Insane campaign

[Wcb87]

I want to start off with saying that my dad got me and my little brother into this when I was in the 2nd grade. 30 years later I buy my own copy and invited him over on Father’s Day for a fun campaign. It was a success! Now that I hold the title of Zargon I felt compelled to try to outdo my father by getting him just as excited as I was a child and by some miracle I’ve recently joined this great site and I’ve combed through the forums and I’ve learned a lot of interesting things that will help with a campaign I’m trying to set up in October. With that being said I haven’t seen anyone post this so I’ve got to ask. I’m trying to setup a campaign for a maximum of 8 heroes. Has anyone done something like this? I want to do it right with getting some of the awesome content I’ve found here with new heroes, enemies, spells, ect… I know it’s here and I’m still trying to wrap my head around how to make it look official with the character pieces and cards. If anyone could point me in the right direction I’d greatly appreciate it.

[Pancho]

There are some good people here who can help you with extra characters, I’m sure they’ll be along soon.

From my point of view I think having 8 Heroes needs to be handled very carefully. The base game is already pretty easy for just 4 Heroes (I play UK quest books but use the increased US body points for monsters).

[Wcb87]

Yea, I was figuring that. It would be silly to add 4 barbarians to the existing party. I want to go with adding a thief, a fighter who wouldn’t be as strong as a Barbarian but has the ability to counter attack, a spell caster, then I’m torn between a bard or another variant of a support. Those are things I feel confident in being able to solve so I guess the real problems are how do I go about getting player cards, new player pieces, spells. If I can get this together and it plays smooth then it’ll get really exciting having a gauntlet run having 4 teams of two all trying to complete a quest against each other. To the point that they can attack each other to get good loot. Defeating each other would result in a knockout and some grudges I’m sure

[Kurgan]

Competitive campaigns, with multiple boards sounds really cool in theory if you have the time and space to manage it! But just speaking of your standard cooperative campaign with extra good guys...

I would say it is perfectly possible to play with more heroes, even using the "official" quests without extensive modification. I myself have only ever played with five before (I ran a souped up version of "The Trial" with some more monsters and a few traps plus some more treasure added) and it went really well (the new Hero was a Paladin who had 5 BP).

You could try adding up the body points of the party to see what you get. For reference, there are quests designed (in theory) for larger numbers of body points.

Take for example Wizards of Morcar (aka Wizards of Zargon in Phoenix's conversion). You could hire up to 12 mercs. Phoenix gave them double body points (EU edition had only 1).

HeroQuest party of four classic heroes (25 BP)
Above Party + 12 EU Men-At-Arms (37 BP)
Above Party + 12 NA converted Men-At-Arms (49 BP)

The NA exclusive (and very hard) Barbarian Quest Pack (The Frozen Horror) was intended (from quest 4-10) to allow you to hire up to six total Mercenaries with 2 BP each.

Party + 6 NA Mercenaries (37 BP)

So you could easily get away with having extra heroes that total another 12 BP for these more difficult quests, leaving off the Mercs or even 24 extra for the absurdly difficult BQP.

I would say EQP and Dark Company are probably okay for more Heroes as well.

I created a "new quartet" of heroes that total another 18 BP (two 4 BP heroes and two 5 BP heroes) which would fit right in. One member of the group has Wizard-level magic while the rest have one or two skills each (so 10-12 cards to manage, comparable to the 12 you normally would get with the standard party; but that means 22-24 cards if you were using all eight which means more time per turn potentially). See the link to "New Heroes" in my signature below.

Having more heroes will decrease the difficulty (if you don't add more monsters to other sorts of quests intended only for the original four) but will also increase the time it may take to complete the quest, since there are more turns, especially if those new heroes have cards (say, spell or skill cards to think about using). If each player is controlling only one hero however, the gameplay doesn't need to slow down a lot more, since that person may be thinking about their turn before it comes around and be ready to move rather than having to think about it (we all have had that one person who will space off or get distracted and not do this of course).

So if you're used to a 2 hour quest with four heroes, I would plan on 4 hours with eight heroes, potentially. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my guess. It's also worth noting that Mercenaries don't get any special cards (spells/skills) and have fixed movement so their "turns" go quicker (the Hero decides how to control them after he's moved his regular piece) and only one type of Merc has the ability to search for and disarm traps (the Scout) vs. heroes who may have other things to do.

One player being expected to control 4 heroes is a lot (especially for new/younger players) but do-able, just be prepared for more turn time, but more than this would probably be a detriment to the enjoyment. Each person having 2 characters is better, and 1 each is the best, but like I said, Mercs tend to be a bit simpler and the game designers anticipated each seasoned player being capable of controlling a Hero and four of them at various points.

As others have said, the "solo quests" in the EQP & BQP are pretty difficult, despite being advertised for brand new, unequipped heroes. So I've played those with two heroes before, and also with mercenaries (no more than 18 BP total though, but as low as 14 too).

Now monster BP are not the sole difficulty factor in a quest (though they do tend to stretch out the time factor unless the heroes are getting great roles and Zargon is getting bad ones), maybe a better way would be to add up the Attack+Defense+BP+MP of each monster to get some kind of overall rating and add those together? But I see just based on BP alone, NA is harder than EU overall... and in either version KK & ROTWL are harder than the base 14 quests, the Japanese game system seems easier than the base EU quest (all but one of the quests are on the low side) and converted to NA they are still fairly easy. Dark Company is on the harder end, especially if converted to NA monster BP, then EQP and BQP with the highest of all the official quests.