The Trollfens: Source of Sickness

Heroes

Alys Raine (Marshall, Manor of Ravens)
Lindel (Stalker, Crown of Destiny)
Ravaella Lightfoot (Conjurer, Shadow of Nerekhall)

Monster Groups

Bol'Goreth
Plague worms
Chaos beasts (open group)
Ironbound (open group)

Summary

This is it: the final showdown.

I lost.

Again.

The objective of this quest is that the Overlord needs to accumulate ten fatigue tokens. There are a number of casks (represented by objective tokens) and infested villagers on the map scattered about the map. In addition, one of the search tokens is a Mending Talisman that the heroes can use to cure infested villagers.

Bol'Goreth and any master monster can carry a cask or villager, while Bol'Goreth can flip search tokens, though he only gets to take the Mending Talisman. You have to carry them to a spot on the map and chuck them out the door: you get one fatigue token for each cask collected, two for each infested villager, and three if you manage to dump the Mending Talisman. You can also get a fatigue token by having a plague worm crawl off the map.

The heroes want to find the Mending Talisman and leave or, along with smashing casks, use it to cure enough villagers so that the Overlord can't even get ten fatigue tokens.

Melissa, through a very risky gambit, started off by having Lindel dash all the way to the plague worms and hit them with a trap that caused them to become poisoned. The poisoned condition causes you to take a wound with each activation, which you can only shake off with a successful Might check. Since only lieutenants can even make attribute checks, they were all basically on borrowed time at that point.

She then went about trying to score the Mending Talisman with Alys and Ravaella, but as luck would have it I managed both to find it first and ditch it before she could kill Bol'. I did lose all of my worms and chaos beasts while trying to drag some villagers to the dropoff point, but since Bol' couldn't be permanently killed and Melissa couldn't do anything with the villagers, it meant that I technically couldn't lose at this point.

However, to avoid a lengthy game in which I envisioned would boil down to the heroes stomping Bol' into the ground, only to have him spend his turn getting up and get stomped down again, I figured I'd make things interesting: I snagged a villager, got as close as I could to the exit, played whatever card has you make two attacks then die (Blood Frenzy, I think), and then on my following turn spawned a minion worm.

I was able to get it right next to the exit, which meant that Melissa had one turn to revive her heroes and try to beat it down: she missed once, but was able to fatigue Alys close enough to make two attacks, flattening it in the process. Without any way to get that last fatigue token (she had smashed all the casks before then), it meant that I lost.

I now regret taking the ironbound. Yeah, it had 12 wounds, a defense of 1 grey and 1 black, and was immune to all conditions, but it's speed was only two. I would definitely swap it out for a flock of harpies, as they could fly over the water and are over twice as fast.

Another factor was that my card draws were almost entirely shit. At one point I had three cards that all required a search, which would have been nice if I had gotten them before Melissa snagged all the search tokens. Oh, I did get a dash card...after my worms and beasts were already dead.

Anywho, that's it for The Trollfens. Since my board game gang is now going to be doing Dungeon World via hangouts (starting tomorrow), the next time we do Descent will probably still be just Melissa and me. This means another mini-campaign is probably in order: I just got Manor of Ravens, but I have a freshly-painted Valyndra, so maybe we'll do Lair of the Wyrm.

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