Prince Magnus' Gold - what is this and how do I fix it?

[Zenithfleet]

G'day all,

Prince Magnus' Gold is the one quest in the basic game that has always really bothered me. It's so tedious. Hardly anything happens on the loooong spiralling journey to the centre of the board. Then, when all the enemies are dead, you're apparently meant to slog your way out carrying the treasure chests and rolling only 1 die each. Even as kids, we used to end this quest once we reached the chests in the centre. There was obviously no point in walking all the way back--we could just assume we made it safely.

It's a very weird design that falls flat, and frankly isn't up to the standards of the other quests.

It honestly feels like the designer intended something else to happen while you carry the chests back to the stairs, but decided not to include it for some reason. Rolling only 1 die for movement means nothing unless you have some reason to be worried about being slowed down. The long, sparse, spiralling layout feels like it's setup for some later event that never occurs. It reminds me of 'The Spiral Passages' from Kellar's Keep, where you're pursued by infinite monsters ... only without the monsters.

The other possibility is that there's supposed to be some player-versus-player fighting over the chests (three chests but four heroes, and carrying a chest means you can be easily overtaken and attacked by the player without one). But even though the EU game is generally set up to allow and even expect competition, this particular quest has never inspired anyone I've played it with into PvP action, for some reason.

Incidentally, being outlawed and never being able to be a Champion means nothing much in the 2nd ed EU game since the gold reward for becoming a Champion was removed in the 2nd edition. Although I suppose it stops you hiring Men-at-Arms in Wizards of Morcar, which could be amusing if you add MaA into the game right from the start instead of waiting until that quest pack.


Anyway, I decided to take a stab at improving this quest by having a 'flee from the monsters' section at the end:


Quest note addition (EU terminology)
If the players search the centre room for traps and secret doors, tell them that there is a hidden trapdoor in the ceiling on the square marked A. They cannot move through this trapdoor. At the start of each of your turns after the players have picked up the chests, you may place an Orc or Goblin on the square marked A if it is vacant. If a character is on the square, he loses 1 Body point instead.

A character carrying a treasure chest may drop it on an adjacent square if he wishes. If he is eliminated, place the chest he was carrying on the square where he was killed. Remember that monsters cannot move treasure chests or move through them.


This effectively forces the players to hurry back to the stairs as best they can, pursued by a steady stream of monsters.

I tried it twice controlling all the models, without doing much fancy stuff (like spells etc)--just rolling and running to see what happened.

Because three of the players will now be rolling only 1 die each, the Orcs and Goblins will be able to catch up to them, although it can take a while. In practice, with the natural variance in die rolls, one hero tends to fall behind and gets caught around the top of the map. If an Orc or Goblin can delay a hero by getting in front of him at the two-square-wide corridor and blocking a door for a turn or two, that hero might be in trouble. On both tries, I lost the Barbarian on the way out before he could get as far as the pit traps (but nobody else was sticking around to help him).

Rolling only 1 die for movement is surprisingly tense and swingy. There's a big difference between moving 1 square and 6 squares when monsters are chasing you, and both are equally likely results. On 2 dice, your move is likely to be 6-8 squares and is far more predictable.

Although I didn't use them in the tests, the Pass Through Rock and Swift Wind spells become very valuable for the escape dash, as is Sleep because the sleeping monster will block its square and delay the others behind it. Pass Through Rock can get a hero back to the stairs quickly via a shortcut through the lower right corridor on the map.

This variant also makes use of that cryptic rule in the 2nd ed EU rulebook that says "Monsters may not move treasure chests." In one of my two test games, the Barbarian died in a doorway and the chest he was carrying blocked it off, allowing the rest of the heroes to get away. Unfortunately the one who wasn't carrying a chest had already absconded up the stairs, so couldn't grab the chest to make sure the Prince got all his gold back.

I wouldn't say it's the most amazing experience in the world--it takes quite a while to escape, and counting all the moves of Goblins and Orcs gets dull--but I do think it's more interesting than the empty void of nothing that this quest is otherwise. If you have a better idea, let me know!

[Kurgan]

We've had similar discussions about the Rescue of Sir Ragnar (the App even goes further and just ends the quest the instant he hits the stairs! whatever happened to looting the rest of the dungeon as you take your sweet time before exiting? yes, it's anti-climactic if you kill all the monsters before you save him and thus nobody hears the alarm and it's a cakewalk back home, but still...).

I figure the original idea was to have kind of a "breather" after the previous difficult quest. The main target demographic originally was 9 & 10 year olds...

Because when you're a little kid, you are singing songs and dreaming about all the awesome stuff you're going to buy with the reward as you carry the chests back to the stairway (we always balanced those treasure chests on the ends of the weapons... it fit perfectly with the old set, yet another thing that doesn't work with the remake!).

We ALWAYS rolled our way back to the stairs. It was like a victory lap. If you gave up before that you forfeited the reward!

Adults are like "hurry up! can't we just call it a night, let's goooo... we won already! come ooooon... I'm so booooooored!!! etc" The sadness of sophistication and age I guess. :/

You can always play one of the revamps of it where the chests are spread out and you have to fight every inch for each one and add extra hidden rooms of monsters that chase you to the end if you want it to be non-stop action.

If it were a video game, you either would be holding down a button so it skips the cutscene and fast forwards to the end, or you'd be hanging around making sure to loot every last inch of the quest to get 100% loot. lol

People also hate the Castle of Mystery even though it has one of the coolest gimmicks ever. But that's why they gave you the Ring of Return to make it a little less painful if you keep rolling the wrong numbers (after the EU edition had no such bonus).

[wallydubbs]

One thing I did to up the ante of this quest was to add a footnote at the start of the quest that the heroes spotted a hunting party leaving the cave system just before entering the dungeon.
Let them forget about this as they play through the quest but once the heroes grab the chests and leave the middle room roll 2 red dice, whatever it is notify the heroes that they have that many turns to leave. The 3 he heroes carrying the chests will be significantly slowed down and wouldn't possibly be able to make it out. Once the number of turns have passed rolled 1 red die:
3 goblins race in from the spiral staircase
2 goblins, 1 orc
1 goblin, 2 orcs
2 goblins, 1 fimir
1 goblin, 1 orc, 1 fimir
2 orcs, 1 fimir

This'll leave 1 hero forced to defend the other 3 as they try to make their way to the stairwell.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

I'm currently "revisiting" the Quest Packs, starting with the Game System, and tweaking them to take into account my own ruleset HeroQuest Gold and also errata and common complaints and have know got as far as this one.

The revised Quest Book, so far, is available on the HeroQuest Gold: Quests topic.

The main issues that I see with Prince Magnus's Gold, most of which have already been pointed out are as follows;

1) Long path - The path to complete the Quest is long, roughly twice the length of any previous quest, and there appears to be no thematic reason for this.

Resolution: Tweak the Quest Map to remove or shorten some of the longest, boring stretches of uneventful passages and possibly add another exit or short cut for the way back.

2) The path through the dungeon is very linear, aside from a couple of short dead-end paths, the rest of the path is too linear, which leaves little opportunity for exploration and/or choosing to split the group.

Resolution: Add in at least one alternate path or loop to bring a little more opportunity for exploration

3) The use of a secret door, splitting the dungeon in half, that MUST be found in order to complete the Quest, has the potential to result in a lot of time spent backtracking and searching already covered ground.

Resolution: Replace the Secret Door with a normal door.

4) Moving Furniture - It introduces the concept that you can move chests, which the general rules don't allow, but the rules for handling this are limited, the roll only 1 movement die, makes the long exit path even longer, and there is nothing to cover other effects of carrying a chest, can you attack and defend as usual, and what happens if you choose to put the chest down, as it presumably then blocks movement. The quest objective of needing to specifically retrieve the chest(s) and ALL the gold feels a little contrived as you would imagine Prince Magnus would be keen on the recovery his 750gc but there is no obvious reason why he is so attached to his chests. The objective written to specifically include the chests, then means that you have to build in rules to handle the Quest specific exception of moving chests, changing the wording of the objective would remove the need to include an exception for moving the furniture.

5) The Penalty - The penalty for taking the gold is that you cannot become a champion, originally from the First Edition, where you receive 500gc reward for becoming a champion, which makes sense in that context* but this reward was removed in the implementation of the Second Edition so it no longer makes sense in the context of Second Edition.
*Almost makes sense except that both First and Second Eedition state that you become a Champion after your third successful Quest, so as PM's Gold is the 4th Quest in the Quest book you may have already become a Champion. Plus even under First Eedition, there is nothing preventing one hero stealing the contents of all 3 chests 750gc and still being 250gc up!

Two possible resolutions here (A) is the simplest whilst (B) is the closest to the original

(A) Resolution: Open Chests: Scrap the exception around moving chests and let the heroes take the gold out of the chests like usual and recover the gold that way. As there is no real penalty for stealing the gold, then rework the objective so that it is the gold that needs to be recovered and it cannot be kept, but other treasure found within the dungeon can be (plenty of other Quests have a similar form, Star of the West, cannot be kept, but other treasure can be)

(B) Resolution: Closed Caskets: Replace all references to "chests" with an alternate word such as "caskets" (small chests for holding valuables) and make the caskets magically sealed, so no reference is needed to the contents. This would mean you don't need to make an exception to the rules around chests, the heroes cannot open the caskets, and could carry them with or without penalty (and potentially one casket would be sufficient)

[The Admiral]

It's actually not too bad a quest. I don't mind the long route, and while it is mostly linear, there are three trap infested false side paths. Every quest doesn't have to have the same feel to it. Also, for only the 4th quest, the final room is actually a slight challenge .

The gold carrying thing is nonsense though.

Or is it? By lucky chance the reward is 10gc less than the contents of one chest, and there are only 3 chests and 4 heroes. What if the heroes can't agree on whether to be good or bad? Maybe the designer was just dropping this in early, before the team was fully bonded, to see if some inter hero conflict might arise?

either way I don't see the quest as faulty, beyond the inherent easiness of the Base Game quests, but that's another issue.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

The long route bothers me, because it is ~2x the length of the previous quests (~3x if you take into account the movement penalty of carrying the chests) which makes it tricky to schedule as a family game, the preceding (and most of the later, quests take around 90 minutes, we generally started at 19:00 so were finished by 20:30 in time for bed at 21:00 then this one comes along and you are still rolling movement dice at 22:00 which causes an issue for future scheduling!

That said if you are playing with an older group then not so much of an issue (although I still like my bedtime)

But in terms of the reward versus stealing the gold, the reward in SE is 200gc rather than 240gc in NA, but that aside it still doesn't "add up" for me. First hero may well decide to open all 3 chests, keep the 750gc and stroll out the dungeon, making a 700gc profit, the other 3 get nothing. If he decides to share then they'll end up with the mathematically awkward 187.5gc (are there half gold coins?) but they would still be 137.5gc better off than being honest and the Emperor seems to have forgiven them by The Stone Hunter as he is willing to hire them again!

You are correct under Second edition it could cause a descent into anarchy, but whenever I criticise "The Trial" for being too hard for a first quest, I always get told that "it is designed to teach the players a valuable lesson in working together that is important for the later quests" however if that is the case then having the first quest teaching them to work together and the fourth quest rewarding them for falling out seems a case of mixed messages!

Either way my tweaked version is available here (and I went with the simplest option A) but I doubt it will be the final version.

[The Admiral]

Each to their own, but I agree with you on 'The Trial'. I would never send a new group on this quest first, it's a sure way to put some people off and who wants to do that? If I was playing through the Base Game quests again, which I probably will never do, I would put The Trial last, as a final passage to becoming a true hero. I wouldn't start with The Maze either, it's way too easy and boring, I think this might put some off as well. I would go straight for Sir Ragnar as a great first quest.

[Sotiris]

A couple years now i have returned to the European version of the game, remaked with many many houserules.
In this Quest i have made 2 changes:
- Heroes start the Quest from the final room (the one with the chests),
- The corridor Orcs are placed at the other side of the corridor, equipped with bows .

[SirRick]

Here is a slightly modified version of the quest I created on that awesome hquestbuilder program. This is my first time using it, so I don’t know if there are ways I can modify its layout, make the text bigger, etc. I don’t even know if there is a way to save it or share it in some way. Embarrassingly I had to print it and take a picture with my phone.

To summarize, the Heroes have two paths to take from the starting room. The obvious path is fairly short and leads to the boss fight. After the fight the heroes can choose to leave the way they came, carrying the chests a much shorter distance than before. Most Heroes however, like to explore every nook and cranny in an attempt to find more treasure. This means the Heroes might explore the rest of the dungeon while having to carry the chests with them.

I moved one of the spear traps to ensure the Heroes face the same number of traps as in the original quest. The original text is the same, but I added notes B and C for some context. Basically Gulthor and his minions are in the process of moving the chests to the interior of their base (the portion of the dungeon behind secret doors) to a designated treasure room.

The notes are as follows in case you can’t zoom in enough on my photo:
A. Same as the original quest.

B. This Chaos Warrior is Gulthor. He and his followers appear to be moving the chests to another location.

C. This room appears to be a vault or storage area.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

In hQuestBuilder, if you click on any square on your map, and then click on the setting icon (cog) in the top left hand corner and then on the right hand menu click on the book icon and then click on the download icon to download (and save) your files and you can share them that way also.

Or on that same right hand menu you can click on the quill icon and print (to file as a PDF) or print preview and then screenshot to share an image.

In terms of your amended quest, it is important to remember that secret doors may not be found, under both EA and NA versions of the game rules, but especially under NA rules as the search for secret doors is the one most often forgotten (no one forgets to search for treasure, and the odd trap reminds people to search for traps). This would lead to a very short and disappointing 4 room quest in your amended version.

Assuming that they do find the secret doors then I'm not keen on the idea of the heroes navigating the bulk of the dungeon carrying the chests, as soon as they open any door to a room, they could just block the way with a chest, and as monsters cannot move chests, they could then just pick off the monsters at their leisure with a crossbow in total safety

I do like your idea about the chests being locked so the heroes cannot take the gold, that removes one aspect of confusion in the original, but if the chests are locked and the heroes cannot open them, how do they know what the chests contain?