DECIPHER.com > The Lord of the Rings > Expansions > Shadows

Site-seeing

by Evan Lorentz
Decipher Game Designer

All this week, I'm going to be sharing the new rules introduced in Shadows, and previewing cards that show off how they'll work. I'll be starting off with the most sweeping change of the set, the new adventure path.

Beginning with Shadows, sites will no longer be numbered sequentially from 1 to 9. They'll have a new, darker compass symbol in the left corner (serving in place of the block symbols for the Tower and King block sets), but no number on those symbols. The range of Shadow numbers on these sites will be much smaller than what you've seen in the past; each site will have a Shadow number of 0, 1, 2, or 3.

Adventure decks will still consist of nine sites. Each site must be different. When you're building your deck, you're allowed to choose any sites from the Shadows set onward. However, you may include no more than three sites that have the same given Shadow number. For example, your adventure deck could have sites with the following Shadow numbers:

• 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 – There's two of every number in this adventure deck, plus a third 1 as its ninth site.
• 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3 – There aren't any 0s in this adventure deck, but since there are no more than three sites with each of the other numbers, it's still a legal deck.
• 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2 – This is perhaps an opposite approach to the adventure deck in the previous example.

So, once you have your adventure deck, how do you use it? That's the easy part. When it's time for you to put a site on the adventure path, you look through your adventure deck and choose any site there. If an opponent's copy of a particular site is already active, that's okay – you can still play your own copy.

As you can imagine, this gives you a great deal of strategic flexibility during the game. For example, take a look at this site:

If this was the old adventure path, and this site had a prescribed number assigned to it, it would always come up at the same place and time. As the Shadow player, if you didn't have a Nazgûl ready to play when that time came, you'd miss out on using the ability. And as the Free Peoples player, you might anticipate the coming of this site and wait to play a key condition until after you'd passed the "dangerous spot" on the adventure path.

Not anymore. Now, if you're dry on Nazgûl minions in hand, or if your opponent hasn't played any conditions, no problem. Choose one of the other eight sites in your adventure deck better suited to whatever situation you do find yourself in. Maybe the right time for Buckland Homestead will come later in the game.

While some of you instantly started imagining these sorts of possibilities when you saw the card, others of you instead wondered about some more technical issues I haven't explained yet. Like, for example, how do roaming minions work now if sites don't have any numbers? How does anything that asks about a site's number work?

The answer is simple: each new site you play takes on a site number when you play it. For example, the site chosen by the starting player at the beginning of the game becomes site 1 when he plays it. Once it is time for another site to be played, the new site becomes site 2, and so on until you reach site 9, where the game ends just as it always has.

Still others of you have been a little distracted since I first mentioned that you can play any site you want to from your adventure deck, wondering: Why would I ever give my opponent a sanctuary to heal at? How is the fellowship ever going to survive to get to site 9?

That answer: sanctuary is no longer a printed keyword. Instead, whatever site is placed on the path as site 3 becomes a sanctuary. Same for site 6. Sanctuary healing occurs in the same places it always has, but without the written keyword (or the silver site template).

Meanwhile, still others of you have been distracted since all the way back when I first talked about the Shadow numbers on sites, wondering: how will the Shadow players ever win with such a small amount of twilight available to them? Good question, and that's where a new concept comes in: region number.

The adventure path is now divided into three regions. Sites 1-3 are always located in region 1. Sites 4-6 are in region 2. Sites 7-9 are in region 3. As the fellowship advances through the regions, the amount of twilight in the twilight pool also increases.

When you move your fellowship, you still add 1 twilight token to the twilight pool for each companion, and add the number specified by the Shadow number of the site you're moving to. But now, you also add twilight for the region – 3 tokens if you're moving to a site in region 2, 6 tokens if you're moving to a site in region 3. (Here's another way of looking at this: whatever the site number is on the most recent sanctuary you've passed, that's how much twilight you add for region.)

Region number is not purely a method for increasing the twilight pool, either. Check out this new version of Gandalf, built to take advantage of the new concept.

So, for any of you still unclear about the whole movement thing, let me give you an example with the cards I've shown you so far. Let's say your fellowship is at site 5, and consists of 5 companions including this new Gandalf. You end your fellowship phase, and move to site 6. Your opponent plays Buckland Homestead from his adventure deck as site 6.

• You add 0 tokens for the Shadow number of the site.
• You add 3 tokens for the region you're moving to (region 2).
• You add 5 tokens, 1 for each companion in your fellowship.

In addition, because it is site 6, Buckland Homestead is a sanctuary. The good news, you'll get to heal if you park it this regroup phase and start your next turn there. The bad news, this is the last site where Gandalf's strength +1 bonus for everyone will work (though the upcoming +2 just for him isn't bad, either).

So there you have the nuts and bolts of the new adventure path. The actual wording of it all, in the form of the Shadows Starter Rulebook and the new Comprehensive Rules 4.0, will be appearing soon.

But I can't sign off yet, not now that you understand just how sites are going to work, not when things are just getting good. Instead, I want to preview a couple more cards from the set, and show you just how much these new rules will allow us to do.

You've already seen how the power to choose where on the adventure path a site like Buckland Homestead falls can be a major point of strategy all to itself. You may also have noticed the new keyword it has: dwelling. Dwelling is an unloaded keyword, and it joins the existing keywords of battleground, forest, marsh, mountain, plains, river, and underground as a type of "terrain." (By the way, terrain is not actually a game term; it's just a bit of shorthand that Design and Development likes to use for it.)

The bottom line is this: on the new adventure path, terrain is going to matter. A lot.

Strength +1 for a ranged weapon is not bad, but obviously when you're at a battleground site, this possession really gets good.

Cards all throughout the set, both Free Peoples and Shadow, call for all the different types of terrain. Certain cultures heavily favor one or two types of terrain over others. You might even find yourself choosing sites for your adventure deck solely on the basis of that terrain keyword, not on the rest of the game text.

One final, important aspect of the new adventure path I want to leave you with is this: it's coming at a perfect time, as the game begins its fourth year. Shadows is first "base set" (Reflections, put your hand down!) to incorporate material from all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. That means that as it grows, it will include sites everywhere from Bag End to Mount Doom itself. And because we're not bound to the material found only in one book or film, we're free to revisit places from earlier adventure paths long gone from Open and Standard play. For example, check out this Shadows card:

While Shadows includes many all-new sites, it also includes a lot of classic sites from the first three years of the game. Re-interpretations of them, anyway. Obviously, the new versions won't have site numbers. They'll also have their Shadow numbers adjusted to fit within the new 0-3 range of sites (though as it turns out in the case of Moria Stairway, the Shadow number is unchanged). A few will have their text tweaked, though still in the spirit of the earlier incarnation of the site.

Speaking of those earlier versions, these new sites do not represent errata to them. The old versions still do what they say, and the new versions do what they say. In fact, the old adventure path itself works the same way as well, should you choose to play a Fellowship, Tower, or King block game. In those formats, you'll get that nostalgic buzz of using 9 different sites, numbered 1-9. You won't add pool for the region your fellowship is traveling in. Straight-up old school.

Come back later this week to learn more about the intriguing new changes in Shadows.

September 28, 2004