Setup: Add Carcharoth to the staging area. Set Morgoth and all objectives and unique locations aside out of play. Set your threat equal to the number of heroes you control.

Forced: Skip the staging step during the quest phase. Instead, each player must discard the top card of his deck after committing characters to the quest. Add the cost of each discarded card to the total in the staging area until the end of the phase.

If Carcharoth has 0 hit points, advance to stage 2 immediately.