And with that, the core set of Lord of the Rings starts off the Shadows of Mirkwood adventure path. The core set itself only contains the first 3 quests in the adventure path - the remaining 5 quests being released via expansion packs. I'm still playing through the core set but so far, I already know that I will be buying more, more, more!!
Just so you know, the text in italics is taken directly from the game.
Passage through Mirkwood
The first quest, Passage through Mirkwood, sees you build out your party of heroes to take a warning to Lady Galadriel. This quest sees you travelling through, as the quest title suggests, Mirkwood forest.
You are traveling through Mirkwood forest, carrying an urgent message from King Thanduil to the Lady Galadriel of Lorien. As you move along the dark trail, the spiders gather around you...
The quest actually starts off pretty easily as you would expect with a quest ranked as 1 star difficulty. For reference, later quests can go up to 7 stars in difficulty (or possibly even higher in later expansions). Granted, there is a forest spider that you immediately need to deal with. With that said though, the first location you can travel to actually readies one of your characters so you can quest and immediately reuse one of your heroes to deal with the spider. Beyond that, the first mission of this quest is fairly standard with little in the way of surprises beyond the cards in the encounter deck and collecting the 8 progress tokens to complete this mission is fairly straightforward.
As you move through Mirkwood, hounded by spiders, the forest path forks before you...
The second mission of Passage through Mirkwood is really more like a placeholder than a real mission. Requiring only 2 progress tokens to complete, you often only spend 1 round before you move onto the last mission.
The trail winds into one of the darkest, most tangled parts of the forest... You sense that a foul, dark presence is hunting you, and you move quickly in an attempt to avoid its evil.
Which brings up the first real point of interest about Passage through Mirkwood. There are actually two different Mission 3's for Passage through Mirkwood and which specific mission you deal with is random. This represents the choice of path you took in the second mission and is a nice thematic way of giving you some variation in the first quest.
Beorn's Path - You attempt to follow a secret, hidden trail to avoid the enemy.
Probably considered the easier of the 2 available options for Mission 3, this mission sees you needing 10 progress tokens to progress. This is relatively straightforward task albeit requiring several rounds to complete. The slight wrinkle to this Mission is that you can't complete it if Ungoliant's Spawn is in play.
Which is very interesting from a thematic point of view. Your team is trying to escape from Mirkwood Forest using a secret trail before they get noticed by Ungoliant's Spawn - one of the nastier creatures in the encounter deck. If you can do so, great. However, if you do get noticed by Ungoliant's Spawn, then it will hunt you and you need to deal with it before you can leave.
In the lore, Ungoliant is a massive spider deity (I think) and one of the oldest entities in Middle Earth. Shelob is probably the most famous of Ungoliant's spawn - Shelob being the massive spider that accosted Frodo and Sam in their quest to destroy the One Ring.
Don't leave the Path - The shadows grow darker, and you realise that a foul presence is aiming to draw you from the path. You must defeat it to pass this way.
It should be obvious by now but the foul presence hunting you is the aforementioned Ungoliant's Spawn. Ungoliant's Spawn is a pretty nasty creature that can potentially kill off an hero or ally with each attack. At the same time, it has a pretty high defence and 9 hit points so it can take a lot of punishment.
And you have to kill it.
Quest thoughts
All in all, as expected for the first quest that players will encounter, Passage through Mirkwood is a relatively simple quest that most players should be able to defeat relatively easily.
There aren't a whole lot of wrinkles with the quest design and a fairly straightforward approach is often enough to complete the quest. Half the time, all you need is solid questing ability. In the event where you need to deal with Ungoliant's Spawn, the use of Gandalf together with other allies is often enough to deal with Ungoliant's Spawn in one round.
Granted, there will be occasions where a run of bad draws will make things tough for you (such as drawing Ungoliant's Spawn before Mission 3 or having to encounter Hummerhorns - the other nasty enemy you might face in the encounter deck). However, overall, it's a relatively simple mission as evidenced by the fact that the mono-sphere decks in the core set can all beat this Mission.
No comments:
Post a Comment