Agreed with Steve-O. Hero Quest in its old form is completely outclassed by Descent in many aspects. It's not exactly the same game, but HQ feels reaaaaally old in comparison and would require a major revamp to be released today. We´re in 2015, tons of fancy mechanisms have been introduced by games since HQ was released and one deciding factor in a game's chances of success is either to be completely innovative (which I don't see happening for a classic fantasy adventure game like HQ), or to combine popular mechanisms and succesful game systems. Today dice systems and resource management are on top of the hotness. Look at Conan for instance. They´re just surfing on that wave. Plus Advanced hero Quest replaced Hero Quest, giving the line a clear RPG direction. That doesn't make the game younger. There was a cancelled Kickstarter about reprinting Heroquest (25th anniversary). It turned into a massive shitstorm for licensing reasons. I actually believe it is more likely for FFG to release a new Warhammer Quest. I wouldn't want that, since it would put us back to the Descent 1E line, but since they have Talisman, now Drakon, Dungeonquest and the rest, it doesn't feel like an impossibility to me.

I guess that's even more true with Basic I, since access to Dash and possibly Dark Charm is pretty vital to many quests. I have never had to purchase deck utility cards since I moved to Basic II. I´m almost sure the few cards remaining in the deck pile are going to give me a little something, as opposed to the sight of two Dash cards in the discard pile and knowing any of the cards left on top of your OL card pile are thrash in comparison. I´m not saying the whole game comes down to how often you use Dash in a quest, but there is certainly incentive to dig for it in the vast majority in the situations, which is a problem you don't have with Basic II. You can still want one Basic II card badly, but maybe not in every encounter.

I agree with everything you´ve said, that is that the re-roll should never have greater relevance than a card effect being played if it is the optimal choice for the situation. My comment on that though is that is can be very difficult to evaluate that play, and that plot cards of that type should be used carefully. People come here asking generic questions about plot cards and I get the impression that people want cards to "use", in the sense of something they can fire off just because it's "cool". My experience of plot cards is that you use when it makes you win. I mean, generally speaking. You can spam Rush of Power cards obviously, but you can't really spam a +4 damage effect or something that doesn't have a global effect on the game. If the +4 damage kills the guy running for the objective then it has a powerful effect on the quest. If the guy it kills is revived next turn and didn't change your board position as the OL, then that's one of the situations where said effect should have been spared maybe. Which leads me to the point that balance is +/- unchanged because what we call the "correct use" of plot decks is to spare them for these one-time situations. Again, bar Zachareth and the "special" plot decks. Even permanent effects can rarely be played quest after quest for the threat investment they demand. Playing a plot card automatically grants something to the OL, so from that perspective yes balance is geared towards the OL at that particular moment in time, but during the normal course of the game plot cards are just dormant. As Zaltyre pointed out, you certainly have psychological warfare in terms of being aware of the presence of a plot card effect that would devastate your heroes party, but you can also learn to play by that and mimimize its effect. 2-fortunes on a hero I´ve seen while using Bol' Goreth's plot deck, I wouldn't call it a marginal situation since you carry fortune tokens across encounters, but it's not that uncommon either. But yeah, re-rolls may be even more dangerous because it can be a cross on a special attack from heroic feat etc. A third action doesn't change the fact the one-time attack with added effects failed.

I´m with you. The first thing I do when we start a campaign is to print out a small table with everybody's attribute stats on it with a color code (green/yellow/red) so I have an instant visualization of my potential targets. Well, that's just the best way I´ve found for me instead of having to read 4 hero sheets in reverse side every time the situation presents itself, but you don't need to go as far, lol. I find challenging to keep the two Befuddle copies in the deck after a couple of purchases, though. They are key to the whole Basic II idea, but they don't do anything on their own, so once you´ve put the couple of underwhelming cards aside, the list of potential outers comes to these two. I´ve never gone as far as ditching both, but I´ve sometimes played with only 1 in the deck. Although I guess you could just play with a 17-cards deck and still be fine. Just since we talk about deck size, do you stick to 15 cards? -- EDIT: yeah, Zachy's 13 are king.. ok bar that -- I do (with the exception of the Call of the Ravens since it's outside of your 15), but I recently came across the OL reward card granting you 4 cards if your deck has 20+ cards in it. I normally want my deck to run smoothly and only keep the relevant stuff instead of drawing dead, but I haven't really been able to qualify the loss of "card flow" against the ability to broaden your scope with abilities. Any view?

Me neither, but on the other hand since I play Basic II more often than not, I tend to be very careful with my plot card activations so I stand a decent chance of making my OL cards through (attribute tests).

That's for the one-off abilities, but then you have a huge set of cards that you can only activate at the beginning of an encounter/quest. Stuff giving an ability to a monster group comes to mind, but there are others. It's a strategic decision that doesn't give you anything at the time you activate it, but gives immediate fortune to the heroes. Otherwise, I agree on the fact that heroes not being able to interact with the OL ability to play plot cards is a plus, but I still stand by the opinion that a re-roll (or a free action) is more powerful and relevant than the majority of the effects you are able to cast using plot cards. That's just in general, obviously plot cards that give you card advantage are always going to be powerful in that kind of game, and there are very good cards as well that justify the spent threat. 0-threat cards are also awesome.

You often mention about Zachareth's plot deck, so I take you are using it a lot in your campaigns. How often do you Rush of Power? I mean, there are tons of good cards in the deck but you kind of need the threat to fuel things like RoP?

Yeah you´re right, Shifting Earth is a really nice card too. I have similar memories to yours in that regard. Mirklace as an agent is really nice too, probably one of the most powerful monsters in the game all things considered.

The OL card says "each hero", but if you include familiars then it would mean they lose 3 life each, since they cannot lose fatigue. But yeah, if you face a party with 2-3 familiars like mine currently, maybe this card loses some relevance. Otherwise, quite cool. heck, it's cool in any case, I can think of many situations when this would be useful. On the down side, many OL reward cards are just.. rewards. Yeah I know, it's just that you can never test them unless you´ve won the specific quest. I wish I could invest in them somehow. For instance, winning the My house my rules quest in SoN gave me the card that allows me to draw 4 if my OL deck has 20+ cards in it. That's quite cool but m not sure I´ll see it again anytime soon :-/ About gettingthe pack, well... That must be another overlord reward Seriously though, maybe it is so that the online store I ordered it from are a tad quicker than others. m in Sweden so there is no reason why we would get this sooner than anybody else in the US in particular. Still, feels reaaaaaly good to be first on that. I wish I had a session yesterday just to be the first to test it out, lol.

My experience of the game so far tells me that the heroes/OL assymetry tends to favor heroes in general, in terms of providing way more tools to do well in virtually any quest if they play correctly. The OL has very little space of manoever and any mistake is paid cash. Heroes normally have better capability for coming back in a quest even with an OL being lucky on the dice rolls. With two attacks a turn, they can also negate your monsters' ability to get you closer to your objective. Above all, once they have geared up a bit, the synergies with the class abilities can make them very hard to kill in normal combat unless you give up on everything else, and once you´ve done that all you get in return is one hero "wasting" a revive action to put the party on track again. With this in mind, I would agree that plot decks sort of expand the set of tools the OL has to counteract the heroes. More abilities, even visible (as opposed to OL cards - well... normally), can only enhance the OL capability to do well in a quest. But in practice: that is soooo not how it works out. Aside from a handful of really useful plot cards spread over something like 12 plot decks total (sorry, I haven't made the count so I can be off here), every card is either: - Stone unplayable - Christmasland-situationally good (read: if you play the game everyday over a year's time with the same plot deck, maybe one day or two you´ll have actual NEED to play the plot card) - Too expensive. Effect is good, but you pay more than you get. In practice, it leaves you with something like 3-4 decks: - Zachy's deck. It's not a fun deck in my mind, but it's functional. - 0-threat decks like Tristayne's. That's a real plot deck. - Raythen for your Treasure Hunter counteract convenience - Bol Goreth for Infector class, and even then some people think Zachareth is better at the job. Otherwise thrash. - Plot decks where you MAYBE want to spend the threat on a very useful card and let the rest dormant over the campaign. Mirklace's Crushing Exhaustion etc. See, I wouldn't mind picking Gargan's deck and just leave it there untouched (e.g. not use it) until I can finally play Crushing Exhaustion during the Finale. Plus in a quest, drawing a OL card instead of claiming a threat token is going to be the best course of action. You only claim the threat if you already know the quest is won and there is no encounter 2 after that. Giving away Fortune token gives more edge to the heroes than the actual card ability you paid for in the vast majority of the cases. I would typically only spend threat if the card put me in such a position that the heroes would have a hell of a difficulty to take back. Yeah it's nice to make your goblin deal +4 damage, but it's worthless (even if it manages to kill a hero) if your board position doesn't change. Whereas the fortune token can be used to re-roll a crucial attribute test or that cross on the blue dice that makes your monster live another turn, granting you two more actions. With all that in mind, I disagree on the fact plot decks are necessary for balance in the game. I think the overall balance is +/- 0 after choosing a plot deck, bar the few decks named above. It even favors the heroes if all you do is paying threat for subpar effects.

I received the box yesterday and... just wow. The monsters all look great. I also love the dynamism in the Dark Priest mini. The Act I versions lack the Horrifying traits though, which counts for both the Dark Priest and the Crypt Dragon. But 6 life and a brown dice on a Master Priest is better than what I had expected. Same with Act I dragons, two grey defense dices seems solid to compensate the low HP. Act I Wendigo hits as strong as its Act II version (the master gets one more yellow dice) except it has lower HP. As said earlier, I´m looking forward using Crypt Dragons alongside Dark Priest and willpower-heavy OL effects. The rumor quest looked very interesting. In particular, I noticed that interacting with a tunnel [objective] token in encounter 1 did not require an action as it normally does in many quests, but required the monster to stay still this turn. The OL reward card "Powers in Numbers" is quite nice: Choose a map tile, if there are more monsters on that tile than heroes, then each hero suffers 1 life and 2 fatigue, and all monsters regain 2 life. The 2 fatigue is really nice. Some sort of mini-radiant light. I wonder if familiars are considered heroes in that case, though.

OK, so today it just doesn't work - exactly like yesterday. Is this server-related? Since I was able to access the whole thing late yesterday, I assume it's not my computer? Is there any offline version of this tool?

Hi, Just wanted to have a look at the Vault for the first time and clicked on "new quest". It sends me to a page http://tools.fantasyflightgames.com/descent/editor/quest/ with some map in the background, but I don't seem to be able to do anything even by using the menus on top of the screen. According to the video, it should display a window with the main properties for the quest/campaign, but non of this shows up, instead all I have is this background. Clicking on Text shows a different screen but I cannot select any of the options. Similarly, I have access to the Quest drop down menu but clicking on any of these options does nothing. My version of Chrome is Version 39.0.2171.95 m I get no particular warning or error message. EDIT: It works now. EDIT 2: Now it doesn't!

I would if I had the time. I love doing these things, and I have a few cool ideas that I wish to implement. Let's make this a resolution for this year! (expect delivery on the 31th December )

Yeah Charmy, it was very nice indeed to get feedback that quickly. But that's the way we would have played it anyway for lack of better reason not to So yeah, we played this quest yesterday, and as expected the heroes had great mobility over the map. Failing a test sending the hero to an uncharted zone (to get the bindings) is no real problem since it helps them moving even faster. So in fact there is high relevance in choosing a high attribute so they don't fail the test in this situation. Skarn is very slow but the problem is to get him to expand in the middle corridor between all the figures. The centre zone was swarming with monsters and transiting heroes so effects like Radiant Light had great effect. It was hard to keep Blast in check. Wraiths spawning right in the action helped a lot to keep the heroes engaged, despite Wraiths clearly lack punch to do any actual damage, and bandits still have enough mobility to reach these areas even coming from the remote exit. I chose Changelings as my open group for Hideous Laughter, but I had to expose the master monster since he couldn't do these shenaningans from the middle corridor (you cannot count spaces through doors, even if those are magical, lol). They went down fast, but at least they focused the heroes' fire for a while. So yeah, they managed to get Lindel to find two bindings, got a third one on another hero, and proceeded to go for the final fourth by the time Skarn headed to the second shard! No major mistakes from any part but I felt at this point they would clear the quest by the time I get to the third shard. Like Nathan said, heroes are granted very high mobility, and you can even control where you land if you fail as you can guess what attribute the OL is going to ask you to test. I couldn't get hold of relevant OL cards and missed a lot of attacks. Then, as Nathan said, the "ugly" happened, in form of the two-bindings carrier missed a door test and ended up in the middle of bandits. He went down, and from there the game took a turn. Basically the heroes decided not to stand him up (to avoid OL card draw to snowball, everybody else was very far from him, he was Black Venomed and I had 4 monsters in range of him). It let me focus on the Disciple to kill him, and get the warrior to low life. It ended up being an OL win. Lindel stood up at some point just to get killed again, the two original bindings left on the floor and the heroes couln'r find a way to reach the tokens (and spend actions to pick them up) while reuniting the missing ones. Skarn slowly got the third shard and I made way in the corridor for him to expand (for that I had to focus fire on one hero to kill him), then a Blinding Speed on 4 put him adjacent to the final green shard. I took a risk and made Skarn link to it as his final action as he needed two actions to move off the map from his position, and that opened the door and exposed the dropped tokens. But there wasn't enough time. Skarn did not get attacked and only lost life due to Radiant Light and the Raven flock spawn. Not sure the heroes had actual time to mess around with him. This quest must be heroes-favored in design, but you have to make sure you have a plan B in case one of the dudes gets killed.

It's all good Zaltyre, you made me re-read the rules, which was a good thing.

The quest rules say that the OL can pick any attribute except the one imprinted on the door, so the presence (or not) of other doors should not affect that particular choice. Then if the hero passes, he can choose the door he teleports to, even if it's the same door (if it's the only door left). If the hero fails then the hero is sent to the objective token corresponding to the attribute imprinted on the door, which is always there. Skarn "links" to them and a fatigue token is placed on the shard to show that, but the token remains there. Well that's what I get from reading the quest rules, feel free to object if I got that wrong lol. ...and Nathan replied The question I asked is if the hero may move to ANY space adjacent to ANY door. So yeah, that's basically the confirmation that the "any door" instance is correct in the rules. Heroes will effectively be flying over that particular map while Skarn tries to get his carcass to these shards before then.. Looks like a tough objective for the OL if the heroes are good at testing, like Nathan foresaw. Ah well I´m going to throw some Hideous Laughter at that to see what happens Thanks guys for the discussion, it was cool to get that much feedback so quickly.

When you perform an attack action you can select any equipped weapon, but just one. You need to announce which one you want to use prior to rolling the dices. You can attack with one weapon and perform a second attack action with the other weapon if you want too (or with the same weapon as in the first attack). Also, some skills rely on how you equip your gear, for instance some skills only trigger if you use a two-handed weapon, some only if you carry a shield (and a one-handed weapon) etc. I´ve seen heroes with both ranged and melee weapons equipped (both one-handed obviously). It's a nice combination to ensure your hero can attack without relying too much on movement. Similarly, you may have one weapon for high damage (pierce, good damage surge), and one for regeneration (stamina mainly) or condition dealing, or things like Reach. These are just a few examples .

Yeah I asked FFG some time ago, but I have no real hope of getting to the bottom of this today. I got the confirmation that the question had been received, if that proves anything. Removing doors does not affect the tests though Zaltyre? The OL still picks any attribute of his choice except the door's imprinted one, so that's still 3 to choose from?

But it would mean the other doors (not the green one which is the first encountered door for all heroes) are only useful to get back from one of the three other areas, so the whole thing works as a one-direction system? Skarn is going to move off the corridor anyway off to his personal quest, so corridor is empty bar small monsters. If the heroes go first for Shard A for instance and I get Skarn to move himself to shard B, then I couuld remove the B door which means heroes cannot teleport to the door B spots anymore and have to go through the corridor. maybe that's the way it's supposed to be played EDIT: but yeah, heroes have very good mobility using that system, plus they only need to send one guy to gather them all, like Lindel in our case =) They win as soon as the fourth shard has been found, they don't need to be anywhere specifically. EDIT 2: well, not quite true, they win as long as one hero carries them all

It's more complicated, because Skarn cannot move off the map before he has linked to each shard, so there is a ton of move around to be done from his part. Also, the OL choose which attribute to test (but not the one linked to the door) but if the hero passes, the hero player decides where to place the figure, not the OL. So I don't see a problem for re-uniting as long as the heroes don't screw up too many of these tests (my party is strong on attributes rolls, have Lindel etc). I´m not complaining for inbalance or anything because I don't know, I have never played this particular quest, but I just wanted to make sure we did this one right, as it's a bit important to said quest =)

Problem is, we´re not playing this quest as a rumor, but as quest number 3 in the Manor of Ravens campaign, so we cannot skip it. I´ll try to get a response from FFG before tonight :-/

I cannot rename the thread, sorry Yeah that sounds a bit weird to me too, even if the rules can well be made asymetrical between heroes and monsters. It means you can skip the corridor with Skarn in completely and rush for the shards for the cost of one move point. That's the way we´re going to play it I guess, but that feels odd to me. EDIT: As a consequence, having Skarn remove the door by linking to the shard seems like a benefit from the OL perspective as it prevents heroes from using the door to teleport. Not sure if that would be correct either.

Need some help about how to interprete the rules regarding the doors in this quest, as we plan to play this quest this evening. The quest rules say "If the hero passes [the attribute roll], he may choose a door that is not locked and place his figure in the empty space closest to that door". Does it mean any side of any door? For instance, if you pass a test on the green door, can you teleport to any space adjacent to the blue door?

Since Fortune tokens are automatically carried over from encounter 1 to encounter 2, it's not really a marginal situation as you think it is, but it wouldn't be honest for me to tell you that it happens on a regular basis. It depends on the plot deck and your own playstyle (conservative or not) I suppose. The blue cross is a god send from the OL perpective. Remove that (by providing a reroll) and the heroes are certain that every attack they make will matter. But as the OL, you have to count on that fact anyway. Since I started playing Basic II, I´m more concerned about re-rolls on attribute tests.