While traveling north through the Vales of Anduin on your way to Dale, you are alarmed by the number of dangerous creatures that you encounter.

Setup: Set Woodmen Village and The Old Ford aside, out of play. Create the Evil Creatures deck (see insert) and place it next to the quest deck. Shuffle the encounter deck and discard cards from the top until X locations are discarded, where X is the number of players. Add each discarded location to the staging area.

Forced: After placing progress here from questing successfully, place 1 resource here.

Forced: At the beginning of the encounter phase, remove 1 resource from this stage. Then, add the top card of the Evil Creatures deck to the staging area.

This stage cannot be defeated while an enemy from the Evil Creatures deck in play.