The Trollfens: Three Heads, One Mind

Heroes

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

Monster Groups

Harpies (Chi'kree, named master harpy)
Ettin (Grug'nik, named master ettin)
Giants (open group)

Summary

Like the previous quest, this is also a race against the clock. There are two named monsters, which are basically souped of versions of a standard monster (+2 wounds per hero). Both of them have an objective token; one is a decoy, and the other is a rusky key, which is necessary to open the locked door. The objective is to get the rusty key and get at least one hero off the board by the ninth turn.

Chi'kree starts off the map, and only lands when the Overlord makes her, or when the heroes pick up one of the objective tokens (which represent trinket stashes) lying on the ground. This means that they have to set themselves up, because if they snag all the trinket stashes and she survives, there is no other way to get at her. I only got to choose one open group, so I went with a giant because of the narrow paths, 12 health, black armor die, and ability to clobber everything within 2 squares.

Melissa started out making a beeline for Grug'nik, and ended up chasing him counter clockwise around the map, gradually whittling him down. This was fine, because my goal was to kite her to the far side of the map and then switch tokens at the last moment with Chi'kree, in the hopes that by the time she killed her she would be too far to make it to the exit. Unfortunately she managed to lock him down with Lindel, so I had to bring Chi'kree in early for the swap.

I managed to get her out of there with only a few wound tokens in tow, but Melissa regrouped her heroes by one of the very nearby trinket stashes, snatched it, and then utterly crushed her using some very potent team synergy with a few rounds to spare (Ravaella did a thing that moved her, triggering a trap, which let Lindel do an out of turn thing...it was a whole mess of dice, fatigue tokens, card exhaustion, and tears).

I already knew that we were going to have to do Source of Sickness, but I was hoping to at least stop her from getting the Immunity Elixir relic (+2 wounds, cannot be diseased). To make matters worse she killed both named monsters, which were worth an extra 50 gp a pop (just enough to buy a boomerang from the Act II shop deck).

This is another one where I think my plan was sound, but I think I would use razorwings next time so that most of my monsters could just avoid dealing with the water. That, and getting cards that didn't mostly trigger on search tokens and doors would also be great. Oh well, I've still got one chance left: she may have won all of the battles, but she hasn't won the war.

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