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Descent: The Road to Legend — Preview #6Packing for the Road to Legend
By now we've made it very clear that a single play through of the advanced campaign can take weeks of genuine, real-life time. Individual play sessions can be as short as one hour, but the total campaign cannot realistically be played in one sitting. (If you manage to play an entire Road to Legend campaign in one go, take pictures and let us know!) Mothers, wives, roommates, and game tables across the world will be delighted to hear that we here at FFG don't expect you to leave the game set up until the campaign is finished. No, we understand that the road to legend is a journey, and one of the most important steps on a journey is packing the things you need away.  Road to Legend comes with six boxes that are used to store important items and information between sessions. Each hero gets a box, the overlord has one, and finally there is the graveyard, which holds cards and tokens that are no longer available for a given campaign. (This is where lieutenants go when they are slain, for example.) Saving the game in between sessions is, therefore, very simple! For the heroes, all they have to do is put their character sheet, skill and item cards, and any relevant tokens that affect their hero in their box. One party member is the party treasurer, and he gets all the gold the party has amassed as well as any party upgrades such as the Enchanted Boat or Kerak's Map or other cards that affect the whole party. The overlord does the same — he places all his avatar upgrade, plot, and lieutenant cards in his box, along with his avatar sheet. If the party was in the middle of a dungeon, then he also adds his current hand of overlord cards. Naturally, not everything can be stored in boxes. Notably, the position of all the various tokens on the overland map cannot be stored in a pristine condition without the aid of scotch tape… or one of the handy provided campaign reference sheets. ;) Completed campaign reference sheet. The campaign reference sheet tracks a number of important pieces of information. Firstly, it tracks the total conquest accumulated thus far by the heroes and the overlord, the current campaign level (determined by the total conquest), and the XP remaining for each hero. It also tracks abstract avatar upgrades like treachery and current monster level. The campaign reference sheet can track things on the game board that are otherwise tracked by tokens, such as the location of lieutenants and the status of each city on the board, so when you set up the board again to resume your game you can easily return the tokens to their appropriate locations. Each dungeon on the board is also noted on the campaign sheet so that its status (explored, not explored, or currently–being–explored–and–this–is–what–level–we're–on) can be tracked. If the game is saved while the party is in a dungeon, then a few more factors must be accounted for. The overlord's current hand of cards is just placed in his box, but he could potentially have a very large amount of threat, so a slot for that is included on the sheet. Also, since the overlord can earn conquest for exhausting his deck of cards, how many cards he has remaining is relevant. When the game is stored, the overlord counts up the cards in his discard pile and notes the number on the reference sheet. When the game resumes, he shuffles the overlord deck and then discards that many cards from the top of it, thereby returning to more or less the state he was in when the game was paused last time. Finally, there's a section for noting which power cards the overlord currently has in play (these are also stored in the box, but marking them on the reference sheet makes it clear which cards are in his hand and which are in play). Don't worry — there's a pretty thick pad of campaign reference sheets in the Road to Legend box, so as long as you can provide your own pen or pencil you can play many, many campaigns of Road to Legend. And if you do manage to run out somehow, you'll be able to download copies of the reference sheet from the Descent support page by the time Road to Legend hits store shelves. That's all for now. Join us next time when we meet some old friends. Read the other articles in this series: | |
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