My group meets about every other week to play Descent via the app and we've been chugging along just fine playing the Nerkhal expansion and we got to the last week before the first mandatory quest. We decided to do the last quest that was available (help out some villagers who were duped by mages) and once one of our party members selected that she was KO'd the game immediately ended the quest in a fail state and gave up money, then read us the "you failed dialogue". I've not seen anything like that before (but we are new to the app) so we wrote it off as bad luck. So we start the mandatory quest to go help the main character (it involved closing green portals that monsters kept streaming out of) and get about halfway through the quest when the same party member dies. Same thing happens. We get a fail state and the game reads us a very long set of {continue} screens which eventually leads us to having that adventure now done and we now have a few weeks before the next mandatory one has to be done.

Is this normal or is there a bug? Short of never telling the app that one of us dies is it going to crash on us again? Or are some of these missions setup to auto fail if any of you die? That feels off, and the app never tells us that this would even be a possibility as far as I can tell.

Please advise.

Follow your morale, red number in the top corner. If it gets to 0 and you're KO'd you lose. From the rules page 15

"During a quest, if morale is at zero (indicated by a
skull on the morale counter) and any hero becomes
knocked out, the heroes automatically flee and lose
the quest."

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/7b/b8/7bb86de6-7427-48e8-bdeb-6ba01e5874ae/road_to_legend_rules.pdf

If it was the only hero death then no that's unusual.

39 minutes ago, Proto Persona said:

If it was the only hero death then no that's unusual.

Right. There is a morale counter in the corner which tells you how many deaths you have left. Are you re-loading a save where you have no deaths left, and then someone is dying?

However, if your morale counter is NOT at zero, what you're experiencing is not normal.

I guess the answer has been given, but in RtL is really important too keep each other alive. For example, playing a party without a healer will probably be really difficult.

Playing with a Dungeon Master means you win or lose depending on who achieves their objective first (The DM or the players), and the only thing death does is make it easier for the DM to achieve their objective.
I RtL the app always has the same objective, kill the number of players +1. As soon as that is done, the app wins.

Also note that if your morale counter reaches 0 and you fail a mission, you have to go back to TOWN to reset the morale counter. If you go straight to another quest (which it sounds like you did) then it remains 0 and the first death will fail the quest.