First Look
Altar of Despair (AoD) is the second expansion for Descent, as the cover proudly proclaims. As with Well of Darkness, if you don't play Descent, you're not going to get much out of this. Well, maybe a couple unpainted otyugh minis for D&D, but the price is a little high for that.
The box is the square shape standard of Fantasy Flight Games. The cover art doesn't feature any heroes. Instead, we see a charging troll, one of the new monsters. However, the box art does line up with the cover of Well of Darkness to make one compete picture (they do not fit with the cover of Descent)
I love opening up Fantasy Flight Games, as they always seem stuffed with toys. AoD is no exception. 27 new plastic figures, representing the six new heroes and the five new types of monsters. Eight new map pieces, but these are not standard pieces, instead bearing the new corrupted terrain. New markers represent new effects, dark glyphs, and altars. Finally, there are 110 cards added in this box, the same number as Well of Darkness.
New Heroes
AoD adds another six heroes to Descent. The portraits of the six have a desert theme, reminiscent of Arabian Nights. The newest Runebound expansion is The Sands of Al-Kalim, a name that suggests these heroes were first developed there.
Two characters are specialized in melee and magic, with one specialized in ranged weapons, and a jack of all trades. Only one character, Tahlia, is female, but she is both the first female specialized in melee (all three dice) and the first female worth four conquest tokens (the other melee character is Corbin, the second dwarf of the game).
The best ability goes to Kirga (a goblin from the look as he looks too different from the orcs of Descent). This ranged specialist prevents monsters from being spawned within five spaces, even if he doesn't have line of sight. With Kirga around, there's no more need to worry about a beastman warparty appearing around the corner.
The weakest of the six is Aurim, the jack of all trades. With only eight health and one die in each attack form, he's not very great in combat. His ability to change his potions into other potions is interesting, but only rarely useful.
New Monsters
Five new monsters join the Overlord's horde. Three are melee, one uses magic, and the last is "other."
The savage blood ape's ancestors wrestled with Conan. The current incarnations are powerful melee fighters that can leap over foes, attacking everyone in a line. The masters go berserk when wounded, using all five power dice in an attack.
Trolls are brutes almost on par with giants for strength and toughness. They have the new bash ability, which allows them to roll up to five power dice on an attack. A blank on any die means a miss, but on a hit they can spend surges to cause devastating damage.
The Deep Elves are swift assassins who will no doubt conjure images of drow. Their shadowcloak ability allows them to avoid any attack from a nonadjacent target. The masters have frost attacks which can make items brittle and break.
The Dark Priests are the new magic creature. Their special is the dark prayer, which generates threat for the Overlord at a rate of one per surge, instead of the usual one for two. They also add range and damage for each surge. Masters bear the black curse, making heroes less effective and giving a curse token to their killer.
Chaos Beasts are primordial tentacled creatures. Their morph ability lets them pick any three dice to roll for an attack- one has to be red, white, or blue, setting the type of attack, but it could use those three dice and make the attack melee, magic, or ranged as the Overlord wishes.
Spawn cards for the Dark Priests and the Blood Apes are added to the deck. Trolls and Deep Elves are on spawn cards that can be added by treachery. There are no spawn cards for the Chaos Beasts, so they'll only appear if the quest calls for them.
New Cards
This time around, there is only one replacement card. Leadership is rewritten to accommodate the new prolonged actions rule. At the same time, a fatigue cost is added, a step at balancing this powerful skill.
Of the new cards, only a handful are available in the shop. Only one is affordable by starting heroes; the Wizard's Robe, armor that provides no protection against melee attacks, but allows the wearer to equip an additional Other Item. The Curse Doll is an Other that can be discarded to remove effect tokens; a pretty useful item, as the week before we bought AoD, one hero spent several turns trapped in a web before the Overlord finished him off. Lastly, a Ring of Protection can be purchased for 250 gold. The +1 armor it provides isn't great compared to the copper treasures you could buy at that price, but at least you know what you're getting.
New treasures include the Mace of Kellos, mentioned in the Descent rules but cut from the game before release. I think heroes will be more interested in the Pack of Holding, which allows the hero to carry an unlimited number of items, and not lose gold on death. Or the Ring of Wishing, with possible wishes earning gold, a choice of silver treasures, or three conquest tokens. A new type of items are cursed treasures, items that are more powerful than normal, but cause the wielder to gain a curse token.
The dark side of treasures are the Dark Relics. A new trap card allows the Overlord to give a hero a Dark Relic instead of a treasure, and the relic must be equipped. The hero might be slowed, or be forced to wear glass armor and take extra damage from attacks, or another effect.
Another four skills are added to each category. Subterfuge takes another step toward the traditional D&D thief with the inclusion of pickpocket, earning the hero gold for every kill. One card in each category is devoted to helping with prolonged actions. Since there are no prolonged actions in pre-AoD quests, these might look worthless (like the elemental Pacts in Well of Darkness if their obstacle isn't in the quest), but the secondary abilities still make these cards useful. Ranger, the subterfuge skill, grants a damage bonus. The magic skill, Bardic Lore, gives all treasure drawn to the hero with the skill, who then distributes them equally; no more does the magic sword end up in the wizard's hands by random draw. Brawny, the melee skill, seems the weakest, but it allows the hero to break down doors, spending no movement and removing the door from the board. The best skill in the box looks to be Sharr the Brightwing, a familiar. Each turn, Sharr can heal a hero of two points of damage, or repair a dark glyph.
The Overlord gets 49 new cards in this expansion. Six of these are added to the base deck, which means it takes longer to cycle through the deck. The others are treachery cards (described below). Some are brand new, others duplicate cards from Descent or Well of Darkness- if you enjoy making heroes attack each other with Dark Charm, why not add a second one to the deck? I'm fond of Time Slips Away, which when played allows the Overlord to draw two more cards. Others might prefer Dance of the Monkey God- just like Curse of the Monkey God, but it affects all heroes.
New Rules
AoD has the same rules changes and FAQ as found in Well of Darkness, so even if you skipped that expansion, you can still make use of the errata. Of course, this information is also available online, but it's useful to have it in the book.
As with Well of Darkness, AoD uses the treachery system to allow the Overlord to customize the deck. The rules (and treachery values for the original Descent quests) are reprinted from Well of Darkness, so let me quote what I said in that review:
The biggest addition to the game is Treachery. For each quest, the Overlord gains a certain amount of Event, Trap, and Monster threat. Each of the new Overlord cards has a treachery cost on it. The Overlord purchases cards with the treachery, adding these to the deck while removing a number of base cards equal to the number of treachery cards purchased. If the Overlord doesn't spend all of the treachery on cards, then he starts with an additional card in his hand for ever two unspent points. Treachery values for the quests out of Descent are included, and each new quest has the treachery in the description.
Additionally, the Overlord can spend treachery points for dark glyphs, at a cost of 2 treachery per glyph. On one side these look like a regular transport glyph, but the reverse is colored depending on the type of treachery used to purchase it. A dark glyph may be laid down in place of a regular glyph. Red glyphs spawn monsters when used, purple allow free draws for the Overlord, and green are sundered, unusable and only worth one conquest token to the heroes.
Altars, for good and evil, are a new quest feature. When activated by heroes or monsters, these have some effect depending on the quest. For example, one quest features good altars as part of a temple's defenses; a hero can activate the altar and cause two points of damage to all monsters within five spaces, as well as giving burn tokens to those monsters.
Two new status effects have been added. Curse tokens, gained from using cursed items or through certain other effects, increase a character's conquest value. Frost tokens make a hero's items brittle and prone to breaking.
The most important new rule is prolonged actions. These cover situations where a hero is searching for a secret door or trying to solve a puzzle. Each prolonged action tests one of the traits. Successes can be accumulated over multiple turns. This addition allows an extra level of interaction in quests; before, a hero activated an event marker or didn't. Now there's a mechanic beyond combat.
New Quests
There are only six quests included in AoD, as opposed to the nine included in the original game and WoD. However, all these quests break out of the mold of "explore the dungeon and kill the boss monster." The first quest, "The Thing in the Pit", is a race to free prisoners before they can be sacrificed to the Thing. Even if the heroes defeat the Thing, if too many prisoners are sacrificed, they still lose.
Another quest involves villagers transformed into monsters. If heroes rush in and kill without thinking, they'll kill the villagers and lose conquest tokens. Even cautious heroes may run afoul the trolls in "Mists of Time", which can ambush and attack during a player's turn.
My favorite of the ones I've tried is "Hold the Line." There is no exploring in this quest. Instead, the heroes must try to defend a temple against a horde of monsters.
New Purchase?
If you're looking to get something more out of Descent, I'd say pick up Altar of Despair. I think it's better than Well of Darkness, with better monsters and items. Well of Darkness seemed to be testing the water, while AoD is jumping into the creative deep end. The quests go even further at pushing the limits. The prolonged action is a great addition in the quests featured here, and should be very useful to anyone creating their own scenarios.
