“When in doubt, don’t.” It’s a pearl of wisdom that offends risk takers and guides more than a few tortoises to the finish line ahead of the rabbits. But in the tone-chasing world this dictum carries extra weight, because depending on your aims, anything you situate between guitar and amplifier can subtract as much as it adds. Indeed, a little restraint can go a long way toward sweetening a sound.
And restraint is one of the things that makes the ZEQD-Pre, a preamp co-designed by EarthQuaker and Mike Zaite (aka Dr. Z), such an elegant piece of kit. The things they didn’t add make it easier to use. The streamlined design also makes the ZEQD-Pre feel truly additive. It can lend body and excitement to big tube amps that sound flat at low volume. And as an analog addition to digital signal chains, it adds real life and a tactile dimension to flat, drab, or spiky DAW and modeler tones.
Feel Free With The Help Of A Pre
Though the ZEQD-Pre is a beautifully integrated whole, it’s effectively made up of two sections. There’s a passive EQ that can do a lot on its own to recast or fine tune the sound of a tube amp or modeler. It also features a boost. Switching on the boost disengages the EQ. But both sections use the level control as an output volume control.
In my first experiments with the ZEQD-Pre, I situated it in front of a 50-watt Fender Bassman and 2x12 cabinet. And though I suspect more potential customers will be interested in the EarthQuaker’s potential in digital environments, it can transform conventional tube amplifiers. I rarely get to turn my Bassman up much past 2 in my house. But the ZEQD-Pre’s EQ section made those modest volumes sound much fuller. The boost is not a high-gain affair, but it adds weight and excites overtones that might otherwise lay dormant at low volume. At higher amp volumes it can add a just-right nudge into the dirty zone that almost always sounds silky rather than harsh.
EarthQuaker Devices ZEQD-Pre Preamp Demo
“It is zingy, responsive, and does much to take away the uncanny valley sense of lifelessness you can feel when interacting with a modeler.”
Use of the EF86 in a preamp is not common—at least relative to the ubiquitous 12AX7. But Dr. Z’s choice of the EF86 for the boost is an inspired one. It is zingy, responsive, and does much to take away the uncanny valley sense of lifelessness you can feel when interacting with a modeler. Those that know the EF86 by its too-hot-to-tame reputation needn’t fear that it will be a handful though. The ZEQD-Pre boost voice is balanced and lively in all the right ways, and these attributes are especially apparent when the pedal is paired with a digital end destination.
When testing the ZEQD-Pre in this capacity—by running a cable from the headphone output straight into the Hi-Z input of my Universal Apollo Twin—I did not make it easy on the EarthQuaker. My main instruments are Jaguars and Jazzmasters, and the relatively thin and trebly output from both of them rarely flatters modeled and DI sounds. But I really liked the tones that I tracked with just the ZEQD-Pre and the DAW—especially without a modeled amp in the mix. The EQ adds body and tone-shaping versatility, and the boost lends real character and color, inhabiting a sweet space that is neither Fender Princeton nor Vox AC15, but which possess some of the smooth richness of the former and the sparkle of the latter. I enjoyed the sound of the ZEQD-Pre direct into the Apollo so much that it ceased to feel like a compromise between amp and modeler. Instead, it felt like something unique—an amp with its own very appealing flavor that I would use for its sonic virtues as much as its convenience.
The Verdict
Though I’ll opt for a tube amp in almost any situation where there is a choice, I’ve warmed to some of our faux-amp friends in the digital domain. That said, I think I would choose the ZEQD-Pre and my pedals over almost any modeler. In direct-to-DAW situations, the ZEQD-Pre is warm, alive, and sounds, well, a lot like a real amp. It also feels like it was designed by people that know how a tube amp should feel under the fingers and in a room.
The ZEQD-Pre makes distortion and fuzz units sound like their real selves. And even without a simulated power amp, the cab sim makes rigs sound great through flat response monitors. The ZEQD is nearly $400, and for most of us, that’s a hefty enough sum to give pause. But the U.S.-made ZEQD-Pre is designed by gifted builders that have poked around the innards of amps and stompboxes for years and built classics in their respective fields. So, you can rest assured that the bars this pedal needed to clear in sonic and quality terms are high ones. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed—to the point where $399 seemed a very reasonable price to pay. And if you’re a tube amp loyalist navigating the worlds of backline-free gigging and digital recording, you may end up similarly smitten.
When Japanese engineer Susumu Tamura designed the Maxon OD808 overdrive, he could hardly have known that it and its export twin, the Ibanez TS808 Tube Screamer, would become perhaps the most influential and, probably, imitated pedals in stomp box history. In fact, upon its introduction in 1979, the Tube Screamer, whose smooth sound is characterized by a bass roll off, midrange bump, and slight high-end attenuation, was not an instant success. But as the pedal was adopted by players as disparate as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Kirk Hammett, it gradually became a ubiquitous presence on pedalboards of all persuasions.
Vintage Verified founders Jon Roncolato (left) and Zach Ziemer
We don’t often talk about Renaissance high art and ’50s rock ’n’ roll guitars in the same breath, unless we’re forming a new rockabilly-prog band called Hot-Rod Maximus. (You’re welcome.) But in the modern world of art and guitar collecting, items reputed to be the work of either Leonardo Da Vinci or Leo Fender are subject to much the same scrutiny from experts in the field, are known for fetching vast prices from discriminating buyers, and, given the millions of dollars potentially involved in even a single sale, are likewise expected to stand up to the most rigorous high-tech scientific analysis, as well. Right?
Well, almost. While the worlds of high art, medicine, astronomy, police forensics, and environmentalism have all taken that last cue to heart by making data-driven determinations with the latest tools of chemical analysis, the vintage guitar market—and its many rightfully respected authorities—has generally proven resistant to sharing the process of authentication with the likes of spectrometers, microscopes, and 3D imaging, tools that have long proven their worth in identifying the material composition of everything from planets to polyps to paint thinners. Black lights on the backs of headstocks have typically been about the latest “tech" in the room.
Until now. In a story that feels ripped from The Da Vinci Code or Cold Case Files, two remarkably down-to-earth—if undeniably intrepid—guitar-shop guys from Nashville, Jon Roncolato and Zach Ziemer, have quietly upended the vintage-guitar market in a matter of months. Fueled by rotating batches of fresh-ground coffee, an abundance of nerve, and a stomach for study, they’ve tapped some of the most advanced and expensive analytical machines available to capture, catalog, and compare hundreds of thousands of data points from countless vintage and modern instruments—their lacquers, pigments, pots, pegs, pickups, and parts—building the largest dataset for guitar-component and finish comparison in existence.
In the process, they’ve issued a gentle nudge to dealers, appraisers, and collectors—and yes, they’ve even shifted the status of some long-held vintage “treasures.” Although they no longer appraise or sell instruments themselves, they’ve still managed to ruffle a few feathers and attract more than a few legal threats. At the same time, they’ve leveraged their diligence and strong reputations to assemble a trusted advisory team made up of some of the most respected minds in guitars, art, and hard science: icons like repair guru Joe Glaser, cultural-heritage scientist Dr. Tom Tague (who authenticated Da Vinci’s “lost masterpiece” Salvator Mundi), Music City session legend Tom Bukovac, pickup mastermind Ron Ellis, and analytical chemist Dr. Gene Hall, among others.
Vintage Duco reference/research materials
Jon and Zach are guarded about the technology, as you might expect. They don’t post selfies, they don’t have a podcast, and they won’t be starting one. As Ziemer puts it, they’d much rather “keep our heads down and keep hammering away” with laser-based spectrometers, plumb the deepest secrets of Fullerton red Strats, and compare the chemical makeup of Duco paints (ironically, both Pollock and Fender’s mutual go-to.) In their scrupulously clean Nashville HQ—which will expand to offices in L.A. and N.Y.C. in 2026—they seem pretty resigned to their current controversial status, and remain motivated primarily by going after, y'know, the truth.
Okay, that and a good cup of coffee.
What was the genesis of this idea to apply these types of cultural heritage sciences to vintage guitars? Is the problem with inaccuracies, refinishes, and forgeries really that widespread?
Jon Roncolato: We met while I was the GM at Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville. We initially hired Zach as part of the inspection team. It’s difficult to find people who have logged enough time examining vintage instruments to truly know what they’re looking at, but Zach had spent a couple years at Glaser Instruments—the go-to shop for repairs on high-dollar pieces.
When Zach became Head of Authentication, we began seeing questionable instruments come through with six-figure price tags that other experts had already signed off on. When you have a six-figure instrument and multiple experts all saying different things, you’ve got a problem. That’s when we realized there had to be a better way to do this—something grounded in science, not speculation.
Zach Ziemer: Everybody misses now and again. Most dealers are trying their absolute hardest with their experience, eye, and gut to tell an original from a fake or a refin. There’s simply some things you just can’t know unless you look at them with the kinds of tools that we’re bringing to the table. And it shouldn’t be that controversial: after all, literally every other collectible industry has a third party unassociated service like ours. The most obvious one is PSA with collectible sports cards. PSA is a little different than it used to be, but everybody still sees a sports card and a PSA box and if it says, “PSA 9,” for instance, you know you’re probably in good shape.
“In the art world, scientific validation has long been standard practice—pigment analysis, canvas fiber studies, dimensional scans. Sometimes it changes the story. That’s not an attack on tradition. It’s the pursuit of truth.” —George Gruhn, Gruhn Guitars
Jon Roncolato: In the art world, if you don’t have both iron-clad provenance and scientific analysis, it’s not possible to certify a piece as unequivocally “by the hand” of a given artist. Art dealers are very specific about their language, and there’s a whole hierarchy of degrees of certainty that directly correlate to the price of the piece. In the world of dealing guitars, though, even if you’re not 100% sure, you have to absolutely stake all your credibility on a guitar, even if there’s some doubt. You're not going to sell a $250,000 custom color Fender if you come out and say, “Well, I think it's a custom color. It looks good to me.” So that's just been the structure of the industry. Being in the underbelly of the whole thing, as we were, we realized what a big problem this was.
There must have been a ridiculous learning curve. You guys are guitar dudes, not scientists. Takes a bit of brass to bite off something like that, no?
Jon Roncolato: We have a framed quote in the kitchen from Wilbur Wright: "There are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse: one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met. The other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile, and then retire to the house." We chose the former.
That said, we spent the first year and a half offering no services at all—just studying the science. That included week-long training seminars where everyone but us had a doctorate attached to their name, and consulting with the top experts in the cultural heritage field.
We also didn’t get here alone. We caught a major break by connecting with Dr. Tom Tague and Dr. Gene Hall, two of the world’s leading experts in analytical chemistry. They took us under their wing and gave us a crash course in PhD-level material analysis.
Zach Ziemer: I can't even express how difficult it was to make heads or tails of any of this at first. Jon and I were not chemists, and a lot of what we do now is largely analytical chemistry. So the learning curve on that was incredibly steep. We always joked that we were smart enough to have the idea, but dumb enough to think we could do it. And while this process exists in other industries, the finished instrument industry is totally unique. The instruments are so modular, and you have finishes, plastics, hardware, pickups, and so you have to have an answer for all that information.
Jon Roncolato: That’s right. The process is designed to have an answer for anything and everything on the instrument. The headstock decals, the finish, the hardware, the fret wire, the fingerboard inlays—we have a data-driven answer for everything. That was really critical, because we didn't want to give incomplete information. Another absolutely critical principle for us was that anything we put in one of these reports has to be defensible in court. If we get subpoenaed to go to court, which inevitably we will, we need to know that Zach or I can show up and we can defend this and prove this. Our other guiding principle is that we remain completely independent, and not touch the buying and selling of the instruments.
“Vintage Verified is doing what we couldn’t do 20 years ago. They’re bringing in real tools—from forensics, from art conversation, from aerospace—and applying them to guitars. And it’s not about replacing experience. It’s about supporting it.” —Joe Glaser, Glaser Guitars
The workshop
Fair enough. So, what’s the most difficult or highly sensitive area of your analysis?
Jon Roncolato: Finish is easily the most complicated part of what we do, an absolute maze of information, and it’s also where you see the biggest value swings. Traditionally, if a guitar’s been refinished, the rule of thumb is that it cuts the value in half. Nowadays, it probably cuts the value by 40%. But if you start talking about custom colors, like a Fender Sonic Blue Strat, or the Fullerton red we have in our lab right now, this Strat here is probably a $250,000 Strat, assuming the finish is original. If the finish is, in fact, not legitimate, then potentially you’re looking at a $20,000 Strat.
And to determine this, you don’t just need that guitar’s own fingerprint, if you will, but you need to be able to conduct comparative analysis against a bulwark of trustworthy data. Where does that come from?
Jon Roncolato: We’ve been very fortunate to have guys like Joe Glaser and George Gruhn in our corner, who put their own cred on the line to help us scan and analyze literally thousands of vintage guitars, plus Dr. Gene Hall, whose work decoding Jackson Pollock paintings means he has the largest collection and database of period-correct Duco, Ditzler, R-M, Sherwin Williams, etc. paints on the planet, the same paints Fender used in their golden era. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We now have millions of data points across several different machines, a good $500,000 worth of spectrometers alone. We spent eight hours a day, all day, every day, collecting data as much as we possibly could.
So is it very much a one-to-one comparison? “This finish’s chemical composition is true to the year this guitar purports to be, so we’re good”? Or is it more complex than that?
Zach Ziemer: A little of both. Sure, the data that I just grabbed matches the aggregate of the given model/era pretty well, so therefore we can say with a high degree of certainty that it’s a period-correct material. But what really blew the doors open for us was when we got past that level, and started to have a fundamental understanding of these lacquer formulations, how various formulations over time were degrading, and how the different components in a lacquer formulation—plasticizers, pigments, etc.—all interact and evolve. How did those components morph over time?
If the government set regulations, what was the regulation attached to? If you look at a spectrum of a given lacquer, you’ll have hundreds of chemical compounds. A ton of information in there. What we had to do was figure out which chemical compounds were going to be chief identifiers of who was using what, and when. Building out this timeline for the major manufacturers was the bulk of our work, just as much as developing an understanding of the complexity of the materials. In other words, the data is only valuable if you understand the materials that are producing the data.
You’ve encountered some backlash, and even dealers who later became supporters initially had their lawyers on the phone. What’s your message to dealers, appraisers, collectors, working players, and the business as a whole?
Jon Roncolato: We knew there would be a significant amount of skepticism and backlash early on, just as there always is around a new service or technology. It’s like the wagon wheel salesman in the age of the automobile. Zach and I think they’ll come around eventually. One positive aspect of our service is that it allows buyers who would otherwise not feel comfortable spending large amounts of money on a piece to now buy with confidence. For years, many people at the top of the market wouldn’t buy custom color Fenders, wouldn’t buy Flying Vs. Because they were largely under the impression that many of them are refins or counterfeit pieces. So, already we’ve seen that many of these people who previously were not buying custom colors, bursts, or whatever, are now joining that market again because they have the trust that these are authentic.
Zach Ziemer: Our mission is to make sure that the data and the information we provide is absolutely correct. That’s our lane. We're not the guitar police. We are not policing transactions, and we do not appraise or assign any type of valuation, monetary or otherwise, to any instrument, ever. We’re hoping that we can help dealers begin to understand that this is designed to be an asset. It’s designed to help you protect yourself. And look, as soon as we print out a report, and I hand it to you, you can throw it in the garbage if you want. But it’s an option for you. Ultimately, it’s something that we believe helps give people the confidence to buy and sell high-value instruments, and know exactly what they’re getting.
Most people think of samplers as drum machines with delusions of grandeur—four-bar loops, predictable patterns, and neatly sliced bits living forever in the prison of the grid. But for me, samplers and loopers are something completely different. They’re instruments of disruption. They’re creative accelerants. They’re circuit breakers designed to shock me out of my comfort zone and force my compositions, productions, and performances into strange, exhilarating new shapes.
One of my favorite studio practices—and something I encourage my Recording Dojo readers to experiment with—is to sample your performances. Not a preset library, not a pack from somebody else, but use your own melodic lines, motifs, rhythms, textures, and half-formed ideas. There’s something magical about hearing your own musical DNA come back to you in an unfamiliar, mutated form. It’s like collaborating with a version of yourself from an alternate timeline.
The real thrill isn’t about capturing pristine performances. In fact, it’s often the opposite: I’ll grab a phrase that’s imperfect, or mid-gesture, or harmonically unresolved, and drop it into a sampler purely to see what it becomes. When you do this, your musical habits—your well-worn licks, default rhythms, and predictable choices—don’t stand a chance. The sampler shreds them, recontextualizes them, and hands them back as raw material for re-writing, re-arranging, or composing something that never would have emerged in a linear workflow.
Sometimes the transformation is subtle—a lick becomes a rhythmic ostinato, a sustain becomes a pad, a passing tone becomes a focal point. Other times the sampler just mangles it, spits it out sideways, and you think, ‘Oh… now that’s interesting.’ Either way, it becomes a tool for breaking patterns, both musically and psychologically.
My Process: Mutations, Not Replications
My approach to sampling isn’t any more complicated than anyone else’s. I’m not using some secret, elite technique. I’m simply collecting fragments—little melodic cells, rhythmic quirks, harmonic gestures—and giving them permission to misbehave.
I’ll chop up key licks into uneven slices, or isolate just the back half of a phrase, or extract a rhythmic hiccup that wouldn’t survive in a normal editing session. Then I reassemble these bits with the expectation that they won’t behave. I want mutations. I want the musical equivalent of genetic drift. I’m not trying to color within the lines; I’m trying to see what happens when I throw the coloring book across the room.
Once the sampler gives me something intriguing, I run these new creatures through chains of further processing: glitch delays that stutter and fold the sound into origami-like shapes, micro-loopers feeding into overdrives or fuzz pedals, shimmering reverbs that stretch a 200-millisecond blip into a widescreen texture. The result can be anything from a ghostly sustained pad to a snarling, percussive accent, to a completely alien harmonic bed.
You can use these elements as alternate melodic lines, counterpoint, ambient beds, transitions, ear candy, or even structural material for entire songs. And because the source is you, the end result stays connected to your musical identity—just bent, twisted, and refracted into something fresh.
Outcome Independence: The Spirit Behind the Process
If there’s one thing that makes this approach powerful, it’s letting go of the expectation that what you sample must “work.” This is pure experimentation, not product-driven crafting.
I’m outcome-independent when I do this. I’m not looking for a result so much as engaging in the joy of the unknown. Some days nothing meaningful emerges. Other days I strike gold. But either way, the process sharpens my creative instincts. It keeps me curious.
“There's something magical about hearing your own musical DNA come back to you in an unfamiliar, mutated form.”
I use this same strategy when producing artists or working on film and soundtrack material. Recently, I applied it to pedal steel—an instrument known for its lyrical beauty—and the resulting textures were … well, not beautiful in the traditional sense. They were fractured, shadowy, almost Jekyll-and-Hyde. Perfect for a track built around the duality of personality. The clients absolutely loved the unpredictable, emotive soundscape those mutated pedal steel lines created.
Some Favorite Tools for Sonic Mutation
You don’t need a million pieces of gear to do this. A single sampler and a single effects chain can take you far. But here are a few of my favorite “chaos engines,” all of which I own and use regularly:
• Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field – A sampler, synth, tape machine, and chaos generator disguised as a minimalist art object. Its sampling engine and tape modes are perfect for tonal mutations.
• Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II – A quick, dirty, wonderfully immediate sampler for slicing, punching, and recombining your ideas without overthinking.
• Omnisphere 3 – The granular engine alone is a goldmine for turning simple samples into cinematic, evolving textures.
• NI Maschine – Still one of the fastest environments for grabbing a sound, flipping it, and building an idea around the unexpected.
• …and whatever else you have lying around. The point is exploration, not allegiance to any one workflow.
Final Thoughts
Sampling your own voice as an instrumentalist—and then breaking it—reminds you that creativity doesn’t live in the safe, predictable spaces. It lives in the moments where you lose control just enough to discover something new. Give your sampler permission to surprise you, confuse you, and sometimes even challenge your sense of what you sound like. That’s where the good stuff begins.
Reverb and delay. What two effects are better suited to live side-by-side in one pedal? Source Audio’s new Encounter reverb and delay is a mirror image of the company’s Collider, which explores the reverb/delay combo via a vintage lens. The mirror by which Encounter reflects the Collider, however, is more like the funhouse variety. There are many psychedelic, cosmic, and wildly refracted echoes to utilize in the Encounter. There are lots of practical ones that can be tuned to subtle ends, too. But Encounter’s realm-of-the-extra-real extras make it a companion for players that ply dreamy musical seas. It’s incredibly fun, a great spark for creativity, and, most certainly, a place to lose oneself.
Exponentially Unfolding
Of Encounter’s six reverb modes and six delay modes, four of them—the hypersphere, shimmers, and trem verb reverbs, and the kaleidoscope delay—are entirely new. Hypersphere, fundamentally, makes reverberations more particulate. Source Audio says it’s a reverb without direct reflections. In their most naked state, these reverberations can still sound a touch angular and perhaps not quite as ghostly and fluid as “no direct reflections” suggests. But they are still complex, appealing, immersive sounds. Odd reverberation clusters can conjure a confused sense of space and highlight different overtones and frequency peaks in random ways. At settings where you can hear this level of detail, hypersphere shines, particularly in spacious solo phrases. Hypersphere also features phase rate and pitch modulation depth functions via the control 1 and control 2 knobs, and they can further accent and enhance those frequency peaks, creating intoxicating, deep fractal reflection systems.
“Blends of the delay and reverb are the kind of places where you can lose track of a rainy day.”
The new trem verb mode can be practical or insane. The two effects together are a pillar of vintage electric guitar atmospherics. But the Encounter’s trem verb explodes those templates. As with the hypersphere mode, trem verb can zest simple chord melodies by using extreme effect settings at low mixes, where chaotic, half-hidden patterns dip in and out of the shadows, sometimes creating eerie counterpoint. But I loved trem verb most at extremes—mostly high mix, feedback, and decay settings with really slow modulation. Sounds here can be intense and vague—like strobe flashes piercing drifting fog. It might not be an ideal place to indulge fast, technical fretwork, but it’s a wonderland for exploring overtones, drone, and melodic possibilities.
Incidentally, the trem verb is a great match for the six delays, and the new kaleidoscope delay in particular, which fractures and scatters repeats in a million possible directions and spaces. Blends of the delay and reverb are the kind of places where you can lose track of a rainy day. The sound permutations often seem endless, and finding magic can take some attention and patience. But you can strike gold fast, too. You have to take care to save settings you really love (you can store as many as eight presets on board, and 128 total via midi) because it’s hard to resist the urge to meander through— and meditate on—hours of sound without stopping. Not all of the Encounter’s sounds are perfectly pleasing. Some combinations reveal peaky little chirps that betray digital origins—the merits of which are subjective and contextual. For the most part, though, the combined sounds are liquid and vividly complex, and can be especially enveloping at high mix and feedback.
Extended Reach
If the onboard controls don’t get you in enough trouble, downloading the Neuro 3 app, which unlocks deep control and functionality, is a minor wormhole. Take the case of trem verb—you can use Neuro 3 to change the wave shape or set up the reverb to affect the wet signal only, just the dry signal, or both of them. All of these changes open up a new system of tone caves as the sound evolves. If you’re deep in the nuance of a mix or arrangement, this functionality can be invaluable. And it’s a boon if you have nothing but time on your hands. In a state of engaged, intuitive workflow, I like to avoid these kinds of app dives. But having that much extended power on your phone or computer is impressive.
Neuro 3 extends the capability of the Encounter in other ways, too. The SoundCheck tool within Encounter is home to prerecorded loops of various instruments that you can then route through a virtual Encounter pedal. That means you can explore Encounter’s potential while stuck in a train station. It’s a real asset if you want to understand the pedal as completely as possible, and certainly a way to extract the most value from the unit’s considerable $399 price.
The Verdict
About that price. It looks steep. For most of us, it’s a significant investment. But when I consider how many sounds I found in the Encounter, how compact it is, and the possibilities that it opens up in performance and portable production (especially when you factor in the stereo ins and outs), that investment seems pretty sound. I must qualify all this by saying I was happiest with the Encounter when exploring its spaciest places—the kind of atmospheric layer where Spacemen 3, ambient producers, 1969 Pink Floyd, and slow-soul balladeers all hang. But there is room to roam for precision pickers that background radical effects, too.
Still looking to justify the cash outlay? Consider the Encounter as a portable outboard post-production and mixing asset. If you’re creating music built on big, shape-shifting ambience, it’s a cool thing to have in your bag of tricks. Different artists will mine more from the Encounter than others, so you should consider our ratings scores on a sliding scale. But as you contemplate the Encounter, be sure to factor in mystery paths that will beckon when you dive in. There’s lots of fuel for creation along most of them.
