G'day and slightly late season's greetings to you all
Inspired by joec's alternative Questbooks for the North American edition, I've created some new maps for the quests in the European base game. If your Heroes fail a quest and need to replay, hopefully these maps will provide a bit of variety.
I'll post the maps as PNGs in this thread. (I can also supply them as Heroscribe XML files.)
So far I've created new maps for all the Quests in the EU base game except for #1a (The Maze), #12 and #14 (the Barak Tor quests, which I'm frankly nervous about messing with), and #10 (Castle of Mystery, which doesn't need changing for obvious reasons).
You'll notice that the basic layout of each new map is quite similar to the official version - I explain why below.
I haven't playtested these yet, so please let me know if you spot any problems!---
General notes about the alternative EU quest mapsThese new maps are designed to work with the existing Quest Notes in the EU Questbook. They're designed for use when the Heroes fail to complete a Quest (e.g. because they all die) and must retry it.
I've assumed that the Heroes are re-entering the same dungeon they failed to complete a few days or weeks later - or a new band of Heroes is attempting to succeed where their more experienced fellows failed...
The monsters won't have had time to rebuild the whole dungeon, so most of the rooms, corridors and furniture will be in the same place. However, the creatures are likely to have done some hasty spring cleaning -- moving any treasure or prisoners to a new location in the dungeon, posting guards and patrols in different places, digging a few new secret tunnels, and so on.
Because of this, the rooms, corridors and furniture usually match the official EU quests, but the monster, trap and treasure/objective placements have changed.
I've tried to be a bit sneaky and use the players' prior knowledge of the dungeon against them. For instance, they might go looking for the treasure room they found last time, but instead walk into an ambush. Because of this, these maps probably aren't the best choice for the first time a Quest is played. I'd recommend letting players attempt the official Quests first, then using these new maps as 'backup' in case they need to retry.
Most of these Quests should be roughly on par with their official counterparts in terms of difficulty. They usually feature the same number of monsters and traps, just in different places. (The exception is Quest #9, Race Against Time, because I've always found it pretty dull and wanted to give it a bit of a kick up the pants.)
[jump to recovered images -edit]