Forgive me if this has been addressed elsewhere in the forum.

In the Quest book for Vanilla Descent it offers rule variants for players who want to carry their characters through many different dungeons and adventures.

Those rules state that the heroes lose all of their items, training and skills and basically redraw from scratch with additional money and (at higher levels) treasure cards.

With that being the case I'm confused as to what the point is of A: giving out conquest tokens for completing a quest and B: having treasure chests and money in the final room of the dungeons. Since the players will lose all their treasure and money anyway it seems kind of silly to save the gold treasure chests for the bosses laid.

Can someone please elaborate? I feel like I'm missing something.

Thanks.

The gold chest in the final room matters because heroes can (and usually should) open treasure chests before killing the monsters in the room.

No one knows for sure why you get conquest when you win the quest. Some possibilities include:

• To establish the precedent that killing a named monster gives conquest (since the rulebook says on page 13 that they should).
• So that the heroes can still win if they kill the boss in a "suicide strike" that simultaneously kills the boss and a hero, for example with a Blast attack.
• For the "competitive" variant where you keep track of how much conquest each individual hero earns for the party so you can declare an individual hero the winner at the end (note: please don't ever try to use that variant).
• For overall scoring purposes, so you can compare the heroes' remaining conquest on different play-throughs (note: that doesn't make sense, because all heroes that complete the quest get the same conquest from the boss and it cancels out in the comparison, but someone always brings it up whenever this gets discussed).
• Leftover from some rules used in playtesting the game that didn't make it into the final version.

Regardless, you understand the rules correctly, conquest and treasure do NOT carry over, and you could break the game very quickly if they did. I actually don't recommend using even the limited basic campaign rules; Descent works best if you treat each quest as a completely separate game.

+1 to everything Antistone said. On a side note some people play with a house rule that if the heroes end the quest with their conquest in the positive they win the game, as opposed to them losing instantly if they fall to 0 conquest or less. Not a rule I'm really a fan of, and it is strictly a house rule, so even if you play with it, it still wouldn't really explain why the conquest for bosses was put in by the designers.

angryangel000 said:

A: Conquest thematically tracks the heroes' progress toward their ultimate goal (find the golden idol, kill the evil giant, whatever.) You gain CTs when you do things that advance your goals (activating glyphs that help you get further into the dungeon, opening treasure chests that provide you with gear and resources, etc. You lose CTs when you suffer a set back - a hero gets killed, the Overlord makes a scary attack (ie: surges.) Killing the final boss in the dungeon is definitely a step forward toward your goals, so you get CT for it. It doesn't do anything mechanically, it's just a thematic thing. People have found other reasons to make those CT matter (I think Kevin even suggested one or two reasons back in the day), most of which Antistone has already outlined.

B: You may only use that gold treasure for one fight, but you'll probably need it.

C: The "basic" campaign rules suck balls anyway. If you want to run a continuing campaign I'd recommend looking into either Road to Legend or Sea of Blood.