As mentioned in my previous post, my friends and I just started our first game of RTL.

There are 4 of us, with 1 person playing the OL, which leaves 3 for heroes. We didn't like the idea of only 1 person playing 2 heroes, and since we're all fairly experienced tactical board game players, (we normally annihilate the OL in vanilla, even with some house rules to favor them), we figured we could handle it with 3 heroes. Here's what we did to make it a bit more even:

1) We were allowed to choose our heroes. We ended up with the melee guy who can wield a 2-hander in 1 hand, the battle mage, and the ice fairy that's worth 1.

2) We're using feats, which just give the heroes a flat power boost and give the OL nothing

3) Anytime the party is given a per-hero gold reward (i.e. coin piles but not chests or killing red monsters) we take the amount that 4 heroes would get.

4) The OL agreed not to have more than 1 LT at copper (see previous thread for why)

We're doing ok so far - our first dungeon we cleared out all the way, 27 conquest for us vs. 10 conquest to the OL. Most of the conquest the OL got was from a really brutal series of 2 turns in which the mage got killed twice. We also drew the Secret Garden as our very first dungeon level ever, and managed to do just fine.

So, my question is, are there any suggestions for things we should consider, or other house rules we might want to use, only playing with 3 heroes? It seems like the final battle with the Titan overlord is going to be -very- tough.

Thanks!

If I were you I'd introduce a few rules from the SoB campaign into RtL. Notably, two come to mind:

• Dungeon leaders scale with campaign level: Double the armor and health bonus at silver, triple at gold campaign level.
• Divine Favour ( SoB rulebook page 8), balancing runaway leaders a bit
• Lieutenants can run, battle and place guard, aim and dodge orders (not sure off the top of my mind if the FAQ allows that for RtL already, too), same for avatars (where the FAQ definitely allows it)

I'm not quite certain whether you want to keep the secret training as it is - SoB lowers the fatigue training to +1, which is more balanced for 4 heroes, but maybe letting it stay at +2 is reasonable for three of them.

I only played RtL with four heroes though, and before SoB was out, so I can't speak from personal experience with three of them. And, my heroes tend to be annihilated by my monsters. Guess I should let somebody else play the Overlord for a change...