A few questions on Orc's Bane

[SirRick]

I think the Orc’s Bane is fine, even if the double attack is only against one Orc. It’s good for the Rogue, as mentioned, or by a character who regularly uses a Shield. It’s basically a Spirit Blade against orcs. It’s 2 and 2 instead of 4 at once. I believe statistically the two attacks are better than one attack of 3 or 4 dice, but I am not a mathematician, so I could be wrong. Also orcs are probably the most frequently encountered monster. It is also an artifact meaning it’s good against ethereal creatures as well. The introduction of ethereal creatures is my favorite addition from RotDM. It gives your seldom used artifact weapons more value to have. Even the Ice Queen’s Spear has some value now because of this.

I do like the idea of the Orc’s Bane working against the Orc Bard. It’s too comical to pass up on the off chance it actually happens. I do like the idea of changing things up a bit and having the hero’s race play some part. Such as if there was an Elf Wizard, they could choose the Elf spells as one of their possible options. Or allowing the default Elf Rogue the ability to use the Elf only items such as the Elven Bracers, the Elven Cloak of Passage, or the elf potions. You could even consider a Barbarian Scout (basically a scout from a barbarian tribe who has the exact same ability and stats as the standard dwarf). I would not mind if a Zargon player was using homebrew stuff like this. Though if you had other orc heroes you would probably want some advantage for them being an orc at some point like some orc-only items or a bonus for particular in-quest tasks like deciphering orc writing or something.

[Kurgan]

Given the most recent nerf from AH... I'm tempted to just allow Heroic Brew (or Elven Speed aka Celerity) plus Orc's Bane to take two swings each at two adjacent Orcs...

[Zenithfleet]

How is it that we've gone through five pages about Orc's Bane, with people mentioning Sting and Glamdring from Tolkien... but no one has brought up the Tolkien sword that Orc's Bane is most obviously an homage to?

Orcrist!

In The Hobbit, Gandalf gets Glamdring from the trolls' hoard--and Thorin the dwarf gets Orcrist. It's called 'goblin-cleaver' in The Hobbit, because goblin is the usual word in that book for the creatures called orcs in Lord of the Rings. But it clearly would be 'orc-cleaver' to anyone else (Orc-rist).

It's funny to see the differences between the different versions.

Only the US version disallows its use by the Wizard.

In fact, none of the UK artifacts disqualify the Wizard.

Whilst it is true that the "UK" artifacts don't explicitly state that they cannot be used by the Wizard, this may not mean that they can, just that the UK designer's thought that "common sense" would apply here (there is no such thing as common sense!) and if the Wizard wasn't allowed to use Broadswords or Plate Armour then he wouldn't be allowed to use magical Broadswords and Plate Armour

I get the general impression that the UK rules assume the basic rule is in play unless stated otherwise. Normally there's no restriction on who can use what, except that you can't wear more than one kind of armour at the same time. If you can't use something, it says so on the card.

In terms of theme, as others have said, in Tolkien Gandalf fights with a sword. The idea that wizards can't use swords (or armour) seems to come from D&D. HeroQuest is of course heavily based on Basic D&D, so you might expect a strict 'no swords or armour' rule to apply, but maybe in this case the overlay of Warhammer background had an effect. In Warhammer, wizards can use swords as far as I know (the one in Warhammer Quest definitely can--again fitting the Gandalf archetype). They can't wear normal armour because it interferes with magic, but they can wear unique sets of magical armour--much like Borin's Armour.


In a recent game we were about to do Quest 2 of Against the Ogre Horde, but were under-equipped and under-golded (if that's a word). So by mutual player agreement we pulled the HeroQuest equivalent of grinding in a videogame for levels: we did Bastion of Chaos from the base game first.

Among other things, the Wizard got hold of Orc's Bane, which was a good find and genuinely useful, since he had no Staff and would otherwise have been rolling one die to attack.

However, I think in future I'll do as suggested upthread and swap the placements of Borin's Armour and Orc's Bane in the quests. Find Orc's Bane in The Stone Hunter. Find Borin's Armour in Bastion of Chaos since it's a stronger item. Instead of putting it in the empty Gargoyle chest, I just say the Chaos Warrior has magic armour instead of a magic sword. Technically in Warhammer you wouldn't be able to take a CW's armour since it's fused to his skin but in HeroQuest I can cheerfully ignore that sort of thing.