When last we met, there was a Witch Hand mage stalking us. Statues shuddering to deadly life. Gargoyles. All sorts of bad stuff. But, we managed to revive the Fire King and get his Hearthkin Horn, the artifact that will help us in our time of direst need.
But, our mentor, Mentor, doesn’t think we have the stuff to go up against both the sorceress Cassandra and the shape-shifting wizard Quindrak, not as we are. But! He has a solution. There’s rumors of a treasure trove, undisturbed, lo, these many centuries, in a mine long abandoned by the legendary King Forgrin, who died refusing to reveal where he’d hidden his most powerful armors and weapons. Without those tools, his kingdom did not long outlive him. But Mentor knows the location of this mine, and doesn’t expect we’ll find much resistance.
We followed his directions exactly, and as quickly as we could, but there is a spy in our camp, and we got to the mine just moments ahead of an army of Dread Warriors coming from above, and a steady stream of Abominations from below.
Still, we’re actually a little better equipped than Mentor seems to know, as we didn’t have too much trouble working our way through the mine. Our eager rogue did run ahead of the group and set off a trap that set an entire room on fire, burning him, but even that didn’t really slow him down all that much. Sure, he was down to one body point, but he had a few healing potions hidden in his billowing cloak.
We found a chest filled with 600 gold pieces, but the real treasure was well-hidden behind a bookcase. We found there a magical longsword, claimed immediately by the barbarian. The dwarf got a crossbow she wanted. Nobody wanted the heavy plate mail that reduces your movement to one red die, so we sold that and split the 850 gold among us. I was able to get some chainmail for my Elf, bringing me to five defense dice. The barbarian got a bracer and I believe the dwarf also got a bracer. The rogue was already stupidly well equipped, so he was content to keep his share of the gold for later.
The trove found, we beat a fighting retreat to the exit, and… that was the game. A short adventure with one purpose — to see us equipped for the last two battles of the campaign.–
We do have a couple of other HeroQuest expansions. I thought it might be fun to bring in one of the unused characters to see how they’d work out in the hardest adventures. I opened the Jungles of Delthrak expansion to check out the Berserker and the Explorer. The Berserker is a Barbarian variant that gets one-time-use abilities as they lose health; the Explorer is an expert at avoiding traps and finding treasure. Neither would really replace the Elf with her healing spell, and so they’ll have to wait until we play HQ again. We’d already played with the Monk on our first HQ campaign, but by mutual agreement, we decided to ban the Monk from play; it is far too powerful.
With this campaign coming to an end, we’ve starting talking about our next long term campaign games. More on those later! You may be surprised by what we have in store…
