Running the Japanese Quests (and others)

[Sjeng]

Ohhh... That KnightBrawler. ¬.¬

[Daedalus]

Also, I changed how treasure is searched for: I know that the character doesn't have to be anywhere near a treasure chest and that when they search for treasure they just get whatever treasure is in the room, but they had discovered three pit traps that block off the treasure chest by searching for traps, and then they were like: "well, we don't even have to worry about those, because we can just search for treasure safely on this side and still get what's in the chest!" and I then realized how absurd that rule is, so I made them go stand by the chest (but first disarming one of the traps). Has anyone else run into absurd "searching for treasure" issues where the official rules just don't make sense? Did I commit a huge faux pas by making them go stand by the chest?

Makes me think the game originally had different rules for treasure searching that were cut out. Other Quests from the expansions have the same problem. Kellar's Keep has two such rooms: Quest 1, The Great Gate and Quest 8, Belorn's Mine. The Frozen Horror has one: Quest 2, Trial by Ice.

My solution is to have one of the intervening traps automatically sprung when a Hero searches for treasure. The assumed movement needed to find the treasure necessarily puts the Hero in harm's way. I'd make it clear to the player what would happen, and why.

[bastianbux]

The group (well, part of it) finally got together to do some more HeroQuesting. The reason why there was such a long break was because they'd started up their D&D sessions again, so HQ was moved to the back burner. And then a friend who had played in their D&D campaigns (and who I'd originally tried to get to play HQ with us) passed away. He'd been too ill to play HQ when I'd originally asked him, and he kept getting worse and worse. He'd been playing D&D with these friends of mine for over a decade and was someone who I only saw at an annual Halloween party and a pre-Thanksgiving "Friends Thanksgiving" party. So everyone took a couple weeks off from gaming.

Quest 7: Trial at White Mountain

Originally we were going to have both Wizards and the Barbarian and Dwarf, but the Dwarf dropped out several days before hand and then the Barbarian had to drop out at the last minute on the day-of (his new baby was sick and his wife had to go to a wedding). So that left just two Wizards for a quest that is specifically built to be played by one of each character. :/ So each of the Wizards doubled up, taking on a Barbarian and a Dwarf. The quest has a pretty interesting design: when a Hero exits the central room, they are teleported to a different quadrant of the board and have their own little self-contained adventure by themselves; when they find the exit in that quadrant, it teleports them back to the central room, and when all Heroes have returned to the central room, the quest is complete.



I should have given temporary Dwarf and Barbarian some gold to buy better equipment before starting out on the quest, but it didn't occur to me... and they perished pretty quickly. The Dwarf came up against a Chaos Warrior but had already depleted all but one of his Body Points due to accidentally triggering traps, so he decided to try to retreat by jumping a pit trap... and fell in and lost his last Body Point. The Barbarian didn't fare much better, as he was immediately beset upon by two mummies who had him cornered. Both of the Wizards, however, made it through their quadrants just fine.



One of the Wizards (the second one) is quite cunning and is always trying to find short cuts, so used Pass Through Rock to simply exit his quadrant. I would allow him to walk through walls within the quadrant but I would not allow him to pass through the exterior wall surrounding his whole quadrant since the whole point of the quest was that it was a test from an Oracle to force them through their quadrants to reach a magical exit door that returned them to the central room... I just couldn't see allowing him to avoid going through the transporter door.

All in all: this was a fun quest, but it would have been all the more fun with more than two people playing the Heroes. Ah well.

[Sjeng]

post the quest!

[bastianbux]

post the quest!

Hm? I'm not sure what you mean?

[Sjeng]

the quest notes of the quest you played, with the map. was it one of the japanese quests?

[Sydcomebak]

Sorry for your loss.

[Sjeng]

Gods yes, my condoleances too.

And never mind, I read too quickly. Quest 7: Trial at White Mountain. D'oh.

[bastianbux]

Yikes. Not only has the group been playing this game very infrequently, but I have been failing to update when we do play.

This particular group of friends I've been playing with also does a lot of camping adventures during the summer so we were pretty busy with that. And then they also HAD started to resume their D&D campaign... but that fell to the wayside for some reason or other. So we finally got a chance to play some more HeroQuest. A couple months ago we played:

Quest 8: Malediction of Darkness
However my memory is terrible and I really can't remember anything of note that occurred during that quest. :/ It's a pretty straight forward quest where there are four Chaos Warriors guarding the corners surrounding the central room and only after defeating all four is a magical barrier lowered allowing the Heroes inside to rescue a cursed Lord Godor who gives them their first of the Legendary Weapons to be used to defeat the Chaos God.

So since I can't remember what happened and no longer have the pics from that one (new phone) let's skip to...

Quest 9: Valor Valley



This quest happened this past Saturday after a facebook post by that gaming group indicated that their usual game they've been playing that I have no interest in (RoboWars or RoboTech or something like that) was not able to occur due to some of the key players having other obligations. I pounced on the post and suggested HeroQuest at my place.

It was a chaotic event because one of the players had to bring his infant son and young daughter along as his wife was working, and he also brought a bunch of other games that he really wanted to play first, so we played some boring zombie game that I didn't find all that interesting, and then his daughter wanted to play some cute Chicken boardgame (a lot like Candyland but with chickens). THEN we finally started HeroQuest after one of the other players already had to head home. The "benefit" of this is that there were only two Heroes playing, so the daughter took on the Wizard character (who was the guy who had to leave early) and one of the other players took on the Elf, so we had a full four Heroes on the board.

I'm assuming she's about five or six (I'm terrible at guessing the age of children) and she was surprisingly deft at the basic strategies! Her dad helped her quite a bit of course, but he always allowed her to make up her own mind as far as where she wanted to explore. She was adorably terrible at counting out movement, however.

As far as the quest itself, it's quite a unique one. The basic concept is that there's a curse across the land that affects mind and body, so at the start of each of their turns the Heroes have to roll White Dice equal to their Mind Points: if they roll any White Shields, they're fine--otherwise they suffer one point of Body Damage. As you can guess, only about three or four times did the Heroes suffer damage, but I think that's okay. That added bit isn't really meant to kill them but simply to add to the tone, I think. The Barbarian (played by the dad) did end up dying, however. And the family of dad/daughter/infant had to leave JUST before the quest was over to pick up the mom, so the remaining player took over for all the surviving Heroes and completed the quest.

This was one of the most unique HeroQuesting experiences I'd ever had because of getting to introduce it to a new generation and because the quest itself was very well designed and had some unique factor. Fun!

Hopefully I'll have more quests to report before several months pass again.

[TMU]

Talking about months passing... Don't worry, I've been away for a long time too

That must be quite different from normal games to play with little kids. And having really little cousins (2,3,4,8) I know it is frustrating to play with them Keep the HeroQuest dream alive!