SHADOWFIST FAQ: v. 3.0 Errata: Dance of the Centipede The card text should read "Turn target card and cancel any effects generated by turning target card." As the card originally read, it sounded as if it could be used to cancel any card. Not so. Note that if the card has already turned to generate an effect, it's too late to use Dance of the Centipede to turn the card. BUT if you use Dance of the Centipede first to turn the target card, its effect is canceled. Evil Twin As written, the card led many players to believe that you couldn't Twin a Unique character without causing a Uniqueness Auction. This was not the card's intention. So the card has been errataed as follows: "When Evil Twin is played, choose any character in play. Evil Twin takes on the Fighting score, designators, and abilities of that character, but not its resources and resource conditions." Uniqueness Auctions occur when duplicate Unique cards appear in play -- Evil Twin doesn't cause Uniqueness Auctions because "Unique" is a restriction, not an ability (see below). Reinvigoration Process The original version of this card allowed certain combos to generate infinite Power. (Hint: Feast of Souls, with or without Vivisector. . .) Yeah, the Architects are powerful, but not that powerful. The rules text of this card should read: "Turn to play an Abomination from your smoked pile." Note that in this and all other cases in which cards allow you to play other cards, you must pay Power costs and meet resource conditions unless otherwise specified. Thunder on the Mountain The 'm' that appears in the rules text is meant to be an Architects of the Flesh symbol. Progress of the Mouse Progress of the Mouse can only be played on an opponent, not on yourself. Probability Manipulator: Probability Manipulator may not change any number to zero... Q. Wait a minute! Wasn't Motorcycle listed in the original FAQ as a card that needed to be fixed? A. That's true. But we've put our brains together and realized that the solution to Motorcycle's problem is different than changing the wording of the card. Instead we are adding a sentence to the rules. The sentence reads something like: "Vehicle and Weapons States are controlled by the controller of the subject character." That takes care of the problems we were having with Motorcycle and also accounts for problems people were going to start having with Fusion Rifle and some of the other Weapons. Q. Any other cards which are being changed for clarity in the second printing of the Standard Edition. A. Yes, a bunch. Here's a list. Alchemist's Lair We goofed on the symbols in the Limited Edition. The site is supposed to provide Magic resources, not Chi. In our reprinting we've fixed the mistake. In tournament play, some people may be playing with Alchemist's Lairs that provide Chi while other play with Alchemist's Lairs that provide Magic. Obviously, in the privacy of your own home you can rule that Alchemist's Lairs always provide Magic. Arcanowave Reinforcer Rules text rewritten for clarity: "All your characters in play inflict +1 damage and are considered Abominations." Booby Trap Rules text revised for clarity: Play on a site you control when the site is attacked. Target site and all characters at its location suffer 3 points of damage. Explosives Play on an unturned character. After subject character damages a site in combat, you may sacrifice Explosives to allow subject character to inflict an additional 5 points of damage to the site. Fox Pass Rules text rewritten for clarity: "Turn to change one attacking character's target to a character or front-row site you control." The General Many people have noticed that one version of The General is printed in black text. That's a typo, not a conscious design decision. Or if you'd prefer to believe in a conspiracy theory, you could heed the net-wit who said that the color shift of The General's text indicated that he had been lost to the dark side. Helix Chewer This State was placed in an Event card border in the Limited Edition. We're putting it into the proper State border. Police Station Police Station can turn to inflict 2 points of damage to a Hood character or Hood site. The original printing of Police Station was ambiguous, sounding as if Police Station might be useful for damaging any site. Ain't so. Proving Ground Rules text rewritten for clarity: "When Proving Grounds is first revealed, turn Proving Grounds for no effect. Turn Proving Grounds to play a character at -2 cost. Multiple Proving Grounds cannot reduce the cost of the same character." Righteous One Rules text added to for clarity: "Any character intercepted by Righteous One while Righteous One is unturned is smoked after combat with Righteous One." Swat Team Just to let you know, that card will be called SWAT Team when it's reprinted. Ditto for Havoc Suit becoming HAVOC Suit. These cards are considered to have the same name, fixing a typo doesn't constitute a name change. Throwing Star Rules text rewritten for clarity: The Card Abilities and Restrictions list that begins on page 45 needs a few corrections as well. Cancels: A card effect with this ability cancels the effect of the target card effect. +X Damage: Characters with this ability inflict additional damage to characters and sites; the value of X varies from card to card. Add the damage bonus to combat damage inflicted by the character. This bonus does not add to non-combat damage inflicted by the character. Independent Characters with this ability may be used to launch an attack during your turn even when an earlier attack failed to damage its target and you are otherwise ineligible to launch another attack. Mobility You may change the location of this character to a legal location at any time, without turning it. This does not allow the character to leave a combat it is in or to avoid receiving damage. It is only possible to change location to an opponent's side in order to intercept an attack. Q. Why do the cards Cellular Reinvigoration and Reinvigoration Process have the same art? A. Because we goofed. Cellular Reinvigoration's art is truly by Mark Tedin. When the same painting appears on Reinvigoration Process and is attributed to Anson Maddocks, that's a mistake. We will fix the error in a later printing. Q. Any other mistakes in the art attributions? A. Hands without Shadow is by Edward Beard, Jr., not L. A. Williams. And we spelled Margaret Organ-Kean's name wrong on several of her cards. And we spelled Nicola Leonard's name wrong on Progress of the Mouse. Q. How many cards in the set? A. By our current count, 323. 38 of these are very common cards. The remainder of the set is split three ways between common, uncommon, and rare cards. For the best card list available at present, check out our two Web sites at http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/fusion/lopez/shadowfist/fist.html and http://www.nu.edu/~gblake/fist. These sites are mutating daily to accommodate changes and new material. Q. What do you need to play the game? A. One starter deck per player and some beads or tokens to use as Power and damage counters. Q. What's in starter decks? A. Approximately half of the 60 cards in a starter deck are very common characters and feng shui sites that fit into any deck design. The very common character are foundation characters: they provide resources but do not require any resources to play. Feng shui sites are what the game is all about -- in order to win a two player game you need to control or have burned for victory a total of six feng shui sites. In multi-player games, the target number is five feng shui sites. We use untuned starter decks for all out demo games at conventions. They play well. Q. Why buy the 12-card Shadowpacks? A. Shadowpacks have a higher proportion of the other three rarity levels: common, uncommon and rare cards. If you want to make decks buying only Shadowpacks, you'll have to buy many boxes of boosters to get enough foundation characters and feng shui sites to provide your deck designs with any flexibility. Q. Are there any problems using untuned starter decks? A. Not for two or three player games. But our experience is that games with four or more players using untuned decks can be very long. Starter decks are full of characters but provide relatively few of the decisive Events and States that help attacks punch past determined characters. We recommend that people who want to play game of four or more players tune their decks with cards that will help them overcome multiple defenders. Q. Are there any errors in the Overview of the Game which appears at the start of the rulebook? A. There's one error and one possibly confusing statement. The error appears in the italicized text under the words "Turn Sequence." The sentence is misleading. It should say "Each player starts the game with 1 Power point in his or her Power pool and with a hand of six cards." The somewhat misleading statement occurs on page 3 of the rulebook: "Before the player under attack defends, each player in turn, clockwise from the player under attack, may intercept the attack by turning each character he or she wishes to intercept with and declaring which attacker that character is intercepting." In this case, the defenders are turning their characters to change location because they are intercepting an attack that is taking place at a location other than the location they presently occupy. Characters do not have to turn to intercept attacks aimed at locations they already occupy. Turned characters can intercept attacks aimed at targets sharing the location they are positioned at. Q. When I turn Cave Network to play a character with a play cost of 3 or less at no cost, can I also ignore resource conditions? A. No. In order to play a card in Shadowfist, it's necessary to meet its play cost and its resource conditions unless otherwise directed. Cards that violate this rule use wording other than "play a card" -- for instance, Golden Comeback says "You may take a character from your smoked pile and return it to play." In Golden Comeback's case you don't have to pay the play cost and meet the resource conditions, you're simply able to put the character into play from your smoked pile. Q. Can I use Proving Grounds or Family Estate to play a character with a play cost of greater than 3 for no cost using Cave Network? A. No. Proving Grounds and Family Estate specify that they turn to play a character at -X cost. Cave Network turns to play a character with a cost of three or less at no cost. The wording on the cards isn't compatible. On the other paw, you could use Proving Grounds and Family Estate simultaneously to play a Pledged character at -3 cost! Q. How do I tell which cards affect which characters? I've got a Police Station that can turn and maintain to add +2 to the Fighting of any Cop, but who is a Cop and who isn't? A. We left a paragraph out of the rules. The paragraph introduced the term "designator." Here's the paragraph that's going back into the rules as soon as we reprint the rulebook: Designators: Words that appear in the name and subtitle of a card are that card's designators. Subtitles are the first line in the rules text. Many effects target cards with specific designators. For instance, the Undercover Cop gets +1 Fighting for every Cop character in play. SWAT Team counts as a "Cop" thanks to its subtitle: "Cop Pawns." Maverick Cop counts as a Cop because of her name. But the Buro Official does not count as a Cop, since his subtitle is "Vile Bureaucrat." If a card effect says that certain cards are now "considered to be Abominations," that means that the affected cards have gained the designator "Abomination" Note that singular and plural forms of the same word are considered to be the same designator. The Undercover Cop gets to count both the SWAT Team ("Cop Pawns") and the PubOrd Squad ("Buro Cops"). Another example: the Assassins in Love Event takes control of all Assassins in play. It only takes control of characters whose designators include the word Assassin. There are characters in the game who have the special ability "Assassinate" but are not designated as Assassins in their card's name or subtitle. These characters do not qualify as Assassins. The exceptions to the designator rules are that the words Feng Shui Site, Edge, State, and Event are not designators. Neither are connecting words like "of," "and," "the," etc. Q. Two related questions. If I have the Arcanowave Reinforcer in play, do all the characters in my smoked piles count as Abominations? Can the Monkey King turn to return a Lotus card from my smoked pile to my hand? A. No. And no. We wrote the cards assuming that all effects apply only to characters that are in play unless they are explicitly stated to apply to cards in the smoked pile or in players' hands. The default is that cards and card effects only affect cards which are in play. If a card specifically states that it affects cards in the smoked pile or cards in a player's hand then that card breaks the normal rules. We'll be highlighting this point in the next edition of the rulebook. Q. Do characters in my smoked pile count as characters I control? A. No! 'Control' is a game term that refers only to cards that are in play. An Undercover Cop, whose Fighting is equal to the number of Cop characters you control, does not get to count the Cops in your smoked pile, only the cops that are in play on your side. Q. When a card refers to you, who does it refer to? A. As explained in the glossary, "you" refers to the controller of the card. Note that the controller of a card is normally the person who played the card. This means that if you play an Illusory Bridge into an opponent's site structure, Illusory Bridge counts as a card you control, not your opponent. Ditto for most States. As mentioned above, Vehicles and weapons are the exceptions. Vehicles and weapon States are controlled by the controller of the subject character. Q. Do characters have to turn to intercept? A. No. In fact the words "turn to intercept" are something of a misnomer. Characters turn to change location and they turn to attack. Characters can intercept attacks at locations they occupy, so a character who is going to intercept an attack aimed at a different location normally has to turn to change location first. Once they have changed location they are able to intercept. The exception is that characters with Mobility can intercept attacks at any location without turning. Q. What about Political Lock and the Walking Corpses? A. When Political Lock is in play, characters can no longer turn to change location within your own site structure or turn change location in order to intercept at another player's location. Characters can still turn to attack when Political Lock is in play. Similarly, the Walking Corpses can never turn to change location, but they can turn to attack. Walking Corpses are able to intercept, but only at a location they already occupy or by using Mobility or Motorcycles to scoot around the board. Q. The rules on page 30 make it sound as if a character always needs to be unturned to change location. Is that right? A. No. The misphrased sentence reads "At any time, you may move an unturned character you control one column to the right or left; you must then turn the character." That isn't precisely correct. Actually, you normally must turn a character in order to move them to a different location. The character does not move to the different location and then get turned. The character turns in order to change location. A subtle distinction, but a better phrasing of the rule would have helped people make more sense of the Mobility ability, which allows characters to change location without turning. Q. Does turning to attack constitute "turning to change location."? A. No. Turning to attack does temporarily change a character's location, but turning to attack is a separate category of action. Q. Are resources spent like Power? A. Using a resource to play a card does not decrease your resource pool. Power is generated and spent turn by turn. Resources gather in your pool. As page 17 of the rules states, you can play any number of cards that require the number of resources you have in your pool, so long as you can pay the Power cost. The only way to permanently lose a resource provided by a character or a resource-providing site is for the character or site to be toasted. Characters or sites that are returned to your hand also stop generating resources, but since they can be played again, that's usually temporary. Q. Do characters have to turn to provide resources? A. No. Characters don't have to do anything to provide resources except get into play. Once a card that provides a resource is in play, that resource remains in your pool until the card returns to your hand or gets toasted. Q. How do I tell whether one of my cards is affected by another card that affects cards of a certain . type? A. One explanation appears on page 15 of the rulebook. Here's another: look at the card's bottom left and bottom right corners. If the symbol in question appears in either spot, the card can be affected by cards which affect or target that symbol. In other words, in game mechanics terms, if a specific symbol appears in either a card's resource conditions or its resources, that card belongs to the class of cards that can be affected by cards affecting cards bearing that symbol. Q. Why should I play with non-feng shui sites if they don't help me win? A. Non-feng shui sites don't contribute to fulfilling victory conditions, but they come in handy providing Power and resources, sitting in front of feng shui sites you want protected. And opponents who seize your non-feng shui sites don't get any closer to fulfilling their victory conditions either. Q. Explain feng shui sites and Power generation. A. Only feng shui sites are played face down. All other cards have to be played face up. All face down feng shui sites generate 1 point of Power in their controller's establishing shot. Face up feng shui sites generate the amount of Power specified in the diamond in their upper left corner. The original printing of the rules contains a misleading sentence on page 16: "When the feng shui site is revealed (turned face up due to taking damage, you get the amount of Power stated on it." Q. If I turn my characters to join in another player's attack against a Blessed Orchard, do I have to give the target player a point of Power from my pool because of Blessed Orchard's special ability. A. No. Joining an attack is not the same as declaring an attack. Only the player declaring the attack has to worry about Blessed Orchard's special ability. Note that Grove of Willows' ability is not so easy to get around -- if you throw your characters into someone else's attack that reveals Grove of Willows by damaging the site, the defender gets Power equal to the total number of characters that participated in the attack. Q. What if I attack Blessed Orchard when my Power pool is empty? A. Then you're in luck. Attack at will, if there is nothing in your pool to transfer to your opponent that's your opponent's tough luck. Note that if you attack an unrevealed site that turns out to be Blessed Orchard you *could* play all the Power out of your pool to avoid giving your opponent any Power, but only if you have Events and States to play, since Edges and characters and Sites can't be played during an attack. Q. Do attackers attack in chains? A. All attacking characters attack in a single human (or inhuman) wave. The attacking player does not get to specify which characters attack first in a given attack. All attacking characters are equally available to be intercepted by defending characters. And all attacking characters inflict their combat damage simultaneously once they reach their combat (unless one or more have the Ambush ability). Q. Can the player whose turn it is play States during their attack? A. Yes! See page 28 of the rules for the full list of which cards can be played during an attack. Playing States during your attack gives the attacker a much needed advantage. Along with surprise Event cards, States played during an attack are a great way to punch an attack through to its target. Q. Can a single defending character intercept more than one attacker per attack? A. No, each intercepting character may only intercept one attacker per attack. But multiple defenders can arrange themselves in a chain and intercept the same attacker. Q. Can I use Robust Feng Shui to redirect damage inflicted onto one of my feng shui sites in order to reduce an opponent's site's Body to 0 and seize the site? A. No. Sites can only be seized when they are reduced to 0 Body by attacking characters. A card which redirects damage becomes the source of the damage to its target. So Robust Feng Shui would be the source of the damage that reduced the site to 0 Body, meaning that you would have to smoke site instead of seizing or burning it. Q. When can characters turn to generate effects? A. Characters can turn to generate effects any time during any player's Main Shot. Q. What do the rules mean when they say that declaring an attack is an effect? A. Declaring an attack is an effect that can be responded to with other effects, but the attack is considered to have started as soon as it declared, so many effects that say they cannot be used during an attack cannot be used in response to a declaration of attack. The attack itself is not an effect, it's a series of steps, including declaration of interception by each player, interception combat between the attacker and each defending player, and combat with the target of the attack. Stephen D'Angelo posted a good schedule of the turn and the attack sequence to the rec.games.trading-cards.misc newsgroup recently. Perhaps we'll be including an edited version of Stephen's work in the next FAQ. Q. If your first attack succeeds in damaging its target and you want to launch a follow-up attack, do you have to declare your follow-up attack immediately, or can you play characters, Edges, and generate other card effects in between the two attacks? A. You can play cards and generate effects in between the attacks. Q. If I have characters in the game and my opponent doesn't have any characters, what's to prevent me from launching multiple successful attacks? A. Nothing except cards your opponent plays, effects they generate with their sites, and the fact that you have to turn your characters in order to attack with them. Q. Page 16 of the rulebook says that there are three ways to gain more Power. Doesn't that leave out burning feng shui sites for Power? A. Yes it does. Make that *four* ways to gain additional Power. Q. We're playing a two-player game and I've played five feng shui sites. Then my Ancestral Tomb feng shui site gets damaged. Since the Ancestral Tomb no longer counts for victory, can I play another feng shui site? A. Yes, you can. It will cost you Power equal to the number of feng shui sites you have in play. And if the Ancestral Tomb gets healed later, you will still have to seize or burn one of your opponent's feng shui sites in order to win the game. Q. Can I attack and burn my own feng shui sites? A. No. You cannot launch attacks against targets you control. Q. Can I target my own characters and sites with card effects that inflict direct damage or smoke other cards? A. Yes. The rule is that your characters can't launch attacks against targets you control, but you can target cards you control for other card or character effects. For example, you'll almost certainly have to find some way of inflicting damage directly in order to get rid of an Illusory Bridge site played into your site structure. Q. If I reduce a site's Body to zero by means other than an attack with my characters, can I seize or burn the site? A. No. The only way to seize a site (or seize or burn a feng shui site) is to reduce its body to 0 by damage inflicted by your characters in an attack (or characters controlled by other players who chose to join an attack which you declared). If you use other effects to smoke a site, the site is merely smoked. See page 39 in the rulebook. Q. What's the deal with the Auspicious Termites feng shui site? A. If you reduce the feng shui site's Body to 0 in an attack you can seize the site, but not burn it. If the site ever gets smoked, it returns to its owner's hand instead of going into their smoked pile. Q. What happens if I seize a site that is the subject of the Inexorable Corruption State? A. States remain on sites when sites are seized. Inexorable Corruption prevents damage from being removed by any means. So seizing such a site is a BAD idea. Burn it instead, if possible. If not you'll have to smoke it. Q. What happens if a character with Toughness: 1 is intercepted by a chain of 1 Fighting characters? A. Unless the defending player has a trick up their sleeve, they are making a big mistake. The character with Toughness: 1 will fight each interceptor in turn. Toughness reduces the amount of damage a character receives from any source, so one point of damage will be subtracted from the damage inflicted by each 1 Fighting score character. The character with Toughness: 1 won't take a scratch, all the 1 Fighting interceptors will be smoked. Q. What happens when a character with Toughness: 1 attacks a site that is the subject of two or more Deathtrap States? A. Each Deathtrap card is a separate source of damage, so a character with Toughness: 1 takes no damage from Deathtraps, no matter how many of them are piled onto a site. Q. What happens when I play Inexorable Corruption on a character with Toughness? A. Again, Toughness prevents one point of damage from any source. So playing Inexorable Corruption on a character with Toughness merely prevents the character from having damage removed by any means. Q. Page 33 of the rules says, "The instant that a character has a number of damage tokens on it equal to its Fighting score, it is smoked." Can you heal a character that is being smoked? A. This "instant" in which the character is smoked occurs as one effect in a sequence of effect that may include other effects. You can't heal damage that been dealt earlier in the same sequence of effects, because when it came time to remove damage counters, the damage counters you want to remove won't have been placed yet! But, as page 40 of the rules mentions, you CAN heal previous damage that contributed to a character being smoked. For example, say your Ring Fighter with a 3 Fighting score has taken 1 point of damage. Your opponent turns a White Disciple to inflict two points of damage on the Ring Fighting, enough to smoke it. You can respond to the White Disciple's effect by generating a healing effect to remove the point of damage the Ring Fighter had already suffered. The resolution of the effects would work out as follows, resolving effects in the reverse order in which they were generated: first you would remove the original point of damage from Ring Fighter, then you would place the two points of damage from the White Disciple. At no time would Ring Fighter have suffered the three points of damage that would be enough to smoke it. Q. Can characters be healed in between successive combats in a single attack? A. Yes. Q. When I intercept an attacking character with an unturned Righteous Defender, does the Righteous Defender take damage from the combat or does he smoke the attacker before getting hurt? A. Righteous Defender's ability works like other combat damage, it is inflicted simultaneously with damage from the attacking character. Since Righteous Defender only has a Fighting of 1, this tends to mean that Righteous Defender gets smoked at the same time that he smokes intercepted attackers. Q. What about the Gnarled Horror's ability to smoke any character it damages? A. The Gnarled Horror inflicts its damage simultaneously with any characters it is in combat with. Like Righteous Defender, Gnarled Horror usually gets smoked as a result of combat. But certain nasty combos or increases in its Fighting score could keep it alive. . . Note that if you could give the Gnarled Horror the Ambush ability, it would inflict its damage first on the attack, and smoke defenders before they had a chance to inflict their damage. Q. The Gnarled Marauder's rules text says: "Any damage Gnarled Marauder inflicts on a site in an attack is also inflicted on the back-row site behind that site." Does this mean that a Gnarled Marauder could conceivably reduce the Body of two sites to zero in the same attack, allowing me to seize or burn two sites at once? A. Yes. Q. Can I play Booby Trap on *any* site when one of my sites is attacked? A. No. The card seems to be played correctly by most players, but see the list of revised cards at the beginning of the FAQ that will make the card's intent completely clear. Q. Is Unique an ability that can be copied with cards like Rigorous Discipline? A. No. Unique and Limited are restrictions. Anything else that appears in the rules text of a card is considered to be an ability that can be copied using Rigorous Discipline. Q. When I play cards like Rigorous Discipline and copy abilities that refer to the ability's owning character by name, how do I interpret the results?=7F A. Translate ability-copying cards by inserting the name of the character who has been gifted with the ability in place of the name of the character who normally possess the ability. For example, the Thing with 1000 Tongues allows you to sacrifice a character to give Thing with 1000 Tongues Toughness: 3 until the end of the turn. If you want to use Rigorous Discipline to give the Friends of the Dragon Thing with 1000 Tongues ability, you would sacrifice one of the characters you control to give Friends of the Dragon Toughness: 3. Q. What happens if I use Larcenous Mist to steal Mother of Corruption's abilities for a turn? A. If Mother of Corruption's rules text goes blank because of Larcenous Mist, she will be able to turn to heal and turn to attack. "Danger, danger, Will Robinson." Q. The explanation of the +X damage ability makes it sound as if my PubOrd Sniper with a Really Big Gun could turn to inflict *three* points of damage on an attacking character. Is that right? A. No. The +X Damage entry left out a couple words. Its last sentence should read: "Add the damage bonus to any damage the character inflicts in combat." Q. If I increase the Damage a character inflicts in combat with a State like Really Big Gun or an Event like Superior Technology, does that also increase the character's ability to suffer damage? A. No. Damage is inflicted to a character's Fighting score. Characters who can deal more damage hurt other characters and sites more, but they can still only take damage equal to their Fighting score. Q. Is a group of characters making an attack a "single source" of damage? A. No. A card that inflicts damage is a single source of damage. This could be an attacking character or a Shattering Fire Event. A character with a Really Big Gun inflicts +2 damage, the character is still the source of the damage. Q. How should I interpret the following sentence from page 11 of the rulebook? "Note that a player is eliminated from the game as soon as he or she runs out of cards in his or her deck." A. It's not entirely pleasant, but the sentence means what it says: as soon as you're drawn your last card from your deck, you lose. You'll never be able to play the bottom card in your deck. Since you have to refill your hand to six cards at the end of your establishing shot, you'd best not play any cards when you're about to run out. Q. Was SHADOWFIST designed as a drinking game? A. No. But you might think otherwise if you noticed how we got confused about which direction is clockwise in the paragraph about "Simultaneous play" on pages 42-43. Sorry about that. Q. Any other mistakes too embarrassing to mention? A. Yes. When we introduced the Ascended on page 8 of the rulebook, we meant to use the word "descendants," not "ancestors." Q. Who is the woman executing a flying kick on the back of every SHADOWFIST card? Is she a character in the game? A. Her name is Ting Ting. Bryan Snoddy did the art and Jesper Myrfors designed the card back. She isn't a character in the game yet, but she will appear in an upcoming expansion. Not to mention the cover of the upcoming Players' Guide. Q. Will all editions of the cards remain in black border? A. Yes. The difference between the Limited Edition and future printings of SHADOWFIST is that future printings won't have the gold foil stamp. Q. Are there any other differences between Limited Edition and the upcoming Standard Edition? A. Yes. SHADOWFIST has a particular narrative thread. A number of characters from the Limited Edition get themselves killed in between the Limited and Standard Editions. They won't appear in the Standard Edition because Operation Killdeer leaves them well and truly toasted. If you read the Limited Editions' flavor text, you'll be able to identify three of these characters. There are a handful of others. The full story will appear in the SHADOWFIST Players' Guide. Q. What else is in the Players' Guide? A. Nine stories that explain the factions and history of SHADOWFIST's secret war. Interviews with SHADOWFIST's designers, Robin Laws and Jose Garcia and its art director, Jesper Myrfors. Chapters on Dynamics of Play, Strategy, Tactics, and Nasty Combos. And lots of cool art. Q. Are there expansions planned for SHADOWFIST? A. The first expansion is called Netherworld. It's also due out in October. The Netherworld is the mysterious underground complex that ties the world's different time periods together. Think lots of Jammers, lots of Four Monarchs cards, and a fiendish plot that threatens to kick the Dragons, Hand, Lotus and Architects right out of the secret war. It blows up real good. Q. What's the battle cry of the Jammers? A. Blow Things Up! Blow Things Up! Blow Things Up! Q. Are there more expansions on the way? A.. You betcha. But the first product after Netherworld will be a Showdown Set containing two pre-made 60 card decks. The first Showdown set is called Combat in Kowloon. It concerns a battle between the Dragons and the Lotus in modern day Hong Kong. The new cards introduced in Combat in Kowloon will later be rolled into the main set. Q. What about promo cards? A. When we do promo cards, we'll do them with gold foil stamps and give them out at conventions and such. Later we'll cycle all promo cards into the Standard Edition without the gold foil stamps. That way collectors get something to collect and players get access to all cards. Q. How is the sorting in the Limited Edition? A. Not quite as good as we'd like. We wanted it to be fairly easy to collect a card set, but there seem to be some patterns to the rare cards which appear in booster boxes that make it harder to collect a full set than we had intended. Briefly, if you get a particular rare card in a booster, it seems more likely that you'll get a second copy of that card in the same box. Sometimes duplicate rares appear in successive boosters. Since nearly all the rare cards are R1s and there are only two handfuls of R2s, this pattern would be statistically improbable if the sorting were as random as we had intended. We are working to solve these problems, if indeed there is a problem, but the earliest we will be able to solve it will be the second printing of the Standard Edition. Until then, people interested in collecting a full set will certainly want to take advantage of opportunities to trade. Dave Bolack and friends have set up a Shadowfist card trading mailing list called fisttrade. fisttrade operates using the Black Marble Wombat mailing list software. To subscribe, send a message to fisttrade- request@mars.galstar.com. The subject field will be ignored. If you wish to subscribe to the mailing list, place "SUBSCRIBE" (no quotes) in the body of the message. If you wish to subscribe to the mailing list digest, place "DIGEST" in the body (again, no quotes). Q. Will there be a SHADOWFIST roleplaying game? A. The roleplaying game is called FENG SHUI. It was developed and written concurrently with SHADOWFIST by Robin D. Laws. FENG SHUI is in the editing stage. It will be published some time this fall, probably in November. A full line of supplements is in the works, Q. Who is Daedalus Entertainment, Inc.? A. Thecompany started in Toronto. The company published the roleplaying game, NEXUS: The Infinite City, in 1994. Daedalus is currently in the process of switching cities, moving to Seattle. Daedalus will be supporting a full line of roleplaying and trading card games. Along with FENG SHUI and NEXUS, Daedalus' rpg plans include the fourth edition of Talislanta and supplements for that game. Q. Are you soliciting submissions? A. At present we are not soliciting submissions for Shadowfist or other card games. We are hiring freelance writers to contribute to our roleplaying line. People interested in writing about Shadowfist should try writing for any of the trading card magazines. Q. How do I contact Daedalus? A. We are providing Internet support in the rec.games.trading- cards.misc newsgroup. We also have a Shadowfist folder in the CCG area of the GIX exchange on America on Line. The Shadowfist netrep, Rob Heinsoo, can be reached at RobMH@aol.com. For people without net access, the best bet is to call the Shadowfist Answer Line at (206) 232-3040 between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Pacific Time, Monday through Friday. --Rob Heinsoo FAQ v. 3.0 9/4/95 11