Poison

The Poison set only has two copies of one card that gets shuffled into the encounter deck, the other four cards are copies of a weakness that players can get after being hit by certain effects from enemies and treacheries.

What it does: Creeping Poison surges into the next encounter card. While doing that, it also deals one damage to anyone who is currently poisoned.

My take: The Poisoned weakness has a couple of consequences for players that earn it. Some token pulls are turned into auto-fails when poisoned and between the pages of the scenario leaflets there is two points of physical trauma that can be gotten from it. Next to these, the one damage ping from Creeping Poison doesn’t look very relevant, but as a surge card it’s of course never something you want to draw from the encounter deck.

Threat level: Low to Mid for Creeping Poison. High for the Poison mechanic as a whole. Surging cards are never to be underestimated and while a simple damage ping isn’t terrifying on its own, there are a lot of damage treacheries in the Forgotten Age cycle which Creeping Poison can conveniently cycle into.

Dealing with it: The Forgotten Age has a lot of sources for trauma waiting in its interlude and scenario texts, and managing which ones to accept and which ones to spend resources on to avoid can be difficult. Trying to not gain any trauma at all will take a lot of supply tokens that are going to be sorely missed in other places of the campaign. However, getting poisoned is difficult to prevent completely and comes with other complications than just the trauma, so spending the supply tokens to bring a few units of medicine will usually be a good idea. It’s certainly a better investment than blankets.