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Dwarves of Belegost by Afalstein
Part one of our GenCon 2015 wrapup begins with an extended interview with lead developer Caleb Grace! Join Dan and Ian as they ask some great questions about the state of the game and where we’re headed. Also, we announce a raffle for our patrons, who have a chance to win a copy of the GenCon 2015 quest, The Ruins of Belegost!
- Welcome/Intro
- Interview!
- Patron Raffle!
- Get in touch!
- E-mail: thegreycompanypodcast@gmail.com
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- Become our Patron: http://patreon.com/greyco/
This episode brought to you by all of our Patrons! Thank you!
Grey Company Podcast 
I appreciate Caleb’s approach to the game in contrast to those who come from a competitive background. You don’t have to win to enjoy! Man do I ever get stuck in that snag.
I find it weird that they get through about 10 minutes of talkign about potentially portraying the Silmarillion in the game without even mentioning Ian’s existing First Age stuff.
Also, on the point about Silmarillion being boring, the issue for me was that a lot of it is written less as a story and more like a history book. We don’t see the characters up close so much (which makes it that much harder to remember which Fin is which) and a lot of it is just sort of “This thing happened, and then this thing happened, and then this other thing happened,” and its kinda dense to get through. I like it much more coming back and just reading select passages when I just want to learn about a specific character or artifact (e.g. Fingolfin and his epic battle with Morgoth, Nauglamir getting Thingol murdered by dwarves, etc). Overall though, when I was reading it through the first time, I just found it really slow going apart from the chapters about Beren and Luthien, which I positively raced through.
I can’t speak for Ian, but it was intentional that I did not bring up Ian’s fantastic First Age custom expansion. I wanted to keep the focus of the interview to the current state of the game, as well as Caleb’s design mindset. We asked about the First Age, because it was relevant to his passion for the land of Middle-earth and the writings of Tolkien, but I didn’t want to sidetrack anything by bringing up Ian’s custom expansion. For my part, this omission was not meant to be a slight against Ian’s work – which I think is wonderful.
As a new LotR card game player and a lifelong Tolkien aficionado I really enjoyed your podcast. I absolutely agree with Caleb on the the lack of need to change Aragorn’s and especially Faramir’s actions in the films. It’s a shame that filmmakers won’t realise that the reason they are making this is because people would like to see the a visual representation of the books, not their interpretation. Also agree about Bombadil and also the barrow downs being dropped, it would have bogged down the first film.
LotR card game however is a great game. One I day I will win,,,, one day… precious.
Great stuff from Caleb!
I agree with him on the ‘you don’t have to play this-and-that card if you don’t want to’ however, Spirit Glorfindel is the exception to the rule imo. He started out being the ONLY 3 attack spirit card, the ONLY 5 starting thread hero and the ONLY hero capable of placing progress on locations in the staging area (save for his lore-version).
Spirit Glorfindel isn’t just powerful, he had a monopoly on many aspects. Idrean, Theoden and his sword finally gave some alternatives in combat. Merry is the first real alternative for extreme low-thread decks. We still don’t have a comparable alternative to Asfaloth though… 😦
With the ‘don’t-like-’em-don’t-play-’em’ mentality, Spirit Glorfindel held MANY other cards hostage. The fact that Elrond or Gandalf or Outlands was super powerful never bothered me though. But I’ve never seen any Gandalf deck online where it’s creator appologized for using Gandalf, but I’ve seen a ton of decks where it’s creator appologizes for using Spirit Glorfindel again.