1514: New Journeys in the Dark

We finally got around to starting a new campaign of Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2nd Edition (hereafer Descent to save my own sanity) recently. We eventually abandoned our original campaign on the “finale” quest after getting a number of rules exceedingly wrong for the entire campaign, which meant that the party of heroes were exceedingly overpowered, while the Overlord (me) was vastly underpowered.

This time around, we’re going to do it right. I’m playing a hero this time around, so it’ll be fun to be on the other side of the table, and we’re also playing with the Lair of the Wyrm expansion, which adds a couple of new character classes plus rules for “rumors” and extra quests that bolt on to the existing campaign. They’re mostly fairly minor changes, but it should be fun.

The new class I’m playing as — a Geomancer — is looking like it has potential to be fun. Beginning with a ranged magic weapon and the ability to summon a stone familiar which can subsequently make use of aforementioned ranged magic weapon, levelling up eventually equips me with the ability to summon more than one stone, detonate them and blast enemies in the vicinity, and all sort of other happy funtimes.

I actually haven’t really explored the other classes all that much, but the way Descent is designed makes for an interesting set of combinations. Each player gets to pick a hero character, and that hero has fixed stats and special abilities (one of which can always be used, one of which may only be used once per “encounter” in a quest) — but from there, you can pick one of several specific classes for that hero’s archetype. This allows for a ton of variety, particularly given that the game and the expansion certainly don’t skimp on the available heroes. I’m looking forward to working through the campaign and getting a feel for how my character fits into the party as a whole.

The game continues to impress me as a good balance between cooperative and competitive, strategic and thematic play. It is, I think, one of the best games in our collection for keeping pretty much everyone around the table happy for one reason or another, and thus I’m always glad to be able to get it out.

As I think I’ve probably mentioned before, one of the things I particularly like is that it isn’t a straightforward dungeon crawl, despite how it positions itself on its packaging and in its marketing. No, instead it’s more of a small-scale skirmish game in which a small team of heroes faces off against a modest force of monsters, with both sides trying to complete objectives that are usually a lot more interesting than just “kill all of the other team”. In the introductory quest, for example, the Overlord’s task is to get five goblins off the map — and said goblins keep respawning even if the heroes kill them. The heroes, meanwhile, are tasked with defeating a strong boss monster while simultaneously attempting to block the flow of goblins. All of the quests are like this to one degree or another; it gives the game a pleasant feeling of asymmetry while keeping things interesting for both sides and preventing it from becoming mindless hack-and-slash.

There’s also a really nice system of dice for combat. A basic attack uses a blue six-sided die, which determines whether or not you hit and a small amount of damage. Equipped weapons then add additional dice to this basic die of either the yellow or red variety. Yellow dice do less damage overall, but they have more in the way of “surges” — energy markers that, when rolled, can be used to trigger special abilities. They can also be used to increase the range of ranged weapons — in order to hit something at range, you have to roll a high enough number as well as hitting with the blue die. Red dice, meanwhile, are largely focused on dealing more damage.

On top of that, there are brown, grey and black defense dice that reflect how much protection a character has thanks to their equipment and innate abilities — but then certain weapons have a “pierce” skill that allows them to ignore some defense. The systems all gradually build on top of each other, but things never get overwhelmingly complicated. It’s satisfying.

In fact, the only thing I’m really not a fan of about Descent is that the box insert it comes with is absolute garbage — in fact, I chucked in in order to get everything fitting in the box a bit better. Between all the miniatures, the zillion tokens and the big thick cardboard map tiles, there’s a lot of stuff in that box, though, and it’s tricky to keep it organised. I’m going to have to look into a better storage solution for it if I want to play it a bit more often, I think!