During Encounter 1 of the Rise of Urthko quest (Heirs of Blood), a special rule for pit spaces reads:

Quote

Any figure that enters a pit space and is not a hero, Lord Merick Farrow, or a large monster is immediately defeated.

The Dark Charm card says that the Overlord can move or attack with a hero "... as if he were one of your monsters this turn."

Does this mean that the Overload can move a dark-charmed hero into a pit space and defeat him immediately because he's considered to be a monster, or is the charmed hero still considered a hero for the purposes of the special rule for pit spaces above?

Thanks!

This is quest-central enough that it would be worth asking FFG directly. However, technically speaking, diring that movement the hero doesn't count as a hero.

The tricky point is that when he enters the pit, his movement would end. When the movement ends, he's a hero again. Golden rules would let the OL choose order of effects... but that may not be intentional here.

Barring some kind of errata, I'm pretty sure the hero would die.

@Zaltyre , Thanks very much for the reply!

We've played this quest twice, and the first time we ruled that the hero is a monster, and is therefore defeated when they enter the pit space, but the second time we ended up deciding that the hero is still a hero, even though charmed, and is therefore just "dangling" and not defeated.

The argument behind this being that the hero is only considered a "monster" for effects related to movement (moving through friendly figures) and combat (effects that concern attacking monsters).

In this quest, the special pit rules say that a hero that enters a pit space is "dangling", which basically has the same effect as being defeated - their figure is replaced with their hero token and either another hero has to spend an action to pull them out, or the dangling hero has to spend their whole turn climbing out.

If we were to play that the charmed hero is defeated when they enter the pit space, they'd first have to stand up or be revived, but they'd still be dangling. They'd then have to be pulled out or spend a turn climbing out.

It seemed to us unlikely that this "double-knockout" was the intended effect of the pit space's special rules.

(This is the first time I've asked rules questions on the FFG discussion forum. Is this the place for such questions, or is it better that I just email FFG directly? I actually have a number of questions about ambiguous situations that we've come across in HoB quests that I'd like to have clarified.)

If the community has an answer, you'll get it faster here than from FFG. We don't have ALL the answers.

Ok, then I guess I'll ask here first, and then write FFG about anything that nobody had an answer for so that I can share their response here for future reference.

I don't think that Dark Charm turns heroes into monsters (or into non-heroes) for quest rules purposes. There are a number of quests in which monsters may leave the map. If the OL could make a hero leave the map with Dark Charm, how would he get back? Would the hero player just watch the game for 2 hours doing nothing? It wouldn't make sense.

An example of this is the 2nd encounter of Caladen's Crossing, where the rules say: " Monsters may move off the map through the Town Entrance or Exit. Each time a monster moves off the map through the Exit, the gatehouse suffers 3 damage. " Dark Charm - Bye, you can go home now? I don't think so.

11 minutes ago, Ispher said:

I don't think that Dark Charm turns heroes into monsters (or into non-heroes) for quest rules purposes. There are a number of quests in which monsters may leave the map. If the OL could make a hero leave the map with Dark Charm, how would he get back?

I think this is a very reasonable point.

Agreed. It may be that this is one of those occasions where quest rules overriding cards becomes relevant.

8 minutes ago, Zaltyre said:

Agreed. It may be that this is one of those occasions where quest rules overriding cards becomes relevant.

I wonder if a general rule could be made that quest rules regarding monsters only apply to actual monsters, rather than figures that are treated as monsters. This would be a parallel rule to how quest rules that affect heroes only apply to actual heroes, and not figures that are treated as heroes.

This is probably the case.