Ye Olde Inn

I don’t recall it coming up, but are there any official quests (old or new) that have a treasure/item/artifact hidden in a room with no furnishings? I’m not referring to the Treasure card draw, but to specific items assigned to a given room.

I must imediatley think of the Spirit Blade.

It took us an hour to find it when we played against the computer the first time since childood. American rules, and we found a wandering chaos warrior in the first room and didn't search for treasure anymore. We expected a treasue chest, weapons rack or tomb as the container, so we searced every piece of corridor for secret doors. Finally we understood that it had to be hidden in an empty room, so we searched and got:

Quest for the Spirit Blade wrote:A The Spirit Blade is in the centre of the room, bathed in a cool blue light.

I guess a human Zargon would have read this sentence to the players. But whenever I run this quest I don't tell the players until they have searched in remembrance of our eternal search. They've always found it (EU chaos warriors), but it's a strange situation.

Yep— there it is in the 2021 QB as well— no furnishings, no description at all. Just “The first hero who searches for Treasure…”
Not even a fancy “why couldn’t we see it plainly” fluff answer.

I had a nagging feeling there was a “blank room” treasure in HQ. Thanks for the memory jog!

Quest 10 of the game system is another one. This is the one where you roll dice whenever you walk through a door to determine which room you end up in. There is no furniture in the quest at all, but you can find an artifact in one of the rooms if you search it after killing the monsters there.

Parzival wrote:I don’t recall it coming up, but are there any official quests (old or new) that have a treasure/item/artifact hidden in a room with no furnishings? I’m not referring to the Treasure card draw, but to specific items assigned to a given room.

Just out of curiosity, why do you ask?

BlackJax wrote:

Parzival wrote:I don’t recall it coming up, but are there any official quests (old or new) that have a treasure/item/artifact hidden in a room with no furnishings? I’m not referring to the Treasure card draw, but to specific items assigned to a given room.

Just out of curiosity, why do you ask?

In the vast majority of cases, the published questbooks place Artifacts or Equipment with some sort of descriptive element: “The first hero to search the room finds a Potion of Healing in the cabinet… etc., etc.” Since this happens a very significant number of times, I was trying to recall if it was always the case that an Artifact or Equipment would only be found in a furnished room— basically, an unwritten rule— in order to guide my own attempts at creating quests. Now I see that it is established from the start that an empty room does not mean the room is empty. I realize I could take that approach regardless, but if players haven’t ever experienced that to be possible, it would hardly seem fair to alter the case. But since it isn’t the case, the “empty” chamber Artifact is clearly a go.

And, of course, I was curious.

Fair enough, I was curious too!

I've always considered searching a room to be completely independent from any furniture that is or isn't present. I have categorised certain furniture as "containers", chests, cupboards and tombs which have a special rule that allows them to be opened by a hero next to them and determines what is found, but this is separate from "searching".

Treasure doesn't have to be hidden inside or behind a piece of furniture, it could be under the floor boards, behind a stone, or even just in a corner. But yes the idea that the Treasure deck are for the hard to find leftover pieces rather than the special ones is intriguing but not universally accurate to the official quests.

In Rise of the Dread moon, lunar charms are found in empty rooms of quests 7 and 9.