So, without further ado, a friend and I tested the Chaos spawn of the rifts ending by Lord Aries here and the we tested the Librarian v2 and the Vindicare assassin . My friend was controlling the space marine and the librarian and I was controlling the Callidus and the Vindicare. The idea was to compare how the two space marines characters and the two assassin characters changed over the course of the game.
First of all, the scenario Chaos spawn of the Rift:
Some caveats: We did not play with the "you must encounter each square one after another" special rule. I don't like the mechanics of the inner tier as it is, so we bypassed that. Second, we did not play with the "After fighting you character get sent back to the Blackstone Fortress Space" special rule. We were running out of time, and for the sake of trying out the scenario, we just played that you remained on the scenario space until you died.
The battles against the spawn were epic. I really liked the mechanic of drawing enemy cards for its battle value. The librarian and the ultramarines got lucky on some draws and were able to draw squigs and ripper swarms (battle value 1) whilst the two assassins kept drawing bloodthirster and Fabius Bile for their battles.
It came down to the Ultramarine he drew 5 cards (2 tokens already) for a strength battle total of 33. With its strength 11, he played the power card Furious assault (doubles strength) for a base of 22, added the relic Reverend fist (+3), then played an iron discipline for his combat roll (+6) and rolled an extra dice (from the 6 from the card) and rolled a 5 for a massive strength 36 which crushed the spawn. That was Epic fun.
However, some questions about the ending: We played that even if you had a red card with a different battle color, it was still a red combat. i.e. You roll a 1 to decide which battle form the spawn will use. A 1 means it will be from the red deck. I draw 3 cards: Chaos tech priest (red 2), Warboss Deffsnagga (red 10) and Evil Sunz warbiker (yellow 3). The combat remains a strength combat at combat value 15. We did not differentiate between the colors. We just added the numbers. Is that correct?
We also felt that the characters had no ways to mitigate bad draws. I am not sure what mechanism could be put in place to deal with the very high randomness of the scenario but we thought we would add:
"you may spend influence to add or subtract 1 to your result for each influence spent when determining the chaos spawn battle form".
That means, I can force the spawn into a combat that would be more beneficial for the player. It then forces the player to think: "Do I want to pay the 8 influences to move 1 space over in the inner tier or do I keep my influence to make sure I get the battle form I want when facing the spawn".
It also makes influence a bit more useful even through to the end game.
However, to avoid the fight being too easy, I suppose you could change it to:
"You may spend only 1 influence to add or subtract 1 to your result when determining the chaos spawn battle form"
Edited by guillaumetexas