Quest objectives that can be failed

[Goblin-King]

A different take could be to simply make an impossible goal on purpose to set the heroes up.

Rescue Sir Richard. But when the heroes arrive he has already been killed. The heroes are accused of siding with the enemy.
Recover the treasure. It's all been spent. The Prince accuses you of harboring the gold.
Kill the Chaos lord. He actually turns out to be an important political figure. Switch to his side and fail or assassinate an innocent man and win?

[The Road Warrior]

Kill the Chaos lord. He actually turns out to be an important political figure. Switch to his side and fail or assassinate an innocent man and win?

That is actually a very interesting moral choice for the players to have to make.
I'm not sure how you could convincingly set a story up where an important political figure could be mistaken for a Chaos lord. Maybe it would work well as a quest or quest pack in the Chronicles of Sir Ragnar?

[Count Mohawk]

That is actually a very interesting moral choice for the players to have to make.
I'm not sure how you could convincingly set a story up where an important political figure could be mistaken for a Chaos lord. Maybe it would work well as a quest or quest pack in the Chronicles of Sir Ragnar?

Doesn't a similar scenario play out in [url=forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=982]Champion de l'Empire[/url]? The Heroes have to decide which of the feuding nobles they should give the Crown of the Rooster King. Choosing wrong sets them on a path to darkness...

[TMU]

Kill the Chaos lord. He actually turns out to be an important political figure. Switch to his side and fail or assassinate an innocent man and win?

That is actually a very interesting moral choice for the players to have to make.
I'm not sure how you could convincingly set a story up where an important political figure could be mistaken for a Chaos lord. Maybe it would work well as a quest or quest pack in the Chronicles of Sir Ragnar?

Take it like Putin does, you go against him and he puts you to prison The emperor wants this political person put down for objecting him, but tells the heroes he is a chaos lord so that the emperor himself can't be blamed.

[cynthialee]

Kill the Chaos lord. He actually turns out to be an important political figure. Switch to his side and fail or assassinate an innocent man and win?

That is actually a very interesting moral choice for the players to have to make.
I'm not sure how you could convincingly set a story up where an important political figure could be mistaken for a Chaos lord. Maybe it would work well as a quest or quest pack in the Chronicles of Sir Ragnar?

Take it like Putin does, you go against him and he puts you to prison The emperor wants this political person put down for objecting him, but tells the heroes he is a chaos lord so that the emperor himself can't be blamed.

make him an ex law enforcement officer with manacles
he rolls Body points in combat dice looking for a Walrus Tusk to cuff a Hero
when him and his deputy (what I didn't tell you he had back up? my bad...) get cuffs on all the heroes he refuses to let the heroes free until they all agree to listen to his tale and see his evidence, which of course should be incriminating as hell on some beloved local lord or magistrate...

[Super Saiyan Musashi]

I can think of a few situations from Shining Force 3 with unusual objectives. I could see them being used for Hero Quest as well.

In several battles, there's a side mission to obtain some rare items from an old temple/cave/pyramid. When your team enters, several thieves present themselves and declare their desire for the treasures. Thieves often use different entrances from the heroes, so faster heroes need to catch up with the thieves in time. Some treasures are kept in locked chests that only characters with certain skills can open. Naturally, the thieves have these skills. In Shining Force, none of the recruitable allies are Thief class, so the only way to get the treasures in lock boxes is to mug the thieves after they open them, but if this were adapted for Hero Quest I could see the Dwarf (or certain fan-made classes) being able to open them too. Shining Force has a rule that the ruins collapse after all of the thieves escape or are defeated.

There are times in Shining Force 3 where there is a secret objective to defeat the boss of a level without killing one of the other opposing characters. Usually the story is that one of the hostiles is a friend or potential friend who is under a spell or being blackmailed, so the right thing to do is to save them in spite of their attacks. I could see Hero Quest having a level where you have to defeat the real enemy without killing the coerced attacker.

[Anderas]

I am cleaning out my cupboard.
Among other things, I am throwing away my Masssive Darkness game. It had not the game play nor the graphics nor the rules I expected when I backed the Kickstarter.
They attempted to introduce a "hide in the dark a patrol is coming" kind of gameplay; which they subsequently discarded for some reason. Then they delivered a game that had two sets of rules, one for dark and one for light zones but there was no hiding anymore for most of the game.

However, there are some missions which are interesting because you can fail them or because they are otherwise creative. I want to salvage the ideas for my heroquest and I store them here.

* Guardian:
A monster stands and stays on a bridge. That bridge fails slowly (it has 3 pillars, you roll a die, on a 6+ the pillar loses one BP, once it lost 4 BP it breaks and the next die roll goes against the next pillar). So this introduces time pressure. Never mind that the exit is on the other side of the bridge.

* There is a quest with moving hallways. If heroes or monsters end their turn on these squares, they are getting moved around the central chamber by a number of squares equalling their normal total movement. They have to try to get into this central chamber, but for that they have to access four points on the map and do something there - not easy if you're constantly being moved. I imagine combining it with some room entrance blockers that take a turn to remove; stone door; monster standing in the way; Spear Trap, things like that.
Never mind the monsters never stop to harass you of course. So this movement rule has a great potential for group separation; which makes everything more difficult. No "I take my time I search for everything, THEN I move".

* Capturing Monsters:
In Massive Darkness, the "roaming Monsters" are the biggest, meanest things. You either kill them fast or you have to continuously run away if you want a chance for survival. Now. What if you have to capture some of them? The monsters of course don't stop fighting. So it will be a difficult balance between fighting for survival and accidentally killing the monster or trying to capture it with an artifact that only one of the heroes posessses. The capturing with a net shouldn't be automatic, it can be on a roll of a black shield on a combat die, so that you have to fight it some rounds or you just endure a quite deadly pounding for some rounds. Alternatively, you lose the net once the attempt fails. You can always run back to some kind of storage for getting the next net, but the hero carrying the net has to use one of his hands for it (no shield or no battle axe with a net) and can't carry two nets
Never mind if you miss one or two of those, they respawn as soon as you killed the last one. Heroes have to face the decision, probably the first time in their lifes, to continue trying or fleeing and coming back for another try

[Bareheaded Warrior]

Make an objective that is dependant on the use of a particular item that you have to locate or is scarce/unique.

This could either be like the 'find the Spirit Blade', 'use it to Kill the Witch Lord' quest objective combo but within the same Quest, so that the possibility exists that you may locate the big bad before you have found the necessary item and therefore have to beat a retreat and fail the objective.

Or you are given an item by Mentor such as a vial of sacred water, or a special potion, that has to be poured into a sarcophagus to destroy a sleeping entity, if that is used or lost prior to the main event then your objective will be failed by default (maybe this is just a variant of the 'fragile item' scenario already called out)