I have such an appreciation for how actual real comic book colorists work. I don’t know who Dall-E 3 ripped this style off from, but wow, I have seen comic books with this sort of detailed coloring and I think it is the most intricate job in comics.
Kasul channeled Zargon from the very start of the game. He set up our minis — dwarf, elf, rogue and monk — in a room deep in the dungeon, with three locked doors and a wild tale of us following a mysterious character through an underground maze, leaving us with only the echoing sound of his laughter as he abandoned us in the dungeon and left through secret ways.
Why? Who knows! Probably another scheme of the evil wizard who dabbles with the forbidden magics of Chaos.
Theories of mine that proved to be false:
- Two of the doors are dangerous, but one is safe: Nope, all three had monsters.
- There is a time limit: Nope, no time limit, this wasn’t actually a race against time.
Now that’s just false advertising. After we finished, I went online to see what other players thought about this quest, and they had a bunch of suggestions on how to add a time limit to the game. 15 round limit, 20 round limit, have each room fill with poison gas after a time.
Although we had fun, for a quest in the back half of the campaign, we were hoping for a little more. The monk was definitely overpowered for this quest. With the dwarf’s new weapon and armor, nobody was ever in any real danger of dying (aside from a turn where the elf found herself tanking — and needed to cast her Water of Healing spell to stave off death). We spent most turns searching for treasure.
Or, as I came to call it, searching for wandering monsters… which is how it usually worked for me. For the rogue, though, it was gold, gems, potions, and the Elixir of Life artifact, the only true treasure to be found in the dungeon. Hence his starring role in the header image for this post.
And toward the end of the dungeon, we have the tale of the Undying Abomination. We’d kill him. Someone would search for treasure. Wandering monster! Zargon would chuckle as that Abomination came back to life! So we’d kill it again! Search for treasure. But no treasure — it’s the Abomination again!
That sucker was popping out of doors and wardrobes throughout the entire dungeon. We should have named him. I plan to paint him so that next time, he can have more of a recurring villain role. Which he has!
Although I don’t know if we’re going to need the power boost, I haven’t felt like the elf has had her moment in the sun. To offset this somewhat, I’ve today ordered the Mage of the Mirror expansion pack. This gives the elf three solo quests, followed up by a trip through the titular mirror with the rest of the group.
I may ask Kasul to consider pumping up the danger level of the quests to make buying expansions like this worthwhile. The base quests were tuned for the power level of the original crew — barbarian, dwarf, elf, wizard. Now that we’re taking on expansion characters, we’re overpowering the basic content. This is entirely my fault for buying them, but once you start down that road….
