Ye Olde Inn

Hi all,

Would love thoughts on this. When a hero dies, the rule book says that items can be picked up as long as another hero is in the room or corridor with the fallen hero.

My question is this: Are base character/starter equipment items allowed to be picked up also? It feels a bit easy to me that all items can be picked up, especially if you can loot all of the basic starter items and then sell them afterwards. You could end up with a situation where characters are profiting from their death.

Example: Rogue dies. Wizard picks up the rogues items including the bandolier. Rogue respawns with a new character name and dead rogues items get transferred back to the rogue. The rogue then sells the old items like dagger / bandolier and is actually profiting from his death.

It feels like with these rules there is no fear of loss, because the dead character will just respawn with same items and will profit from their death.

Maybe I’m wrong? Would love other people’s thoughts on this…

Also im new here. Thanks for setting up this forum, it’s been a great source of info for us replaying this incredible game.

You could do that, there is nothing in the rules preventing it, but your characters are supposed to be heroes. They don’t exist to be used for cannon fodder for the purpose of gaining more wealth. Mentor is the one spending time and money training these heroes, so it doesn’t make much sense. I’m sure most Zargon players would forbid the players from doing such a thing. Maybe Mentor only has a limited amount of equipment so new replacement heroes start with nothing and depend on their comrades for their leftovers.

In a non-standard situation, the Barbarian died in The Trial. The Dwarf and Elf finished the quest, but before leaving, they dueled each other to the death over the Barbarian’s Broadsword. We were trying to take advantage of this and were expecting the new Barbarian to start with another Broadsword. The Zargon player would not allow it, and the new Barbarian started with the surviving Dwarf’s Shortsword. This was just a one-shot night of quests so we were not taking things very seriously. After some reflection, I would have to agree with my friend, that Mentor does not have an unlimited supply of Broadswords and Bandoliers at his disposal.

Since the Instruction Booklet doesn't include rules for selling back gear to the Armory, the assumed default is the dagger and bandolier could be retained by the Wizard but not sold. Also, transferring gear back to the rogue in your example is possible but not mandatory. Since the Heroes are between Quests, the Wizard can keep the gear, but I see no problem with gifting it to another hero, such as the new Rogue. That would start the new Rogue off with two daggers and two bandoliers. This is a bit strange however, as this contradicts the starting gear and weapon of the Rogue card. I imagine most Zargons would disallow this and restrict the Rogue to one dagger and one bandolier as originally intended.

I suppose it's possible for the Wizard to keep the dagger and bandolier until the Quest started and then give them to the Rogue, passing them as would be done with a potion. However, passing weapons and gear isn't covered in the Instruction Booklet specifically, so again the simplest thing may be for Zargon to disallow this. The overall gist I get from the Instruction Booklet rules is starting gear isn't meant to be sold back. If you want to look to expansion rules and Avalon Hill social media that restriction can change, however.