Ye Olde Inn

Hello

Do people generally take their gear and cash between quest books or start bare all over again?

What's the best way to farm for gold in early games if you don't carry over your stuff?

Cheers
LordViper

The "Advancement System" in HeroQuest is basically that you acquire gold in-quest and as a reward for completing some Quests successfully, you use that to buy better weapons & armour between Quests which improve your stats, so yes it is essential that your Hero retains his gold, weapons and armour throughout his life (there are particular rules around death and recovery of gear).

More details on the Advancement System discussion can be found here Advancement - how to do it?

And welcome to the forum LordViper!

There are some quest packs that give you some kind of large reward for completing the whole thing. That would be pretty useless if you couldn’t carry it over to the next quests.

There is no way to farm gold outside of playing a quest and finding stuff or sometimes getting rewards for finishing the objective of a quest. You can sell extra armory equipment for half its value.

The expansions assume you played through the Game System quests. I think a number of expansions would be too difficult to start from scratch, but it may be possible. There are some rooms in the first two expansions that are nearly entirely filled with monsters, so new unarmored heroes would die fairly quickly. The Mythic Tier quest books look like they could be played with fresh heroes, but I have only glanced through them. I try not to study quest books in case I play as a hero in one of them.

The idea is once your heroes have all the best stuff, you save your money for the potions available from the Alchemist’s Shop. They are quite expensive, and you may need stacks of them just to survive some of the harder quests. For example the Barbarian or Dwarf will probably want some potions that can restore Mind Points to avoid being severely crippled or even one-shotted in some cases.

If you want to start an expansion straight away, the Zargon player could consider giving new heroes some starting gold or some extra equipment, maybe some Game System artifacts. A couple shields, helmets, and broadswords may be enough of a boost. The expansions do give out a lot of gold, and for Kellar’s Keep and Return of the Witch Lord, you probably have less need for the special potions, so players can catch up fairly quickly if they survive.

Sometimes heroes die in a way in which they lose all their stuff, but this isn’t much of an issue if a couple heroes are still decked out. They might even have extra equipment “at home” that they no longer use, to give to a replacement hero a little something.

Yea I'm playing solo and starting in Keller's keep (just got it) and the first quest starting characters from scratch was difficult to say the least. I managed to get through it without any heroes dieing though.
I'll remember that when moving on after Keller's Keep to keep gold and equipment.

**Update**
All four died in second quest today even after giving them an extra 100 coin in Keller's Keep. I'm back and starting on the original quest book first to gear up...

Thank you all for your help!
Cheers

Starting from scratch between quest books doesn't make sense unless you literally have a brand new character (died last time). Even so, if anyone in the party has played before they should have SOME gear to share between them. The purpose of playing the Game System before expansions is not just to learn how to play, it's also to build up gear, gold, etc.

The expansions pretty much ASSUME you've upgraded your heroes, hence the increased difficulty. The only exceptions to this are the "solo quests" in EQP/BQP which were originally purported to be for a single fresh hero who was trying to "catch up" with the other party... now they didn't do a great job of this because although you get lots of gear, the difficulty is such that it's really only workable for someone who is already upgraded (or just really darn lucky). So that errata aside, you will certainly run into experiences where one or more heroes are starting from scratch either because they joined the campaign already in progress or had one (or more) character(s) die without the possibility to be revived with a last minute save (and perhaps their gear was claimed by monsters).

If you did wipe the slate clean, you'd just have to turn around and then give them free gold and/or equipment and hide the needed artifacts early in the quest as special treasures anyway to make up for it, because they assume you've played at least the game system beforehand (all or more of it).

The last artifact (spoiler) you get on Quest 14 after killing the final boss, so there would be no opportunity to use it if you lost it at the end... to merely make it a special treasure to find again early in the next quest (in whatever pack you follow up with?), seems a little silly.

So I'm all for continuity as much as possible. Sure, if you're playing with all new people or it has been years, maybe starting from scratch makes sense, but again if you are jumping right into the expansions, you should get some boosts to make up for not earning your way there again and what you'd accumulate. If you as Zargon are worried that the heroes will be too OP, you don't have to invent a storyline where they all went bankrupt, had gambling debts, or got sued by the citizens after all the destruction they wrought defeating the bad guys last time... just entice them into buying potions and/or mercenaries this time.