I've been thinking about it lately, and I was wondering creating a new item for the heroes to use.

The item would be a Heartstone and it would be buyable token at the shop (and why not even have it lootable from the dungeon floor like you would with a potion, on custom maps that is).

Hearthstones would take a potion slot in the heroes' inventory, and the heroes could buy them at 200 gold at the shop. A hero may carry only one Hearthstone at a time. A hero may use his Hearthstone at the beginning of his turn, and doing so uses up a half action (i.e. the hero may use a Hearthstone and attack once OR move his speed). When a hero uses a Hearthstone, the Hearthstone token is discarded and put back at the shop inventory. At the beginning of the next Overlord's turn, the hero is sent to town. A hero cannot use a glyph of transport and a Hearthstone on the same turn.

What do you think? I am quite unsure about details such as price, and how heroes would use them. Also I don't think I'd initially use Hearthstones in the 9 base quests — although if there was a way to make Hearthstones usable on these, that'd be great. Keep in mind that I only have vanilla Descent, so I have no idea how this item would fare in expansions (mainly Road to Legend and Sea of Blood , considering those expansions offer a different take on dungeons with smaller maps and such). Obviously, I'd print 5~6 Hearthstone tokens for the heroes to use.

Fenrick Marlowe said:

It's a cute idea for those who really enjoy World of Warcraft, but it's fairly pointless as an item in Descent.

It would be easy enough to introduce such a thing in vanilla games (the base 9 quests or any other). It's simply a token that is acquired and functions exactly as you describe. Obviously there are none on the floor in official quests, but buying one from town for 200gp would work fine.

The problem is there are relatively few situations where such a thing would be useful, I think. Assuming "at the beginning of the Overlord's turn" works the way Tatianna's hero ability does - meaning they can wait until after spawning before they leave and thus provide LoS coverage then there would be at least some purpose to using one. But, generally speaking, I haven't noticed the heroes in our vanilla games ever having trouble finding a glyph if they want to return to town. For the "primary" purpose of getting back to town, it's mostly useless. Unless you start designing homebrew dungeons that have several areas between two glyphs.

In the AC game it would be slightly more useful, since AC rules require a hero to start on or beside a glyph in order to use it (the AC game completely rewrites how the town rules work, btw.) The Hearthstone would allow a hero to glyph out from anywhere on the map. The problem I foresee with that is that the rules concerning glyphs in AC were changed for a reason. Dungeon levels are much smaller and the "rarely being out of glyph range when you need it" from vanilla becomes "never out of glyph range" in AC. Introducing a hearthstone would obliterate the rules changes introduced in AC. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is probably something each group would have to decide for themselves. As such, your proposed homebrew would be in good company, since house rules exist mainly to be used on a case-by-case basis.

In summary, I probably wouldn't use these myself, but don't let my opinion stop you from trying it if you like the idea.

At first I had some custom dungeon designs in mind when I thought of the Hearthstone, since I know vanilla dungeons have plenty of glyphs so getting back to town is pretty easy. However the Hearthstone would still be of use if you need to run in order to use a glyph, but you still want to pull off an attack before leaving. Also, a runner may use the Hearthstone after moving his speed + using Fatigue in a newly opened room thus getting back to safety with no problem — although in both these situations, a simple fatigue potion may do the trick. Finally, Hearthstones could help a hero out of tight (albeit situational) instances where they are Grappled, being Knockbacked in a nasty place or a have their movement impaired because of a viciously used pit trap.

I did not have Tatianna's ability in mind when I came up with the Hearthstones. I just checked up her hero sheet and indeed both her ability and Hearthstones work pretty much the same. And yes, their lack of LoS coverage is intended. The 'hearthstoning' hero remains in the dungeon for the duration of all the heroes' turn so that he may still block LoS, his space, etc. but the idea is to port him back to safety. If in addition to all he'd still count towards LoS during the Overlord' spawning phase, that'd be way too overpowered.

All in all, what I had in mind with the Hearthstone was to give a new little toy for heroes to play with, not a groundbreaking uber awesome item I don't expect every single of my players to carry one around every time, however I'd like them to go "Aww man, I could've survive there if I had a Hearthstone in my pack" every now and then. I'll wait for some more players' impressions before deciding whether I should print some and add them to vanilla Descent.

For the record, my Hearthstone item idea is indeed a mix between World of Warcraft 's hearthstones and Heroes of Newerth 's homecoming stones (which more or less have the power to teleport you back to safety but expire after one use).

In the project I'm working on, I'm including "Portable Glyphs", Other items which the heroes may carry that allow them to transport themselves and all adjacent heroes back to town, or back to their home town if they're on the world map. They're, of course, one use and cost as much as a potion, which I thought fair since towns are easy enough to get back to, and there are other ways of getting back to the home town in this AC that I'm working on. Eitherway, I have mine trigger immediately after use, rather than waiting. The hero uses it, and then the affected heroes are instantly transported to town. In playtesting, I'll see how much it's used and abused, and what changes I need to make to it... Thinking about making it usable only at the beginning of one's turn.