I finally had a chance recently to continue the Descent campaign I have going with some friends. As I've mentioned in a previous post, we've been using the Road to Legend system, where a computer program acts as the game master, telling you where to place game elements.
For reference, here is the character card and equipment I have. I'm playing a necromancer whose most effective strategy seems to be to reanimate a familiar and let him do the close melee fighting for me, while I hang back and use ranged attacks.
**Spoiler alert - If you don't want any knowledge of the quest involving Splig and his goblin hordes prior to playing, you should stop reading now.
The quest started well enough. A group of goblin archers had taken over a castle, and we showed up to clean house. As soon as we opened the door, we faced a flood of monsters. Not just the goblins, but also some wolf/dog looking creatures who boxed us in from the jump. The white and red figures are the monsters, gray are the adventurers.
After clearing the first room, we opened the door to the second room and found more of the same.
The third room however, held a threat of an entirely different nature: 2 dragons! And of course the requisite goblin archers.
Somehow we defeated the dragons, but not without paying a heavy price. You see, in Descent, you don't die if you lose all your health. You just get knocked down, and then have to use an action to stand back up, but you have very few hit points then, so unless you can get healed up somehow, it's very easy to get knocked down again. If you get knocked down too many times, you lose the quest. After our encounter with the dragons, we only had 1 knockdown remaining for our group.
We opened the next door, and found ourselves in the midst of the final encounter. We met the goblin lieutenant, Splig, and his legion of protectors.
In the very first round of combat, our healer took some major damage and was knocked down. We lost the game. It was the first time our group encountered defeat.
Apparently, this just means next time we play, we will try this same quest again. Next time, I think we will take a different route to the final encounter, as there are some doors we didn't get a chance to open. However, I'm not sure if the game randomizes things on subsequent plays, so it might be a completely different experience next time.
Despite losing, it was a fun night with friends. One thing that made losing more tolerable is that we were drinking some excellent pear cider while playing. Although I suppose it's possible that this also led us to exercising some poor judgement. Maybe that's why we lost...
