The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

So a quick refresher on boss battles, it is going to be one half of the level book that has the battles in it, so when you flip open a page, one part will be the level itself with all of the level actions and artwork, and any restrictions for the level, anything like that. The other side is going to be the map for the boss battle. This map will tell you some about the terrain, but not about the boss whom you’ll be facing, you’ll find that out by talking to information brokers, NPCs, and PCs. When all the players are done taking actions on a level, that’s when the players decide together to jump into battle.

When fighting monsters, it was just going to be a do or don’t you hit sort of thing to defeat them, but bosses are going to be different. Bosses will track hit points like the characters. And bosses are going to have their hit point track split into multiple parts. This is how the boss is going to change up their attack as time goes on. But a boss will attack in a predictable pattern, like video game monsters do.

Let’s do a fake boss fight: Glorglor the Minotaur stands menacingly in the room.

First Attack: Rush Forward, attack everyone directly in front of him and to the front left and right spots on the grid for 10 damage.

Second Attack: Move to the nearest character do a power blow for 15 damage and push them back two.

Third Attack: Attack any enemy adjacent to you for 10 and dodge, add +2 to Minotaur’s defense.

Something along those lines. Those three attacks would repeat 1 through 3 over and over again until one of the health bars is completely empty, then between Two and Three the Minotaur would add in a new attack.

New Attack: Leap 5 spaces, attack all adjacent squares for 10.

This would change up the battle so that you can’t, as players, complete your puzzle and just let it auto play itself out based off of what the monster is doing. The added card is probably going to be a card the players haven’t researched before as part of learning about the boss monster, so it should mess up their plans.

Finally for the boss, they are going to have their standard targeting. It is going to target whomever is the closest to them. If there are two or more heroes close to them, it will target in a way that it can hit the most, if it can only hit one, it’ll target clockwise from the direction it’s facing. There are going to be a few exceptions to this rule, mainly if an attack can hit multiple player characters and there is a grouping like that in range, it will move to attack them. So like the jump ability, say there are three archers off to one side of the board, it’ll jump over to them to hit them all if it can, instead of focusing on the tank in front of it.

So as for the players, what are they doing on their turn?

Players are always going to have two things on their turn that they’ll do, and players can actually go all at once, doesn’t matter turn order. It seems like it might if they are placing a weakness on the boss or a buff on everyone else, but generally those are going to stick around, which means that you don’t get it for that turn, but you’ll get it in upcoming ones. I wanted to create as little downtime for the players as possible. So everyone decides what to do, and then players move and attack/buff/weaken accordingly.

The move is going to be simple, but there is one thing to pay attention to, if a player has a faster speed than someone else and they are both moving to the same spot on the board, ideally, the faster character will get there first. So I guess, when I say everyone is going at once, the movement will be based off of speed. And your speed/movement is also going to determine how far you can move. In this, there is no walking, it is just assumed that everyone is going all out, as you would in a game where you could die, and therefore there won’t be boosts to movement.

The next thing is an attack, buff or weaken, but I’ll start with an attack. An attack is going to be something the players can always do, if they are within range. The players will have a choice though with their attack how to do it. They will always have a basic attack, so a basic long sword might be 4 basic damage, plus strength, plus one modifier flip. But they can also augment an attack with a skill, so maybe they play “Furious Strike” that would have a cool down of one, add 2 to the damage and give another modifier flip. Or maybe they augmented the sword with poison and it’d add in 8 poison damage. The augment would always do it’s extra damage, but the skill would then go into it’s spot on the cool down track and then after the monster goes, everything in the cool down track would shift down one.

Let’s talk a bit more about the cool down track. It would have up to six spots on it, there would be a 5 down to 1, plus a 0 spot. That means that any skill you play, such as Furious Strike, with a cool down of 1, would always be out of your hand for a turn. If it’s at 5, it’s going to be out of your hand for 5 turns. Skills are placed in this track face down, just because of the upcoming mechanic to differentiate.

To build off of that, some skills might use the cool down track in a different way, it would be used as a powering up track. So let’s say I have the skill, I don’t know, let’s call it “Lightning Sword”. That would go face up into spot 3. And I’d draw a modifier card. So why would I draw a modifier card, the example text for Lightning Sword would be something like: Place in Spot 3 on the Cool Down Track face up, draw up to 2 modifier cards per attack action. Threshold: Modifier total less than 6, no damage. 6 to 10 – add 10 damage to basic attack lightning damage, 10+ add 15 lightning damage to basic attack and two modifier flips ignoring cancel attack. Then that card would get flipped and would go back onto the cooldown track. So basically, it’s a skill that is probably going to knock the socks of damage wise which is why you would build up to it. This probably isn’t going to be something that you do early, but when you know that you’re doing, you set it up to try and take down the bad guy in a blow. When using an ability that charges up like this, you can still move, but can’t attack.

With buffs and weakens. These are played instead of an attack and they have to be done at the right range. Almost always these will go onto spot 5 in the cool down track and you will have the whole time that buff or weaken is in the cool down track that it is active. These will go face up like the power up just so you remember that they are active. Buffs and weakens are also going to always just be a plus or a minus to a total. These will take up your attack for the turn you play them.

That’s the vast majority of how combat is going to work. To recap how the modifiers work quickly, there will be modifiers that you can add to your deck or swap in for other modifiers that will allow your fellow players to draw more modifiers. The cool thing with drawing a new modifier is if you draw that additional one via a boost like that, and it’s a cancel the attack, it is just discarded, but you don’t get to draw a new one. If you draw a cancel the attack on your own draw, that will kill the attack. That is going to be a required card that can’t be removed from the deck. But you’ll start out with some pluses, some minuses, and some zeros, and you’ll work on building up your pluses or removing minuses through questing, skills, and stuff like that.

So we have two things left with boss fights, the first is the part your guild plays in a boss battle. Before the boss battle starts, you’ll decide how many guild members you are going to take into the battle with you, they are basically going to keep minions off of you. Minions are meant to be annoying, so if you have 0 guild members with you, a minion will hit you for a small amount of damage, let’s say on level one it’s 1 damage, but they’ll do that every round, and you don’t calculate defense against minions, it just always is pinging you. So you want to bring in guild member. There are going to be a few different levels that you check on the minion card. Let’s do an example minion cards.

“Annoying Kobolds”

< 3 – All guild members brought in die, 2 damage per turn, lose 2 morale

3 to 5 – All guild members brought in die, 1 damage per turn

5 to 7 – 2 guild members die, 0 damage per turn

7 to 9 – No guild members die, 0 damage per turn, gain 1 morale

10 or more – No guild members die, lose 1 morale

This basically is the chart that you’d check the number of guild members you picked against. The last one is probably going to have some questions with it, why would you lose morale if you bring in too many guild members? Well, first you’ll lose morale for every two guild members who die, so it’s better to have too many than too few, or just barely too few, but if you bring too many in, you are putting too many people at risk, and that disheartens them.

So then finally, the most important thing, what do you get for loot? If the boss has a signature weapon, that will be dropped, it might drop some skills or augments as well, and then of course currency. On the bosses main card it will tell what loot pack to open as well as how much currency and XP that you’d get coming out of that fight. I want with the bosses in general and the loot pack for them to be sealed things, so before getting to a level and researching the boss, you won’t know what that boss looks like. As you research you find out more and more. This is an idea that I really like from Oathsworn and am borrowing because of that. I don’t want people to be able to open up the box and see all the bosses. Instead, I want to give them something to explore and discover.

So that’s a lot of information, but hopefully boss fights sound found. I want to give players lots of different options for solving the puzzles of a boss fight.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

Quests are going to be one of the more interesting things to do in town or on a level when playing in this game. Not to say that the others won’t be interesting or important, but quests are going to delve into the story of the game and the world more than other things might. I do want to tie story into as many elements as possible, but quests are an obvious area to do it.

So, first thing that we need to consider is how do you find a quest?

There are a few ways that you can do this, but I want them to be something you have to “find” by doing other actions. If you go shopping a weapon crafter might have a quest for a rare metal or crystal, same with an armorer or an apothecary. If you talk to an NPC, they might have a quest for you, if you talk to a PC, they might have a quest that they can’t do but that they know about if you want to try your hand at it. Or it might be a level event that triggers that you can do as a quest. Some of the quests might even have multiple ways to get to them, a PC and an NPC might give you the same information, but it might branch slightly depending on who you got it from.

Now, with having to “find” quests, does that mean that the first time frame or potentially multiple ones on a level there won’t be any quests available to go on? No, there will always be a level quest. Something that will give you a more generic thing, mainly money and XP. Those can be great because if you are getting an interesting skill or weapon, that’s going to be the bigger reward, and you might get some money along the way, and you will for sure get XP, but it won’t be as much money and might not be as much XP. Of course, that won’t always be the case, it might be possible that the level quest will branch and you might find something unexpected at the end, so you can’t always just pass on that quest, or send guild members to do it. Again, as I’ve said so many times, I want every choice in the game to be hard and meaningful in an interesting way.

So, how will quests work?

So quests, are going to generally be multiple part things, though, some might be pretty simple. They can also be evolving or chaining things. For example, rescue the farmer’s daughter could be a very simple quest that will then find out about a troll invasion that is going to happen and will unlock that quest from an earlier point that it would have if you hadn’t done the rescue the farmer’s daughter quest.

But that’s again pretty general as to how these will work. I’ve talked about it a bit before with the modifier cards, but each part of the quest is going to be a little bit of story, something will happen, it could be that you need to track the trolls through the forest, or avoid an ambush while looking for the trolls. I’m thinking that this’ll almost be a Near and Far like thing where in that you are trying to reach a certain threshold but you can go higher and hit a second threshold. So let’s take the farmer’s daughter quest, tracking the trolls should be pretty easy for a PC in the game, so that’s just a check of a five, as the player you know that you’ll pass that, but you’ll also know that there is a higher mark you can try and make it to, but the PC won’t know what that means, so the player shouldn’t know what that means either. So if they spend, now they are paying enough attention to spot the ambush up ahead as well as the tracks, that’ll give them a branching path for the next part of the quest where they can either spring the ambush and fight, or go around it. That’s what that player would then be doing on the next time period on that level.

Now, let’s quickly talk about skills. I’ve talked about them a lot as of late. Just a refresher, on some quests you’ll be able to get a skill. That skill will modify the end challenge for that quest. To also talk about weapons or armor, if it makes sense, so an example of when it wouldn’t, a dragon isn’t going to wield a sword, those will be attached and modify as well. When thinking about loot drops, why would something that drops a legendary or an interesting item, weapon, armor, or otherwise, not be using it themselves? So I want those to attach and modify for a monster as well.

And finally, what happens once you complete a quest or part of a quest?

So if you’ve done part of it, you’ll have the option to continue in the next time period. Any XP you’ve gained can cause you to level up and you can allocate the points you get for your character from that.

If you reach the end of the quest, you are going to get more of an XP bump, plus any rewards at that point in time and you’ll be transported back to the town. I’m not a fan of games where you have to fight your way into the dungeon and then run back through the whole cleared out dungeon to get back to the closest fast travel point to then go to the town and turn it in. Screw that noise, you get teleported to the town and to the person who gave you the quest. The next time period, you can, if you want, complete that quest at that location as well as do whatever action is attributed to that location. The player doing the quest will have already spent a lot of time on that potentially.

How long could a quest be? I mentioned it above, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. Quests will vary in length. If something sounds like a short quest, it probably is, it might chain another quest, but the first will be done. To go back to what I just said above, a chained quest, you’ll have the option to continue into that quest immediately instead of getting teleported back. If you do, you’ll still get the reward at that point in time from the one that you’ve just completed so that you don’t miss out on it. But back to my question, a single quest might be as long as 6-7 time units, which would be most of what one player does on the floor. Most won’t last that long, but each part of the quest will have one challenge decision point, might be conversation that wouldn’t require a card, and quests might vary in length depending on choices. To go back to my example of rescuing the farmers daughter, if you sneak around the troll ambush you’ll miss out on some XP, but that’ll make the whole quest faster, so you’ll have time to do more. I want it to be fairly logical like that where you can guess when it’d be faster.

So what do you think of quests, does it start to make sense as to how they are going to work?

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There are a number of things really that got me interested, the IP is interesting in that Fantasy Flight is making a non-Marvel/Star Wars/Game of Thrones/Lord of the Rings game, and making one that is based off of their own properties that isn’t Arkham Horror. That is fairly rare for them, so to have them go back into the world of Terrinoth, super fantasy name activate, was a lot of fun and interesting to see that they are keeping up some of their own lines. The app integration was also interesting as well as the game play and the cooperative nature. In Descent 2nd Edition, that game was a one versus all game. One person played as the “overlord” who ran all of the bad guys in the scenarios against the players. This is fully cooperative because of the app, and while Descent 2nd Edition had an app that gave it a cooperative campaign, that was not how it had been built to play.

So why am I talking about this now, well, because of these two things.

Fantasy Flight had a big kind of trailer kickoff and announcement for the game. So there is now a whole lot more known about the game, in fact, there is a ton more known about the game. If you are interested in knowing a whole lot more, watch the second video, if you want to read my recap and have a trailer, watch the first video and then read my recap, it won’t cover everything, but I am going to talk about some highlights.

First off, highlight wise, this is an app assisted game along the lines of Mansions of Madness or Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth. Fantasy Flight has been doing app assisted games for quite a while, and for some people that has been a turnoff, they want to get away from technology while playing board games, which I can understand, but I don’t mind an app assist when playing a game, as long as I’m not doing everything on the app, and I don’t feel like I have been with Journeys in Middle Earth or Mansions of Madness. But there’s even more with this app, and I’m going to get into some details, but first, I do want to say that this app was built from the ground up for this game, in previous games they have leveraged their old app design and framework in order to make it faster to market, and that has some limits built in, such as it being really hard to have an undo button if you clicked the wrong thing, this has an undo button. This is also important because that means that this is going to have a different feel and probably a more modern feel to the app.

But let’s talk about features in the game, because that’s what people are going to care about more, than me nerding out over an undo button or the fact that they have built a new framework. There are a lot of cool things they talked about with the app, and I’m just going to highlight a few of them, the first because of how the app is built and because it’s their own IP, they are able to have really big branching storyline changes in it. They’ve done that to some extent in something like Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth, but obviously you source material to that requires the world be left in a certain state, in this, it’s their world, they can do a lot. Next were two things about the bad guys in the game. That was tactics and weaknesses. Weaknesses are what they sound like, something that a bad guy is weak to, a bandit might be weak to slashing damage, but as players, you get to find that out in the game. As you try different weapons, it might tell you something like “You swing with your sword, and it did more damage than you thought it would as it slashes through the bandit.” Now you know swords are good, so next time you see a bandit you’d want to remember to use a sword, and the game keeps track of that you know it for you, so you don’t have to remember because forgetting and discovering the game thing over again wouldn’t be as fun. With tactics, certain bad guys are going to be apt to do certain things that are foreshadowed. For example, again, at the end of a round a bandit might be eyeing a chest, that the game narrates, you don’t know what is going to happen the first time, but after you see them grab a chest from the map and run away, you’ll know that you will want to stop a bandit from doing that again, basically, you have a round to kill them. Another thing that the app helps handle is downtime. Now with this I don’t mean downtime in the set-up or between turns, I’m talking about between missions, what your heroes are doing. A character might decide to do a side quest and they can pick between two, one might give you valor and one might give you honor. You have to decide which one to do, and the game will remember and make decisions about how people react based off of what you’ve done before. And there are more examples of the game remembering or knowing who you are, one person might get a different reaction and conversation based off of their character type and who they are than someone else would. Or the game might know that you are a big fan of using your war hammer in combat or opening chests, and it can tailor challenges and rewards to your style of play.

That’s a lot on the app, so let’s talk about some other things, like the heroes, the bad guys, and the terrain (some might still tie back tot he app).

Let’s actually start with the terrain and the components. The minis themselves are a harder plastic than Fantasy Flight has used before, though the ones in the video are resin, the reason for that is that they are still very strong, but because it’s harder plastic, they are able to get more detail in, and the detail on the minis looks really good in the resin prints. Resin is going to be closer to a hard plastic in the detail that you can get. But enough weird nerding out about that, because the terrain is awesome as well. The terrain is not only just flat map tiles and maybe some tokens to represent objects, it is cardboard 3D terrain where you build up your maps and put items on them. So a map could have multiple levels and some abilities might move bad guys, so you can maybe push them off the edges of things, which seems important. But not only can you interact with the height, you can interact with the objects, if there are trees, you can climb a tree, a well, you can hid inside it, that sort of thing. And how one character can interact with a thing might be different than another character. The reason I added in the app caveat is that this would be really hard to do without the app, so the app keeps track of who is doing that action.

Next we have the monsters, I don’t have a ton to say about them, except that there are 11 different types of monsters. But really, there are more than that, there are 11 different types of monster minis. Because they introduce a concept of factions. If a group of bandits are off by themselves, they are just bandits. If they are working with the Uthuk, the evil magic users or those corrupted by evil, they would be Uthuk bandits and behave differently.

But finally, let’s talk about characters, because really, a game like this is all about playing the heroes and how you play them. Descent: Legends of the Dark, has both cards and dice used in the game, so it’s kind of a hybrid between a few different games, but dice chucking is mainly going to be where it is at for combat and for taking actions. But you’ll use the cards, and their fatigue in an interesting way. A lot of things causes fatigue which is bad, in Descent 1st Edition, there were just turns of resting and doing nothing because you were fatigued in order to be able to do something again. In this, they’ve changed that up. You place fatigue on your character or your card, if that card hits it’s limit, you have a choice, you could leave it there, or you can flip it. Flip it gives you a different ability and you can use that one and start to put fatigue on that side since the fatigue clears off on a flip. It creates an interesting puzzle of a character. They have also made it so that you change up your character very easily. You have your unlocked skills and you have an XP budget, you can try whatever build you want with that XP budget, so a card might be 2 XP and another 1 XP and you have 3 XP so you take those two into battle with you, then the next one you decide to try three 1 XP cards, you can do that. Thematically, does it make sense, probably not, but game wise, it makes it a lot of fun, because you aren’t stuck playing a build you don’t like, in fact, if a character just isn’t your style period, you can swap in a new one, overall, an awesome idea to make sure the game is fun.

Now, in that hour and forty minute video, there is a whole lot more that they talk about, and they show off minis and things like that. If you want to know more, check it out, though, I cover some of the bigger highlights for me of things that are really interesting. But let’s also talk about the price tag here, before we wrap up, this is a $175 game, that is expensive. Now what you get is a lot, they were asked about game play and said probably 50 hours if not more in the base box. But compared to some other games, though with less minis, Gloomhaven you can find around $100 now and I probably have 200 hours into base Gloomhaven. So does that mean that this is too expensive, I’d say no. Gloomhaven doesn’t have an app built specifically for it, this does, and it is a brand new app, there was a ton of story work put into this game, and if you play through the whole game, that’s probably way more time than most people would put into a single game that costs $60. Plus there is the experience factor as well, I realize that the price will turn some people away because they just can’t afford it, and that’s a shame, if you have a group, make it a group buy if you can, but I get that it is a hefty price tag and why it is. It is still one that I’ll want to pick up, just for the cool factor if nothing else.

So, what do you think of Descent: Legends of the Dark? Does the game sound interesting to you? Does the price tag or app worry you?

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Soothsinger

The Soothsinger is an interesting character, I picked my original retirement objective because of the symbol that was for the soothsinger. It is musical notes, so in most other systems it probably would be considered a bard. In Dungeons and Dragons, a bard is a capable fighter because of their spells, and while I likely could make the Soothsinger into a capable fighter by my card selection, it really shines as a support character.

The main focus of the Soothsinger is a mechanic known as “songs”. These are cards that you put in play and leave in play until you switch the song you are playing. It’s a bonus for your allies most often, though can be a negative to the enemies depending on how you want to play it. I’m only a level four character so I haven’t unlocked the most powerful songs, but there are a lot of interesting cards. Normally I’ve found that I don’t switch the song that I’m playing all that often, because depending on the creatures, certain cards are better than others. For example, in the last combat, we were dealing with a fair amount of poison. Normally I have a card that adds additional damage to an attack out, but because players were getting poisoned each round, I instead I used a song that allowed them to heal 1 point at the start of each round and would remove the poison for them. This kept the damage down because otherwise we might have had characters get exhausted in the scenario. There are other songs that wound opponents when they are attacked, give extra speed or range, and give opponents disadvantage. There are songs that can be swapped in any time really that will help out your allies, and you don’t need to be in the middle of the fray.

Another big thing about the Soothsinger is that they are very fast. They would probably rival the Scoundrel in terms of speed, and that is key. While our Soothsinger and Scoundrel never were in the party together, having the Soothsinger go so quickly means that I can adjust the battlefield for the other players. I have cards that strengthen allies, stun all enemies in a certain range, or even cards that allow my allies to either move or attack. This going out of order allowed us to complete a task one turn earlier than we would be able to otherwise. While that might not have changed the outcome of the scenario, it was very useful. I also hand out a lot of blessings for my allies and curses for my enemies. This means that my allies can deal out a whole lot more damage. And the biggest help I’ve found in these support cards that I can play has been a card that allows me to strengthen my allies. The combination of blessings and strengthen, which gives you advantage, means that you are basically always modifying your damage higher.

Now, having flipped through the cards, it is possible to play a much more aggressive Soothsinger than I am. You’d still use songs, as they give you XP at the start of each round, but you could have a limited number of them and instead focus on your own attacks. There are a number of area affect attack cards that I could slot into my deck without losing much speed, but I would drop a lot of my support ability. However, playing support isn’t for everyone, and it might be that it won’t be for me the whole time I play the Soothsinger. The songs are always going to be a strong component in your deck, but adding in that damage and attacking ability could be fun as well. However, the Soothsinger has low health and not that many cards, so being more in the fray is dangerous. Right now, I think I have two attack cards that do damage in a way different the normal damage you can do no a card. One allows me to do basically a normal attack but then curse the monster and bless an adjacent ally. And I don’t remember what the other one does exactly, because in three scenarios, I’ve used it once. It does a base 1 damage, but I believe that it stuns as well.

The Soothsinger is a very fun character to play. I feel like it is not extremely complex, however. Once you have figured out the right song for a scenario, that song is generally the one that you’re always playing, so you’re trying to piece together cards other wise since the top half of your cards aren’t useful anymore. This, I guess, does add some challenge to the character, though it isn’t all that complex. You just need to figure out the balance of support cards and songs so that you always have something available to do.

Complexity: Low
Combat: Low
Support: High

Would you want to play a character that is support heavy? When you play other games, have you played a bard of cleric that is focused only on aiding others?

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