by Shelfwear
Hello fellow LotR LCG fans!After having played a couple customs scenarios from BGG users I thought I'd give it a spin too. My scenario "Shadows over Emyn Muil" is meant to be the following:
1) I wanted a difficult scenario (Difficluty rating 8+)
2) I wanted to turn the weakest of the official scenarios - The Hills of Emyn Muil - into something enjoyable and challenging (it has beautiful location art after all)
3) I wanted a fun scenario that is engaging (no pun) without introducing any new game mechanic or making things too complicated
4) I wanted to use the art of the great Angus McBride. Some of you will know him from his MERP illustrations. All art for the custom SoEM encounter cards is by Angus McBride!
A very big thanks goes to GeckoTH without whom nothing of this could be possible. Thanks for your templates!
[user=GeckoTH][/user]
Shadows over Emyn Muil looks easy but it is not. I had all the new power decks (Dwarf decks or Spirit Glorfindel etc) in mind while designing this scenario and it will provide you with a challenge I hope
Quest spoilers
[o]The inital scout enemies look wimpy but the twist here is that you need to get through stage 1 as fast as possible because once one player reaches threat 35 the game is lost. That's quite hard considering that you have to quest through Emyn Muil locations.
In the second stage you might want to kill off the scouts but you need to keep at least one alive. Here the challenge is that there are cards that manipulate the number of Scouts in play, either by removing or adding them. So a simple Ambush treachery card might end the game for you instantly if it shuffles the last scout in play back into the encounter deck. Abandoned Lookout is a tool for the player to have some control about this.
Decks that swamp the game with allies wont help either because sooner or later the Alerted Easterlings treachery card will kick in limited the number of allies in play severly.
Stage 3 is just bloody because because of the encounter deck setup there will be only enemy cards in the encounter deck. You will first have to drag away the Honor Guard away from the War Chief which means you have to survive a whole turn before engaging the War Chief. Especially annoying are the "return enemy to the staging area" shadow effects that might put a Honor Guard back onto the War Chief. Considering that in stage 3 all encounter cards are enemies and all shadow cards will have effects you have to end the final battle as fast as possible or you get smoked by the Easterlings.
Most of the enemies in SoEM dont look terrible dangerous but there are many nasty shadow effects making the enemies hard to pin down plus the War Chief and the Scout Leader turn average enemies into a bloody affair.[/o]
This scenario uses the custom scenario cards shown below plus the encounter cards from "The Hills of Emyn Muil". Shuffle the custom SoEM cards together with the Hills of Emyn Muil encounter cards.
You need the following amount of copies of each card (you can see the required copies also on the bottom of the card next to the one ring symbol):
Abandoned Lookout x2
Acolyte of the Long Night x1
Alerted Easterlings x3
Ambushed x4
Easterling Fighter x4
Easterling Pursuer x4
Easterling Raider x4
Easterling Scout x4
Easterling Skirmisher x2
Easterling War Chief x1
Honor Guard x4
Quest Card 1a/b x1
Quest Card 2a/b x1
Quest Card 3a/b x1
Scout Leader x2
Tracker of the East Mark x1
You can download all the cards in a zip file here (single JPGs) [pending] or here (PDF-Sheet) [pending]. The SoEM card set consists of 39 cards in total.
Have fun!
Edit: Corrected typos on Quest Card 3b, Easterling Pursuer & Skirmisher and Scout Leader and replaced their card images.