Us: "Hey, it's all good, The net result is the same and it would be a pain to go back and undo all the rolls we did."
KD:M: "Pain? I'll show you pain."
We started the settlement phase and immediately drew.... plague. Plague is what wiped a prior settlement. We are terrified of plague. It's especially bad when you have a limited number of survivors to choose from, since it can only infect survivors with at least 1 hunt XP. Each of the four you choose has a 20% chance to die from contracting the plague.
We lost all four. One of them was a savior.
Also, plague comes back next lantern year. That means we have to choose four more survivors to roll on the plague table. More potential tragedy.
For the hunt, we decided to add Spidicules to the campaign, the first expansion we've added. For a new campaign he could replace the Screaming Antelope, so we thought that would work well.
Yeah, right. Remember the pain thing?
Warning: some Spidicules spoilers here...
Right away, the "Young Rivals" story event to introduce the big spidery ball ended up losing us an experienced survivor. We were really down to a limited number of survivors who had been on a hunt at this point.
We set out with two new survivors, the red savior and the experienced archer Link. Getting Link to bow mastery is part of our settlement strategy to allow more survivors to get bow specialist points. Right away the hunt started oddly. We faced a muggy heat wave and had to roll for heat exhaustion. We all laughed because last time we faced a snap of freakish cold that damaged the unarmored. What did we get later in that hunt? The cold snap again. Survivor Al was especially beat down by the cold.
What went especially well was the hunt event that resulted in our getting the rare gear Spidicules sword. We couldn't use it this time but we'll have that one ready for next time.
Facing Spidicules was scary but not terrible. In fact, we walked out of that encounter with more survivors than walked in thanks to the nest at the center of the table, from which we freed two captives. He flings lots of little spiderlings around, and they are a decent enough threat but easy to kill. We must have drawn another easy AI deck or immediately buried any difficult cards because nobody suffered any maiming. At the end of the showdown, the spider (another spider maybe?) grabbed survivor Al and carried him off. We'll find out what happened to him if we fight the spider again or as a settlement event on lantern year 11.
We took our loot and headed back. One thing we didn't really notice before is how great armor sets are. If you have all the same type of armor in all five slots you get some pretty good (and fairly distinct) buffs. Things like being able to switch hits to other locations or getting spent survival back 50% of the time. We only noticed it when adding the Spider Silk armor card to the set.