While searching for Gollum in the Anduin valley, you recieve word that a group of Trolls have come to the Carrock. As this area is under the watch of the Beornings, you seek out their leader, Grimbeorn the Old, and discover he has already set out in a rage. You follow, hoping to find him before he confronts the Trolls.
This quest starts off with deceptive simplicity as the focus of Mission 1B is simply to travel to the Carrock in order to find Grimbeorn. The Carrock location card itself starts off in the questing area but you can't actually travel to it until you complete Mission 1B. Once you do complete Mission 1B, by collecting 7 progress tokens, you automatically travel to the Carrock.
Thematically, this simply represents you travelling to The Carrock. Easy enough right?
Well, not quite. This wouldn't be LoTR LCG if the quest was that easy! However, I'll save my specific comments on that for later!
You approach the Carrock, and find that the Trolls have been watching you from the top of the rocky river landmark. As you approach, the Trolls close in and attack!
The quest only has 2 missions so is relatively short in that sense (compared to many other quests I've played which often have 3 missions). Mission 2B only requires 1 progress token to complete. However, the mission cannot be completed if there are any Troll cards in play. As you can probably guess from the mission intro, you actually get ambushed by four Trolls so in essence, Mission 2B revolves around you surviving that ambush and fighting off the four Trolls.
Which is no easy feat! Even just one Troll in this game has been enough to give players nightmares and there are a ton of blog posts out there around how to defeat the Hill Troll in Journey Down the Anduin. And here you find yourself facing off against four trolls at the same time - all of whom boost each others stats!
Assuming you manage to defeat the trolls, the Quest basically ends and you win.
Quest thoughts
I mentioned before that Mission 1B is deceptively simple. My first time through, I had no idea of what was waiting for me so pushed through to Mission 2B quickly. I promptly got my rear end handed to me by the four Trolls.
The key to winning this quest is to use the time during Mission 1B to get ready for the trolls. Realistically, your deck is probably going to struggle to deal with four trolls unless you specifically prepared for it and the game helps you by providing Grimbeorn as an ally - provided you can find him. And finding Grimbeorn in the Encounter Deck is actually the real main focus of Mission 1B.
Grimbeorn, in addition to his amazing stats, also has a massively useful ability in that he doesn't exhaust when defending against a troll. This allows you to use him to defend against the trolls attack and then use him again, together with some of your other characters, to kill off the trolls one by one.
There are two ways to find Grimbeorn. You can get lucky and draw him directly from the deck. Alternatively, there are three Bee Pasture location cards in the deck which, if you can clear, allow you to pull Grimbeorn from the deck directly. Even after you pull him from the deck, you still need to put 8 leadership tokens on him so you need a lot of leadership resource generation as well! As you can see - getting Grimbeorn isn't easy but he is so good that he is totally worth the trouble.
All in all, this was a massively fun quest with some really nasty encounter cards which really force you to change your tactics (and hope for luck!) in order to win.
