Another tough day for the Fellowship, played by my son, with Merry, Pippin, Sam, Gimli and Boromir all going under and never coming back up. This is a crazy hard scenario for the Fellowship to win. I think we'll play it one more time to see if the Fellowship can do something different to escape the Watcher in the Water.

Photos here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1SMSSz ... j5yEG8uG5d

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What a beautiful board! Great work.

I don't have the Fellowship Journey book unfortunately, but it does look quite similar to the scenario in #19 of the DeAgostini Magazine series. In my experience that scenario was easier for the Fellowship than it is for the Watcher, but perhaps there are some key differences between magazine and Journey Book. My Fellowship tactics was having Legolas stay back and shoot tentacles three times a turn, having Gandalf sorcerous blast those monsters and letting Aragorn, Gimli and Boromir rush towards battle.

Comparing your pictures with mine at
https://aiwendil.video.blog/2019/03/08/ ... the-water/
, I have the feeling that the Fellowship has to traverse more land and there's less water for the Watcher to cover compared to my play of this scenario. Which would definitely make it harder on the Fellowship.

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For scenario and campaign playthroughs, visit https://aiwendil.net/

I agree, very nice set up. Had the gates and everything.
Cool tentacles.

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Hey Voyager360 - I read through your battle report (which was great!) and spotted a few differences in the scenario from Scenario 11 in the FOTR source book. For some reason, you can only push tentacles back, never kill them. For Good to win, it says on 5 members of the Fellowship need to pass through the Moria gate. I think there was some bad editing on this scenario because it should say that of the 5 members, one must be Frodo.

Also, Evil gets some pretty easy chances to wound and kill and "Enveloped" Good characters at the end of a fight phase by rolling D6, Strength 8 wounds per enveloped character. For the half-lings, this means a pretty quick death.

The one similarity I saw between our scenarios was keeping Legolas back to shoot 3 arrows a turn. Still needed a 6 to wound though!

But its a fun scenario, one that makes you realize that the FOTR had some serious power for Good behind it to help it through what would normally be an impossible situation.

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Ah that explains it! Yeah killing the tentacles make them respawn at one of the board edges in the DeAgostini version, which is quite the delay.

That's interesting, in the DeAgostini scenario the tentacles have strength 2 (defence 5, so only needing 5s to kill for Legolas) and can choose to try to kill Fellowship members as normal, or ensnare them to abduct them to either board edge (which will take multiple turns with moving and all), after which the abducted Fellowship member is automatically slain.

There's no mention of Strength 8 hits in the version I played, I can imagine that would be devastating on those poor hobbits!

Anyway I can now completely understand why this scenario would be very hard on the Fellowship.

Looking forward to your future plays of scenarios in the journey book(s).

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For scenario and campaign playthroughs, visit https://aiwendil.net/