Hey guys, so I have noticed there are some cool tiles or abilities that were either un-balanced or un-used and I didn't like that. Below are a few of my proposed house rules for RtL and SoB. Some of these can apply to the base game, however they were designed in light of the fact that RtL and SoB didn't incorporate some of the cooler tiles from some of the other expansions. I also decided to implement these because I feel that the balance of the game with feats has shifted slightly and I feel this tips it back.

Sharr the Brightwing: When Sharr ends her turn on a hero, they lose one lingering effect of their choice other than a curse or frost.
(This rule was picked up somewhere else, I modified it a little bit to my liking)

Bane Spiders: Crawl, Bane Spiders may ignore up to two spaces of obstacles that block movement.

Rolling Stone: Allowed in the advanced campaign.
(I never understood when they ruled to take it out, so far it hasn't ever put a hamper on the heroes in my experience giving me a total of 1 kill across most of my games. My house rule is simple... let it be played)

Lava Beetles: When a lava beetle is killed, place one lava token where it was killed. Ignore this ability during over sea encounters.
(I also heard this one mentioned on the forum, and I liked it, simple not hard to implement)

Shades: When a shade is killed, roll a power die, if a surge, place one fog token where it was killed.
(Fog doesn't block movement so this couldn't exactly be abused, also the surge roll prevents it from occuring too often as fog is a nice tile. also this can be applied to deep elves if you don't have Tombs of Ice)

Golems: When a golem is killed, place mud tokens where it was killed, using up to four mud tokens. Ignore this ability during over sea encounters.
(Mud really doesn't show up much in SoB or RtL, and it only slows the heroes down a bit, which Golems are often used for anyway, I feel they both work well in tandem)

Dark Priests: When an attack made deals damage to a hero, roll a power die, if a surge, place one corrupted ground token benieth the hero, ignoring the threat gain for this token until the next round.
(Corrupted ground is one of the coolest tiles in my opinion, however ARE they are very strong, so I feel rolling for a surge balances it out slightly. Also I feel the corrupted space's effect works in synergy with Dark Priests' abilities.)

And, since we will be seeing lots more floor tiles due to these changes, I was thinking of modifying the Invlnerability potion to help with that. I have heard of a few house rules for them that usually involved scaling armor with campaign level, but that was too much, and from what I understand, even that change would throw the balance of the game.

Invulnerability Potion: Drinking an invulnerability potion protects the drinker from the next 2 corrupted, mud, ice, or lava token's triggered effects.
(I am in favor of a change like this for Invulnerability pots vs armor scaling for sure, and I hope that this potion's change will add more value to Aurim, and the Alchemist skill.)

Let me know what you guys think of these changes. Like I said, these tiles just don't get much use in the advanced campaign and I would love to see them around much more, and I feel that with the use of Feat cards, these changes won't throw off the balance of power.

Also, I just felt like I should include my Printable Familiar reference sheet I made. It was based off someone elses previous work, but was just updated with all the new rules, as well as the new familiars from Sea of Blood. This sheet includes Sharr the Brightwing with my house rule.

Sheet 1

Sheet 2

I do like most of those for thematic reason, and think they could be good additions to the game. My only concern is the Dark Priests one...I think you are going to end up with a lot of corrupted tiles out there.

The downside to all of these is that if I remember right, by placing those terrain tokens out there you've now blocked all chances at playing an "empty space" trap card there so you limit yourself somewhat.

That said...still some cool ideas.

This will make for some very interesting new strategies!

The foresighted OverLord will make sure his minions die where he wants the terrain to appear, even if he has to arrange their demise himself.

Knockback will, all of a sudden, become something the Heroes almost NEED to be able to inflict. Certainly, they will want Knockback capable weapons in their packs.

And what happens to the terrain if these creatures are killed on a space that is not empty ? Does Mud replace a pit? Can a Lava Beetle killed on Ice replace the Ice with Lava?

All in all, this sounds quite intriguing. We'll have a go at it for sure!

XmenDynasty said:

Haha! You bring up some good questions that haven't occured before. I like both of your ideas, I think those rules would fit in quite nicely.

Mud

Mud>Pit
Ice>Mud
lava>Mud
Fog>Mud
Corrupted>Mud

Lava

Lava>Ice
Ice>Mud
Corrupted>Ice
Ice>Fog
Pit>Ice? (Not sure if this is the case with the path of frost card?)

Lava

Lava>Pit
Lava>Ice
Lava>Corrupted
Lava>Mud
Lava>Fog

Corrupted

Lava>Corrupted
Corrupted>Ice
Corrupted>Mud
Fog>Corrupted
Pit>Corrupted

Fog

Fog>Mud
Lava>Fog
Ice>Fog
Fog>Corrupted
Pit>Fog

am I missing anything?

Also, all of these effects are ignored if a tile would be placed over shallow water, a tree, raised obstacle, chest, runekey or coin pile.
what do you guys think?

Edit: Also I updated the Familiar sheets to account for a few of my errors already. Links are in the top post.

I like it a lot!

Nice great theme. Cant wait to try those out for a spin.

Zombie these look great! I think I will have to give them a try in our current Sea of Blood game and see how they work out.

Thanks everyone for the kind words, I would love to hear how any of your games are going with these house rules. The players that play the heroes for me are pretty craft and even with these changes give me a run for their money. Let me know how its all goin

Wow, so I just finished playing a 6 hour session of SoB using these rules and I must say, that was a LOT of fun. It was by far the most balanced game I have every played.

My opponent is usually pretty crafty, he always finds some of the most powerful combos and uses his heroes in some of the coolest ways. for instance blocking large characters with Zyla and sniping them from a distance while he cant do anything. we ended the session for now with exactly equal conquest.

I had some insanely lucky roles with undying which never usually happens. He had three dungeon levels in a row with an undying leader, which I brought back at least 4 times each. brought one back about 6 times.... yeesh

So far rolling for surges has really balanced out the abilities for spawning tiles, despite the fact that I always get surges for undying rolls. I wasn't ever able to get fog to spawn with my shades. I was able to get a few corrupted spaces spawned, but he never had to worry about the triggered effect, he just always went around them.

I almost feel that these cool tiles should have overlord cards associated with them like path of ice for instance. It wouldn't be too hard to implement I'm sure but would take a lot of graphic work I think.

Anyway just wanted to give some more feedback making use of the house rules, and like I said it was really fun!

It's hardly fair that only the OL monsters turn into terrain when they die. Heroes should leave a positive terrain, say call it "consecrated ground" on their death spaces. They could do something good for the heroes, like +1 armor to adjacent heroes, or something bad for the OL, like having aura 1 on the OL turn. I suggest marking it with bleed tokens.

This is good stuff! I like it.

Updated the Familiar sheets, fixed some typos (See the first post)

The Warp said:

Thanks for the love guys, always appreciate it!

nice stuff great work and the famillar cards are cool as well.

wblackthorn

Digging this thread up , was wondering if anyone else has come up with some cool house rules? I am going to be getting a bug game together, lots of hours plan on being played with a full set of people.

Let me hear any ideas you have so I can incorporate them before the game

We've House Ruled Feats into the Advanced Campaign:

Each hero starts with a Feat Hand of 0 (yes, I said Feat Hand). At the Secret Trainer, the heroes have the ability to upgrade +4 Health, +2 Fatigue, or +2 Feat Hand. Once a Hero has a positive Feat Hand, they can draw Feat Cards as per the normal rules (and when they gain an increase they immediately gain that number of cards). That one girl in ToI that has a Feat Hand of 6 instead of 4 starts the Advanced Campaign with a Feat Hand of 2.

This helps keep the +2 Fatigue in check (none of our heroes have maxed out the Fatigue upgrade) and has worked really well in our group.

We've also house-ruled that the one-potion-per-turn limit is per type (i.e. no hero can drink more than 1 health potion, but they can drink 1 health and 1 fatigue in the same turn). Useful in the Advanced Campaign when Fatigue + Power Potion are pretty common.

-shnar

Well i must say, 2 fatigue is extremly imbalasing , everyone would get 2 fatigue, it's better than HP.

I'm surprised the OL alowed that. Why do you think the rules are for only one fatigue ? LOL

In Road To Legend, the rule *is* +2 Fatigue. That was the "normal" balance for that game. My guess is Kevin assumed players would spread it out and get some health, some fatigue. But in practice, heroes were just getting a lot more Fatigue (potential for +8 with 3 secret trainers and the silver legendary dungeon). So, my house-rule to address that was to allow Feats but only as Secret Trainer upgrades. It's worked really well in our group, as the temptation to have at least *some* feats outweighs heavy fatigue usage.

I'm not sure what we're going to do in Sea of Blood, if we'll just start with Feats up front and let the Fatigue upgrade be +1, as per SoB rules, or if we'll house rule it back to RtL's way of doing it (i.e. +2 Fatigue Upgrades but Feats need to be trained as well)...

-shnar

shnar said:

The balance for fatigue in RtL is the total 24 (IIRC) fatigue counters.

And the max is +6 since the silver dungeon allows you to get an upgrade for a specific level, which means you can't already have or later get that upgrade.

Yeah, but in SOB rules are different. I thought you were talking about SOB

Slapul said:

Shnar was explaining his houserule for Feats/Secret Master Training for the advanced campaign, which was based on RtL rules because that was the only advanced campaign for a long time.

When ToI first came out there was a lot of talk about house ruling Feats somehow since they were this cool now thing that were totally unaccounted for in RtL. It wasn't reasonable just to add them in because they were a completely free bonus for heroes with no balancing effect for the OL - so either the Advanced Campaign was imbalanced before them or it must be imbalanced after them. It isn't possible to simply give one side a large boost and have everything balanced both before and after the boost...

At that stage a houserule for feats was clearly necessary to impose some sort of cost to having and/or playing them in order to maintain balance in the overall campaign. Shnar's group tried the secret master training option and liked it. I was working on drawing and playing costs related to the OL getting free card draws or threat, with some success.

IMO when the FAQ came out the heroes took a massive hit in losing Bear Tattoo and (particularly) Telekinesis. The OL took a minor hit as well, losing some things, but not nearly as much as the heroes. The removal of Telekinesis made a major change to the tactical battlefield and adding Feats was a significant balancing factor to that - obviously more than enough if you weren't a smart user (abuser) of Telekinesis in the first place, but possibly still not enough if you were an abuser of Telekinesis. At any rate, swapping out BT and Teke for Feats seemed relatively even for me so I abandoned the house rules that I had been trialling and played RAW.

In addition, I don't think that many people actually played the 24F token max in RtL, which made the +2F secret master bonus very, very powerful (even if you do play it you can easily have, say 2x8 + 2x4F heroes or 8+7+5+4F). You could easily have 2-3 heroes with 7-8F by early silver which made them extraordinarily flexible and powerful and did some severe damage to the battle mechanics.
With +2F being quite obviously much more powerful that +4W in most situations, something needed to be changed and the change in SoB is a good one (though I think 1F is too little and 2F too much, its tricky). However since Shnar's group's houserule already reduced the abuse of the 2F bonus by giving another powerful option and encouraging the heroes to spread their option taking around a little more, they seem to have decided to stick with their houserule which already has a balance they are familiar with.
Essential, in SOB, they are houseruling to remove feats unless you buy hand size at a SM and in return are upgrade the SM fatigue upgrade to 2.
At least that is what I understood Shnar to be saying?

For myself, I just pointed out a few possible errors in shnar's underlying assumptions as to why they introduced their houserule.

All correct. We just started a SoB campaign (putting our RtL one on hold) and we decided to continue doing Fatigue/Feats in the same manner.

-shnar

shnar said:

This one has been in the FAQ for a while.

uhchewie said:

IIRC, the FAQ states you can only drink 1 potion per turn, period. That doesn't fly well with our group, so we've house-ruled it to be one-potion-TYPE-per-turn (this is a thread about house-rules, right?).

-shnar

shnar said:

Yup, and I like that house rule for sure I'm a big fan of making use of ALL the little pieces that came with the game. I am trying to figure out a generic way to use prolonged actions, though I haven't thought of anything too clever yet.