The Forgotten Souls Co-op Descent Adventure Is Now Available

Forgotten Souls, a cooperative adventure for Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition, is now available via FFG’s in-house manufacturing!

Previously announced in January for Organized Play, Forgotten Souls is a new cooperative adventure, allowing up to four heroes to play a fully cooperative variant of Descent: Journeys in the Dark. In a normal game of Descent, one player takes the role of overlord, commanding monsters and the forces of evil in the game. Up to four players combat the power of the overlord by playing heroes who gain experience and new items over the course of a campaign.

Forgotten Souls changes the normal structure of Descent by emulating a mini campaign in a completely cooperative atmosphere. Although this expansion does not replace the normal game of Descent, it offers a variant for you and your friends to explore an expanding dungeon, passing tests and battling fierce monsters. Encounters and monsters are controlled by decks of cards, rather than the overlord in Forgotten Souls. You’ll also grab loot and experience as you face down a series of encounters, culminating in a battle in the heart of the dragon’s lair. Enter the darkness within Forgotten Souls!

Important: The rules for the Forgotten Souls expansion are not included in the box. The rules (pdf, 17.2 MB) are available for free download by clicking the thumbnail to the right or from the Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition support page.

Into the Dark

Forgotten Souls enables you and up to three friends to experience a mini campaign in one night. You and your friends follow a twisted path, working through the rooms of the dragon’s lair, passing tests and battling any monsters that stand in your way. New rooms and challenges are revealed from an Exploration deck, meaning you’ll never encounter the same dungeon twice in the Forgotten Souls adventure.

Each room that you encounter carries its own objective that you must complete to move on. You may be required to creep through a room of sleeping barghests, or steal dragon treasure from a trash heap. After you either achieve your goal or fail to reach it, you may open the next door and reveal a new Exploration card for you and your fellow heroes to encounter.

There is no overlord player to command his monsters against you in Forgotten Souls, so your objective also changes. In the cooperative variant of Descent, you and the other heroes win the game if you can make your way through the rooms of the Exploration deck until you reach the final main encounter. If you defeat the final main encounter, you win the game, but you must be careful not to run out of time along the way.

The overlord track replaces the overlord’s objective in cooperative Descent. A fate token and a doom token are placed at opposite ends of the track, and if these tokens ever meet, the heroes lose the game. The doom token advances slowly, but once it advances, it can never return. The fate token, however, fluctuates based on the outcomes of your encounters. For example, if a hero is knocked out, fate advances by one, but successfully completing a main encounter may allow you to reset the fate token.

Hordes of monsters lurk in the shadows of this expansion, eager for the blood of heroes. Monsters in Forgotten Souls and all cooperative Descent adventures are controlled by a deck of monster activation cards that gives the monsters a list of actions each turn during the Overlord phase. Monster activation cards contain different actions for every type of monster, meaning you’ll never know exactly how the monsters will react.

Because cooperative Descent simulates a mini campaign, you’ll also have chances to gain experience and collect new items for your heroes. Experience is granted after completing main encounters, and you immediately have the chance to improve your hero’s skills by purchasing new Class cards. You’ll also obtain new items in Forgotten Souls by filling the loot track. The loot track increases with each monster you kill, and killing larger monsters gives you access to a wider selection of items. Grabbing items as you run and fight allows your heroes to improve their armor and weapons over the course of the Forgotten Souls mini campaign.

For more on the Forgotten Souls expansion, we turn to the developer, Jonathan Bove.

Jonathan Bove on the Forgotten Souls Adventure

Exploration is a huge theme in the Forgotten Souls expansion. The heroes open doors and face new encounters on a constantly expanding map, never knowing what they’ll find in the next room. Not knowing what monsters and challenges await you keeps you on your toes and forces you to strategize constantly. More than once I’ve found myself saying “If the Trash Heap is next, we’re in big trouble!”

The monster activation cards are the heart of the cooperative experience, though. I based the AI system around the idea that monsters should always be doing something, even if their prime goal changes. For example, a ranged monster may be instructed to attack the furthest hero. The monster moves to gain line of sight to that hero, but can’t move far enough. Instead of moving again, it will attack a different hero that is in line of sight. So even though the monster didn’t reach its first goal, it’s still dealing damage to the heroes.

Something else I’m very excited about is the loot system. Each time a hero defeats a monster, tokens are added to the loot track. Once the track reaches a certain threshold, the heroes will draw from the Shop Item deck. Loot is gained immediately, without waiting for a shop phase, so you get to fight, loot, and keep on fighting. Spending XP works the same way: you spend it when you earn it. This makes gameplay in Forgotten Souls very fluid and simulates a mini campaign.

The Adventure Begins

Enter the dragon’s lair in Forgotten Souls, a in-house manufacturing expansion that introduces a fully cooperative variant to Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition for players to enjoy alongside the main game. Gather a hero party of your friends, grab some loot, and prepare for adventure!

Download the rules from the support page, and order your copy of the Forgotten Souls adventure today!

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