If you were at all a fan of Descent: Journeys in the Dark but found the extremely long play times frustrating, you owe it to yourself to check out the second edition. The days of spending half an hour clearing one room of a giant and a couple of nagas, only to open the next door and find them all re-spawned and ready to fight again, are thankfully over. Fantasy Flight Games addressed all the problems of the original game without losing the dungeon-delving flavour that made it a hit.
Descent: 2nd Edition is a fast-playing scenario-based dungeonbash with a sprinkling of light campaign progression and wilderness travelling thown in, for when you want to scratch that fantasy roleplaying urge without all the preparation and effort. Personally I’d like the tone to have been a bit more mature and the scenarios a bit more complex, but I completely understand that this is geared to a family-friendly audience. Regardless, it’s pretty much the perfect fast-playing, fun dungeoncrawling game.
Remember you can buy a Conversion Kit that lets you use all the heroes and from the original edition. And Fantasy Flight are also running an open beta of the Quest Vault, an online resource where players can create and share their quest designs.
This latest update of my rules summary includes the rules from the first expansion to the new edition: Lair of the Wyrm.