Ye Olde Inn

by **lucasdp** » January 14th, 2016, 2:08 pm

We're hoping to play Castle of Mystery this weekend, and I like the idea of the lever that can reset the number for the 2/12 door. But I'm thinking of just putting it in the room with the Orcs, rather than behind a secret door.
My reasoning for this is that I usually let the heroes know ahead of time if there are no traps or secret doors, mostly to save time, and there were no secret doors in the original quest.
Or am I thinking about this wrong? Is there a good reason to let the heroes search other rooms in vain and maybe find that one secret door if they search the right room?

(Never played Castle of Mystery before! Looking forward to the new and different mechanics of it!)

You can put it in the same room why not.
The Castle of mystery has one big Problem: finding the exit can take forever. The rest of the quest is quite fun. This is why I placed the lever: with it he Heroes can randomly switch the numbers of the exit and it will hopefully not take forever to get out.
Would you show the heroes which number is where? It would be kind of a prerequisite... OK after the first discovery of a room of course, not before.

The secret door is there because I liked th the thought of a hero group finding the secret control room of the setting. But you're right it has a good chance not to be found, so maybe it is better directly in the room.

by **lucasdp** » January 15th, 2016, 1:35 pm

Yeah, I looked up dice probabilities to prep for this quest:

2 - 2.78%
3 - 5.56%
4 - 8.33%
5 - 11.11%
6 - 13.89%
7 - 16.67%
8 - 13.89%
9 - 11.11%
10 - 8.33%
11 - 5.56%
12 - 2.78%

With that in mind, I agree that giving them the chance to reset the exit door is good if the quest starts to drag.

Yeah, they will have to figure out the room numbers as they go. I'm not going to tell them. |_P

by **lucasdp** » January 20th, 2016, 5:19 pm

Well, we played Castle of Mystery and somehow my heroes NEVER rolled a four when going through doors, so I can't really say that I playtested your lever. :lol:

Having finally played this quest, I can see why people are split in opinion about it. My heroes HATED this quest. So much so, that they insisted on playing a "normal" quest afterwards (when we usually only play one quest in an evening). My heroes have figured out that the key to success in this game is teamwork, so they hate getting split up.
Which of course means that I, Zargon, was having a wonderful time. :twisted:

Lots of BP was lost, the Dwarf was killed. The Wizard somehow survived the two Chaos Warriors to find the Ring of Return, and promptly used it as soon as he was down to one BP with no more healing spells.
Basically, as soon as they figured out what was going on in this quest, they all left as soon as they could. Even before finding out it was fool's gold, they had scrapped the idea of everyone getting their own bag of gold.

Castle of Mystery is a weird one, for sure. I hope to get a chance to inflict it on a different set of heroes someday.

by **Anderas** » January 21st, 2016, 3:02 pm

Weird yes, but it really can be fun.
If your group didn't like it, ok - nothing to be done about it

It's one of the most difficult quest, by the way, and just because the group gets masterly split up.

What quest did you play afterwards?

by **lucasdp** » January 22nd, 2016, 8:08 pm

Afterwards, we played "Narran's Seal," Quest 3 from Lord Narran's Battles (Agin's quest pack based on Dragon Strike). I just updated my thread on that if you are interested. |_P

by **Kitch1982** » February 19th, 2016, 10:45 am

Andreas, this is fantastic! I'm currently playing all the quests again, don't suppose you have any plans to re-do the extension packs like this?

I have some over powered heroes plus an additional hero playing at the moment (5 heroes in all). Would be great to have a way of making it more of a challenge for them :twisted:

by **Anderas** » February 19th, 2016, 2:47 pm

Thanks Kitch!

Yes it is in the plan. But as Count Mohawk and Slev may possibly confirm, i am absolutely out of time at the moment. I hope that changes soon but there is just no guarantee. I need two or three hours per quest, so that's not nothing.

Most needs the part where i think if i could possibly incorporate a quest objective that can be lost. Besides, i never got feedback about that Necromancer who wants to steal the Talisman of Lore, and i didn't playtested that one quest. So if you do it, please give feedback. Thanks!

by **Count Mohawk** » February 19th, 2016, 3:01 pm

Anderas wrote:Thanks Kitch! Yes it is in the plan. But as Count Mohawk and Slev may possibly confirm, i am absolutely out of time at the moment.

+1. Slev has been planning a bunch of stuff behind the scenes, some of which Anderas is privy to but unable to spare the time to give a thorough once-over.

If you want to try adjusting the Quests yourself in the meantime, you might consider trying out my Questimator (linked in my sig) and attempting to hash out a room layout yourself...