The expedition to rescue Lanwyn from the dungeons of the Necromancer proceeds apace. I’ve had a great deal of success with the test runs, and I’m quite happy with these deck’s performance. I think that having Galadriel be the captured hero is the ideal situation – the loss of the card draw and threat reduction is annoying but doesn’t significantly impair the ability of the deck to function, while the theme is wonderful. Of course, our decks assume that Galadriel isn’t actually coming herself – like many thematic decks in this game, hero Galadriel is assumed to represent Galadriel’s influence from afar, lending her strength and willpower using her mirror and her ring. The idea that the dungeons of Dol Guldur are a place where even her power cannot reach is a beautiful thematic fit.
The worst situation for these decks is having Haldir captured. Without him, we lack a strong attacker capable of knocking down enemies as fast as we engage them. I did win one game with Haldir captured, mostly due to luck and being able to quest quickly through the first stage and get a progress on the second before the enemies built up a critical mass.
Anyways, all that needs to happen now is me finding time to actually record a playthrough. I hope to carve out a space in the next few days to finally get a successful run. Then it’s time to write up the narrative of Dol Guldur. Life looks like it will be calming down after the weekend, so I hope to be finished with that by early next week. That might be an optimistic projection – mine often are. We’ll see how things go, though.
Since we are so close to the end of the Core Set, it’s time to start looking forward to how we want the upcoming cycle to play out story-wise. The Shadows of Mirkwood Cycle is one of the more problematic cycles as far as LOTR canon goes. Canonically, Aragorn did the Hunt for Gollum alone, after Gandalf and the Wood-Elves gave it up. In our continuity, Eleanor and her band are going to get caught up in it all somehow, but I’d like to hew closely to the canon if I can. So, let’s look at each of the quests in turn, to get some initial ideas on the table for deckbuilding purposes, as well as charting out potential narrative problems well in advance so that they can be resolved if need be:
The Hunt for Gollum – This cycle offers a few good places (essentially this quest, Hills of Emyn Muil, and perhaps the Dead Marshes one) in the narrative for a traditional Silvan deck, and it’s not far-fetched that Aragorn might have enlisted the aid of Elves of Lorien for the search. Also, I’m really not going to have a chance to run a Lorien-style Silvan deck for a long while after this cycle ends; the upcoming locations are Khazad-dum, Gondor, Dunland/Eregion, and Arnor/Angmar. After that, we go sailing in the Dreamchaser before crash-landing in Umbar and trekking through Near Harad. Given that, I’d like to run this style of deck before it becomes narratively inappropriate. For this quest, I’m leaning towards an Aragorn/Celeborn/Galadriel deck to partner with Eleanor, Lanwyn, and Thalin.
Conflict at the Carrock – This quest and the one following it are diversions from the main hunt for Gollum, but they offer a welcome chance to explore novel deckbuilding options. I’m strongly tempted to try out Beorn in this quest, even though he’s technically dead by this time. Could justify an elderly Beorn going off to get his son Grimbeorn out of trouble, and it would be great fun. Either way, I think that I’m going to introduce a few more Dunedain – possibly Beravor and Thurindir. They are probably here to help Aragorn with the search, but are getting sidetracked just like us.
Journey to Rhosgobel – We need Lore and healing in this quest, and there are a few potential options. We could go towards the Lore Dunedain, justifying their presence in the story by Aragorn’s needs. Or we could dust off the Woodland elves, maybe even including Mirlonde for variety. Or we could even go with both options. This is probably the oddest of the quests to try and fit into the overall narrative, and especially to find a useful ally deck. I might just take whatever heroes I added to Conflict and go with that lineup (except for Beorn, if I decide to go with him) for this quest.
Hills of Emyn Muil – I’m actually strongly tempted to hew closer to the canonical version for this quest and the next one, and just take one deck through these two quests. It would be an Aragorn deck, of course. Authraw, who blogs at Darkling Door, had some excellent ideas for thematic decks for this cycle. One of my favorites was the Aragorn + Arwen secrecy deck. It would still be stretching the canon a little bit, but nowhere near as much as bringing Eleanor, Thalin, Lanwyn, and a troop of Gondorian soldiers into the Emyn Muil and the Dead Marshes, practically on Sauron’s doorstep. Narratively, I think I’d go with Eleanor meeting Aragorn and Arwen returning from the Marshes, and hearing the story from Aragorn about how they caught Gollum.
The Dead Marshes – (see above)
Return to Mirkwood – This is going to be tough, but I’ll likely switch to the Lore version of Aragorn, drop Desperate Alliance in, and just include as much Threat reduction as I can. I don’t really have ideas this far out yet, but I’ll want to keep it consistent with the rest of the cycle. That means that Arwen (in either hero or ally version) will show up somewhere, and that I might be drawn towards some of the Lore Dunedain heroes. This is far enough out that I’m not going to worry too much about it yet.
Print-on-Demand Quests
While I’m doing this long-term planning, though, I probably ought to figure out where I can slot in the GenCon and Fellowship event quests (if I can). Here’s a list from my memory:
Massing At Osgiliath
Battle of Laketown*
Stone of Erech
The Old Forest*
Fog on the Barrow Downs*
The Ruins of Belegost
Murder at the Prancing Pony
The Siege of Annuminas
Assault on Dol Guldur*
The quests marked with an asterisk are ones which I’m not going to be able to work into my narrative campaign, because they deal directly with the Saga expansions. And – as far as I can tell in the near future – Eleanor and friends are not going to meet Frodo in Rivendell and follow him to Mount Doom.
As for the others, Massing at Osgiliath and the Stone of Erech can both be slotted into the Against the Shadow cycle, into one of the narrative breaks. Belegost is going to be extremely tricky – it’s just so far away from anywhere and everywhere we’re going to be going, and the motivation of searching for abandoned treasure isn’t going to resonate with any of our heroes except for maybe Thalin.
Actually, that gives me an idea. If Belegost was an adventure Thalin went on long ago (or even just heard of), it could become a story he tells to the company at some point. Just for fun, I’ll slot the story into the middle of the Khazad-dum cycle, probably in between The Long Dark and Foundations of Stone.
Murder at the Prancing Pony probably fits best right before the Angmar Awakened cycle starts, or right after it ends, and the Siege of Annuminas could fit in there somewhere without too much difficulty. In fact, Annuminas could be a feint by Daechanar to draw attention away from Carn Dum during the ritual. Another possibility is that Annuminas starts off the cycle, and then the Orc War Party we drive away from Bree is part of the scattered army defeated there.
Either way, we have options for all of the quests that aren’t explicitly part of a Saga campaign or closely related to one.
With the cycle and the thus planned out, we can rest a little easier. The narrative might be difficult to navigate through, but it will only get easier as we go on. By the middle of the Khazad-dum cycle, location cards are more abstract and will cause us much less narrative dissonance. It can be difficult to justify in-story why we had to travel all the way to the East Bight from the Heart of the Marshes just to track Gollum.
Later cycles give us locations that hew much closer to the narrative core of the story, which is a thematic win and means that it will become much easier to write these stories as time goes on.
Now I just have to find time to do it.