Ben's Coworkers Play HeroQuest - Narrative Wrap-Ups!

[Anderas]

Just an idea to play around with:
They took him prisoner one time, they can put him back into the cell a second time, no? I think that's one of the few quests where the end = the beginning is roughly suitable.

well, or you swing the magic wand and save the day.

[benvoliothefirst]

You're absolutely right, Anderas. However I do want to reward the player for asking about the gods of the HeroQuest world right before his demise, I think that good roleplaying should be encouraged. The assumption that they were being held captive for a purpose and not outright slaughtered IS why the rest of 'em live, though!

Yesterday we had a significantly different group with some new players join. The issues of rotating players and character progression started to become apparent, now that as a whole my groups have moved halfway through the game system quest pack. We had two new players, Joe as the Dwarf and Jamie as the Elf. I was itching to use my copy of Xanathar's Guide to Everything to auto-generate some character names, so the Dwarf became "Nordak Donkil" (Hmm... we can do better... "Nordak Dawnkiller?") and the Elf became "Dethrina Meliarme." Sounds like an evil elf to me!I added in a couple other mods to our game in addition to Jacob Busby's random events (fate), including making furniture a separate search from the room it's in and allowing the wizard to have free line of sight for spells. I also ruled that the dwarf didn't obstruct LOS for the taller characters' shooting purposes, which I assume must be pretty common. With players now searching rooms and then individual furniture for traps and then treasure, as well as rolling for fate any Evil Wizard turn with no monsters on the board, it slowed the pace of the game down quite a bit. The players were unlucky enough to pull four wandering monsters almost in a row, so after the first mummy jumped out of the fireplace I decided to switch 'em out for gobbos (thematically, probably should've been skeletons) for the rest of the quest, and thank goodness I did. Those cheapo wandering monsters weren't enough of a deterrent to stop the players from searching every nook and cranny, however. I may house rule that the wandering monsters can't simply pop up in the room and have to come in from around a previously unexplored corner.

The heroes deduced they must be heading towards a final fight with a powerful necromancer and resolved to save a good bit of healing for later.

The heroes diligently searched every room and corridor for traps and secret doors, and the fact that there was a pit trap on the other side of room "C" meant that the dwarf fell in for one BP of damage. He successfully discovered the second pit and avoided it, and then disarmed the trap on the chest. Whizz-Bang the wizard, being wise in the ways of potions, made a successful mind check to identify the purple liquid as a potion of petrification, and the heroes immediately started envisioning sling bullets and sword blades doused in the potion that would turn all their enemies to stone.

The fate dice were very kind to the heroes this time around and gave several boons, including the elf finding some healing herbs growing in the walls. It appeared that Whizz-Bang had some sort of connection to the celestial realm, as he rolled "heroism" twice, which I allowed to be stacked and last for the whole dungeon, meaning chaos warriors, gargoyles and bosses had -2 defence dice. This came in VERY handy and probably saved them the game. But it wasn't all good news as he rolled 66: Triumph of Chaos as well, meaning shards of darkness appeared out of nowhere and stabbed some of the heroes.

At this point the heroes realized the Southwest corner of the map was a dead end and doubled back as quickly as they could while still attempting to arrange themselves so as to keep the "meat-shields" (Bar-Bar the barbarian and Nordak the dwarf) on the outside of the party. Nordak rolled his movement dice poorly, in accordance with dwarven tradition and scooted along slowly, and Dethrina the elf rolled high and backflipped and pranced her way over pit traps and the other heroes with her high rolls, no doubt aided by her very cute familiar Parker, a very VERY laid-back maltipoo who basically sat in her lap for the entire 3-hour game. Jamie claims he's good luck, and that seemed to bear fruit during multiple high-stakes rolls, although fate did come for her as well as she activated a pit trap in the small room which made navigating it a chore. Whizz-bang also revealed that he kept hiding in corners and "stroking the (fuzzy) walls" which he CLAIMED was because he was "just searching for more secret doors" but started making the other heroes somewhat uncomfortable after the third instance of searching a room that was already cleared once just because he could!

The heroes had taken a good bit of damage from monsters, wandering monsters and traps at this point and they hadn't even discovered the center hallway with the four chaos warriors! I did a quick poll and they only had the ability to regain 8 HP max so I made the decision to remove two of the chaos warriors from the left center hallway and just leave the remaining two on the right. Despite the fate rolls meaning the CWs only had two defence dice instead of four, they still managed to do a good bit of damage to the heroes. I encouraged them to step up and attack since the CWs were going to continue assaulting them with everything they could. At this point things were getting tense! They managed to take out both CWs and move on to the Southeast quadrant. With their body points painfully low I resolved to remove some of the lesser undead minions and a plan began forming in my mind for the final encounter...

The skeleton in the first room opened the door to the gargoyle before returning to have its skull caved in by the heroes, and uttered "You will not take him!" as it shattered. The gargoyle held its ground and howled in rage but didn't move as the heroes piled in to fight it. Fate intervened once again and the door to the East blew open with the mummy on the other side cursing Whizz-Bang to freeze with fear in his tracks. With only 3 defend dice now they made short work of the gargoyle, but the heroes were unnerved by the fact that I left the mini splayed on its back in the center room. After they took out the mummy in a very tense encounter (Whizz-Bang used his Ball of Flame spell and the mummy exploded in a fiery inferno), visions of the necromancer resurrecting the gargoyle danced in Whizz-Bang's head and they decided that they must behead the corpse, the dwarf making short work of the grisly task. The dwarf searched the weapons rack and found our first artifact as a play group, Borin's Armor! They found the gold in the alchemy room chest as well as notes on the desk in Wardoz' handwriting that asked whoever found his golden amulet to return it to the emperor. The amulet had a letter "W" embossed on it, but it wasn't in the empty study. On searching for treasure in the room with the gargoyle's corpse they found the amulet had been around the beasts' neck... Wardoz had been transformed into the gargoyle! They took both the amulet and the gargoyle's head back to the emperor with them as proof that Wardoz had been corrupted and claimed their reward of 100 gold each. Several daggers were purchased, and Dethrina the elf picked up a staff so she could attack diagonally.

[The Admiral]

You're very generous. If Heroes persistently search for treasure when they know the WM is a Mummy and they are struggling, then more fool them. And reducing monsters in a fairly low monster quest is the height of generosity. Let them die I say!

Sounds like a fun quest though

[benvoliothefirst]

Yeah, I've had two TPKs now and with the players rotating in and out, there were a couple newbies this week and I was getting nervous towards the end that they might not make it. I feel like "everyone almost died but somehow we all made it through to the end," is the best case scenario for a game. Maybe I'm trending towards cynthialee's "RPG-lite" version of HeroQuest.

[Anderas]

With your players rotating out, I guess that was because of frustration through dying. So I guess that was a good decision, softening the edge a little bit.

[benvoliothefirst]

The party soon found the stone steps that descended to Black Fire Crag. Shava and Alberich quickly proved their worth in battle, despite being relatively untested. The dwarf learned the hard way that zombies require finishing off by severing the head or destroying the brain. In the course of their search for Balur Whizz-Bang's connection to the celestial realm once again bore fruit, as a surge of heroism washed over the fellowship, inspired by some cosmic event. This meant the dungeon boss would have –1 defend die. They stumbled onto Balur in the first room they entered, and after unsuccessfully attempting to win the heroes to his side with some unsubstantiated claim that the emperor sits on a throne of lies, he intoned a few syllables in the black speech and four orcs suddenly materialized and filled the already cramped room. He then turned tail and fled. A mighty battle ensued, by the end of which the room was covered in shattered skeleton bones and greenskin blood and guts, but the heroes were relatively unscathed. They sloshed about in the gore and began the grisly work of collecting trophies from the fallen, Whizz-Bang's staff wrapped in entrails and topped with a zombie skull. The few undead that littered the western rooms didn't prove to be much of a hindrance, other than fouling up the players' trap searches. More hazardous were the wandering fimir that kept popping up every time they searched for treasure. Whizz-Bang attempted to treat with one such monoptic monster, only to be met with a blood-curdling screech and a new recurring nightmare that would bedevil his sleep for months. Not long after, he accidentally blinded a second fimir with an errant stroke of his staff while attempting to search a hallway and drenched the grisly totem in the beast's blood. The players reached a dead end and quickly doubled back, having deduced that in Bar-Bar's hurry to slay foes, they may have missed a secret door. Whizz-Bang's encyclopedic knowledge of arcane masonry soon led to their finding a secret room and some small treasures. By this point they had soaked up a good bit of damage and begun tapping into their limited reserves of healing potions and magic. Balur was still nowhere to be found (as he had previously used the same hidden passage to evade pursuit). They came to another junction and strategized about which path to take. Bar-bar was adamant that they should storm the large central room and cut their losses before too much more time had passed, since although he was still in good health the rest of the party was now limping and licking their wounds. His battle-fervor won the others over, and they kicked in the door and found Balur waiting. He gave another half-hearted attempt to talk sense into the heroes, and when it failed he resorted to casting Firestorm and engulfing the library in a holocaust of flame. Bar-Bar barely survived and Alberich fell to the fire, unconscious. In a hail mary play, Shava the elf made a tremendous leap over a pit and dealt the killing blow to Balur, ending the quest. The heroes took a moment's respite to bandage their wounds and revive Alberich, who stumbled woozily to his feet. They elected to forgo searching the rest of the rooms, discretion being the better part of Balur. Shava the elf decided to continue their tradition of collecting gory trophies, and took Balur's horned helm, and the severed head inside it, to use as a backpack.


The heroes camped for the night outside the dungeon entrance, and awoke refreshed and eager to collect their bounty and spend it on gear in town. They faced a tough decision: a short trip to a less well-stocked town, or a six-week journey back to Nuln? After some deliberation they elected to travel further for the city, but shortly after embarking, they happened on band of swarthy mercenaries, dragging a wealthy-looking man behind them. They chivalrously elected to help him and after a fierce fight, freed him. He introduced himself as Tuomas Linhardt, a merchant of Nuln who would reward them handsomely once they delivered him safely from the wilderness. They agreed and shortly thereafter arrived at a large town gripped by the plague. They didn't realize this until Linhardt had handed over their reward and shuffled off to find accommodations, however. Whizz-Bang, still itching to uncover the secrets of the golden circlet, headed toward the first shop he saw. "Meliarme the Merchant" said the sign above the door, and the man inside looked at him quizzically as he entered. Whizz-Bang asked if he could identify the crown. The merchant tried to maintain a look of quiet disinterest but Whizz-Bang knew enough of human nature to recognize the glint of greed in his eyes. "It's a trinket. Fool's gold. It's worthless. Here, let me dispose of it for you." He reached toward the crown and Whizz-Bang shied away. "Please. It's nothing. I'll give you five gold fer it," the man said calmly. Whizz-Bang resigned himself to finding no answers in the small shop and cast sleep! on the huckster, who promptly collapsed behind the counter. Whizz-Bang heard a woman's voice cry out from the back, "Mel, what's that kerfuffle I hear?" The wizard poked his head out the shop door and frantically signalled to the rest of the party, who promptly snuck into the shop and grabbed an item each from the wares before quickly departing the plague-ridden backwater. Shava grabbed a shield, no doubt hoping to decrease her reliance on the uncouth Alberich's defenses. For his part, Alberich's keen eye for weaponry lead him to deprive Mel's shop of their finest battle-axe. Bar-bar hefted a bulky suit of plate mail from the wall, failing utterly in his attempts at stealth, and Whizz-Bang appropriated a tool kit, visions of disarming trapped secret doors swimming in his mind. Only once they cleared the town's borders did they realize that both Shava and Alberich had contracted the plague from their time in town, and would be at –1 body point for the next quest.