Hi, sorry for taking so long to blog again. There has been a lot of gaming going on, but also a lot of real-life stuff, including and especially my employer mandating I return to the office. This means more time spent commuting, less time spent writing.
When I say there has been a lot of gaming going on, I am not kidding at all. My BF dragged me to a Malifaux tournament last weekend, and it was pretty amazing. A lot like Frostgrave, about which I think I have written — it’s a miniatures-based skirmish game. I spent last night starting to work on putting together the models for it. But more on that. I’ve also been working through Sword of Mana (GBA), Unicorn Overlord (PS5), Kill the Justice League (PS5), more Palworld, Guild Wars 2, etc etc etc. I hope I will have a chance to write about at least some of these things.
But today — everyone’s schedules and illnesses finally meshed enough so that we could get together for another HeroQuest quest. (Oh yeah, I bought two new expansions for HQ, too. I will get to those).
It had been so long that I’d almost forgotten that I had accidentally dumped a glass of water on top of the game a month or so ago. Everything was soaked; and it’s all paper and cardboard, so I was worried I’d have to buy the game again, and this is not a cheap game. Fortunately, I took a roll of paper towels and a lot of heavy books and managed to leave everything in a usable condition. A little wrinkled, but playable. Paper towels between every page of the scenario book. That was the part hit worse. And the most important part to preserve.
In the Castle of Mystery, a mad wizard stored his treasure in a mine at the end of a magical maze, where passing through any door sends the player — alone — to a random room in the dungeon. Could be nothing, could be treasure, probably gonna be monsters, and you can’t jump back once you pass through.
We didn’t know about all this going in, and the elf turned out to be the first one to pass through a door — and found herself facing a dread warrior, who immediately put the hurt on her. We saw the trick then. The rest of the team tried to rush in and help — and found themselves all scattered around the dungeon. On her next turn, the elf ducked back through the door and found herself in a room of goblins, which was a little easier for her to handle. She is poor at melee, having little defense and only a short sword to attack. She mostly uses a crossbow, and the occasional spell.
Heroes had to stop in their tracks on the other side of each portal, which made them easy pickings if another hero should randomly land in the same room. When that happened, the person who was there first would lose a body point, and be forced through the portal again. We had a situation where this happened twice in a row, with heroes ping-ponging around the entire map.
Before the elf finally landed safely — in a room where the dwarf was fighting two dread warriors — she had lost all her body points and had to save herself with a frantically cast healing spell. The dwarf appreciated the aid, as two dread warriors were more than even his battleaxe and magical armor could handle. He also found himself downing precious healing elixirs to stay in the fight.
Meanwhile, the monk found himself in a room of skeletons and mummies, and then again in a room of goblins, able to use his unique abilities to do vast amounts of damage at once, while shrugging off the monster attacks.
And the rogue… kept sneaking around until he found the room with the treasure. 5000 gold. Or, as he would tell the rest of the heroes, 1000 gold that he would be happy to split four ways. But that much gold is heavy, and anyone carrying it could neither fight nor defend themselves. The rogue found himself in that exact situation as he tried to carry it through the portals back to the stairs out. He did find himself, finally, in the room where the dwarf and elf were finishing their encounter with the dread warriors. The elf had found, amongst their corpses, a magical Ring of Return that could instantly teleport anyone in the same room to the start of the dungeon… but she wasn’t going to cast that spell unless the rogue saw his way to dividing things more equitably. The monk soon finished with his encounter and eventually found the room with everyone else.
Grumbling, the rogue agreed to share the entire 5K equally. The elf cast the ring’s spell and they returned to the start, only for the mad wizard’s ghost to appear, laughing maniacally while revealing that the gold was all fool’s gold, and we were the fools.
This quest doesn’t have a lot of fans online. We had fun, and Kasul as Zargon was having a hell of a time teleporting us into and out of sticky situations.
We have only four more quests from first campaign, and I imagine this was just a bit of fun before things get serious. I do have two more expansions, but we may try some other games in between. I haven’t even opened Frosthaven, and I’ve had that sitting downstairs for almost a year now.
