I seem to remember the quest book for vanilla Descent mentioned a rules variant for campaign play so players can keep the same character throughout all of the quests in regular Descent (not Road to Legend). Does anyone know what these rules are or where I can find them online? I thought it was in the rule book, but after downloading it from the support page I found I was wrong and I am unfortunately no where near my game at the moment. Thanks!

They're on the front cover of the quest guide. Players retain the same character and starting skills, but don't keep any of the treasure, upgrades, purchased skills, conquest, or anything else from actually playing the previous quest. Instead, they're given a small cash bonus at the start of a new quest depending on the number of quests they've completed, and the overlord starts with some extra cards/threat to compensate.

I don't really recommend them; you're sacrificing some of the game balance in the early part of the later quests, and you get very little feeling of continuity in return. Plus, I would say that trying out new hero and skill combinations is a lot of fun; staying with the same ones forever is less interesting, and may skew your experience if it happens to be an especially strong or weak combination.

That's right, now I remember. I thought it was rather silly to have the characters lose all the Treasure and upgrades they got every quest but, I can see now that if they did get to keep everything you would have characters that were way to powerful by..heck...the 2nd quest! I wonder if anyone has found a decent way to water that down some to make it work?

If I'm correct I think there are...9 quests total? So one aspect you could do is turn all Treasures in the first three quests to Copper, the middle three quests have all Silver and the last three are all Gold Treasure. That way they can keep there Treasure but not get the powerful stuff too early. And since you can't buy random Treasure till you open one of that kind they wouldn't be able to get gold too soon.

You could also restrict how many upgrades they get. They could buy one training token or Skill card every 3 quests. Don't give them any bonus gold at the end of the quests and I think the amount they would get from coin piles and red monster bounties should suffice. I know in the past some players have completely avoided a coin pile because of monster placement or urgency to get to the end. This could make them think real hard about them now.

And with restrictions of how many items they can carry they will most likely have to make some tough sacrifices or really work hard to position themselves so they can pass items back and forth.

Not sure what the Overlord would get in return though...

You can't just turn all the treasures in early quests to copper, because early quests expect the heroes to have good weapons at the end. There's a maximum and a minimum level that the heroes need to be at to maintain balance, and the minimum level at the end of a quest is generally higher than the maximum level for the start of the next one.

I've seen a lot of threads on this topic. People don't like to hear that what they want is self-contradictory, but the existing quests ARE NOT on a single, continuous power curve, so there is no continuous power curve that you could possibly put the heroes on that would match up.

Thus, every option boils down to one of:

1. Reset everything important between quests, e.g. as in basic Descent
2. Throw out the basic quests and write an actual campaign from the ground up, e.g. as in the Road to Legend expansion
3. Screw game balance

Anyone who claims to have a solution that is not one of those three is selling snake oil.