Explore. Search. Battle. Quest.Announcing 2014 Season One Descent Game Night Kits
As you begin your journey into the dungeon, corpses that lined the floor begin to writhe to life. Behind you, near the sealed entrance, monstrous beasts appear from the shadows. You must stand or fall together!
Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the addition of Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition to our Organized Play program in 2014! Soon, you’ll be able to enjoy a brand new Descent cooperative experience by talking to your local retailer about ordering a 2014 Season One Descent Game Night Kit. The deadline to oder kits is January 17th, and the season starts in March.
The Organized Play program introduces a new, cooperative variant of Descent for you to experience. In a normal game, one player controls the forces of the overlord, attacking the heroes with monsters and Overlord cards. The cooperative variant of Descent introduced by Game Night Kits, however, presents one to four players from your community with a unique new way to play Descent, pitting you against evil in the realm of Terrinoth.
How Does Descent Work With Organized Play?
In the 2014 Season One Game Night Kit for Descent: Journeys in the Dark, you will find a new adventure, Forgotten Souls, enabling one to four players to experience a mini campaign over the course of a single evening.
When playing Forgotten Souls, you and up to three friends follow a twisting path, working through a series of rooms, passing tests and battling monsters in a quest to escape from the clutches of the bloodthirsty dragon Tharn. Every room is represented on an Exploration card, which features special rules and conditions that must be met for the heroes to advance. Once a room is complete, you will open the door. Then, a new Exploration card is drawn, and a new room is revealed with monsters and dangers for you to face.
After a room’s objective has been completed, either by successfully accomplishing your gaol, or failing to reach it, you will move on to a new room, generated by drawing a new Exploration card. Monsters and tokens are placed in the room matching the revealed Exploration card’s entry in the Encounter Guide. After each of the heroes takes a turn, the Overlord Phase occurs.
When playing cooperative Descent, there is no overlord player, so the game’s victory conditions change. You win if you work your way through the deck of Exploration cards to reach and defeat the final main encounter. You must defeat the final main encounter before you run out of time, however.
In the cooperative variant of Descent, the overlord’s objective is replaced by the overlord track. A doom token and a fate token are placed at opposite ends of the overlord track, and you lose if the doom and fate tokens ever meet on the overlord track. Doom is an inescapable force that slowly progresses when the heroes fail encounters and in other ways. Fate, on the other hand, is a fluctuating force that the heroes affect both positively and negatively based on their progress. For example, whenever a hero is knocked out, fate advances by one, but by successfully completing a main encounter, you may be able to reset fate to its starting point.
The overlord track is not the only obstacle you must overcome in cooperative Descent. Monsters attack from the shadows, preying on the weak and keeping your heroes from achieving objectives. Rather than a human overlord player, Forgotten Souls uses cards to activate monsters and attack the heroes. Every Activation card contains actions for every kind of monster group in Forgotten Souls, and with ten Activation cards, you’ll never be certain how the monsters will react.
Although the pace of cooperative Descent is frantic, you’ll still have a chance to increase your character’s skills and find some loot along the way. You and your fellow heroes win the game if you complete the final main encounter, but two earlier main encounters grant experience points as a reward for victory. These experience points are spent immediately, securing new skills for your hero.
You’ll also be able to collect loot in Forgotten Souls by slaying monsters. Every monster you kill adds to the loot track, and when it reaches a certain point, Item cards are revealed and one is given to a chosen player. The more master monsters your heroes destroy, the more Item cards are revealed when you receive loot.
Even if you don’t attend a Game Night at your local retailer, the adventure included in Season One 2014 Descent Game Night Kits, Forgotten Souls, will be available to you via In-House Manufacturing after the kits are rotated out of circulation later in 2014. For more on the experience and themes in co-op Descent, here’s a word from developer Jonathan Bove.
A Word from the Developer
Exploration is a huge theme in the Forgotten Souls expansion. The heroes open doors and face new encounters on a constantly expanding map, never knowing what they’ll find in the next room. Not knowing what monsters and challenges await you keeps you on your toes and forces you to strategize constantly. More than once I’ve found myself saying “If the Trash Heap is next, we’re in big trouble!”
Activation cards are the heart of the cooperative experience, though. I based the AI system around the idea that monsters should always be doing something, even if their prime goal changes. For example, a ranged monster may be instructed to attack the furthest hero. The monster moves to gain line of sight to that hero, but can’t move far enough. Instead of moving again, it will attack a different hero that is in line of sight. So even though the monster didn’t reach its first goal, it’s still dealing damage to the heroes.
Something else I’m very excited about is the loot system. Each time a hero defeats a monster, tokens are added to the loot track. Once the track reaches a certain threshold, the heroes will draw from the Shop Item deck. Loot is gained immediately, without waiting for a shop phase, so you get to fight, loot, and keep on fighting. Spending XP works the same way: you spend it when you earn it. This makes Forgotten Souls gameplay very fluid and simulates a mini campaign.
What’s in the 2014 Season One Descent Game Night Kit?
Each 2014 Season One Descent: Journeys in the Dark Game Night Kit comes with everything you need to support up to four players in a cooperative new quest set in Terrinoth:
- The Forgotten Souls cooperative adventure for Descent: Journeys in the Dark
- Four cardstock playmats for organizing each hero’s materials, featuring places for Skill cards, conditions, items, hero tokens, and more.
- Four translucent blue attack dice – one for each player
- Four sets of six acrylic wound tokens – two ‘fives’ and four ‘ones.’
- One sixteen-page rules sheet explaining how to play cooperative Descent: Journeys in the Dark
- One eight-page info booklet
- One promotional poster depicting Roganna the Shade and Augur Grisom moving cautiously through the Valdari Swamp
A copy of the Core Set for Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition is required to use a Descent Game Night Kit. Either a player or the retailer must provide a copy.
Are You a Retailer?
If you’re interested in ordering an Descent Game Night Kit, you can do so through your distributor or through our B2B store. For more information on all of our Organized Play Tournament and Game Night Kits, visit the front page announcement! The deadline to order these kits is January 17th, and the season begins in March!
...
Source:
Explore. Search. Battle. Quest.
