Trust me, for FFG games, that quick. The very fact that you can say "more than an hour" instead of "more than four hours" proves that FFG has improved the game in this regard, compared to first edition. I have never played D1E but I heard about how lengthy this game is. That's also what's pulling me out of the hype around Myth. That just suits a very specific type of playgroup. I own a few other FFG games and you are correct that Descent must be one of the shortest ones Talisman, Arkham Horror, BBTM, BSG etc. These are all very long games. Although one could argue that Descent could be the longest in fact if you consider campaign play, but we can probably agree that it is not the same thing. For me personally (and speaking for my own playgroups), this format that is Descent is awesome. It allows us to play RPG-like adventure games without the huge time investment. These small play sequences fit very well in our session window. Many of us have D&D backgrounds, and now have families and jobs and so on but this game allows us to immerse ourselves again in this type of game without the need for booking a whole sunday staying in the dark playing one single RPG quest. Trust me, for FFG games, that quick. The very fact that you can say "more than an hour" instead of "more than four hours" proves that FFG has improved the game in this regard, compared to first edition. Haha, my group doesn't actually have this problem at all. First blood is 20 mins max. Yeah the playgroup I was talking about is reaaaaly slow at making decisions. I sometimes ask them to wake me up litterally once they've come to an agreement as for in which order the heroes would be playing this turn. What's annoying me too is that they move the minis around as part of their planning, which forces me to remember all initial positions. I tried a couple of times to explain that decisions are always mitigated by luck on the dice roll, but they still need to plan for every action before they start executing their plan. Something bad things happen on the dice roll, let's go plan again from scratch. Who said the OL was the evil man, lol.

This man (Chav) summed it up very well. At the end of the day, players need to accept that they're going to lose a certain % of the quests they're going to play. Look, this game is built around this very concept, and still you get your XP even if you lose plus another shopping round, You lost the last quest? Too bad, now buy this Whirlwind and this Halberd and go slice some Goblins in the next quest. Look at me in the eyes when you say it isn't something to look forward doing. You get my point. You still get to develop your character, and I would push this even further and say that the only quest that truly "matters" is the Finale. But hey, lose the Finale, so what? Look at the past 30 hours of gaming and tell me you didn't have any fun at all. If your playgroup has severe objections to this then this game might not be suited to them. I don't know what kind of games they would enjoy playing though. I hope for you they will come to the realization that this game is about something else. It is a fierce battle, yet you can still get tons of fun out of it and being able to put up a decent challenge every quest you play regardless who won the previous ones. I would NOT recommend that you dumb down your strategy/choices as the OL to let them win more quests. The only thing you could do imho is making them play rumor quests if you want to give them a little push. Good luck

If you intend to play the OL Infector class then the Bol'Goreth plot deck should get your attention. It synergizes very well with it. I am also playing the Mirklace plot deck in another campaign and I like it so far. A bit too soon for giving you a complete breakdown of the cards but I will as soon as I get more experience with it.

Are you sure the Raven wil be considered a figure?

I'll go get it as soon as it gets released. For the teams mainly. It all looks cool, but I'm not so sure at all about the stadiums thingy. I don't think this game needs any more restrictions for how you can play your cards, and that's exactly what stadiums seem to be doing. So I play Humans but I cannot use the pass skill (or use enchanted ball with pass skill) in that stadium,? Great... What a nerf to my team. Stadiums to me need to be neutral. I'm not opposed to introducing cards (abilities or upgrades) that would negate/blank out a particular ability for a round, but just plain forbidding said ability for a whole matchup, no thank you. So you play Wood Elves and the tournament is in this stadium blanking out your Sprint ability? Think twice before you commit players there buddy. Then I just hope the rules around the referree system won't be too random.

A full length campaign certainly means a certain time investment, in terms of keeping every gaming session dedicated to just Descent for the next X weeks/months. It requires dedication, and also that players attend on a regular basis. I've found that one-offs are not even close to be as enjoyable as campaign play. Feels like a total waste of time because there is so little focus. Good to test some of the heroes/classes though if you run Epic Play on top of it, otherwise quite pointless. I was recently asked to run a custom quest totally on-the-fly after we were done with two campaign encounters (after 3.5 hours play mind you, and we had 30mins left), since I only had the material required for said encounters and could not start another campaign encounter. Some players said I could just build my own map and throw whatever monsters I had available, and their heroes (from campaign) would go delve in there and take whatever treasure there is. I said no way. To me there is no "quickie" with this game, even First Blood takes more than a hour with my playgroups.

We haven't got a chance to play with Familiars yet but I intend to use the following at least: - Skeleton Warrior from Legend of Zagor - Wolf from Village of Fear - Some painted stones for the summoned stones - For the Shadow Soul I'm not sure.

I'm genuinely concerned about the time the game would take with more than 4 heroes involved. To me Descent is appealing as a game as the quests/encounters are not designed to take your whole session's time. Think that you probably need to run this as a campaign and you want this campaign to progress. Our personal ratio is 2 encounters per session with 4 players and 2.5/3 encounters with 3 players. We play with Rumor quests and I "hope" to be done with the Shadow Rune campaign with minimal time investment so we can start with the SoN one. The two playgroups started at the same time and I can see half through the campaign that the game progresses way too slow with the 4 heroes group, and it's not because the 3-heroes group doesn't spend time deciding about things. Games are better when they keep flowing imho, only a handful of very long games are able to maintain the tension at an enjoyable level but they are still a heavy investment. I'm concerned that Descent would get pretty slow due to the sheer amount of decisions taken by 5+ heroes. The amount of possible communication channels increases exponentially the more you add players to the game. As a OL, not being directly involved in the decision making of my heroes, I find it already boring-ish at times when it takes 10+ minutes for them to deliberate on any situation. But that's one man's opinion. One thing you should probably never try doing though is splitting the OL's job in two, it will make the game very slow and boring for the two of you. I really do not recommend that.

The Ynfernal hulks are on my agenda next week, and I'll make sure I'll make their base a flow of lava with burnt rock edges. I don't care about the tile they sit on later when we play, it makes the model so much more alive and reflects the true nature of these beasts. Thanks for sharing your work, OP, that's an amazing piece of work.

I just checked and I can confirm your observations. I don't think there is a problem though, It's just the way they were sculpted. The axe in particular doesn't strike me as being absurd or anything, I don't think it had to be symetrical. About Serena's face, they could have detailed it a bit more but I don't think it makes the figure look weird or anything. She just looks constipated, is all

Contaminated from Infector class gives a surge to all of your monsters at the cost of one threat. That is huge. The Infector deck has great synergy with Bol'Goreth's Raging Infection plot deck, since the plot deck introduces lots of ways to deal Poison and Diseased conditions to your heroes, later turned to Infection tokens by the Adaptive Contagion OL card. I also have Plan Ahead in my deck to increase my chances to draw the cards I need. Obviously building an Infector class alongside Zachareth's plot deck helps a lot to maximize your chance to draw the cards you need, but Bol Goreth clearly brings the infector effects to another level. I run Mass Mutation to regain 4 threat tokens at the end of the encounter, and this is even with a Disciple in the hero party. Sometimes it doesn't get off as fast as I would have liked it to be, but once it starts off it's a real pain in the butt for your heroes. Bol Goreth (and Serena btw) inflicts Poison and Diseased on surge so I have the summon card in my deck. So far I have found him to be really powerful. The only "doubts" I have about this Infector class is about the Envenom card, e.g I am still not sure I need two condition "enablers" (alongside Infected) especially for fatigue-heavy use heroes. Then Afflication Aura looks really powerful but I still haven't come around the idea of paying 2 threat tokens for it. Sounds situational but god I have been tempted. Anybody with more extensive use of the class is welcome to comment. I am just starting the Act II of the Shadow Rune campaign so my experience is limited to a few quests.

Very true. This said, Dwarves and Vampires are totally unplayable regardless of how "adaptive" you are (not considering massive luck in the equation) and I think the idea of a house rule for these is not completely off the charts. Dwarves need sprint ability and Vampires need a way to generate more blood tokens. I see no issues with Orcs, and although Undead are definitely in my top 3 best teams in this game, I don't see them as OP as some others here claim they are.

No worries man. You can find the plot deck and all the cards by following this link: http://d2edb.zbmott.net/browse/plotdeck/seeds_of_betrayal/detail basically it allows me to play with a 13 cards OL deck (instead of 15), allows for cycling my cards and also getting more threat tokens. Phoenix Pendant allows Grisban to recover 3 extra life upon standing up or when a hero revives him. I had good use of Trip wire but the hero I want to stop in essence is Logan so he doesn't run around to snipe and search for tokens remotely. I agree traps are not completely irrelevant given the stats of the dwarves, but the dwarves don't search or open doors so that restricts the amount of good cards I can get. Plus trap cards are really situational. Sounds like I think they're bad but I don't, but again my experience with this game is rather limited so I might be missing things. Curse condition is good. I got it on Grisban once and it did a good job on him. I do not have the CK as I haven't got any D1E stuff but technically speaking I could get it and get the minis from plenty of other games I own anyway just to give me that extra choice of monsters. I had No Rest for the Wicked under my radar but I see now how it could be useful.

Radiant Light means 2HP monsters is a no-no, otherwise they just pop as soon as the Disciple has line of sight. They have fortune tokens to support their dice rolls as well. That's a severe restriction for me as a OL considering the fact every quest is a race which is where small monsters tend to excel. I had good impression of the Arachyura with its double attack and triple dices which brought the heroes very low before going down itself. The only problem with that monster and large monsters in general is that I get only one of them since we have three heroes. I picked Bargeists, Harpies and a master Merriod for the Shadow Vault. Controlling their fatigue and surrounding them seems to be more effective. Zachareth is quite good too, I have been inflicting bleeding status a lot due to the fact it makes them spend more fatigue. I would ultimately need a better OL card dealing with the lifegain. I mean, regardless of how good my monsters are and how geared my opposition is, if they just regain all their HP/fatigue instantly then it's pointless Any idea of some OL cards I could invest in?

I noticed there is a search token placed in the corridor between one of the sealed door (which only Zachareth or a master monster may open by using the Shadow key) and the exit tile. My question is simple: how do you loot that token if you can't pass the door? My understanding is that only monsters can go in this corridor. I know Thief classes allow for remote looting but that cannot be through a sealed door?

I'm playing as the overlord against 3 heroes and we've just cleared the Shadow Vault quest of the Shadow Rune campaign, which is the interlude for that campaign. Heroes won it quite easily. There were some good fights, but my monsters respawn too far from the battlefield so the heroes are able to advance faster than my monsters. Since they rest/heal themselves a lot, I cannot keep them under pressure during the campaign. My question is if you think I should plan for anything in particulater in order to keep up with my heroes in terms of challenge? I am not unlucky with my dice rolls at all, as I happen dish tons of damage and get to kill at least each hero once every encounter (that means a lot of threat tokens), but my monsters are getting slaughtered by Logan Lashley along with the team's huge healing capacity. Their team: - Logan Lashley - Thief Greedy/Appraisal/Sneaky/Unseen Lucky charm/Bow of Bone/Immunity Elixir He gets three dices if he doesn't move and a +3 surge as well. I normally Dark Charm him to get him in the middle of my monsters but I start to believe making him shoot instead would be a better option given the damage output. One huge issue is the fact I cannot immobilize him and he can re-roll skill checks. - Grisban the Thirsty - Berserker Rage/Brute/Whirlwind Chipped Greataxe/Fortuna's dice/Phoenix Pendant Nothing to complain about, really. He makes very poor rolls BUT he is a big tank so my attacks often need to focus on him in order to get my monsters into position. - Augur Grisom - Disciple Prayer of healing/Blessed Strike/Radiant Light Iron mace/Elm Greatbow/Iron shield/Leather armor/Ring of power Quite weak, but his abilities are insane. Every turn he would always Rest + Radiant Light. Monsters have no defense against it, it is pure life loss. Overlord Basic I Warlord I: Dark Fortitude, Blood rage Punisher I Trading Pains (since they rely heavily on the healing) Relic: Staff of Shadows Plot cards Seeds of Betrayal: Sole purpose, Two pronged gambit Rush of power I have no traps as their stats are just too good for them to be of good use. I was hoping to purchase the Zachareth agent as the ability to inflict any condition has revealed to be great in order to make the heroes waste their actions or skip them. I run a 13 cards OL deck and it's flowing very well. As said my monsters deal tons of damage. But the heroes just heal as much through Augur, and Logan kills everything. Grisban misses most of his attack due to bad dice rolls but that makes him a good tank as well. As you can see, my heroes are well prepared/equiped. Any tips as for giving them a better challenge?

I have two playgroups, one local and the other one located 250km from me. Now I'm the one organizing/feeding these groups with games, Descent in particular, and I own everything released to date, including the LT packs. When I need to meet up with my local group I only have 200m to do but even that is a pain. I basically throw all of my boxes (which are completely full) in a big IKEA plastic bag and carry the whole thing to the destination. As I progress with my painting I lose more and more space to give room and protection to my minis, so even that is a problem. Now with the second playgroup I do the same thing except I have to carry other stuff with me as well, and I travel by train and bus, for that I use a large suitcase that can either stand up or lie horizintally, which means the same for the boxes and their contents. I tend to wrap my minis with clothes to limit friction but I think they still move around judging by the tiny bits of grass and sand coming off their bases. I'm wondering about how I could do this better. There is a limit to how much stuff I can carry with me and I start to believe the ultimate solution would just be to hold Descent sessions at my place. But that's also very restrictive. Has anybody made the attempt to travel wth all of that stuff? What was your solution? Obviously driving would have solved some issues but I cannot do that. Given the amount of minis I kind of ditched the idea of getting a storage solution for the minis only with foam and small plastic boxes, which you can get from the usual tools shop. I found one with 24 boxes (12 on each side), each box being large enough to put a shadow dragon inside, but I'd need two of them minimum to fit everything so that's two hands. Plus I don't think Mirklace and Queen Ariad would fit in there. Jesus Mirklace is huuuge. Would be a shame to stop playing the game because I get Immobilized status from it? I can set aside the cards we don't use but I prefer not to be too selective about the minis since we can virtually play any quest with any lieutenant.

Yeah that's a good point. The best way is probably to run the two budgets independant of each other, however no trading allowed between first pick and second choice heroes makes little sense. Even if I forbid it they can still exchange items on the quest map. I'll have to give it some more thoughts. And yes, that's a hell of a lot of item cards revealed during shopping phase and I don't like the sound of it. My first playgroup said they were happy with their current hero and didn't want to choose a second one for now. That's okay, Im a bit disappointed asI really wanted to pilot these dual OL/plot decks. This said the initiative was primarly directed to the other playgroup, which I'll play with in no less than three weeks so that's a bit of time to think this through. I'll report on my findings afterwards.

About doubling gold. I think we'll have to, otherwise it will amplify the risk for players picking their "best" hero and leaving the other one rotting aside with no gear at all. Because they cannot afford to gear up 8 heroes. But I like the idea to simply cut the budget (well, x2 the budget strictkly speaking) in half, one for the first pick heroes and one for the second choice heroes. Then sure, theoritically they could put all gold from the first pool to gear up one hero, and do the same with the second pool and play these two superheroes together with some random fillers. I don't think that's very likely though, since the loot is sort of random anyway. And to be frank, let them do it if they fancy that sort of strategy I don't care. At worst it will show the limitations with this model, and it's not like this gamke doesn't have flaws anyway in the strategic sense, but I believe it will work. So much depends on the kind of gear and the hero so I'm not going to draw a detailed break down and see potential balance issues cause I don't care as long as the high level picture makes sense. One thing I did not touch at all until now is the campaign phase. I don't think we need to make this a big deal. The rules book say that the party travels safely back to Arrhyn (not sure I spelled that right) and then I would add that they must decide of a new team before travelling again. Obviously shopping and spending XP for abilities do not require players to select a hero. Another question is how to handle the relics. I think they should be able to pass it on to another hero before a new quest commences. About doubling up my XP as an overlord. That's what I meant, except instead of doubling the XP I was duplicating the XP pool with each budget dedicated to a specific deck. I guess that's semantics.

Thanks for the reply. Since we've just started (first quest of Act I done in both groups) I was thinking about implementing this, like seriously, because that would be a great way to diversify our campaigns and to keep our players interested given the time investment anyway. It's probably much better than the multi-classing idea I had in another thread since this could potentially break the balance of the game which would be sad. One-off quests is not our cup of tea, because it feels like there is no story behind them. We rather play Talisman if we want a build up hero game for one single session. So yeah, I'll give my players another choice of Hero with the only limitation that the class is not taken by any of the 7 other heroes. Since we've done a few quests already, I'll grant them the missing XP so they can get in line with the rest of the heroes. As said earlier, hero players will pick one hero for each quest between the two they have available. I will grant 1XP to every hero (whether it has been used or not in the quest, so that's effectively 8XP) and double gold earnt during the quests. If I don't do that they will have to make choices as for which hero they want to upgrade in terms of gear, whereas with double gold there is plenty of room to keep both heroes up-to-date. Obviously this will not get rid of the issue of one player deciding to spend every gold on one hero but I guess I just have to pick on the weaker ones then. Not going to put additional restrictions, I'll just do that and have a feel about it. That's a heck of a deal for the heroes, my players will be happy. As for me, I will indeed select a second plot deck, and get double threat tokens. This way I will be able to spec in both plot decks. Only one plot deck allowed per quest, though. I think this is a great way to go around this agent <>lieutenant limitation. The question is if I need another boost as well, since the heroes have this great capability of selecting heroes for the job. I can't really touch the monsters (like giving myself another open group) because I'm afraid of pushing the initiative in the wrong direction, but maybe I could also have access to more OL cards. Double XP sounds like it could be too much but that's what I would almost need in order to remain competitive. Actually scratch that, I will just get the normal XP but keep two XP pools separate and build two different OL decks this way. Keeping track of two XP accounts and just spending these XPs on cards tied to these "accounts". Then pick one deck. That's great as it means I too can pick my "tools" for the job. Basic I as the first deck base, Basic II for the second one. No overlap. Some quests grant me OL cards, I'll just assume they can be available for both decks.

I'm playing the OL currently in two different Shadow Rune campaigns (two different groups who don't know each other). All of my hero players are first time players (no experience prior to the campaign). My question is as follows. There are people interested in trying out several characters/classes, however the campaign format only gives room for one single combination for the next 20-ish hours. I was wondering how you guys could get the time and motivation to test a good chunk of these combinations? Same goes for the OL btw. I'd like to try a different plot deck, etc. Does it mean we need to play this game in this exact setting for the next 20 hours? I was thinking maybe once these campaigns are completed - and assuming people don't lose interest on the way - then all I have is the Labyrinth of Ruin campaign where players can decide to re-spec, but I mean that's it. I guess single quests is the way to go otherwise? There seems to be a limited amount of choices of good one-off quests you can run. I somehow feel like there might be a problem with this game at least for players like me and my fellows, because even though it's definitely replayable, has tons of choices when you start, on the other hand you are really stuck with that choice all campaign long. Now guys running a full campaign with rumor quests does take several months for us. There are some very good other games out there as well that my playgroups want to try out at some point, but right now people are hooked up, so the question is for how long. Replayability is there, but do you really think re-shuffling up is worth the time and effort? How many Fat Goblins do you need to play until you feel you've done it back and forth? I was considering making heroes choose 2 heroes each with two different classes with no overlap. Then they would bring one hero of their choice to the next quest (same hero for both encounter obviously). Heroes still share items and gold, and progression is mutual so every hero is at same level. I would probably pick two plot decks as the OL to grant me more choice as well.

Anybody sleeving up the heroes sheets? What do you use?

That's great advice, thanks. I am running two campaigns in parallel currently as the OL, with 3 resp. 4 heroes (different groups of people), and the question just came up naturally, since people have other duties so we can never garantee a full attendence to the sessions. In one of the groups especially I never know how many we are until we start and even then people might even join the group later on during the evening, which is a problem for that kind of game. This is not a game club where people are redirected to other games and can join/leave whenever they want, we only run one game and it's only us in a living room. This kind of required flexibility is something I look for when I pick games normally, but as for Descent I warned people that if they wanted to play a campaign then they had to be there otherwise it just wouldn't work. Anyhow The only potential issue with your solution (aside from the fact it does take longer, which is something I noticed too with 4 players, and I'm not sure you can shrink this time that much with experience only because of decisions to be discussed and taken which you cannot cut), is that my players want their hero for themselves so letting somebody else pilot them is something they are a bit reluctant doing.

I would like to hear from the community how you would deal with the two following situations. In both cases you can assume we're in the middle of a campaign and arrive to the next session with the intention to play the next quest on the agenda. 1- One player cannot make it to the session. We play with one less hero. What do we do with his character next time he's playing with us? +1XP per quest he missed? 2- We started the campaign with 2 or 3 heroes, but we had a joiner in the middle of it. Do we set up that hero with 1XP per quest he missed so he/she can start at similar skills level than the rest of the group? Any ideas as for the situation when you have to stop a session after encounter 1 of a quest? I would assume it's possible to add one hero between encounters but I would keep the current settings/results of encounter 1. Not sure if that would favorize the heroes or the OL in some of the quests. Thanks by advance.

I don't know what to think about the Splig deck. I too read a lot of good things about it, but when I looked at the cards it just felt too restrictive in my opinion, like Valyndra and her boosts to large monsters. If it suits your playstyle then go ahead, but from my own experience as a OL I would rather opt for something more generic giving me lots of choices without having to consider the type of monster I picked for the quest. Because otherwise I may end up with dead cards in my deck/hand. Yeah I can set them aside when selecting 15 cards, but they're still dead cards I cannot even consider. I have no real answer as for which plot deck would be best to pick, but I'm currently testing both Alric and Merrick in my campaigns and they seem fine. Belthir looked interesting too but I wanted something more than just utility. Quite frankly it would have been GREAT to pick one school/trait of whatever can be used to classify the agents, and be able to purchase ANY card from any plot deck at a cost resolved around the category it belongs to versus the specialization you chose or whatever the name. The OL cards system is great in that sense. Okay that top tier card requires you to own lower tier cards of the same type, so why not applying the same mechanism to plot decks? I want to be able to buy any agent's level 1 plot card then I can specialize and get more from 2-3 of them. Ultimately, what's the problem with having two possible summon agents in my plot deck, especially since I won't be able to summon that agent in a certain number of quests anyway? Just add a restriction that only one agent can be summoned by quest and let the OL decide which one he/she wishes to use. I'm in the situation where I just pile up threat tokens and wonder if the system around these couldn't have been better implemented, or at least less restrictive. Alternatively, getting access to certain plot cards could have been a reward or a special quest event, not that it would put plot cards straight in your hand (or?) but at least make them available for purchase. Similarly, also because I often get the question from my heroes, why not unlocking class abilities outside of the class you originally picked from the start, so that a Champion may purchase a Knight class ability for either its price (when made available from a quest) or with an increase of cost (based on archetype)? I just don't see why it should be a hassle to select a class/OL/plot deck and restrict yourself to these few cards for the whole campaign. I think the game is fine as it is, but I also think many of these unnecessary restrictions/boundaries have been set which don't really need to exist at the first place. It doesn't make the game more complicated to allow players to get access to more abilities, it just diversifies the game more. You can still block access to other archetypes or if you think two agent decks are incompatible because they're enemies thematically or whatever.