Kris's Tutorial Game
Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 9:50 pm
Thanks to KVB for this great tutorial! (Note that this project is still partially in the works: it could be a couple turns longer, and it may have some typos.)
Tutorial Game for the Middle Earth Collectible Card Game
Both players involved used Challenge Decks (Kris using the Stewards of Gondor deck, Mark the Return of the King deck).
Anatomy of a card.
Before starting a game, let's take a look at all the different types of cards. A first distinction that can be made is
that there are a lot of cards with the Lidless Eye on the back, while some have the map of Middle Earth on them. Those last ones are sites,
which I'll describe later. The first ones are subdivided in 3 groups :
- characters (usually either lightblue for heroes or darkish purple for minions, with some distinction for the main characters : the wizards
(coloured as denoted in Tolkien's books), Ringwraiths (red) and the Balrog (red)
- resources (rusty brown for heroes, dark blue for minions) and
- hazards (black).
Tapping
An important game term that can be useful to explain in advance is tapping. Tapping a card is done by turning it 90° sideways, and denotes
that a card has been used. In case it is an item, this might mean the palantir has been gazed into and its power has been depleted for the
turn being, in case of a character it means the character has exerted himself already this turn (perhaps fighting, perhaps gazing in a
palantir) and cannot perform certain actions while performing other actions at a penalty.
Dice
Middle-Earth uses dice to add another segment of luck & danger to the randomized cards in the decks. Whenever this tutorial mentions to make
a roll it refers to rolling 2D6, two six-sided dies, and adding the pips on both dice together. This means that however dire the fate of
Thorin facing Smaug is, there is still a chance of heroism and survival (rolling a 12) for our brave dwarf.
Let's now go to the game itself.
Character Draft
The first part of the game is the character draft, where you decide on your starting company of characters using the characters you selected
in your pool. The character pool is the first deck section we'll describe here, using those of the challenge decks. The character pool of the
Stewards of Gondor deck contains 10 characters : Adrazar, Anborn, Fatty Bolger, Glorfindel II, Sam Gamgee, Theoden, Peath, Ioreth, Haldir and
Balin, as well as 2 minor items, the Horn of Anor and Cram. Generally, a character pool may contain 10 characters and 2 non-unique, non-hoard
minor items (2 classifications of cards that are described in their text box). Now, when the draft starts, both players select a character
from their pool (in this case Kris selected Fatty Bolger while Mark chose Aragorn II) and place them face-down in front of them.
Before going any further into the character draft, let us take a closer look at these characters. Aragorn has a 3 in the upper left corner,
which indicates his Marshalling Point value, i.e. how valuable he is in the war against Sauron. Below his name is an artist's rendition
of Aragorn. To the left of this drawing is a white head and a black hand. The White head (and the numeral within) indicate this character's
MIND, i.e. how "stubborn" he is (it is harder to control somebody like Aragorn than to control somebody like Bombur, after all), whereas the
numeral inside the black hand is this character's (DIRECT) INFLUENCE, which means how much control he can exert on people he meets. Aragorn
has a mind of 9, which is one of the highest in the game, and a direct influence of 3, also a fairly high value. Below the character's art
is the character's race and skill(s). If we read Aragorn's card, we can see he is a Warrior/Scout/Ranger Dunadan - certain actions which are
limited to Warriors, or Scouts, or Rangers are available to him, while actions reserved for Sages or Diplomats (the two leftover skills) are
out of his reach. Aragorn is a Dunadan, one of the many races of characters in Middle-Earth, a fact referred to on a few cards (as we shall
see further in the Tutorial). What else is there on a character card?
Beneath the character's skill and race is its text box, which contains special abilities of the character, a quote from one of Tolkien's
books and the character's home site. In this case, Aragorn's game text states that he is Unique (Unique cards can be placed only once
in a deck, and can only be in play on one side - if the other side draws their Aragorn while yours is in play, they cannot also play him)
and that he has +2 direct influence against the Rangers of the North faction (if Aragorn would ever need to exert his direct influence against
the Rangers of the North faction, his direct influence would be 5 rather than 3, barring other modifiers). Aragorn is also a very
important and irreplaceable character in Middle-Earth (being the last heir to the Throne of Gondor), which is indicated by the -3 Marshalling
Points if eliminated : if a player has failed to keep his Aragorn alive, he is penalized by a 3 Marshalling Point penalty. Aragorn's home
(as far as he has any, being the wanderer that he is) is shown to be Bree.
A last statistic that is important for the game is the character's prowess/body, i.e. how proficient he is at fighting the creatures of
Middle Earth, and how resilient he is when he is wounded by those same creatures. Aragorn's P/B is 6/9, commendable statistics.
If we take this same look at Fatty Bolger, we will see he is worth only 1 Marshalling point, not surprisingly for just a fat hobbit happy
to stay in his hobbithole while Sauron's forces threaten the free people. He has a mind of 3 and a direct influence of 0 - he is quite
gullible and easy to command, but will not be able to muster anybody to his service unless he succeeds in delivering an astonishing speech
(i.e. rolling really good with the dice). If we read on, we see that Fatty is a Scout Hobbit. His special text (Unique. Unless he is one of
the starting characters, he may only be brought into play at his home site. All of his corruption checks are modified by +1. He can tap to
cancel a strike against another Hobbit in his company) shows he is unique, gives us already one of the uses for the Home Site attribute,
shows that Fatty, as a hobbit, is slightly more resilient to the siren's call of corruption than the common Middle-Earther, and gives Fatty
an ability to rescue endangered hobbits by tapping. Fatty's home site is Bag End, and his prowess/body is 1/8 - not surprising for a
halfling.
Once both players have selected a character, they turn them over, and put them in play if they are different or non-unique. If a player
reveals a unique character already in play or just being revealed, the character is placed aside.
We have already talked about Direct Influence, which is how much control your characters can exert over other characters or factions in the
game, but not yet about YOUR influence, also known as General Influence. Each player has 20 points of general influence, to be used to
control characters. Mark just revealed Aragorn, so he subtracts Aragorn's MIND (9) from his general influence to find his REMAINING general
influence. During the character draft, all characters are placed under general influence (so a player must stop drafting once he has 20 points
of mind worth of characters in play already (or 5 characters, the maximum for a starting company), or has no playable characters remaining
in his pool), but during the game, characters can come under the direct influence of other characters (for example, Aragorn could control a
character with 3 mind, or 3 characters with 1 mind each).
In this tutorial game, Kris continued to draft Sam Gamgee (MIND = 4), Glorfindel II (MIND = , Adrazar (MIND = 3) and Anborn (MIND = 2),
for a total of 3 + 4 + 8 + 3 + 2 = 20. Mark drafted Arwen (MIND = 3) , Faramir (MIND = 5) and Annalena (MIND = 3) in addition to Aragorn,
for a total general influence used of 20.
To give a starting company at least a tiny bit of starting equipment, each player may play 2 minor items on characters in their starting
company (with the condition that they are non-unique and non-hoard, but that distinction is easy to make on the item's text box and not
really relevant in this tutorial game anyway). In this case, Kris played a Cram on Glorfindel and a Horn of Anor on Adrazar, while
Mark gave a Star-Glass to Arwen and an Elf-stone on Faramir.
Items are a new card type, so let's take a quick look at them. Being resources, they are the rusty-brown colour for hero players, and have
their marshalling points at the same spot as characters do (and in fact every card worth Marshalling Points) - the upper left corner.
Minor items, however, are worth no marshalling points (being mere trinkets, to be honest), so none of these 4 items have MPs (the other
types of items are Major, Greater, Gold Ring and Special - we'll see every type of item as we continue this tutorial game). Where a
character's race and skill(s) would be, an item has its type. Items that change a character's statistics (P/B, Mind, Direct Influence)
usually have their effects both in the game text box as on the spot where the character's corresponding statistic would be (for example, the
Horn of Anor has a +2 in the Direct Influence symbol (the black hand), where a character would have its Direct Influence printed. However,
it is printed between brackets - and the reason why is in the text box of Horn of Anor : Horn of Anor only gives its +2 Direct Influence
bonus when used to influence factions, and can as such NOT be used to control characters. The Elfstone also has a [+2 DI] symbol, but as
this extra direct influence works against both elf characters and factions, it can be used to control characters (as long as they are Elf
characters). So, with Faramir (DI : 1) bears this Elfstone (+2 DI vs Elves) he can control Annalena (a 3 MIND Elf character).
The last thing written on the card is its Corruption statistic. Items in Middle-Earth tend to weigh heavily on the mind of their bearer,
the more as the importance and value of the item increases. Most minor items carry a low corruption of 1 point (as these 4 do), whereas
a heavily corrupting item like the One Ring carries a curse of 6 points!
With the character drafting over (in this case, nobody could reveal a character at the time another player revealed the same character, as
the character pools of the Challenge Decks are discrete), players decide for each leftover character (never considered to be played, or
"bounced" in the character draft when revealed simultaneously with the opponent's copy of the character) whether to remove it from the
game or to place it in his deck (but a play deck may contain at most 10 characters).
Kris' starting company is Glorfindel with Cram, Anborn, Adrazar with Horn of Anor, Sam Gamgee and Fatty Bolger.
Mark's starting company is Aragorn II, Arwen with Star-Glass, Faramir with Elf-stone and Annalena.
Kris rolls 2D6 and gets 11, Mark only tolls a 5, so Kris will start the game. Both players draw 8 cards (Kris draws Ioreth, a Hauberk of
Bright Mail, Men of Lebennin, Stealth, Marvels Told, Orc-Lieutenant, Orc-Watch and Doors of Night while Mark draws Gandalf, Beautiful
Gold Ring, Sword of Gondolin, Dark Quarrels, Ambusher, Cave-drake, Lure of Expedience and Twilight)
We see a whole lot of new card types here, so we'll pause the game once more to do some more anatomy on them. Ioreth is a character and we
know about those, so we'll just skip here and go to the second new card : a Hauberk of Bright Mail. Another item, but this one is a major
item - the greatest difference between items based on their classification is where they can be played. Minor Items can usually be found
lying around almost everywhere, whereas Greater Items tend to lie only in very dangerous places. The hauberk is of midling importance
apparently, as it is a mere major item. It is worth 2 MPs as can be deducted from the left upper corner, and gives a +2 body bonus to its
bearer. This bonus is repeated in its text, but it carries a condition : the bonus is only given to a Warrior character, and cannot raise a
warrior's body higher than 9. The golden rule here is : everybody can pick up and carry an item, but only a Warrior gets to use it.
Finally, there seem to be plenty hauberks in Middle-Earth (as it does not carry the unique keyword), and they are not very valuable - the
item gives a mere 1 CP.
Men of Lebennin is another resource card, and this one is a Man Faction. Faction cards represent the goodwill of a major group of people in
Middle-Earth - while they hardly ever take a direct role in the game, they supply sometimes high amounts of points found in the centres
of civilization rather than the uncharted wildernesses where wolfs tend to howl, and orcs prowl. The Men of Lebennin give 2 Marshalling
Points when convinced to join you, and how to convince them is explained in their textbox : The character trying to influence them needs
to be at Pelargir, and needs to roll greater than 7 (although he gets a bonus to his roll of 1 if he is a Dunedan). As the Men of Lebennin
are a Man Faction, characters with a Direct Influence bonus against Man Factions will also gain a bonus to their roll, but more about that
when we'll play a Faction during the Tutorial Game.
Stealth is a representative card of the second type of resources - events. Events usually don't give any Marshalling points (as opposed to
Items, Factions and the last type of MP resources : Allies), but generally make it easier for your brave companions to travel the lands of
Middle Earth without dying. This particular one is a Short Event (which means it is immediately discarded after being played) and explains
what it does in its text box : "Scout only. Tap a scout to play at the end of the organization phase only if the scout's company size is
less than three. No creature hazards may be played on his company this turn." Now, what is a company size? As the name says, it is the
number of characters in a company - for example, Mark's starting company has a company size of 4. There is one small exception : Hobbits,
being the small and stealthy folks they are only contribute 1/2 to their company's size, rounded up. This makes the company size of Kris'
starting company also 4 : Glorfindel, Anborn and Adrazar each count for 1, and Fatty and Sam each for 1/2. If one of the hobbits would die
or otherwise leave the company, its size would stay 4. So, using Stealth would require a scout to tap whose company consists of at most 2
characters (or 1 character and 2 hobbits, or 4 hobbits) - and if he does so, no hazard creatures can attack his company for the rest of the
turn - a powerful card, but with severe limitations.
The last resource Kris drew is a Marvel's Told, another short-event. This one requires a Sage to tap, and discards one hazard event from play.
However, when it does so, it forces the sage that tapped to make a corruption check at -2. Making a corruption check for a character means
making a roll and comparing that to the corruption point total of the character. If the roll equals (or is 1 lower than) the character's
total amount of CPs, he is discarded, and if it is even lower than that, the character is eliminated (the difference between discarding a
character and eliminating it is that a discarded unique character can still be played (by the player who owns him if he can return the
character to his hand, or by his opponent if he draws a copy. An eliminated unique character is dead or corrupted so much that the cause of
the Free People means nothing to him, and cannot be played again). A corruption check roll higher than a character's CP total has no effect.
Marvel's Told, however, forces a Corruption Check at -2, which means the roll is reduced by 2 ... a roll of 2 would now already discard a
character without any CPs. If Glorfindel (who is currently bearing a Cram worth 1 CP) would roll a 2 or a 3 after tapping to play the Marvels
Told and discarding the targeted hazard event, he would be discarded).
In addition to these resources, Kris also drew some hazards. Hazards are cards that simulate the evil creatures and cruel environments
created or mustered by Sauron or his master, Morgoth, and are played during the game to harrass your opponent's characters. There are
basically 2 types of Hazards : Creatures (such as the Orc-Lieutenant and the Orc-Watch) and Events (such as the Doors of Night). As Hazards
are played during another player's turn, there is no need to look at Kris's Hazards so far.
Tutorial Game for the Middle Earth Collectible Card Game
Both players involved used Challenge Decks (Kris using the Stewards of Gondor deck, Mark the Return of the King deck).
Anatomy of a card.
Before starting a game, let's take a look at all the different types of cards. A first distinction that can be made is
that there are a lot of cards with the Lidless Eye on the back, while some have the map of Middle Earth on them. Those last ones are sites,
which I'll describe later. The first ones are subdivided in 3 groups :
- characters (usually either lightblue for heroes or darkish purple for minions, with some distinction for the main characters : the wizards
(coloured as denoted in Tolkien's books), Ringwraiths (red) and the Balrog (red)
- resources (rusty brown for heroes, dark blue for minions) and
- hazards (black).
Tapping
An important game term that can be useful to explain in advance is tapping. Tapping a card is done by turning it 90° sideways, and denotes
that a card has been used. In case it is an item, this might mean the palantir has been gazed into and its power has been depleted for the
turn being, in case of a character it means the character has exerted himself already this turn (perhaps fighting, perhaps gazing in a
palantir) and cannot perform certain actions while performing other actions at a penalty.
Dice
Middle-Earth uses dice to add another segment of luck & danger to the randomized cards in the decks. Whenever this tutorial mentions to make
a roll it refers to rolling 2D6, two six-sided dies, and adding the pips on both dice together. This means that however dire the fate of
Thorin facing Smaug is, there is still a chance of heroism and survival (rolling a 12) for our brave dwarf.
Let's now go to the game itself.
Character Draft
The first part of the game is the character draft, where you decide on your starting company of characters using the characters you selected
in your pool. The character pool is the first deck section we'll describe here, using those of the challenge decks. The character pool of the
Stewards of Gondor deck contains 10 characters : Adrazar, Anborn, Fatty Bolger, Glorfindel II, Sam Gamgee, Theoden, Peath, Ioreth, Haldir and
Balin, as well as 2 minor items, the Horn of Anor and Cram. Generally, a character pool may contain 10 characters and 2 non-unique, non-hoard
minor items (2 classifications of cards that are described in their text box). Now, when the draft starts, both players select a character
from their pool (in this case Kris selected Fatty Bolger while Mark chose Aragorn II) and place them face-down in front of them.
Before going any further into the character draft, let us take a closer look at these characters. Aragorn has a 3 in the upper left corner,
which indicates his Marshalling Point value, i.e. how valuable he is in the war against Sauron. Below his name is an artist's rendition
of Aragorn. To the left of this drawing is a white head and a black hand. The White head (and the numeral within) indicate this character's
MIND, i.e. how "stubborn" he is (it is harder to control somebody like Aragorn than to control somebody like Bombur, after all), whereas the
numeral inside the black hand is this character's (DIRECT) INFLUENCE, which means how much control he can exert on people he meets. Aragorn
has a mind of 9, which is one of the highest in the game, and a direct influence of 3, also a fairly high value. Below the character's art
is the character's race and skill(s). If we read Aragorn's card, we can see he is a Warrior/Scout/Ranger Dunadan - certain actions which are
limited to Warriors, or Scouts, or Rangers are available to him, while actions reserved for Sages or Diplomats (the two leftover skills) are
out of his reach. Aragorn is a Dunadan, one of the many races of characters in Middle-Earth, a fact referred to on a few cards (as we shall
see further in the Tutorial). What else is there on a character card?
Beneath the character's skill and race is its text box, which contains special abilities of the character, a quote from one of Tolkien's
books and the character's home site. In this case, Aragorn's game text states that he is Unique (Unique cards can be placed only once
in a deck, and can only be in play on one side - if the other side draws their Aragorn while yours is in play, they cannot also play him)
and that he has +2 direct influence against the Rangers of the North faction (if Aragorn would ever need to exert his direct influence against
the Rangers of the North faction, his direct influence would be 5 rather than 3, barring other modifiers). Aragorn is also a very
important and irreplaceable character in Middle-Earth (being the last heir to the Throne of Gondor), which is indicated by the -3 Marshalling
Points if eliminated : if a player has failed to keep his Aragorn alive, he is penalized by a 3 Marshalling Point penalty. Aragorn's home
(as far as he has any, being the wanderer that he is) is shown to be Bree.
A last statistic that is important for the game is the character's prowess/body, i.e. how proficient he is at fighting the creatures of
Middle Earth, and how resilient he is when he is wounded by those same creatures. Aragorn's P/B is 6/9, commendable statistics.
If we take this same look at Fatty Bolger, we will see he is worth only 1 Marshalling point, not surprisingly for just a fat hobbit happy
to stay in his hobbithole while Sauron's forces threaten the free people. He has a mind of 3 and a direct influence of 0 - he is quite
gullible and easy to command, but will not be able to muster anybody to his service unless he succeeds in delivering an astonishing speech
(i.e. rolling really good with the dice). If we read on, we see that Fatty is a Scout Hobbit. His special text (Unique. Unless he is one of
the starting characters, he may only be brought into play at his home site. All of his corruption checks are modified by +1. He can tap to
cancel a strike against another Hobbit in his company) shows he is unique, gives us already one of the uses for the Home Site attribute,
shows that Fatty, as a hobbit, is slightly more resilient to the siren's call of corruption than the common Middle-Earther, and gives Fatty
an ability to rescue endangered hobbits by tapping. Fatty's home site is Bag End, and his prowess/body is 1/8 - not surprising for a
halfling.
Once both players have selected a character, they turn them over, and put them in play if they are different or non-unique. If a player
reveals a unique character already in play or just being revealed, the character is placed aside.
We have already talked about Direct Influence, which is how much control your characters can exert over other characters or factions in the
game, but not yet about YOUR influence, also known as General Influence. Each player has 20 points of general influence, to be used to
control characters. Mark just revealed Aragorn, so he subtracts Aragorn's MIND (9) from his general influence to find his REMAINING general
influence. During the character draft, all characters are placed under general influence (so a player must stop drafting once he has 20 points
of mind worth of characters in play already (or 5 characters, the maximum for a starting company), or has no playable characters remaining
in his pool), but during the game, characters can come under the direct influence of other characters (for example, Aragorn could control a
character with 3 mind, or 3 characters with 1 mind each).
In this tutorial game, Kris continued to draft Sam Gamgee (MIND = 4), Glorfindel II (MIND = , Adrazar (MIND = 3) and Anborn (MIND = 2),
for a total of 3 + 4 + 8 + 3 + 2 = 20. Mark drafted Arwen (MIND = 3) , Faramir (MIND = 5) and Annalena (MIND = 3) in addition to Aragorn,
for a total general influence used of 20.
To give a starting company at least a tiny bit of starting equipment, each player may play 2 minor items on characters in their starting
company (with the condition that they are non-unique and non-hoard, but that distinction is easy to make on the item's text box and not
really relevant in this tutorial game anyway). In this case, Kris played a Cram on Glorfindel and a Horn of Anor on Adrazar, while
Mark gave a Star-Glass to Arwen and an Elf-stone on Faramir.
Items are a new card type, so let's take a quick look at them. Being resources, they are the rusty-brown colour for hero players, and have
their marshalling points at the same spot as characters do (and in fact every card worth Marshalling Points) - the upper left corner.
Minor items, however, are worth no marshalling points (being mere trinkets, to be honest), so none of these 4 items have MPs (the other
types of items are Major, Greater, Gold Ring and Special - we'll see every type of item as we continue this tutorial game). Where a
character's race and skill(s) would be, an item has its type. Items that change a character's statistics (P/B, Mind, Direct Influence)
usually have their effects both in the game text box as on the spot where the character's corresponding statistic would be (for example, the
Horn of Anor has a +2 in the Direct Influence symbol (the black hand), where a character would have its Direct Influence printed. However,
it is printed between brackets - and the reason why is in the text box of Horn of Anor : Horn of Anor only gives its +2 Direct Influence
bonus when used to influence factions, and can as such NOT be used to control characters. The Elfstone also has a [+2 DI] symbol, but as
this extra direct influence works against both elf characters and factions, it can be used to control characters (as long as they are Elf
characters). So, with Faramir (DI : 1) bears this Elfstone (+2 DI vs Elves) he can control Annalena (a 3 MIND Elf character).
The last thing written on the card is its Corruption statistic. Items in Middle-Earth tend to weigh heavily on the mind of their bearer,
the more as the importance and value of the item increases. Most minor items carry a low corruption of 1 point (as these 4 do), whereas
a heavily corrupting item like the One Ring carries a curse of 6 points!
With the character drafting over (in this case, nobody could reveal a character at the time another player revealed the same character, as
the character pools of the Challenge Decks are discrete), players decide for each leftover character (never considered to be played, or
"bounced" in the character draft when revealed simultaneously with the opponent's copy of the character) whether to remove it from the
game or to place it in his deck (but a play deck may contain at most 10 characters).
Kris' starting company is Glorfindel with Cram, Anborn, Adrazar with Horn of Anor, Sam Gamgee and Fatty Bolger.
Mark's starting company is Aragorn II, Arwen with Star-Glass, Faramir with Elf-stone and Annalena.
Kris rolls 2D6 and gets 11, Mark only tolls a 5, so Kris will start the game. Both players draw 8 cards (Kris draws Ioreth, a Hauberk of
Bright Mail, Men of Lebennin, Stealth, Marvels Told, Orc-Lieutenant, Orc-Watch and Doors of Night while Mark draws Gandalf, Beautiful
Gold Ring, Sword of Gondolin, Dark Quarrels, Ambusher, Cave-drake, Lure of Expedience and Twilight)
We see a whole lot of new card types here, so we'll pause the game once more to do some more anatomy on them. Ioreth is a character and we
know about those, so we'll just skip here and go to the second new card : a Hauberk of Bright Mail. Another item, but this one is a major
item - the greatest difference between items based on their classification is where they can be played. Minor Items can usually be found
lying around almost everywhere, whereas Greater Items tend to lie only in very dangerous places. The hauberk is of midling importance
apparently, as it is a mere major item. It is worth 2 MPs as can be deducted from the left upper corner, and gives a +2 body bonus to its
bearer. This bonus is repeated in its text, but it carries a condition : the bonus is only given to a Warrior character, and cannot raise a
warrior's body higher than 9. The golden rule here is : everybody can pick up and carry an item, but only a Warrior gets to use it.
Finally, there seem to be plenty hauberks in Middle-Earth (as it does not carry the unique keyword), and they are not very valuable - the
item gives a mere 1 CP.
Men of Lebennin is another resource card, and this one is a Man Faction. Faction cards represent the goodwill of a major group of people in
Middle-Earth - while they hardly ever take a direct role in the game, they supply sometimes high amounts of points found in the centres
of civilization rather than the uncharted wildernesses where wolfs tend to howl, and orcs prowl. The Men of Lebennin give 2 Marshalling
Points when convinced to join you, and how to convince them is explained in their textbox : The character trying to influence them needs
to be at Pelargir, and needs to roll greater than 7 (although he gets a bonus to his roll of 1 if he is a Dunedan). As the Men of Lebennin
are a Man Faction, characters with a Direct Influence bonus against Man Factions will also gain a bonus to their roll, but more about that
when we'll play a Faction during the Tutorial Game.
Stealth is a representative card of the second type of resources - events. Events usually don't give any Marshalling points (as opposed to
Items, Factions and the last type of MP resources : Allies), but generally make it easier for your brave companions to travel the lands of
Middle Earth without dying. This particular one is a Short Event (which means it is immediately discarded after being played) and explains
what it does in its text box : "Scout only. Tap a scout to play at the end of the organization phase only if the scout's company size is
less than three. No creature hazards may be played on his company this turn." Now, what is a company size? As the name says, it is the
number of characters in a company - for example, Mark's starting company has a company size of 4. There is one small exception : Hobbits,
being the small and stealthy folks they are only contribute 1/2 to their company's size, rounded up. This makes the company size of Kris'
starting company also 4 : Glorfindel, Anborn and Adrazar each count for 1, and Fatty and Sam each for 1/2. If one of the hobbits would die
or otherwise leave the company, its size would stay 4. So, using Stealth would require a scout to tap whose company consists of at most 2
characters (or 1 character and 2 hobbits, or 4 hobbits) - and if he does so, no hazard creatures can attack his company for the rest of the
turn - a powerful card, but with severe limitations.
The last resource Kris drew is a Marvel's Told, another short-event. This one requires a Sage to tap, and discards one hazard event from play.
However, when it does so, it forces the sage that tapped to make a corruption check at -2. Making a corruption check for a character means
making a roll and comparing that to the corruption point total of the character. If the roll equals (or is 1 lower than) the character's
total amount of CPs, he is discarded, and if it is even lower than that, the character is eliminated (the difference between discarding a
character and eliminating it is that a discarded unique character can still be played (by the player who owns him if he can return the
character to his hand, or by his opponent if he draws a copy. An eliminated unique character is dead or corrupted so much that the cause of
the Free People means nothing to him, and cannot be played again). A corruption check roll higher than a character's CP total has no effect.
Marvel's Told, however, forces a Corruption Check at -2, which means the roll is reduced by 2 ... a roll of 2 would now already discard a
character without any CPs. If Glorfindel (who is currently bearing a Cram worth 1 CP) would roll a 2 or a 3 after tapping to play the Marvels
Told and discarding the targeted hazard event, he would be discarded).
In addition to these resources, Kris also drew some hazards. Hazards are cards that simulate the evil creatures and cruel environments
created or mustered by Sauron or his master, Morgoth, and are played during the game to harrass your opponent's characters. There are
basically 2 types of Hazards : Creatures (such as the Orc-Lieutenant and the Orc-Watch) and Events (such as the Doors of Night). As Hazards
are played during another player's turn, there is no need to look at Kris's Hazards so far.