RPG’s and Me Part 3: The Future

In my last blog I prayed for a game company to make a game like Warhammer Quest, but with higher production values and full ongoing support for the game, I hoped that it would contain everything that a player would need to play the game to the fullest and that it would all be available in the base game and it’s subsequent expansions. I believe that my favorite game publisher, Fantasy Flight, may soon deliver this Holy Grail to myself and others that have searched for the definitive mix of RPG, Dungeon Crawl, and boardgame all in one.



When Fantasy Flight released Descent in 2005 my friend Ed bought it right away. We were both very excited and I was very jealous that he had gotten it before me. He was telling my friend Scott and I all about the game via e-mail and phone and he insisted that we make the 3 hour drive to his home so we could all play it. Scott and I had many fond memories of playing Warhammer Quest together and always wished that we could have played it with Ed. Now here was a game that promised to be better than Warhammer Quest and Ed had it. Needless to say we made that 3 hour drive.


So we played and we were disappointed. When I say “we” I mean Scott and myself. Ed thought it was great, but he had never played Warhammer Quest. We explained to Ed that one of the most addictive qualities of WQ was building your character up over many game sessions. Descent did not have this ability. Descent was designed to take a character from “zero to hero” in one session. Your character literally starts with nothing and then over the course of crawling through this one dungeon finds items that give them tremendous power. Also there is some boosting of the characters innate abilities. In WQ, we argued, the player really becomes attached to their character because of the time invested in trying to not only make them more powerful but customize them with all the various skills and special items available. The characters in WQ had so many different options that each character pack came with a small rulebook that was typically 8 to 12 pages long. That is what Scott and I wanted out of Descent, not some quick “play with them once and throw them away” characters.

Descent had some great things about it though. The production values were high. Every component was great quality. The miniatures for the monsters and characters; lots of cardboard tokens for keeping track of health and potions; cards that represented your magic items with fantastic artwork; modular board pieces for designing the dungeon; all these were great. Also the player that ran the game and acted as the “Overlord” got to do all kinds of fun things to stop the Heroes. Like setting off traps, and spawning more and more and even more monsters for the Heroes to fight. Best of all these things though was the combat system. It used a unique set of dice that simplified combat but retained enough depth to make things exciting.


There were two expansions released for Descent. The Well of Darkness in 2006, which added more monsters, more Heroes, and more Traps for the Overlord to use.

Then there was Altar of Despair in 2007, which added even more Monsters and Heroes and Traps.


I have to admit that all this extra stuff coming out was making me excited for the game again. It was exactly what I had always wanted for Warhammer Quest, affordable expansions that added more of everything. It really showed that Fantasy Flight was dedicated to supporting the game. With all this cool new stuff Ed was able to talk Scott and me into playing with him again, I even borrowed it from him and played it again with Scott by ourselves. Once again we just could not get passed our disappointment with not being able to flush out and build our characters over time. I scoured the internet trying to find anyone that might have come up with their own rules to play the game this way, I even spent sometime while I was borrowing the game from Ed to see if I could come up with my own rules, but it was all hopeless, I gave the game back to Ed and gave up on it.

Well now there is some very interesting news. The designers of Descent have heard the pleas of other Descent players that feel the same way as I do. Fantasy Flight has announced another expansion for Descent to come out in 2008, but this one will be different. It is called The Road to Legend.

This expansion promises to add “Campaign Rules”, which means finally you can make a character and watch them grow and improve over multiple adventures. It’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years. As far as I can see it is the only missing piece that will make Descent the RPG Boardgame I have been questing for. In addition this expansion claims that it will shorten play time from long arduous 3-4 hour sessions to quick 1 hour sessions. This is possible because of the new rules that enable the carrying over of characters from one quest to the next, these new rules simply enable shorter play sessions because you can just pick up from where you left off. There will also be mechanics in place that will even give the Overlord player a chance to experience the joys of character building themselves, by giving them evil boss characters to grow and cultivate, striving to turn them in to the ultimate super-villain, a true nemesis for the Heroes.

I know I have been so nit picky about finding the perfect RPG Boardgame, that most people will say that I won’t be anything but letdown by The Road to Legend. I have hope though, I think that this has been a long time in coming and I believe in Fantasy Flight. They are my favorite game publisher after all.