Pass through rock - furniture and monsters

[Bareheaded Warrior]

The Wizard cast Pass Through Rock so the Dwarf could run through a full room of stone and get the jump on whatever monsters are in that room while the other heroes would come in through the door.

Another difference in how we play as I don't allow movement through solid rock only through walls, but that may be down to the versions that we are used to, as the additional text added to the card in the NA remake version which may have been intended to explain why you can't move through solid rock, actually caused confusion by implying that you could move through solid rock...

So to me, the exception is in the spell's name "Pass Through Rock"

As far as I'm concerned the spell could be called "Henderson's Spell of Pastafarianification" the description text on the card explaining how it works is the bit that is relevant.

Plus I have an extended Treasure Deck and don't feel the need to return cards to the deck and reshuffle every time.

Great debate around this point is currently going on here

As far as the thread goes, I would reveal the room as soon as the hero passed into it

Subtle but important difference, I'm not suggesting that the room should be revealed as soon as the hero moves into it, I'm suggesting that it should be revealed as soon as the hero is in an adjacent square and their player states that they want to move through the wall. This way it is exactly aligned with how the rules state you should handle a player opening a door into a room (hero in an adjacent square, player states want to open door, room revealed, then hero MAY but doesn't have to move into the room). Keeping it aligned with the standard rules is important because it means that the scenarios that arise from this action are then covered by the existing rules (and it is the way in which the principle of "card text has precedence over rule book text" is supposed to work, in that you make the minimum number of exceptions to the rule text as necessary in order to achieve the effect stated on the card)

So perhaps this is the best approach...

It allows you to pass through walls as per the spell description, walls being the white lines between the squares on the board, it doesn’t allow you to pass through solid rock, the shaded areas on the board because they are not walls (some of the confusion here arises from later versions of the game that added text in an attempt to explain why you can’t pass through solid rock, but instead ended up confusing players into thinking that you could do exactly that but there were risks).

Blocked squares are an interesting case as they are essentially solid rock, shaded squares surrounded by a line representing a wall, so these also cannot be passed through as an effect of this spell, the wall part could be, but the solid rock core cannot, closed doors can be passed through as they are in a wall.

One way of cutting through some of the confusion here is to imagine that when a character under the effects of this spell decides that he wants to move through a wall then handle it exactly as if he had just opened a personal and private temporary door in the wall that exists only for him and only for a moment. He opens this virtual door, the contents of the room or passage are laid out exactly as if he had opened a normal door, and play continues as per the usual rules, but the moment he moves through the virtual door into the room or passage, the door closes and ceases to exist.

The only other point to note here is around monsters that are revealed using this spell but once the character under the influence has passed through their room, they are left isolated with no escape. The rulebook includes a rule that monsters cannot (check the wording) open doors, but this more of a general principle, monsters generally don’t open doors, because they have no reason to, no reason to suspect that their lair is being infiltrated by a bunch of blood-thirsty heroes .seeking fame and fortune. Obviously monsters can and do open doors, how else do they get into the rooms in the first place (and they can move treasure for that matter and furniture – they don’t hire removal men!) but in general this activity takes place “off camera” out of sight of our heroes much like the wanderings of wandering monsters and we don’t have to be concerned with it, the monsters are revealed in the positions according to the quest map when they become visible to our heroes because that is where they happened to be at the moment that our heroes encounter them but the use of this spell I would suggest makes a valid exception to the general rule. If a bunch of monsters in a room, see a character move through a wall into their room, and then through another wall and out of their room, then they are now aware of the presence of intruders (or at least an intruder), due to this the EWP is perfectly entitled to allow the monsters to open whatever doors are needed to order to pursue the intruder and ensure that he ends up on their dinner table as the dark gods intended.