Myth Story Quests rendered into Chapter Quests: The Stone Of Life

These cards are based on the Myth Story Quest "The Stone Of Life". I broke that quest out into Chapters, worked up necessary clarifications and revisions for things that didn't work so well in the original, and altered the flavor text to better match the "Adventurers telling a story of their exploits at a tavern" theme. I used Tom Howard's card template to make these, and went with his "S" designation so they'd match the remixes he'd done of my cards from The Mad King. I think from a rules perspective they'd be clearer with a big "C" in the corner instead, but this is one case where consistency is at least as important as accuracy.

That said, I moved the rules and rewards for success down into the resolution area where the flavor text for success lived. Likewise, I moved the rules and consequences for failure down to where the flavor text for failure resides. All of it's below the "Resolution" label. I've found that when we complete a quest, we immediately read the reward section, and then get distracted by whatever decks or tokens that involves, and often forget to return to the bottom of the card to read the color narration of what just happened. My hope is that consolidating all of this into one area will make it harder to forget.

To use these new cards you would shuffle "Arrival At River Falls" and "By Emberweave's Campfire" into your Quest Deck. Between the various forums where I posted my earlier work, I've had a number of questions about how to use these cards, so this time I was very precise on the card itself about where each Chain gets put in the deck.

The original "The Stone Of Life" quest has a weird disjointed structure. The second act is confusing, and feels like it's almost a different story. I had to read it all a couple times to figure out what the heck was actually going on.  To address that, I broke that second Act out as its own unit, a single Chapter Quest that can be played on its own. That meant the main line of the quest was now about 50% shorter. To compensate, I added a few extra monsters and some sterner pass/fail conditions to the chapters, plus a mandatory Quest Deck shuffle in the middle. Essentially, it will play out as 3 Chapter Quest chains rather than a single Story, and you can only get the Title by completing the first and third Chain series.



I might still revise this campfire quest a little. For one thing, I was uncertain whether I should give it a "C" or "S" designator. More importantly, I think the second reward line as written is more complicated than it needs to be. It'd be better if it was "search the Quest Deck for any Quest Card and put it on top of the deck", and if I struck the River Falls reference entirely. The result would be a stand-alone Chapter that lets you hunt for any Story or Chain you wanted, which would actually be pretty cool.

Jewel In The Water is extrapolated from the 1st Act of the original, but adds 4 extra Crawlers. It's a speed bump, mainly here to make sure the Heroes encounter enough Tiles to really earn the Title at the end of the Story.

I moved the two "Remove a White Token from the Treasure Bag" rewards of this Act ahead to this and the Arrival quest, so you'll still feel some small benefit if you call it a night in the middle of the chain.





Pete's Cell is as faithful an adaptation as I could make of the original without dictating a specific Tile.  It's  possible to recreate the original with terrain bits where the doors had been, or you can let your creativity go wild and create a unique makeshift prison for Pete.

The Resolution flavor text here is heavily influenced by the weird Act Two of the original, which I removed to be it's own sidequest (see "By Emberweave's Campfire", above). I nearly just cut that Act out entirely, but decided that made the story too short, and thus the Title too easy to acquire. While it's still a little short now, the mandatory shuffle on this card prevents you from just blitzing through the Quest. Chances are you'll have to accomplish it in non-consecutive segments.


After the shuffle, you'll probably encounter plenty of other quests before ending up back in the River Fall vicinity. This card is basically picking back up with what had been Act Three of the original.

In the rulebook, Yardu's plan is a terribly unclear, and is the only hint in the core game that the the various Darkness villains may sometimes have competing agendas. That ambiguity, plus Emberweave's obvious efforts against the cult (see next card) provoked the idea that maybe he's just an illusion of Yardu.

There was a chance that you'd get this card as the first draw of a new adventure, with very little equipment and thus no real shot at winning. So I built in a safety valve to compensate. If Yardu clobbers you, you don't actually suffer any consequences other than having this specific Quest Chain be further delayed.  "By Emberweave's Campfire" is also shuffled back in to further reinforce the notion that he's meddling in your lives, and that "all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again." Frakkin' toaster. :)


This and the next few Tiles were very tricky to convert into Chapter Quests, because there's a number of complicated rules that apply to all of them and they have very precise placement in the original. To save space, I presented the rules only where needed instead of laying out the big picture on every card.


Failure on this card doesn't stop you from completing the main quest, but does raise the difficulty. In the original you technically couldn't fail and could take all the time you wanted, so when I added a failure condition I slipped in a bonus treasure drop to compensate.




Failure here can shut you down completely, so I included a "save point". :) That is to say, if fail here you can eventually pick it back up here and not have to backtrack to previous cards. Hard to say if that's actually beneficial to the Heroes or not.

You'll see on the final card that I also made some minor changes to how the Triggers and Runes work for the sake of brevity and clarity, but the end result has exactly the same completion odds as the original, provided you place exactly two lairs on the "Fire-Weaver's Beacons" Tile and concentrate your Triggers on a single character.  I built in mechanisms to allow players to customize that experience, and thereby make the scenario a little easier or harder as they see fit.



The last card can give you the Title while the T1kL is still on the map, which is a strong advantage to the players. To keep that "on the level", I tied the Trigger Tokens to each Hero's personal inventory. The challenge level of the quest itself has overall gone up slightly, but then adjusts itself down to below the original's level of complexity if Heroes start falling in battle. I'm pretty pleased with the elegant way that works here.

I added a couple serendipity to the success entry, so that if the Players press on after the big fight is over they'll be more likely to afford resurrecting fallen comrades. One response I heard when I did this on a different quest was that clever players might use it to immediately summon Talek Three Dunes and buy an item to save with their new Title. I'm really not worried about that, since Talek only carries green items. If you're so under-equipped that a random green item purchase is actually worth saving after defeating a Boss, then you definitely earned the Title you just fought for.

Mad Hermit Remixed

Progression of an idea:

• Mercs/MegaCon Games made some Story Quests for Myth, including "The Mad King" all about this guy The Hermit King.
• I converted the quest into Chapter Quest format to allow more flexibility.
• Justin N over at Board Game Geek had the awesome idea of changing the flavor text on Myth's various quest cards to better reflect the "adventurer's telling a story in a bar" element of the game's setting. Link to his text.
• Tom Howard at Board Game Geek made a lovely full-bleed photoshop layout that more faithfully recreates the original Mercs card frames. Link.
• Then Tom ported over my version of the quest cards into his new format, and converted the flavor text to match Justin N's "bar boast" version. It was way cool of him to do so, and the results are awesome:

The end product:

Pretty nice, huh? I'm really pleased with the results.

It was admittedly a tiny bit shocking visiting BGG and discovering that something I planned to do this very afternoon had already been done, but the final version looks sweet and he saved me a lot of work swapping to the "tavern story" versions of the flavor text. That's certainly worth the tiny bit of Geek Gold that I'm missing out on for someone else posting them (and it's not like I'd gotten around to it yet).  These are _vastly_ superior to my rough drafts. Thank you, Tom!

Infinite Darkness Loop

Played some more Myth last night, and ran into a weird spot where two different instructions from the FAQ resulted in a not technically infinite (but functionally very close) loop, that became a rather painful TPK.

Myth FAQ, Page 7:

What happens if you need to spawn monsters but have no more minis?
Players can use proxies for any additional minis that spawn. Additional Minion Packs will be made available in the future. If players do not want to purchase additional minis or use proxies, they can implement the rule: For every two models that can’t be placed for any reason, increase the Darkness Meter by 1.

Myth FAQ, Page 9:

In the quest Drums of the World, the card text says: “The Heroes must kill the Mucker to stop the drumming. Roll 5 b” When are these Fate Dice rolled? 
This is done at the start of each Darkness Cycle. If any duplicates are rolled, treat them as if they are only 1 of the corresponding result.

We started our Act with a 12x12 board. That size board has a Quest and a Lair. The Quest we drew was Drums of the Wold, which places a large orc hunting pack on the board, plus an orc captain who has a set of magic drums. Since there's already orcs from that card, we made the thematic choice of having an orc lair.

In the first two Hero Cycles we were unable to kill the captain with the drums. He was surrounded by minions, tucked behind a red-bordered terrain feature, and Captains aren't really all that dangerous in the game. So we buffed and positioned and loaded our quivers and hid in shadows and refreshed our hand once. What a mistake.

None of us had snapped to the math of the situation, so we didn't realize that in order to survive we absolutely had to kill him before the first Darkness Cycle could happen.

Every single Darkness Cycle, the orc captain rolls 5 Fate Dice, consulting this little chart. For the benefit of those who haven't played Myth, I'm translating these into normal d6's:

1. Monsters get stronger.
2. 4 monsters spawn.
3. The next darkness cycle happens nearly twice as soon as normal.
4. Monsters get faster.
5. 4 other monsters spawn.
6. The monster-captain who's rolling these dice is harder to kill.

Then the Darkness card itself almost always spawns at least 4 more orcs (3 normal, +1 because there's an orc captain in play) at the end of the Darkness cycle, sometimes more than that.  So if 5d6 turned up at least one "2" and one "5", there would be a minimum of 12 monsters spawning that turn. Of the two monster types the drums could spawn, the base game comes with 15 of one (orc minions), and 9 of the other (specifically the melee-version of the arachnid minion). So if you roll both of those "spawn more monsters" results when all the minis are already in play, the Darkness meter advances by (12/2=) 6... which is exactly what it takes to trigger another Darkness Cycle.

That meant every bad guy on the board took 6 turns in a row, which was enough for them to kill 3 of the 4 Heroes, before finally getting a "bad" roll that left the Darkness Meter on space 5 (of 6). Sadly, the only surviving Hero had 3 cards in her Action slots and nothing else good in her hand. So she had no choice but to refresh her hand, and the Darkness Meter automatically advances one per monster type during the refresh phase. So the bad guys immediately took two more back to back turns, killing the final PC. They technically triggered a third Darkness Cycle before they were done, but it didn't matter since we were all dead.

Curious what would have happened if we'd used proxies instead, we immediately reset the board and got out a bunch of green legos to be proxy-orcs. I wouldn't call it an easy fight, and the Soldier and the Acolyte both nudged up to 9 Threat before it was over, but we triumphed without losing a character.

I'm not yet certain if the fault lies in the alternative-to-proxies rule, or in the Quest we played, but either way something smells rotten in FAQmark.

Myth Story Quests rendered into Chapter Quests: No Rest For The Weary

Continuing on from my previous posts, here's a conversion of Myth's Story Quest #1: "No Rest For The Weary" into a Chapter Quest Chain.

Again, as with the previous posts, the following House Rules are recommended when trying to use these cards:

House Rule #1:  At the end of every third session, the players receive a Deck Manipulation reward.  When this happens, items are reset to their starting (brown) equipment for each character, but you can save 1 item + 1 per earned Title. Serendipity and gold are reset to zero at this time as well.

Addendum to House Rule #1: If the Heroes ended the third session while still in the middle of a Quest Chain, they may choose to delay the Deck Manipulation and item reset until the end of the session in which they complete that chain. Further Deck Manipulation rewards do NOT accumulate while you are delaying one.

House Rule #2: When you complete a chain Quest that directs you to add a new chain to the Quest Deck, you may choose to either place that card on top of the deck, or to shuffle it into the deck. If the last Quest of a session tells you to add a new chain to the Quest deck, you may make the decision at the start of the next session.

With those in play, you can incorporate the cards below into Myth's "Free-Questing" mode.

Throughout this chain (and some of my other Quests) I list Resolution instructions and flavor text for failure even if there's no explicit Failure condition. I feel a TPK (Total Party Kill, meaning all the Heroes died) certainly equates to failure, though in that circumstance you might not feel inclined to read the text and follow it's instructions. Since these cards are meant for Free-Questing, it's not impossible that the players might decide to abandon a quest. (After all, the whole point of playing Myth in Free-Questing mode is to have creative freedom for the session, and have better control of factors like Tile set up and session duration than a Story might give you.) There's no clear rule for handling that, but it's certainly in the spirit of Free-Questing, so I've included likely consequences on the cards for Heroes that run away very unheroically. Since the proprietor of The Silent Minstrel is a serial killer, I've put some very "Saw-like" components into those failure blocks.

The Story in the rulebook had an extra 12x12 tile with no special rules before you got to the 6x12. I've skipped that here, making the Act a little shorter (unless you compensate by putting a trap-filled Tile in between the quest Tiles) but keeping it every bit as dangerous since your equipment situation will likely be that much worse when you arrive at the double-tile that was the end of the Act in the original version.

I should have explicitly put the quest goals on this card. I've been assuming that the default of goal of any quest is to Clear the Tile unless something else is specifically mentioned, and failure happens if the tactical situation forces you to abandon the Tile without clearing it.



If the players abandon the Quest and flee off the double-sized Tile, they can escape past some Trap and then exit. Doing so here breaks the chain progression.
 

The Story in the rulebook includes a cryptic statement of "The Mini-Boss doesn't appear until Wave 5 is cleared." That's the only mention of a mini-boss being part of the Act. Weird, huh?

I decided to keep it, but broke that off into its' own Chapter Quest that follows this one. If 5 waves of slaughterfield eats up all the time you had to play, you can save the mini-boss fight till the next session.

It was a little tempting to move the miniboss all the way to the end and have it be the Innkeeper, but that would have really changed the power-level of the final battle which already has several strange rules and didn't need the further complication.



The events of this Quest are a hybrid combining the Miniboss from the second Act of the Story, with some of the special rules of the final Tile of the third Act.

Gathering kindling is mentioned in the Story, but not really explained or defined. Here it's a bonus Treasure, and also sets up a benefit for the final Quest.

The original Story mentions "the Heroes must gather the wood and fire to light the fire" and puts some tokens on the map but fails to explain how that works.

I added a non-combat action with a die roll to make it just a little harder. The Title you get as a reward for success is a big deal, so I felt it needed an extra hurdle.

I came "this close" to adding a mini-boss or captain to this card to represent the innkeeper. It would have really complicated the fight, but killing that jerk would have felt cathartic.

Myth Story Quests rendered into Chapter Quests: The Common People

Here's another set of Story Quests from Myth converted into Chapter Quests. This time I tackled Story #4: "The Common People".

These cards are intended to be played during Free Questing, with the following House Rules to replace the usual Story-dependent "level up" rules about decks, titles, and equipment.

House Rule #1:  At the end of every third session, the players receive a Deck Manipulation reward.  When this happens, items are reset to their starting (brown) equipment for each character, but you can save 1 item + 1 per earned Title. Serendipity and gold are reset to zero at this time as well.

Addendum to House Rule #1: If the Heroes ended the third session while still in the middle of a Quest Chain, they may choose to delay the Deck Manipulation and item reset until the end of the session in which they complete that chain. Further Deck Manipulation rewards do NOT accumulate while you are delaying one.

House Rule #2: When you complete a chain Quest that directs you to add a new chain to the Quest Deck, you may choose to either place that card on top of the deck, or to shuffle it into the deck. If the last Quest of a session tells you to add a new chain to the Quest deck, you may make the decision at the start of the next session.

House Rule #2 is arguably the intent of the designers at Mercs/MegaCon Games. It is already implied on page 11 of the rulebook, when they say you can abandon Story or Act Quests to pursue a Chapter Quest Chain, but I wanted it to be listed explicitly since I got a few questions after I posted my conversion of "The Mad King" into Chapter Quests.

Here's the cards that together act as a conversion of "Common People" into a series of Chapter Quests...


Act 1 of the "Common People" Story is/was a rush across several tiles on a 10 Darkness Cycle timer.

I turned this into a per-Tile Hero Cycle timer for 2 reasons:

#1: To allow the players to wrap up the game for the night at the end of any Tile, and eliminate any memory issues next session if they do so.

#2: To allow the players to have the freedom (standard to Free-Questing) of choosing which tiles have Quests and which have Traps without it complicating the Quest.







When I say "complete this Realm Tile" on the various cards, I meant "Clear this Realm Tile". Memo to myself: fix that bit of language whenever I get around to updating these cards.


 (By the way, I made these cards a few weeks ago, so they've got the older layout. I'll probably move them to my newer layout whenever I implement any playtest feedback that crops up.)





 

 I'm a little nervous that I might have set the Hero Cycle timers too aggressively, and need to relax them later so players can actually succeed, especially this last one.

The difficulty may have gone up, but the rewards if you are successful on all three have also increased a tiny bit. You'd get 3 treasure draws instead of 2, and you'd get two of them a tile or two earlier than otherwise expected. My hope is that the combination roughly evens out.









Giving the players control of when they call it quits for the night meant I had to include text on both Burning Bridges and Fallen Guard to ensure that the former would continue to affect the game while the later was being resolved.

At first glance, there's no way to fail this Chapter Quest. However, a TPK is definitely a possibility in any game of Myth, and the players should probably have the freedom to abandon any quest when Free-Questing. With that in mind, I decided to include some minor directives and flavor text for failure. Such failures won't come up very often, so I didn't spend a lot of time or energy on them. Keeping with Myth's stated "the heroes are telling the tale in a bar after the fact" theme, I decided to not make a TPK end the plotline.


The second Act of this Story was a little vague, and I'm taking a position here on what it meant. Any Hero may exit the Tile as normal by moving off the edge (and placing a new Tile if there isn't one yet), but instead of having to "Clear" the tile to progress, each Hero can individually escape as soon as the number of monsters on the Tile is less than the number of Heroes. The previous quest will keep sending monsters towards you to mess up that math, so this may be tricky, especially for the last Hero through the doors. Players will find success at the Quest hinges on them being coordinated and clustered at a Tile-edge so they can all flee at the start of a Hero Cycle when the monster count is low. If some Heroes flee before the others and accidentally trigger a Darkness Cycle in the process, it may cause the group as a whole to fail. Leaving someone to die outside the gates doesn't feel like success to me.

Trying to pack everything into a single card and keep it legible wasn't easy. I had to truncate a few sentences, skip some of the flavor text, and even omit important information. So it's not as clear as it could be that you win at the end (not the beginning) of wave 10. I don't spell out exactly how the limited entry zones affect Slaughterfield spawning -- personally I'd basically spawn them as if there were off-board lairs adjacent to those 6 spaces -- so how you interpret it might render the Quest a cakewalk, or on the other hand Heroes trying to fix the gaps may find themselves surrounded suddenly and frequently. I also left off the description of what the three resources represent for space considerations (pickaxe/rock, bucket/water, and hand spade, for those still wondering).

Even with those problems, I think the process for fixing the walls is still probably clearer on this card than it is in the rulebook. In the rulebook it's on this weird little copy/paste chart from another quest, and there's no mention of where or how you get a hand spade. I've seen forum threads where different groups interpreted the rulebook in very different ways based on the vagueness of the rules.

In closing, I would just like to say that despite having thoroughly read, thought about, re-typed and re-edited the "Common People" story, I still have no clue what the name means.

What I Didn't Do

A few posts back, I successfully talked myself out of the Recon kickstarter.

What I forgot/failed to do, was convince my wife. So with ~15 minutes left to the kickstarter ending, she pledged for the Myth level. A level which, I'll admit, got better than I'd originally expected. They hit extra stretch goals and announced alternate sculpts that would actually fit the Myth setting. In the end it was $40 for I think 7 minis and probably around 35 cards or so. Not a great deal, but better than I'd feared. She didn't back full Recon, just the Myth crossover parts, so I won't have to stare across the table at Tango & Cash. So that's something.

Myth Story Quests rendered into Chapter Quests: The Mad Hermit King

The Myth rulebook has a bunch of Story Quests in it that are basically more structured tales with specific tile layouts, special rules, and increased rewards. Frankly, I don't like them. They undermine Myth's flexibility, which is among it's greatest strengths, and make it possible to have to take notes on a complicated board position because you called it a night in the middle of a fight. Also, using Story Quests encourages you to nose around in the rulebook during play, which is pretty much the last thing I ever want to do during a game of Myth. That rulebook is scary.

Unfortunately, character progression in Myth is tied directly to Story completion.  That meant I needed a house rule to allow characters to advance via Free-Questing at about the same rate that they would if you only played Stories. Here's the simplest version I could think up, along with an addendum and a clarification that came up when people asked me questions on how that rule worked.

House Rule #1:  At the end of every third session, the players receive a Deck Manipulation reward.  When this happens, items are reset to their starting (brown) equipment for each character, but you can save 1 item + 1 per earned Title. Serendipity and gold are reset to zero at this time as well.

Addendum to House Rule #1: If the Heroes ended the third session while still in the middle of a Quest Chain, they may choose to delay the Deck Manipulation and item reset until the end of the session in which they complete that chain. Further Deck Manipulation rewards do NOT accumulate while you are delaying one.

House Rule #2: When you complete a chain Quest that directs you to add a new chain to the Quest Deck, you may choose to either place that card on top of the deck, or to shuffle it into the deck. If the last Quest of a session tells you to add a new chain to the Quest deck, you may make the decision at the start of the next session.

Basically Rule #1 and it's addendum just treat every 3rd Session as if it were automatically the completion of a Story. You don't get an automatic Title each time, but your Item Limit is treated as if you had 1 more actual Title than you technically do so you're not screwed for not starting with an official Story. It's roughly balanced vs the original Story mode requirements and rewards. It's slightly in the player's favor, since some of the Story Acts can run unexpectedly long, but the difference/benefits should be almost entirely about  convenience, not power level.

House Rule #2 is possibly how the rulebook intended quest chains to work, but it's hard to say for certain as page 11 is short on detail and at best kinda lazily implies that's how "pursuing a quest chain" in Free-Questing mode works.

Armed with those rules, I set about cutting the Story Quests apart into their component pieces, fixing and clarifying the rough parts, ditching a few rare truly broken parts, and putting everything worth saving onto Chapter Quest Chains. Provided you occasionally drop in a Tile with Traps rather than simply rushing every possible Quest opportunity, it should be only a very minor impact on play balance, and you'll get to enjoy all the best parts of both Free-Questing and Story Mode.

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EDIT: I was asked some questions about how you're intended to use these cards. The person asking was worried that this somehow made the story chapters happen out of order. That's not the case at all.

Put the first card (and only the first) of each chain into your Quest Deck and shuffle.

When you eventually draw and complete that quest, the card it unlocks can either be shuffled into your deck, or can be placed directly on top of your deck so that it's guaranteed to be the next Chapter Quest you encounter.

I don't think of that as a house rule. I'm pretty sure it is what the designers of the game meant when they said in the rules:

"If the players chose to, they can simply game the entirety of a Chapter Quest chain and forego accomplishing any Act or Story Quests. Even if those quests have already been drawn, players can choose to pursue a Chapter Quest chain instead." - Myth rulebook, page 11.

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Here's my initial "proof of concept" version, which converts Story #3: "The Mad King". There's a tiny bit of new content on the cards below, but for the most part it is all just text taken from the rulebook's Story section,  ported onto Chapter Quest card format. Copyright on all of this belongs to Mercs/MegaCon. I don't think they'd complain about me posting it here, as you'd need the core game to make use of any of this, and the essence of these quests can all be found in the core game rulebook.

The first three Chapter Quests are just adaptations of the "Circle The Wagons" Act from the Story. I converted it into 3 cards, and made the third one optional, so players can choose whatever length and difficulty they want for overall "story".

Failure is unlikely on most of these Quests, as it is in the original. Just in case, I included new penalties for failure in case the Heroes have a streak of bad luck and decide they need to Abandon the Tile/Quest. This "ups the ante" just a bit, and ensures the new format isn't significantly easier than the original Story Mode version.

If you choose to use only the first two of the three wagon-related quests, you'll end up with less treasure than in the original, but if you use the longest version (which has more lairs and wagons than in the official Story) you'll get slightly more treasure than in the original.

Also, adding both cards to the deck means you can revisit just the wagon mechanics in later sessions without having to restart the entire Quest Chain.

The qualification that the Lair is at the far edge in the third version is also an increase to difficulty and game length. Heroes will have a hard time penetrating deep enough into the Tile to take it out before the whole place is swimming in monsters.

The middle Act of the original Story basically boiled down into a single Chapter. Players may want to add at least one Trap-filled Tile to pad this out a bit.

About 3 Trap tiles to every 5 Quest tiles is roughly the ratio used in the original Story format (for most of the stories, anyway).

The start of the 3rd Act of the original. I added the "leftovers" rule for the event of drawing this Quest on a 6x6 tile in a 4- or 5-player game.

I added some provisions here to keep it properly challenging regardless of the Tile size the players chose.

The rewards include a Deck Manipulation, because I converted this before I'd settled on the House Rule (see top of page) that makes it redundant. Most people will choose the Title anyway.

There's also some Serendipity bonus on the final card because I don't want to assume the players will call it quits for the day after doing this card. The whole point of doing these as Chapter Quests was to give players more control over the game (including length) and not be straight-jacketed by the Story structure if they'd prefer to be flexible about it.

Cockatrice Chapter Quest Chain for Myth

Here's another short (4-card) Chain of Chapter Quests that I made for Myth. The first two are basically just effects that trigger at the start of the tile, but the last two in the chain include ongoing effects that should mix up the tactical situation and require some decision-making during battles.

 It all starts with a nasty toxic fog that destroys items. It was kind of a cool idea for dialing back the throttle on character advancement, and is basically a lighter version of the start to the "No Rest For The Weary" Story Quest. It'll be painful if it comes up at the start of an Act, but no big deal if you get it after a Chapter or two of play.

I haven't made the "Industrial Evil" Quest Chain yet. It's basically a placeholder for a whole other plot idea that would start out the same but go in a different direction entirely. This lets me get double-duty out of the first Quest card, without increasing the frequency of equipment destruction too much. For now, the fog is toxic and corrupting simply because the area is near the nest of a cockatrice, which are several flavors of deadly depending on which mythologies or bestiaries you read.


The rest of the Quest Chain is fairly simple and self-explanatory. The second Quest in particular is pretty much a guaranteed win. Partly that's to compensate for the hefty punch of item destruction in the first Chapter. This Chain isn't meant to be nearly as difficult overall as the official Story Quests, since it doesn't have a Title reward at the end.

The third Quest is a small tactical challenge that can be solved with Aggressive Movement. It's not particularly difficult, but sloppiness is penalized.

The final step has a built-in triggerable board-clearing ability to offset the dangers of a double-tile, but it comes at the risk of a bad roll potentially killing Heroes.

Edit: Not letting the Heroes actually battle the cockatrice is a bit of a cheat and a let-down, but it's a trick that Mercs/MegaCon themselves used at least twice (with the Innkeeper at the end of "No Rest For The Weary"  and the Hermit King at the end of "The Mad King"). It's not ideal, but it means I don't have to stat out a cockatrice and pick out a mini for it.

The flavor text on the various cards pokes some fun at the treasure-grabbing nature of dungeon-crawling games in general. Fitting a story into 4 rules-laden cards is pretty tough, so rather than beating my head against the wall trying to produce great drama, I just went for a little bit of snarky humor.


EDIT: Posting these cards here caused me to think more about them. In retrospect, I suspect I may have put these in the wrong order. It might actually flow more logically if the Petrified Fighters were the first quest, instead of the third. You find evidence of cockatrice trouble, and then encounter the nasty environment only if you intentionally approach its lair to kill it. Changing that now would require major rewrites.

Why I Haven't Kicked Recon

Mercs/Megacon, the company that made Myth (which I really liked) have another Kickstarter wrapping up in a few days. Mercs:Recon looks like an interesting game, but there’s a few things holding me back. Really this is the post where I talk myself into it, or out of it.

Okay self, why should I NOT irresponsibly throw oodles of cash at Mercs:Recon?

• 1) I’ve got too many cooperative minis games right now. For the last week I’ve been posting about Myth, Galaxy Defenders, and the upcoming Shadows of Brimstone. The only way Recon will get any play time at my table is if I retire 2 or 3 of the other games permanently. Much better to save my money for the inevitable Myth Expansions kickstarter. Recon is more of a "one-off" board game, and not campaign-style. That does make it easier to jump into on a off night, but at the cost of some of the fun and investment.

• 2) It’s not cyberpunky enough for me to use the parts for something other than the game itself. Futuristic mercenaries breaking into a corporate high-rise sounds like it should be right up my alley. I love CP2020… but this game only has about 10% of the CyberPunk aesthetic. The game has minis for modern-day office workers and private security, and for futuristic mercs in MetalGear, but not for anything that represents the core player characters of a CP2020 campaign. If there were cyborgs, or street punks, or even glamorous CEOs in fancy italian suits and evening gowns, it might be worth my kicking in for the minis. I kinda want the office-building map tiles, and the add-on purchase 3D terrain and drones, but at this point there’s better ways for me to spend my $135. While that's not their fault, they aren't making CP2020 the minis game after all, it definitely means the game itself would need to be more compelling because there's nothing else for me to do with the parts.

• 3) The four playable factions don’t seem different enough. 3 of the 4 are indistinguishable to my eye, all being decked out in basically the same power-armour and armed with the same style of weapons. The sample character sheet was all about bonus dice, instead of more colorful abilities. Character niche seems a little shallow at first glance, though that could just be a marketing failure. If the other elements were compelling enough, I could get past this issue.

• 4) I’m not so thrilled with the stunt-casting. Remember how Galaxy Defenders has minis that are clearly lifted from Aliens, Predator, MIB, and RoboCop? That’s kinda cool, but very distracting. It undermines immersion, and leaves a weird taste in my mouth about the setting. Now Mercs:Recon also has a mini lifted from RoboCop, not to mention a couple from Die Hard and, of all things, Tango & Cash. What!?! Rambo and Snake Plisken I might have been able to get behind, but Tango & Cash? Really? That's what you thought gamers were dying to play?

Tango & Cash scored 39% on Rotten Tomatoes.  Just sayin'.

• 5) The Myth pledge level is a bad deal. For a $40 pledge, you can get just the stretch-goals that come with a Myth tie-in. At the time of this writing, that’s 1 figure that comes with 2 cards. By the time you’re reading this (I’ve written so many posts today that I’m scheduling them out to go live one per day), they may have hit the next Myth-related stretch goal. That’d be a second miniature, with about 30-35 cards. Still not a great deal, and not Megacon’s best mini either — it’s hard to get excited about a mini that’s intentionally generic enough to kinda sorta fit both the near future and medieval fantasy europe. If the kickstarter gets another $100,000 past that, it’ll unlock 4 zombie minis that most likely come with a single card.  Are 1 to 6 minis and 2 to 40 cards worth $40? That kind of pricing is what drove me out of WH40K. The original Myth kickstarter was $100 for 150+ minis and 200+ cards, so you know the cost to manufacture any given component can't be very high. I'm a little worried that if people buy into this, it will set some really bad precedents for what Megacon can charge MSRP for a single figure.

Good points, self. You’ve convinced me to stay out of this one. Though there is a little voice over my bad shoulder that tells me objections # 2, 3, and 5 could all be negated if there’s some cooler stretch-goals added in the final days. I wonder how I’ll feel about it a week from now when this post goes live?

Myth vs Galaxy Defenders vs Shadows of Brimstone part 8: Non-Combat Actions

This is the 8th, and probably final post in a series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. In this installment, I discuss the non-combat portions of three games that mostly about their battle systems. What is there to do in these games, other than kill monsters?

Non-Combat Actions

Myth provides a great variety of things for you to do in-between killing monsters. Nearly every session will involve at least one trap that needs to disarmed or circumvented. Many of the quest cards provide allies to rescue, timers to race, or special terrain to interact with. You probably average from 3 to 6 of these special rules or objectives in a typical session, and they really change your goals and play style when they’re active. The main boxed set includes a nice variety of such activities to liven up your sessions, and there's a lot more coming up in the expansions and stretch-goals. Admittedly, the non-combat-action rules are sketchy and under-developed, but they’re also quite flexible.  I particularly like that most non-combat checks don’t interfere with your fighting abilities at all. You don’t usually have to choose between kicking-ass or advancing the plot, as more often than not you can do both equally on your turn. Each character class has at least one unique card that helps them in non-combat activities.

Galaxy Defenders seems to offer a bit less than Myth in that area. There are missions, and most of them involve getting to a particular place and doing something special once there, so that's a step in the right direction. The first several missions in the rulebook are just 1 or 2 small rules or objectives that only come into play at the end of the hour-long session. Later missions are more involved, but are also balanced for larger groups of high-level well-equipped characters, and have longer expected run times. GD has interesting quests and events, it just takes several sessions and level-ups to unlock them.

Characters in Shadows have a large number of non-combat stats on their character class sheet: Agility, Cunning, Lore, Luck, Spirit, Strength, and Willpower. You don’t roll any of those in normal combat (sometimes Willpower is used for a Sanity check during a fight with the worst supernatural horrors), they exist mainly for use with the Encounter cards, which are little quests and events that happen as you travel through the maze. The demo I played was a pretty simple “learn the rules” treasure hunt, so we focused mostly on combat and didn’t see many of these Encounter cards. If that same ratio of fights to encounters exists in the main game, then SoB only has about the same number of non-violent activities as your typical GD mission… but I honestly doubt that’s the case. Given over half a dozen non-combat stats, it seems likely that they’ll come up quite often in normal play. I expect cave-ins, clue-gathering, and other exciting subplots and side-missions to crop up regularly. That said, each session is on a turn-clock (if a particular token advances 15 times the heroes lose), and the tunnel layout is pretty linear, so there may be practical limits to how many encounters and side-quests can actually happen.

And The Winner Is: Myth. Its lead in that area may shrink somewhat when I get more time with the other two games and learn their secrets, but at very least Myth has the most immediately-accessible things to do other than just simply kill for profit. (Killing things for fun and profit is the mainstay of all three games, though, so don't take that the wrong way.)

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Summary and Conclusion

In the previous posts, I awarded "wins" to each game in various categories.

1. Character Customization: Shadows of Brimstone
2. Set-Up Speed: Myth
3. Flexibility: Myth
4. Game-Length: Galaxy Defenders (was tie with Myth before this update)
5. Pacing: Myth
6. Setting: Subjective
7. Miniatures Versatility: Shadows of Brimstone
8. Maps/Tiles: Shadows of Brimstone
9. Rulebook: Galaxy Defenders
10. NPC AI: Myth or Galaxy Defenders
11. Non-Combat Activities: Myth (but Shadows of Brimstone looks interesting)

If those were all evenly weighted (and they're definitely not) the score would be something like Myth 5 to GD 3 to SoB 4, depending on how you handle ties. Of the three, Myth is currently my favorite, but the character advancement system in Shadows has exciting potential so that could change over time. All three games seem very solid to me, but each has it's flaws as well.

• Myth's rulebook is a ridiculous mess, and individual sessions may not have enough structure for some players.
• Galaxy Defenders has a very involved set-up process, and the game itself includes a little more clutter and book-keeping than the others.
• Shadows of Brimstone has slightly less interesting AI for the monsters, but otherwise seems quite solid. It also doesn't release for several months, and so it could have additional flaws that weren't evident in the demo I attended.

Myth cost about the same as GD via the Kickstarter, but it will include a lot more content once all the stretch-goal items arrive later this month. Myth and Shadows feature what seems like comparable amounts of content from my current perspective, but the full palate of stretch-goals kicked in at a much lower price tag on Myth. Overall, Myth feels like a better deal to me, though again the bad rulebook is a deal-breaker for some groups. It's kind of a shame. I may revisit this series when Shadows of Brimstone actually releases, when a more detailed comparison can be made concerning components I don't yet have in my hands.