Ruling — Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition)

← Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition)

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition)bg-104162-en-1e · Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) – Lair of the Wyrmbg-129423-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

**General Setup**

1. Choose Quest: Refer to the Quest Guide to choose a quest.[1]

2. Assemble Map: Refer to the chosen quest's 'Encounter 1' diagram in the Quest Guide to assemble the map and place any doors as indicated.[1]

3. Choose Player Roles: Decide who will be the overlord and who will be the heroes.[1]

4. Prepare Tokens: Sort all damage, fatigue, hero, and condition tokens into piles by type and place them within easy reach of all players.[1]

5. Assemble Search Deck and Condition Cards: Shuffle all Search cards together and place the deck facedown within reach of hero players; place Condition cards in separate piles by type within reach of all players.[1]

**Hero Setup**

1. Choose Activation Cards and Hero Tokens: Each hero player chooses one Activation card and takes the hero tokens of the corresponding color.[2]

2. Choose Heroes: All hero players must agree on which player controls which hero; each player chooses one Hero sheet and takes the corresponding hero figure.[2]

3. Choose Classes: Each hero player chooses one Class deck matching their hero's archetype icon; any Class deck for a class not chosen is returned to the game box.[2]

4. Choose Skills: Every hero begins with the basic skill and starting equipment from their Class deck; if playing the basic game, all other skills are returned to the game box.[2]

5. Place Heroes: Each player places their hero figure on the map in the area indicated by the quest rules, typically an entrance tile.[2]

6. Place Hero Materials: Hero players place their Hero sheets, Class cards, and Activation cards (with corresponding hero tokens) faceup in front of them.[3]

**Overlord Setup**

1. Choose Monsters: The overlord takes the Act I Monster cards and figures for the chosen monster groups as listed in the Quest Guide.[4]

2. Choose Lieutenant: The overlord takes the appropriate Act I Lieutenant card and token.[4]

3. Perform Quest Setup: The overlord follows the 'Setup' section of the chosen quest, which includes placing monster figures, objective tokens, search tokens, and villager tokens on the quest map.[4]

4. Create Overlord Deck: The overlord shuffles the 15 basic Overlord cards to create the deck; if playing the basic game, all other Overlord cards are returned to the box.[4]

5. Draw Overlord Cards: The overlord draws a number of Overlord cards equal to the number of heroes into their hand.[4]

6. Place Overlord Materials: The overlord player shuffles their Overlord card deck and places it facedown in front of them, and places all needed Monster cards in front of them.[3]

**Additional Components/Final Placement**

1. Place remaining items: Place all dice, search tokens, and objective tokens in the appropriate spaces or within easy reach of players as described in the Quest Guide.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.4 · General Setup · Hero Archetypes

[2] RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.5 · Hero Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.6 · Setup Diagram (Four-player Game)

[4] RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook · p.5 · Overlord Setup

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 84 ms · ask 6932 ms · total 7018 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7018 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 6, "score": 0.047883, "snippet": "Map: The map is set up in the center of the play area with the hero and monster figures, search tokens, and any objective tokens placed in the appropriate spaces described in the Quest Guide. Hero Sheets: Hero players place their Hero sheets faceup in front of them. Class Cards: Hero players place t", "headingPath": "Setup Diagram (Four-player Game)", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046671, "snippet": "The overlord player performs the following steps after hero players perform Hero Setup (see 'Hero Setup'). Choose Monsters: The Quest Guide lists the monster group options available to the overlord for the chosen quest. He takes the Act I Monster cards and figures for the chosen monster groups and p", "headingPath": "Overlord Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.046486, "snippet": "After completing General Setup, the hero players continue setup as follows. The overlord player then performs Overlord Setup (see 'Overlord Setup'). Take Activation Cards and Hero Tokens: Each hero player chooses one Activation card and takes the hero tokens of the corresponding color. Choose Heroes", "headingPath": "Hero Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.046409, "snippet": "Before playing, set up the game as follows: Choose Quest: Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition includes 16 unique quests (along with 4 campaign-specific quests) with specific setup instructions and objectives for both the heroes and the overlord. When choosing which quest to play, refer to t", "headingPath": "General Setup · Hero Archetypes", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.045335, "snippet": "To start a new campaign, the players must assign roles for the campaign. One player takes the role of the overlord. The other players take the roles of the heroes. This process is identical to the rules described in 'Setup' on page 4, with exceptions as noted here. It's important to note that the ch", "headingPath": "Starting a New Campaign · THE SHOP ITEM DECK · MONSTERS & LIEUTENANTS · CAMPAIGN MAP · Quests in a Campaign", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 24, "score": 0.030077, "snippet": "Choose Quest Assemble Map Choose Player Roles Prepare Tokens Assemble Search Deck and Condition Cards Take Activation Cards and Hero Tokens Choose Heroes Choose Classes Choose Skills Place Heroes Choose Monsters Perform Quest Setup Create Overlord Deck Draw Overlord Cards Blast: On a Blast attack, a", "headingPath": "General Setup · Hero Setup · Overlord Setup · Attack Keywords · Conditions · The Campaign Phase · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029727, "snippet": "This section describes the various components in detail. The Quest Guide lists all of the quests in the game, including setup, special rules, and the objectives for each quest. Players will refer to this guide when choosing and setting up each quest. Heroes and monsters are represented on the game b", "headingPath": "Component Overview · Quest Guide · Plastic Figures · Custom Dice · Hero Sheets · Campaign Sheets · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 20, "score": 0.029631, "snippet": "After each quest of a campaign, there is a Campaign phase during which players may make decisions on how to upgrade their heroes and prepare for the next quest. It is important to note that most quests have two encounters and the Campaign phase does not take place until the entire quest is finished.", "headingPath": "The Campaign Phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "General Setup · Hero Archetypes", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Hero Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup Diagram (Four-player Game)", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Overlord Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 369}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 369 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 369 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.92527 of 2355 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row retained until: Nov 16, 2026 18:22

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Setup Diagram (Four-player Game)	p.6	0.047883 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Overlord Setup	p.5	0.046671 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Hero Setup	p.5	0.046486 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	General Setup · Hero Archetypes	p.4	0.046409 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Starting a New Campaign · THE SHOP ITEM DECK · MONSTERS & LIEUTENANTS · CAMPAIGN MAP · Quests in a Campaign	p.19	0.045335 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	General Setup · Hero Setup · Overlord Setup · Attack Keywords · Conditions · The Campaign Phase · …	p.24	0.030077 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Component Overview · Quest Guide · Plastic Figures · Custom Dice · Hero Sheets · Campaign Sheets · …	p.3	0.029727 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	The Campaign Phase	p.20	0.029631 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 80 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

one thing that looks wrong and is not: a row a floor seated can carry a fused rank LARGER than the pool size above it. The floors draw from the whole fused list, not only from the passages the re-ranker scored — so a rank past the pool is a floor reaching down for something the re-ranker would never have seen, which is exactly what the floors are for.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) – Lair of the Wyrm — Rulebook (corpus doc 907)	Quest Guide · Playing Basic And Epic Play Games	p.9	#9	0.029274 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	guaranteed a slot by the base-rulebook floor
#2	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Hero Setup	p.5	#3	0.046486 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	General Setup · Hero Archetypes	p.4	#4	0.046409 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Setup Diagram (Four-player Game)	p.6	#1	0.047883 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) – Lair of the Wyrm — Rulebook (corpus doc 907)	Lair of the Wyrm Expansion Rules · Quests · Inactive Monsters · New Hero Classes	p.4	#18	0.024697 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Starting a New Campaign · THE SHOP ITEM DECK · MONSTERS & LIEUTENANTS · CAMPAIGN MAP · Quests in a Campaign	p.19	#5	0.045335 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Overlord Setup	p.5	#2	0.046671 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) – Lair of the Wyrm — Rulebook (corpus doc 907)	Expansion Setup	p.3	#12	0.028718 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	General Setup · Hero Archetypes	p.4	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Hero Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Setup Diagram (Four-player Game)	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) — Rulebook (corpus doc 369)	Overlord Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 84 ms · first delta 3844 ms · total 7018 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 84 ms · ask 6932 ms · gateway work 7018 ms · total 7018 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3253
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 642
tok/sec: 205.5 tok/sec — 642 output tokens in 3.124 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 11s ago)
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched: SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
matched words (in the normalized question): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 298), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.