Quest-bearers: A Fully Generalized Ring-bearer Alternative

[TelTura]

I typed this up in response to another thread but I think it might deserve its own.

I feel like Decipher tripped a bit when they made the concept of alternate ring-bearers.  I do think that the core idea of "let someone other than Frodo be the center of attention for once" was good, but they executed it as a What If? scenario tacked onto the war of the ring, when they should have dreamed bigger.

What if instead you generalized the concept of a ring-bearer to that of a journey with a special item you had to carry, so the One Ring is just a special case?

Instead of a singular The One Ring card, you would instead have a Quest card that is carried by special quest-bound characters, which might act like an artifact (The One Ring, The Last Silmaril, The Palantiri of Numenor, The Shards of Narsil) or something more like a dream or passion that acts like an equipped condition (Search For Valinor, Avenge The Stolen Silmarils, Hear Again The Nightingale's Song, Remember My Father Hurin, Restore The Throne Of Gondor, Spit In The Eye Of Morgoth).  

Then you could have specific cards (or versions of cards) that are bound to particular quests:  a version of Beren that is Quest-bound:Luthien or Quest-bound:Silmaril, versions of the sons of Feanor that are Quest-bound:Silmaril or Quest-bound:Vengeance, versions of Bilbo who are Quest-bound:Erebor, or Quest-bound:The One Ring, versions of Aragorn that are unbound, and versions that are Quest-bound:The One Ring, and versions that are Quest-bound:Gondor.  Boromir could also be Quest-bound:Gondor, but if a version exists that is Quest-bound:The One Ring, he's got some awful cost that makes him Hard Mode.

In each case, designing a new quest-bearer would be based on deciding who the primary quest-holder is, and who their "core" companions would be that share quest-bound (unbound companions of course being as flexible as they are in the base game).  This is similar to deciding Frodo is the primary ring-bearer, while Sam and Faramir (for some reason) are also ring-bound.  You might decide a particular quest-bearer uses a brand new quest, or you might not.

Perhaps it might make sense to have a catch-all Quest-bound:Honor that could count as quest-bound to any quest after paying a certain cost. A version of Eomer that is designed to "follow" Aragorn, for example, who might read "Quest-bound: spot Aragon or remove a threat", which would mean "At the start of each Fellowship phase, you may spot Aragorn or remove a threat.  If you do, Eomer is Quest-bound to the current Quest until the Regroup phase."  This would allow for Faramir-like tacked-on quest-bound companions who are nonetheless intended to work with any Fellowship.

I'm sure I don't have to point it out further, but this would permit for expansions or groups of expansions all based around far more disparate storylines than just vanilla Lord of the Rings.  A Quest-bound:Erebor set of companions for The Hobbit (perhaps converting the existing fan sets), Quest-bound:Silmaril companions to cover like...half of the Silmarillion, etc.  You could even have smaller, less epic goals: a version of Bard and other cards with Quest-bound:Smaug?  A version of Elendil or Isildur or Elrond with Quest-bound:March on Mordor or Quest-bound:Flee Numenor? A version of Aragorn with Quest-bound:Gollum?  A version of Smeagol with Quest-bound:Find Those Filthy Bagginses?

Heck, with smaller Quests you could probably divide up the War of the Ring into smaller quests than just The One Ring.  Quest-bound: Flee To Rivendell. Quest-bound: Persue The Uruks.  Quest-bound: Enter Mordor. Quest-bound: Cast It Into The Fire.

With such sub-divisions, there would be some rule to the effect of "Characters with Quest-bound:X lose that keyword if X is not the current quest."

Signets could possibly be re-introduced with something to the effect of "While the target of this signet can be spotted, this character is Quest-bound to the same Quest as the signet character."  Whether that conflicts with/replaces/is replaced by general Resistance would depend on other design decisions beyond the scope of this mechanic.  If the icon isn't used, surely a keyword could be created.

Sites would probably have to remain Shadows-esque, although I would probably take the opportunity to add Region One, Region Two, Region Three, and Sanctuary-only keywords just to allow for more wiggle-room in balance design.  Maybe stylize it as Outset, Journey, Climax?  But that's quibbling.

The concept of burdens and resistance for Quest-bearers is probably fine as-is.  Even marking specific companions with the ring icon to indicate they are the ones who can actually bear the Quest item itself is fine.  Getting drowned in despair and forcing the quest-bearer to give up is as legitimate a strategy here as it was for Frodo (if perhaps slightly less, hmm, directly applicable).  

Thoughts?

^{Also hey wow it's been a while hasn't it.  o/ errybody}

[menace64]

It feels like you have 130% of a good idea  

I'd suggest sanding your keyword down to bare bones: Quest-bound should feel precisely the same as Ring-bound since both keywords, in effect, are the same thing. No need to make it confusing by adding colons and such. I understand your desire to differentiate between a whole host of various quests, but that can probably be handled elsewhere on the cards.

So, to borrow the example of tracking down Gollum:

•Gandalf, Seeker of Sneaker
Companion • Wizard
Strength: 7
Vitality: 4
Signet: Frodo
Quest-bound (resistance 3.14159).
[insert drawback]
[insert Gollum text]

And then, to go with him:

•Aragorn, Wilderland Tracker
Companion • Man
Strength: 8
Vitality: 4
Signet: Gandalf
Ranger. To play, spot a Quest-bound Wizard.
[insert Gollum text]

---

Honestly though I just don't see a whole lot of mileage in this mechanic. To make full use of Quest-bound you'd need [at minimum] 9 sites worth of card support on both sides of the twilight pool. While there's undoubtedly material to support Silmarillion stuff and The Hobbit stuff, I say best of luck in stretching "pursue the uruks" into an entire game.

[TelTura]

Reducing it to Quest-bound would take it halfway there for sure.  Theoretically that could work, so long as cards that generically refer to "Spot a Quest-bound Elf" are fine working on Feanor and Luthien and Elrond all at once.  It would probably work initially, and then in the event that additional storylines got converted it would start to buckle on itself.

If we look for a moment at the theory behind Ring-bound, I think it was an effort to create one set of cards that worked on Frodo and Sam, and another set of cards that worked on Merry and Pippin, without saying "Spot Frodo or Sam" or "Exert Merry or Pippin".  It was an attempt to make a mechanic rules-based while preserving some subtlty about the intent, and leaving the door open for later companions with the distinction of "with Frodo" and "not with Frodo" (as we see with Smeagol). 

They then ran into the same issue with the Ithilian Rangers and Aragorn.  They couldn't just say "spot a Ranger" as that would work on Aragorn, and they wanted those cards to be thematically dissimilar (for whatever reason).  So they decided (apparently) to co-opt the Ring-bound keyword, since Faramir and co were "with Frodo", while Aragorn was "not with Frodo". 

Honestly tho, it just meant that they should have made a new keyword, such as Scout or something.  There's a lot of cards that say "Spot a Ring-bound Man" and it's like "you guys obviously don't want this to work on Aragorn or Eomer or Boromir, so you tied yourself in knots with three keywords where one would do".  They avoided this mistake in RotK when they introduced Knight, rather than hamstring themselves with "Spot a non-Ranger unbound Man (except Boromir)". 

Likewise, I anticipate the same problem with using just Quest-bound.  Initially it would work great; taking The Hobbit as an example, Bilbo and the other Dwarves would all be Quest-bound, while Gandalf and Bard and Beorn would not, so you could design a card around the concept of "in the Company" vs "not in the Company" without playing musical keywords.

However, then let's say someone releases sets for Beren and Luthien.  And then Turin.  And the Silmarils. And then the Fall of Numenor.  The "main characters" of each of those sets are all Quest-bound, while the "side characters" are all unbound.  Where before we could just say "Spot a Quest-bound companion", we now have to specify "Spot a Quest-bound Elf who's not Luthien or Celegorm or Curufin" if we want to indicate "someone in the Silmaril set" without permitting Luthien to get all the bonuses intended for Feanor and co. 

At which point the obvious objection is "why bother with the keyword at all, if your intent is to segregate sets so that you can't use cards from one set to synergize with another?"  And the answer is, to permit both powerful, specific cards and weaker, less specific cards.

If I make a card that reads "Spot a Quest-bound Elf or exert an Elf companion to make an Elf strength + 4.", the idea is clearly to utilize Main Character elves and not random splash (in which case the card is nerfed: an exertion for strength, instead of free strength).  This card is fine under both designs, and is clearly meant to work both in this set and other sets without much stretching.

With the more complicated design in the OP, if I had a card that was designed specifically for Beren's story it might state "Skirmish: Spot an exhausted Man companion and exert a Quest-bound:Tinuviel Elf twice to cancel all skirmishes and advance to the Regroup phase." 

There are a few ramifications here:

• We avoid listing all relevant specific cards.  The example could just say "Spot Beren, exert Luthien twice" but where's the fun in that?  This permits you to instead use Celegorm or something, granting flexibility in deck design while still clearly using flavor inspired by the story.
• Plus, not all Quest-bound sets involve small groups like Beren and Luthien; I don't want to have to list all thirteen members of the Erebor Company just to avoid future problems with a "Balin Retakes Khazad-dum" set.
• Later sets do not have to take all of the most powerful cards into account. If we later release a Silmaril set that has, I dunno, a Feanor with 8 vitality and a Man with 1 vitality, we haven't shot ourselves in the foot and made a broken combo.
• Nine sets later if we want to expand the ideas of a previous set, we can do so.  Let's say for example that, for whatever reason, the set based on The Hobbit didn't have all thirteen company members as companions.  If a later set decides to fix this, they can easily do so just by making a version of Fili or whatever that is Quest-bound:Erebor and it is automatically compatible with that earlier set.

TL;DR the intent is to grant card designers the ability to be backwards-compatible or not, and the ability to be forwards-compatible or not.  Powerful, questline-specific cards are possible without being a headache to other quests, other sets can easily be made as "expansions" by using the same specific keyword, and set-crossing less powerful cards can all co-exist, all using the same framework.


(I will grant that Quest-bound:Tinuviel and the like uses a lot of card space.  Perhaps a symbol could be created, so it is printed more like [Q]:Tinuviel just to save space.)

[TelTura]

Honestly though I just don't see a whole lot of mileage in this mechanic. To make full use of Quest-bound you'd need [at minimum] 9 sites worth of card support on both sides of the twilight pool. While there's undoubtedly material to support Silmarillion stuff and The Hobbit stuff, I say best of luck in stretching "pursue the uruks" into an entire game.

Sites are one thing that the game could probably use more generic versions of.  "Woodland Forest" or something that grants a generic bonus instead of being a super quest-specific locale.  Obviously some Sites would be essential keystones, such as Smaug's Lair or The Secret Gate of Erebor or Morgoth's Throne Room, but with a base of more open-ended Shadows-style sites (maybe even the ones that already exist), it shouldn't be a problem to have like 6 generic-ish sites and 3 quest-flavor-specific ones in any given deck.

Plus...the base game already has you teleporting all over the place, even in Movie block.  I'd say just lean into that.

"Pursue the Uruks" is sort of weak on its own, yeah, but the fact that [Tower] sites exist at all is already mostly there.  Tower block is essentially two parallel quests of "Follow the Uruks then defend Rohan" and "Go through Osgilioth and enter Mordor", and the Ring doesn't even come into the first one.  In other words, it's already like this in some ways, we just ignore it.

[Phallen Cassidy]

I'm with menace, it's a neat generalization (and works for more than just LotR!) but to get full use out of each quest you'll probably need to make a full card pool for it. Which I guess is your plan anyway. Enola got around this for The Hobbit by making his game a Draft game, forcing variety on a smaller pool of cards (and allowing a natural counterbalance to some power cards).

For some of these smaller quests, take Pursue the Uruks for example, there's an interesting opportunity to make it work: shrink the game, too. So maybe there are no sanctuaries and the game ends at site 5 instead of 9. Instead of a rule of 9, there's a rule of 3 or 5 (since your "quest-bearer" is Aragorn in this case, you'll need less overwhelm protection anyway). This shatters any hope of cross-compatibility, but it also makes for a new take on the game without making a new game. Plus you won't need as many cards to pull it off.

We "ignore" the jagged movement across the site path because it is what we expect - that the game based on the movies follows the movies. It's canonical teleporting I think generic versions of sites is almost as far removed from the ideal experience as the Shadows+ unrestricted site path. After all, what makes these any-woods "Site 4"? The path is nearly as important as the characters, which is one of the (many) reasons the game just isn't as thematic after Movie block, which is a big hit for a game based on a very specific theme.

[TelTura]

Hmm, fair points.  That makes me wonder how much of the TTT/ROTK paths were inflated by the fact that there were essentially two plotlines to follow.  Come to think of it, Fellowship paths are kinda...same-y, locale-wise.

[menace64]

Hmm, fair points.  That makes me wonder how much of the TTT/ROTK paths were inflated by the fact that there were essentially two plotlines to follow.  Come to think of it, Fellowship paths are kinda...same-y, locale-wise.

I liked Decipher's take on the TTT split in the site path by writing cards like Cliffs of Emyn Muil, Dead Marshes, Henneth Annun, and so on. Such cards gave players a feel for where Frodo was on his journey despite the fellowship moving through Rohan and her wars. It's a pity they didn't carry these sorts of cards into King block.