Spoiler Alert: In a similar vein to the Grey Havens Encounter cards, this impressions-based look into our futures contains spoilers for the encounter. If you don’t want to know what might hit your heroes skip this article.
I sleeve all my encounter cards and as I do, I get an impression into what the encounter deck might hold. I don’t read each card for very long, and definitely don’t study any interactions or special abilities in great depth. However, I do walk away with a mental view of what might be in store. Whilst we’ve not done a review of player-cards for this pack (yet?), I do talk about the Hero from the pack over here.
This article covers the Encounter cards found within the Flight of the Stormcaller adventure pack.
Artwork
The Flight of the Stormcaller is the first in the Grey Havens cycle. The first thing that hit me was how gorgeous the art is on the cover and this is taken from the Stormcaller enemy card. In fact the generally high quality of the artwork continues through the pack with the ships continuing the art-style established in the Deluxe and the locations being appropriately nautical.
Narrative – Mechanic
The story of this expansion sees the heroes chasing down the enemy aboard the Stormcaller and this sees that ship and the heroes both trying to advance their own quest lines. The cards support this narrative very well, with some locations such as Vast Coastland going into the Stormcaller’s quest area helping that ship evade the attentions of the heroes.
The adventure also makes use of the sailing mechanic, with quest card effects and encounter cards having a worse effect if the characters are off-course.
Is Being Off-course bad?
Yes, yes it is. Just as we learned in the first quest of the Grey Havens deluxe, being off-course is to be avoided as much as possible. However, in this particular pack there are some cards that will punish over-commitment to a Sailing test so it pays to be more careful than before.
Enemies
The enemies are made up of the Corsairs ships and crew, with the usual ‘when engaged’ effects that represent them swinging onto the rigging for the crew-members. It should be borne in mind that whilst a card says “put into play engaged with you” that still triggers the “when engaged” text on the card.
The enemies appear to be mid-ranged in strength, without a clear boss enemy. I didn’t particularly pay attention to shadow effects so I’m not certain whether there were any particularly nasty ones to avoid or cancel (sorry!).
Treacheries remain treacherous
Man, the seas of Middle Earth are filled with all kinds of treacheries, and like some of their land-bound cousins these cards deserve some respect. For instance, Man Overboard is a potential killer: if you have greater than 8 willpower committed to a quest, you need to discard a questing character committed to the quest. Let’s hope that you’re not in the early game and questing with just your heroes, as one of them might end in the drink!
The other treachery in the pack is of a similar power-level, so I strongly recommend some treachery cancellation.
I hope that this is useful to those that have decided to spoil themselves, and please leave comments below with any additional insight once you’ve played the quest.