about magic? you'd have to restrict it to people like gandalf, of course -- i'm sure he did a few spell-type things in the books. he might not have stood over a cauldron reciting little poems, but i seem to remember that he did use his staff for a few magical things.

maybe they could work like attachments. attach them to gandalf, and then exhaust them when you want to use them

i really want the game to get more involved and complicated, though -- so it ties all the quests together. imagine if we could pick up an object in one quest (in the same way that we do treasures), and then deliver it to someone in another quest... giving us a great new weapon, or something.

or maybe they could have a great new ally who won't join us until we've completed some part of another quest, to gain his trust... stuff like that.

what about magic? you'd have to restrict it to people like gandalf, of course -- i'm sure he did a few spell-type things in the books. he might not have stood over a cauldron reciting little poems, but i seem to remember that he did use his staff for a few magical things.

maybe they could work like attachments. attach them to gandalf, and then exhaust them when you want to use them

i really want the game to get more involved and complicated, though -- so it ties all the quests together. imagine if we could pick up an object in one quest (in the same way that we do treasures), and then deliver it to someone in another quest... giving us a great new weapon, or something.

or maybe they could have a great new ally who won't join us until we've completed some part of another quest, to gain his trust... stuff like that.

This is exactly what I'd love to see as well, and I hope we get some of it in the new cycle.

An expansion of nothing but Beornings.

Just sayin'

On the more serious side, if FFG could ever secure the rights to the first age, playing as the Valar in their fight against Morgoth would be pretty amazing.

what about magic? you'd have to restrict it to people like gandalf, of course -- i'm sure he did a few spell-type things in the books. he might not have stood over a cauldron reciting little poems, but i seem to remember that he did use his staff for a few magical things.

maybe they could work like attachments. attach them to gandalf, and then exhaust them when you want to use them

word of command is sort of a spell. apart from that there isnt a lot. i think a big chance was missed in shadow and flame to give us 'you cannot pass!'

Personally I would love to see a mechanic to play off and reward you for playing at high threat. If any of you ever played the old Army of Two xbox games, there was this great idea of aggro. Basically the more attention you draw to yourself the less the other player was noticeable. It was a great mechanic that actually made the other team member practically invisible at some points.

Would love to see a similar themed mechanic here. After all isn't that exaactly what aragorn gandalf and all of rohan and gondor were doing while frodo sam and smeagol were going secrecy?

Isn´t that kinda represented by enemy engagement cost?

If you have a threat of 42 and your partner plays a secrecy deck and has threat 16, you´re pretty guaranteed to engage all enemies over your partner (he is seeming almost invisible to enemies).

As for player cards that can only be played at a certain (high) threat level for a lower cost (kinda like a reverse secrecy) might be kinda fun. If it´s done properly theme-wise.

Yeah this is already partially built into the game. There are advantages in staying low or starting high. I was specifically referring to the secrecy idea in reverse. Ie instead of Secrecy where you can play the card anytime but get a bonus if you are at 20 or lower threat there being essentially an opposite trait where you get bonuses if you are over 40 for example.

There are a lot of things that I would like to see that I don't think are necessarily weird - even the super-quests that go beyond 50 threat were suggested by the core rulebook, which I'm very fond of mentioning

I never thought we'd see a Saruman player card, and yet I am shortly to be proven wrong! I think Ent player cards would be weird, so we'll see if the same thing happens here, too...

what about magic? you'd have to restrict it to people like gandalf, of course -- i'm sure he did a few spell-type things in the books. he might not have stood over a cauldron reciting little poems, but i seem to remember that he did use his staff for a few magical things.

maybe they could work like attachments. attach them to gandalf, and then exhaust them when you want to use them

word of command is sort of a spell. apart from that there isnt a lot. i think a big chance was missed in shadow and flame to give us 'you cannot pass!'

the good thing about having magic, is that it could apply to every enemy at once. they'd have to make it pretty expensive because it would be so good, but it would be cool if gandalf could lift his staff up and damage every enemy on the board, or send all of them running back into the encounter deck.

i also think that it would be cool if they did some more spheres, but i think they have left it too late for that now. the new sphere would have too much catching up to do.

A bunny sled attachment for Radagast

****. You actually got an audible chortle out of me for that one. Loved it!

what about magic? you'd have to restrict it to people like gandalf, of course -- i'm sure he did a few spell-type things in the books. he might not have stood over a cauldron reciting little poems, but i seem to remember that he did use his staff for a few magical things.

maybe they could work like attachments. attach them to gandalf, and then exhaust them when you want to use them

word of command is sort of a spell. apart from that there isnt a lot. i think a big chance was missed in shadow and flame to give us 'you cannot pass!'

Since that was a specific moment from the book, I could see them wrinkling it into a saga encounter, but not the "general" encounter decks?

Someone's already touched on a Gollum/Smeagol hero.... taking that a bit farther: A traitor technique for multiplayer.

For example: Smeagol/Gollum, Saruman, and Denthor hero version. That all start the game as positive heores, but convert when the controlling player reaches a certain threshold. Then begins working WITH the encounter deck against other players... Or perhaps instead of dying when the player reaches 50, his/her deck remains in play but converts in some manner.

Or eventually a "juggernaut" style game (1 versus 3) where an actual person manipulates an enhanced encounter deck against 3 other players.

Or eventually a "juggernaut" style game (1 versus 3) where an actual person manipulates an enhanced encounter deck against 3 other players.

I've toyed around with what I affectionately call "encounter mode," where I control the encounter deck and other players play against me. We affectionately called it 'encounter mode.' Tried it a couple of different ways, but one way that worked fairly well was to have the 'encounter master' draw X+3 cards at the beginning of the game, where X is the number of players (excluding the EM). At questing the EM decides the order of cards to be revealed, THEN heroes commit, then you reveal. At combat the EM draws X cards, where X is the number of shadow cards that are to be dealt. He can then freely decide which enemy gets which shadow card.

Needed to come up with special rules for cards that do things like shuffle the encounter deck, scry, etc. I haven't done it for awhile but I think what we did was to try and make a distinction between cards in the EM's hand vs in the actual encounter deck, and rework some of the scrying effects. All a little fuzzy now. Need special rules for objective cards too, or the EM can just hold them back. Fun, but needs a lot of conversion to make it workable.

I’d love to see a core set on the Sauron side, followed by expansions & cycles just like the normal game. One could have “villains” as a counterpart to “heroes” and have a deck of evil themed cards, with evil mission type of quests fighting against the free peoples.

Some villains could be like boss characters already in the encounter deck as there are not so many named evil characters other then then Witch-King, Khamul, Saruman and a hand full of Orcs. How would you like to play as Ghulat or Dru-Buri_dru for example?

Dru-Buri-Dru is not evil, and would make a reasonable ally or even hero in current environment.

We've had ally-objectives, so it would be interesting to have hero-objectives. Maybe one that you can use for other quests once you've discovered them in a quest...that could give a feel of "unlocking" a hero by completing a quest.