Who designed The Frozen Horror? A SADIST?!?!?!?

[Naniyue]

I just finished Quest 6 FAIR AND SQUARE!!!!!

Who designed this quest pack??!?!? It's INSANELY hard! My party is so battered and bruised, even with hiring mercenaries, though I admit I had to be frugal since I was near broke. I was told this quest pack was difficult, but DAMN!

SUGGESTION: Use your own house rules for crevasses! I DID make it fair and square, BUT I WILL use house rules for them from now on!

[Kurgan]

You're not joking!

[Vorimir]

Number of expansion monsters should be halved, you can't find 2 bears in three rooms or as wandering monsters
Bad designed quests and monsters, but with a bit of work are fun. Less monsters or monsters woth ñess Body points.

[SirRick]

That is why I am playing through all the quests from the beginning and hoarding healing potions and cash. I had some bad luck in the last couple quests I played in PoT, so I actually had to use 3 or 4 healing potions. I still have around 84 potions left and about 4000+ gold pieces or so.

My big fear is a hero plunging down a crevice carrying 20+ healing potions and valuable artifacts. I may have to houserule something when I get there. Even if I was Zargon, I would feel terrible if that happened to a player because its so sudden and cheap. The FH is full of such cheap mechanics.

[cornixt]

I think the designer said that they sent off their first draft and it was just published without testing it.

[Kurgan]

It's not quite that blatant, but there's some truth to that sentiment... they were under a big crunch before the franchise essentially folded (on the board game front... some reprinted 2nd edition boxes appeared in other territories and in the UK there was another HQ novel in 1993, then the Amiga computer game HeroQuest II: Legacy of Sorasil in '94, to be fair). So they probably figured get a quick cash in before it was too late.

Despite being more difficult, BQP was finished first. It was a big meaty campaign, designed to kick the butts of players who found the game system "too easy" but they (like many makers of sequels to popular but "mastered" games) over-corrected to be sure... add that to the crunch factor above to explain the issues. Fast forward to the modern age, AH was still in "don't change it" mode with regard to re-releases. Witness the corrections in the box to the Elf pack released after, and the updates and revisions being introduced into ATOH in a few months!

The old drafts (thanks lucapaschi) indicate other ideas were being discussed, some of which could have softened the difficulty. Otherwise they were relying on hardcore players to fix the quests for them (I pity any first time young players that actually tried to enjoy those "solo" quests as truly for beginners!). In the modern age "Into the Northlands" and its addendum with the playtesting, etc. is a nice starting point for revisions that most players will want to consider. But some of the old drafts provide some ideas too...

For instance the Yeti hug escape mechanic was in the drafts but ignored in the actual release (1 BP damage per turn after being hugged the first time the Yeti damages the hero instead of 2... each turn hero rolls 2 combat dice... 1 white shield is no damage that turn, 2 white shields means immediate escape... so you see not as forgiving as the new mechanic in the HQ companion App which is 2 red dice and any 5 or 6 rolled is an escape while still getting 2 BP damage otherwise OR you can just click the button to get an immediate escape if you toggled escapes in settings, but still!). Also, in the draft notes a hugged hero (and monster) would still defend with one less each (so the Yeti rolled 2 defense). They intended it to be a coop thing, where you save your buddy from the monster, but the escape mechanic was essential for the three solo adventures! The presence of unmarked treasure chests also shows that the never-found artifacts have a place in the game (more of these unmarked chests in Mage of the Mirror). Into the Northlands gives the suggestion to add animal companions (to save you from the Yeti) and/or simply nerfing the Yeti so they don't hug anyone if there is only one heroic character in the quest at the time.

They were toying with changing the search mechanic, to say you would need to move up to treasure chests to open them (but via the fact they didn't follow through and the recent Stephen Baker interview show that this was never the intention any the game up to this point, and yet players still house rule it and even quest designers occasionally forget and put traps next to treasure chests!).

Mage of the Mirror was actually harder, originally. Yes, you could buy from two different shops (one that sold potions that were half price but had 50% chance of failure via die roll), but Ogres were introduced in the very first quests (mostly erased or replaced with Fimir). There were also more numerous Giant Wolves. There was to be a "blind jump" and "double jump" mechanic... you could choose to jump ANY square (even before searching) meaning you could leap through doorways and not fall into the trap every single time. I imagine that rule would have been applied to BQP as well above. The double jump meant you lept over two squares but had to roll a white shield on one die (failure meant you just landed on the first square and proceed like normal, but you could always attempt to jump the next square, etc. etc.). The other mechanic left on the cutting room floor was to allow a room with multiple pieces of furniture to have each furniture piece searched individually (and perhaps another search of the "rest" of the room too? unsure). It really was only intended for the solo quests (would have slowed things way down if these rooms allowed multiple searches per hero! and the treasure deck would have been depleted of good cards much faster potentially) presumably to build up the suspense.

You can see traces of the removal (or non-implementation) of these mechanics in the first Elf quest, the second Barbarian quest, and any time you see two trap tiles in a doorway.

On the bright side you could look at it this way... even though each of these packs purports to have 10 quests (3 solo, 7 group) it's really more like they gave you 17 group quests each. Someone who really wanted to overhaul the whole thing would probably either start deleting monsters and traps like you say, or split the big quests into two each.

[Naniyue]

Thank you for the explanations!
I never thought of a board game suffering from being rushed just like a video game!

I managed to play both KK and ROTWL without visiting the shops, but that's just not possible with TFH.

So the remake of TMOTM has been sort of fixed? I had planned to play that one next.

So, are there any further suggested house rules for this quest pack?
I don't want quick/instant death, but I don't want to feel like I'm cheating either.

[wallydubbs]

Thank you for the explanations!
I never thought of a board game suffering from being rushed just like a video game!

I managed to play both KK and ROTWL without visiting the shops, but that's just not possible with TFH.

So the remake of TMOTM has been sort of fixed? I had planned to play that one next.

So, are there any further suggested house rules for this quest pack?
I don't want quick/instant death, but I don't want to feel like I'm cheating either.

Yeah back in 1992 Hasbro bought out Tonka, who owned Parker Brothers, so Hasbro now had ownership of both Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley.
Parker Brothers had all the lucrative business contracts with Disney. Disney was a big money generator before it went Woke, so Hasbro continued making games for them. Since the headquarters for both board game companies was in Massachusetts they decided to consolidate them into the same building. I've helped companies change buildings and saw how disorderly it gets. So odds are they tried to finish off Hero Quest before the move and they never got around to playtesting. It's a shame I would've liked to see the Dwarf and Wizard quest packs.

My suggestions in playing the Frozen Horror are as follows:
- Use 5 heroes.
- Give the Wizard 4 sets of spells instead of 3.
- Limit the Wandering Monsters to 1.
- When the heroes come across rooms with Mercenaries, give them the option to buy them instead of fighting through them.
- When you turn a corner and there are 3 Ice Gremlins waiting, use 1.
- Remove unnecessary rooms that don't go anywhere or have a specific purpose, you can do this for the whole Southeastern quadrant in Deadly Depths.
- Remove Wandering Monster traps (Keep the Treasure Deck).
- Cut off areas of the board that lead to empty hallways.
+ Consider wearing Plate Mail for the hero wearing the Snowshoes of Speed.
- Reduce Yeti hug damage to 1BP.
- If a hero caught in a Yeti hug has a Dagger, allow him to try to stab the Yeti on his turn.
- Roll Defence Dice for both Polar Warbear attacks.
- Any time the heroes come across a Sorcerer's Table, let them draw a spell scroll artifact card at random.
- Allow the Elf to use Elf spells and other heroes to buy Reagent Kits and add Treasure cards from other quest packs

[Kurgan]

Those are some cool ideas!

wallydubbs, with your dagger suggestion above, are you thinking an unblockable attack against the Yeti, or like if they roll a skull they escape only (or damage the Yeti by one)? Because Yeti have pretty high BP and decent defense against a 1 BP attack like that.

My suggestion, to make it easier would be to remove 1/3rd of the monsters and probably 1/3rd of the traps across the board, allow some form of Yeti escape mechanic, and certainly don't cut off shopping between quests (no quest pack officially stops you from shopping in between other than ROTDM which uses the hideouts mechanic instead... although ATOH gave the OPTION to do this)... though both MOTM and FH treat the last two quests as a single long one, so you're on there about not being able to shop.

If you're playing as a hero in the companion app there isn't so much you can do to feel like you're "not cheating" but you can still do some of the things we've suggested. When a room (or corridor) is revealed with monsters, you can use dice to determine which monsters stay or go. So on the roll of a skull, click the "kill" button to remove that monster until you've covered the room. Then proceed with combat as normal.

When we played TFH we mostly added rather than taking away (more opportunities for potions, mercenaries, etc), but the result is that games were very long. Many of the quests took 3-4 sessions to complete. At times we did use more than four heroes, which (especially when a player controls more than one) made the turns take longer as people had more to manage. Granted, we are also playing remotely (and refining the accessibility of our system as we go), so it may not be so extreme in your case depending upon your setup.

But playing the solo quests as group quests is a good fix (can't be done in the app, sadly), and just multiply the rewards accordingly based on the number of heroes. It's possible this way to actually play the solo quests with "starting" hero(es) rather than fully equipped (maxed out equipment, potions to spare). We used a Barbarian and two guardian knights for an overall party BP of 22 (classic four heroes overall is 25). The Knights of course can each absorb one attack completely and have "stalwart" which is like a 1 BP death save each.

At absolute minimum I would read over the addendum pages for "Into the Northlands" for your Frozen Horror Fixer Upper.

Regarding MOTM, Avalon Hill did introduce some fixes right out of the box:

1) No such thing as an "empty" chest (those have 200 gold coins of "Elven Riches" for the first hero searching). Actually they replaced all of the unmarked chests with gold rewards or the Elven Bracers.
2) Elven Bracers are actually found, very early on, to give the Elf his permanent boost (+2 BP, +1 MP, not that you need Mind Points in this one). Elven Chainmail is implied only to be usable by the Elf this time but he was probably going to get it anyway, just now nobody else can use it if he dies.
3) You're permitted to hire Mercenaries from any expansions you own in the group quests (does that mean if you own both FH AND ROTDM you could hire 16 mercs at once?).
4) It doesn't say you can't have more than one Elf hero in the party at once.* So depending upon what sets you own, you could have 3 of the 4 being Elves. That means you could have two Elf Spell users and one elemental spell user AND a Wizard with the rest of the magic! (only 2 elf spells wouldn't get used).
5) Ogre Body Points reduced from 10 to 5. This has the side effect of making the "Restore Dread" spell a lot less useful for the badguys, but whatever.


Other (official or semi-official) suggestions outside of the pack:
Encarmine suggested that there are a lot of things about Mercenaries the text DOESN'T SAY. This implies he's okay with you passing equipment and artifacts (not just potions) to Mercs for them to use in the quest. The App contradicts this, saying they can't do a lot of those things, but the App is eccentric in many ways and gets things wrong, so it's not always reliable.

Doug Hopkins on his Pulse Designer blog suggested that the Alchemy Deck from ROTDM could be used in other packs, at the very least implying the removal of Hero-specific restrictions on certain potions and adjusted prices (only one Potion got a lowered price, but still) for the Alchemist Shops. You could go all the way and allow the Wizard to craft potions at the Alchemist Benches in the quests, but that would also mean you'd have to start using the ROTDM treasure cards (re-agent ingredients) in your treasure deck. You could also offer re-agent kits for sale between quests for other heroes to do the same, but they are very expensive (400 gold coins and expire after 5 uses).

Rogue Heir of Elethorn (Hero Collection) lore card suggests ALL multi-attacks against the same target be treated like the Polar Warbear double attack. This means one of those attacks will be unblockable, which helps the good guys a lot more than it does the bad guys since you have so many more opportunities than they do.

* The Hero Collection expansions discourage this idea, but still, we're talking fixes here.

Fans have questioned what happens to all the Elf specific stuff (the App is very strict on what the Elf vs. other heroes can use when it comes to Treasure, Equipment and Artifacts for MOTM) if the Elf isn't playing. Many have suggested the Rogue should fill in because he's also an Elf (if not THE Elf). But that's the same situation Zargon is in every time you swap out one of the classic four for one of the new ones that weren't thought of back in the 90's. You can designate any Hero to be "that one" for the purposes of completing the quests if that's what it takes. Maybe they're an "Elf Friend"?

FH remake did make it a little more ambiguous or confusing when it comes to stolen objects. The GS rule was that if any artifacts are lost (by heroes dying, monsters stealing them) then they are found again early in the next quest as a "special treasure" by Zargon so they can be recovered (and not just Artifacts essential to winning a quest, though that is the example given to justify the rule). A few instances of artifacts actually being destroyed comes up in some early expansions, but mostly artifacts will always come back unless they are "consumables" that are used up. The 1992 version of FH set it up so that anything stolen by an Ice Gremlin would be recoverable later (sometimes a few quests later) from those Treasure hoard rooms. As the text is abbreviated this time it leaves it up to Zargon if he wants stolen items to be recoverable in the future or only on that particular quest if that room is found and searched. To me the synthesis of both rules is that the special rule for next quest recovery would only apply to Artifacts, while the Ice Gremlin room thing would apply to all items stolen by Ice Gremlins (treasure, equipment, potions). So you can still put a stolen artifact there, but if they don't find it, it'll still be available early next quest.

Speaking of basic GS rules, it's also important to remember that a dead hero is replaced in the next quest automatically. How precisely the Elixir of Life works is up to that particular Zargon, but in general I think probably it was intended to allow the revival of a dead hero mid-quest (and a two part quest is like a single quest, so I don't imagine heroes coming back just because you crossed over from quest 9 to quest 10, but the Elixir would bring them back anytime). Sadly the App doesn't really recognize such things, you have to decide if a hero is really dead the moment he dies... you don't get a second chance to spawn him back in (but it retains a full starting party the next group quest you play, assuming it isn't a two-parter!).

[Naniyue]

Thank you for all of the suggestions! I'll try things on the fly and see what works for me.
I'm DEFINITELY using house rules for crevasses!
Fortunately, I've become more adept at killing yetis, especially with added mercenaries.

I'm stupidly trying to play with no heroes dying! I do allow use of an elixir by one hero to bring back another, but once out of elixirs . . . I've made it through the main campaign as well as KK and ROTWL like this, so I am determined to do so with TFH as well!

I'm playing everything non mythic tier that has been on Amazon in the past year or so, in order of release.