Last night I started playing Tainted Grail: The Last Knight with the same group who have recently finished up playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon with me. We took a little bit of time off between games, but not that much, just one session to play some other games. We were all ready to jump into the next chunk of story in this world that we grew to like but was very different from the one we’d been at previously. Let’s talk about what’s new and different that we’ve seen thus far.

The Setting of Tainted Grail: The Last Knight

Let’s start with the setting. It is still the lands of Avalon, but time has passed by and the lands are now covered in a snow. The Wyrdness isn’t as bad, but food is scarcer and you’re worried about exposure. All of the “heroes” have gotten lost in a snowstorm, found each other, but also all have scene a four armed foredweller. In the cold, will they survive and find their way back to a village. But even if they do that, it doesn’t solve the issue that their village is having.

I really like this new setting, and the new mechanic is brutal. I’ll talk about that later though. By throwing all of Avalon under a blanket of ice and snow, the world feels different. And while I kind of remember the map from before, it took a little bit to place everything. And that’s nice that it did. If it was too familiar or the story felt like the same thing, I’d have been less interested. Right now we’re just trying to survive, but we don’t even know what we feel like our end goal is going to me.

Exposure

This is one of the new things in the game, and I will say that it is brutal. To help balance this, they made it so that if you’re outside of the range a Menhir, you don’t lose two health and gain two terror, you just game a terror at the start of each day. But exposure is basically the cold seeping into your bones. If you keep moving and don’t run into any issues, you won’t get it. But when you get exposure, it doesn’t leave your body until you’re told to remove it. It basically caps your max health.

Now, that’s not great because that can limit your energy and cause you to panic faster. Though, in story mode, which we are playing, that isn’t the case. In story mode, it doesn’t limit either of those things, but obviously, less health is bad. And you’re still gaining terror as you go, pushing you to go insane. But it isn’t as brutal, just might get you dying faster, well, much faster.

The Menhir

Another new thing to start the game at least is that we don’t know how the light the Menhir, okay, that isn’t new, but there aren’t Menhir on the map at all. There are Menhir on the map, but they are leaking magic, not something that we can light at this point. Our town has no Menhir on it at all. There are seals and those things help keep exposure at bay that are called Menhir seals, but we can’t light them yet.

And in the original, you got the Menhir rites immeidately. That is the point of the first chapter to get the rights. Here, that’s not the case. Nothing points us to getting those rites thus far. We might have some hints at it, but nothing that directs. So gaining terror every day, that could be a thing for a while.

New Combat Traits

There are also new things in combat. None of them are good. In fact, a lot of them are really bad. Frostbite is a keyword that just gives you exposure every single time. Multi-attack hits everyone. They definitely haven’t made it any easier to fight the monsters in Avalon. I expected things to get changed up this way, adding in new keywords isn’t that hard to do, and I’m glad that they did.

They actually cleaned up some other keywords, such as some secrets now have the word Global on them. There were some that it was implied on some of the previous secrets but now it is explicit. That makes the game easier to play, th ough wasn’t hard before. It mainly makes it cleaner to play.

Importing From Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

So, this was something I wanted to know how they’d make it work. Basically, decisions in the previous campaign that made a difference to ours. Honestly, I was disappointed in this. Now, let me be fair, I wasn’t disappointed in the game. We didn’t get a lot of things done. That is on us, not on the game. Or we could have done a whole lot more. We swapped out one location based off of what we’d previously done. And I checked a single box in the legacy section.

I think there are around fifteen of those different legacy boxes. Probably another four or five locations we could have swapped out as well. We didn’t though, because of how we played the game. And, if you remember me talking about going back and playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, now I am ready to play it again. And I could, almost, play it solo right now if I wanted to. But for a few things.

Adding Base Content

And this is the thing blocking me. You add in base content for the expansions. This includes monsters that you add into the decks. You use the random events from the base game. Secrets from the base game, the items, and the help cards. So there are a lot of things that get used between the games. And I like that, in some ways. There isn’t a need to reinvent the wheel every time you play a campaign. Using things across games is really nice. However, now I need to figure out how to store it all.

I wish things would easily slot into the base box. But I’ll always need to pull out the second box to at least get the miniatures for our characters, unless I leave them out or loose somehow. I wish I had an easy way to just swap stuff out of the base box to only get that one out. Make it more generic for only the active campaign. Granted, with how it was shipped, I don’t think that’d be possible. And this protects the miniatures more.

Initial Impressions on Tainted Grail: The Last Knight

The first thing I think is that I wish we’d continued in The Fall of Avalon one session longer. I think we might have gotten more check marks. After that, I like it thus far. I can see how not in story mode this would be extremely brutal. Exposure can stack up really fast and that’d make a slow journey back to town or somewhere to heal yourself.

And I also want to add, we already have something we wish that we’d done. Now, not something that is that important, it is just a branching path that we didn’t go down because of choices we made. That would be very different and unique to what we’d done. The fact it’s an option in the first chapter is great. I am excited to play more of this game and then the final campaign as well.

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