Is it legal for an overlord to deliberately move his monsters over glyphs so that heroes cannot access it unless they kill the blocking monster? I know this is true of potions, but not sure about glyphs. Seem to recall somewhere that chests can also be guarded in this manner.

If it is legal, then what if all the players were in Town and all existing glyphs have been blocked? This means no one may enter anymore, and the OL wins by default due to his deck still constantly being drawn while the players are stuck in town. I was thinking that this is legal, except that it is going to take a loadful of monsters to completely block each glyph due to heroes being able to travel back to any square adjacent to the glyphs (total of 9 each)

Monsters are not allowed to end their movement on ACTIVATED glyphs. However, they are allowed to end their movement on UNACTIVATED glyphs, so they may block glyphs that haven't been activated.

If a monster is standing on an unactivated glyph which gets activated by Runewitch Astarra's special skill or by a hero with the acrobat-skill, the monster has to leave the glyph in its next turn.

Wanderer999 said:

correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't transport back to a spot adjacent to an activated glyph from town. you must transport to the glyph itself, and that costs 1 MP.

You're correct, Eric!, you teleport directly to the glyph. At least in vanilla; glyphs work differently in the extended campaign.

You also teleport back directly onto a glyph in RtL.

What if there is no glyph on the map at all? Do players just not come back after dying?

That isn't normally possible, since each map will start with at least one glyph already active (the heroes need to start on or adjacent to it), and there are no standard mechanics that will cause a glyph to disappear.

By default, though, if the active glyphs are all somehow destroyed, there's no way for a resurrected hero to leave town. I can think of a few quests where that's possible; I believe they all have rules stating that the heroes lose if there are no active glyphs and no heroes left in the dungeon.

lonebrendan said:

There's always the glyph you start at, which begins activated. As far as I know there's no way to destroy a glyph in normal play. There's at least one quest that locks the heroes in before the final battle, but it has special text to cover what happens if the heroes die.

I guess I was looking at encounters in Sea of Blood. There are no glyphs there, but it makes sense since thats one way the OL can win.

What confused me was in the final battle against Captain Bones there was no glyph. After reading through the manual it makes sense. Everyone has one life here. I admittedly have not made it up to any OL Keep yet.

Wanderer999 said:

i guess, wanderer999 doesn't want to move monsters on the glyph to block it, he wants to "surround" the glyph....

XXX
XGX
XXX

X= squares with monsters

G= glypgh

sounds legal to me....

lonebrendan said:

Ah, yes. Overland encounters (sea encounters, in SoB) do not have glyphs. If a hero dies then they're down and out for the remainder of the encounter. If the entire party dies, then the encounter ends with the TPK (Total Party Kill) result. I haven't looked through the SoB book in detail, but I know this result was spelled out in Road to Legend, so I would assume it's in SoB as well.

BigYogi said:

This is legal, yes. It won't trap the heroes in town of course, because one of them can appear on the glyph. All that hero needs to do is kill one monster to open a path for the rest of the heroes to get back into the dungeon. It's a perfectly legal play, very mean if you can pull it off, but not game breaking.

I remember one game I did this to the starting glyph after everyone foolishly retreated to town. One of the monsters I had in the mix was a Naga, which meant the heroes had an extra obstacle in the fact that each of them became grappled as soon as they moved to an empty space (due to terrain blocking some adjacent squares, there was no way to avoid the Naga while getting off the glyph.) So the heroes all go back into the dungeon, but they were strung out and at least three of the four were grappled by this naga when their turn ended. Needless to say, they learned their lesson about leaving the dungeon "unsupervised." >=D

Surrounding the glyph with monsters with Aura is also fun, since you can damage the heroes (possibly multiple times) when they teleport in.