Fall of the Necromancer – Scenario 8: Attack on Rhosgobel

The Mirkwood Spiders have come looking to prey upon the Wizard living alone in the Woods.

Playthrough: 1v1

Played on: Monday 20 October 2025

Scenario: Fall of the Necromancer (2021) #8 (out of 13)

Ruleset / profiles: 7th edition (2024 War of the Rohirrim Edition)

Participants

Good (1 model)	Evil (4 models)
Radagast the Brown (without Sebastian)	4 Mirkwood Giant Spiders (previously known as Mirkwood Spiders)

Objectives

The game lasts until one side has completed their objective.

The Good side wins if they can rescue all of the 6 creatures within Rhosgobel and have Radagast enter his house by moving into it via the front door.

The Evil side wins if Radagast is slain.

Special rules

Rescuing Creatures – The six objective markers represent the woodland creatures in need of rescue. Radagast may save a creature by ending his move in base contact with a marker so long as he is not engaged in combat. When a creature has been successfully rescued, remove the marker from play.

Radagast’s Determination – Whenever Radagast rescues a creature, he may restore one Fate point spent earlier in the battle.

Campaign bonus (Evil) – Whenever a Spider model suffers a Wound, roll a D6. On the roll of a 6 the Wound is ignored.

Pre-game tactics and thoughts

This seems to be an interesting scenario. In the new edition Radagast has his attacks increased by 1 (to 2, without Sebastian), which is pretty huge. However, his casting values for his spells are generally worse and the Mirkwood Giant Spiders have a +1 better courage value. We’ll see how that impacts the game!

Fate will be extra useful in this game against the Spider Webs, even more so now that the Fate points are automatically successful. So it’s likely beneficial to not use the Fate points on Wounds, especially since he can cast Renew to regain lost Wounds. However, rescuing the creatures does restore Fate points as well. Therefore it might be good to not save the creatures too quickly. Perhaps the best way to win this scenario as Radagast is to try and kill the Spiders one by one. If Radagast gets overwhelmed he can always use Heroic Defence as long as he has the Might remaining.

He should definitely cast Terrifying Aura on turn 1 to make sure he won’t get charged by all Spiders every time. Since it’s a 3+ I’ll likely use 2 Will (1 free and 1 not) for it. It is likely (89%) this will succeed and this will leave 5 Will (or 4, because I want to keep 1 Will remaining for the Exhaustion spells) for other spells. I will probably follow this up by an Aura of Dismay the next turn, using 3 Will (including 1 free, giving me a 70% chance of success). I could boost this to a 80% success rate if I use 4 Will, which would leave me with 1 more useable Will in a critical turn. I will then likely just use Transfix or Nature’s Wrath from that point onwards, or perhaps Renew for when that becomes important.

The game

The game is played on a 2’x2′ board, with Radagast’s house in the centre. The Good player deploys Radagast touching the door to his house. The Evil player deploys the four Mirkwood Giant Spiders so that each one is touching the centre of a different board edge.

1G. -> Good begins. As planned, Radagast uses 2 Will to successfully casts a Terrifying Aura on a double 6. He dashes towards one of the creatures. He then gets charged by one Mirkwood Giant Spider, who shoots a web as a throwing weapon. It hits, which means Radagast uses a Fate point to prevent being Paralysed. Radagast loses the combat, and takes 1 Wound.

2E. -> Evil begins. Three Mirkwood Giant Spiders trap Radagast. Radagast uses 2 Might points to win the combat, but only deals 1 Wound to a Spider.

3G. -> Good begins. Thankfully Radagast can use his Magic again this turn. I’ve thought about using a Nature’s Wrath because it would affect 3 Spiders, but then they could just get up and still Charge. Another option would have been a Transfix, but then that Spider would still contribute their dice to the attack pool. So I decided to opt for Aura of Dismay, using 4 Will (including 1 free). This was successful and one Spider did fail his Courage test, but that still left 2 other Spiders being able to Charge Radagast. Because of a successful webbing shot, Radagast had to spend another Fate point. In the combat, Radagast did manage to win and kill the wounded Spider, leaving 3 more Spiders to deal with.

4E. -> Evil begins. The two Spiders that could Charge Radagast do so. Since Radagast has the higher Fight value, I decided to save my Might for winning the combat rather than go for a Heroic Defence. Unfortunately, Radagast loses the combat by more than 2 points. The Spiders kill him and the game ends in an Evil victory.

Aftermath

Victory for Evil. This means that in the next scenario: Exploration of Dol Guldur, the Evil player gets to roll 2 D6 and choose one for determining which statue the Witch-King will hide in.

Post-game thoughts

Well, that was disappointing. Radagast couldn’t even save 1 animal. Instead he was just continually swarmed by Spiders. Only 1 Spider failed a Courage test and Radagast didn’t roll great on his combats. But a bit of bad luck should be expected, so I do think Radagast has an uphill battle here. I’m not sure if the old profiles would have helped much, because then Radagast would have had even just 1 Attack. I think having to deal with 2 to 4 Spiders at the same time is just too much for the Wizard. Perhaps if he had Sebastian, things would have been better. But that wouldn’t make a lot of sense thematically.

If I were to rebalance the scenario, I think I would just increase Radagast’s Attack value to 3 for this scenario. Alternatively, maybe he would have more chance against 3 Spiders. Perhaps worsening the Courage value of the Spiders by 1 could also help a lot and make it less like a number of combats on the same spot on the map, but I’m not sure if I could justify that thematically.

All things considered, I felt this to be an underwhelming scenario and I didn’t really get to enjoy the freshly build & painted home of Radagast as much as I had hoped.

In the next scenario, Radagast sets out to investigate the ruins of Dol Guldur for the source of the dark magic that has set the creatures loose that attacked his homestead.