Last night we took a break from our campaign to play vanilla descent for a change (and so I could be a hero instead of an overlord). We played the first quest in WoD; the one that has a collapsing mine. We drew our starting heroes randomly using the RTL method, and the party ended up being Ispher (me), Mordok, Karnak, and Silhouette (whose skills of quick shot and the +2 fatigue made her a room clearing beast). We started off really well, making it to the third room by the third turn. This is where things went to hell for us. First, the overlord played the treachery kobolds for speed bumping us, which slowed us down by way to much. It took us a little over 3 turns to make it out of the room, by which time the falling mine started catching up to us. Then the next section (the long bendy section with a couple of ogres) proved to be our undoing. We ended up getting stuffed by Kobolds, Blood apes the overlord played, and an ogre stepping on top of the unactivated glyph making it so we'd have to kill him first to activate it. So...we start hacking our way through the minimum to clear a path to for me to run and hopefully kill the ogre and activate the glyph. Unfortunately, one of our characters was killed by a trap, and another fell off the map when we had no more glyphs to bring us back. Then I did something stupid. I opened a chest and got turned into a monkey, completely sealing our fate . We had a blast, but even if I hadn't been stupid I doubt we would have made it. Aside from an unfortunately unavoidable time-crunch in the room with the Ogre and bottomless pit, and me being silly at the end, we were making great time.
My question is, aside from the overlord not drawing a large number spawn card (which is pure luck), and my idiotic mistake at the end (which at that point we were more than likely screwed anyways. It just took our last hope), what can the heroes do to beat this level? Get Lucky?