My buddy and I finally played our first adventure (3 scenarios). He was the sorcerer and I was the rogue. We changed our names and character pics to protect the innocent. Our starting deck was also built using the suggested cards from the rulebook as we didn’t want to spoil any surprises by reading all the cards first.
The first scenario had my buddy’s sorcerer wiping out monsters easily by discarding cards (turning them into spells) while I sat at another location evading monsters and henchmen trying to get all the boons. After a while we realized this was a terrible plan as my buddy’s sorcerer was now almost dead and we were running out of blessing cards with no idea where the villain was. Not to mention that any encounter I was involved in I couldn’t roll higher than a 3 on the dice (the dice gods hate me). Speaking of which, I (as the rogue) was a victim of the Ambush and I failed my check to avoid it, so I assumed that I couldn’t evade the monster that appeared because of the failed check?
Anyway, through some crazy miracle, we were able to close two location and with each of us hanging out at the remaining two locations. The remaining two locations had one with no cards that we failed to close and the other location with a deck that was untouched (but through the process of elimination we knew the villain was there, somewhere)…needless to say we figured we had lost. My rogue had the final turn and we were just going through the motions to end the game when I drew a spyglass. After easily acquiring the spyglass I used it to look at the next two cards and was shocked to see the villain as the second card. I quickly put the villain on the top of the deck and my buddy and I went from a low (losing the game) to a high (we’re going to win the game).
I used an ally to explore a second time and, to my lack of surprise, I found the villain. This time, unlike so many other times during this scenario, I remembered that I could add dice to my combat check as a rogue. We were unsure how many dice I can get. Recharge to add 1d6 or discard it to add an additional 1d6. So is that 2d6 for discarding? We went with 2d6, though it didn’t matter since I rolled max on every one of the dice and slaughtered the villain (the dice gods love me). We won and celebrated like mad men. Now remember how I said we went from a low to a high? Well apparently we got so high that halfway through the second scenario we recalled that we didn’t close out the other location because we were so focused on killing the villain, so technically we lost that game. However, since we were already halfway through the second scenario and we figured closing the location would have been easy, we chalked it up as a beginner mistake and accepted it as a win while preparing ourselves to never forget that again.
The second scenario was much easier, especially as a rogue with thieves’ tools. I had no problem finding and disabling all the traps myself, leaving mostly harmless areas for me and my buddy to take all the cards since we found the traps early and decided to not close the locations until we took as many cards as possible from them. We were a little confused on if the check for the ally was more difficult or easier, we assumed that it only made story since if it was easier to gain allies in the city and went with that. My buddy got a dog that he absolutely loves for some reason, I don’t see the coolness of the dog, but to each their own I suppose. We did discover another question at this time that we couldn’t figure out. The dog gives a bonus to a perception check, but his sorcerer doesn’t have perception so when a card came up that he wanted that required a wisdom perception check does he roll d6 for the wisdom plus the dog’s bonus, or does he roll a d4 since he doesn’t have perception skill, and then adds the dog’s bonus? We never answered this question ourselves as we then noticed that he had a potion of visibility that he used to automatically pass the perception roll.
Anyway, everything was going good, we were watching our time, using the one closed location ability to stack our hand, and we set the last open location’s deck up to the point that we knew the next card was the villain. Everything was going our way, right? Wrong. Our plan was this; with two turns left in the blessing deck, I would make the first attempt to kill the villain since I had plenty of ways to reduce damage if I screwed up and if I didn’t succeed in killing him, my buddy would finish the job next turn. Except we found out by reading the card that his attacks are poison attacks and we can’t reduce damage! In addition, I couldn’t stack my hand with the dagger I wanted and was stuck with some kind of bow that I wasn’t proficient with. We then got confused again. Not being proficient means we increase the difficulty by 4, but does that mean if we fail the roll, we take damage based off the new difficulty or off the villain’s printed difficulty? The logic being that our lack of bow skills doesn’t mean the villain hits us harder. We ruled in our favor again, not increasing the damage dealt. Now that I’m thinking about this, I think it may have been a bad ruling. This turns out to be a crucial decision, since I failed the roll and had to take damage. If we ruled in my favor I would live, if we ruled in the villain’s favor I would not be able to draw my hand size and would die. Since we ruled earlier that I would live, I lived and my buddy went up and zapped the villain with a bunch of magic, blessings, and hocus pocus stuff to kill the villain.
The third scenario was pretty quick, at this point my buddy has a spell that allows him to name a card type and check the top three cards of the deck for the card type and place those cards on the top or bottom of the deck, he named villain and found the villain quickly. We then pillaged the temple for all its boons and quickly closed out the remaining two locations after killing the henchmen. Killing the dragon was easy for me, I walked up to it by myself, used a dagger 2d4, class power 2d6, and used my blessing of the gods to copy a blessing that gave me 2 dice to my dexterity based combat attack for 3d12, and the dragon had no chance. Though there was a slight scare right before when I lost three cards from my hand due to a breath weapon attack, but ultimately the dragon was toast.
We figured that at the slow rate in which the new adventures are released, that we would quickly fly through the adventures and then have to wait forever to continue the story. So instead we are setting our characters to the side and taking two different characters through the same 3 scenarios next week. He’s taking the barbarian and I’ll step out of my comfort zone and play the druid. Then the next week we will take two more characters through the adventure, he’s taking the bard, and I’ll be the fighter. This will slow down how quick we go through the adventure, hoping the complete path will be released by the time we get all three set of characters advancing through the campaign at the same time. During the points in the adventure when everyone has done the same adventures, we can interchange characters, and if a character dies, we will quickly have a back up to use to continue the game.
Having lots of fun.