Ye Olde Inn

by **Longwing** » December 8th, 2023, 6:28 pm

I've been doing some analysis of gold and item rewards in Heroquest to figure out appropriate prices for fan-made content purchases. It occurred to me that folks here might benefit from it too.

This is a rough analysis based on the gold in the treasure deck and the gold available from quest text. It assumes finding a portion of the treasure cards and all of the annotated treasure. The analysis further makes assumptions about what the heroes are likely to sell vs what they're likely to keep, and includes my personal house rule that they can sell potions for half the potion's value.

Here's the google sheet for anyone who'd like to review it. I've enabled commenting if anyone would like to make suggestions.

The take-aways from this are pretty interesting. By the end of the Gathering Storm, the Heroes are likely to have acquired an aggregate of around 9500 gold. By the end of Kellar's Keep, that total grows to around 16,000. Looking at the shop, the heroes can conceivably drain the entire shop deck of every purchasable item prior to the end of the Gathering Storm (presuming no potion purchases and only equipment). This also explains the high cost of potions. Once the shop deck is emptied out, heroes will have nothing to spend gold on. Expensive potions function as a money-sink.

However, while the gold rewards in aggregate stack up to a lot of money, the individual per-hero rewards aren't particularly egregious on a quest-by-quest basis. Most quests offer somewhere between 100 and 200 gold per-hero. This means a typical hero can buy a piece of equipment once every other quest or so (again, assuming they don't spend any coin on potions).

This gets a bit weirder when they've bought all the equipment they want to buy. Potion prices are really quite high. Even a potion of Lesser Healing would typically only be purchasable every other quest.

I'm curious if anyone has thoughts about the practical economics of the armory and the alchemist. As it stands, the process of buying equipment from the Armory could almost be considered a special set of rules from Gathering Storm (akin to the Elf Spells from Mage in the Mirror, Mercenaries in The Frozen Horror, or Alchemy in Rise of the Dread Moon), since these mechanics will likely become irrelevant before they reach the Kellar's Keep quest pack.

I get it, "Gathering Storm" is a fan name for the first 14 quests. You could say it's clever because (as someone pointed out) it starts with the same letters as "Game System."
It is actually the name of one of the later EQP quests.

You get even more gold (potentially) in the EU editions, and there are no Alchemist Shops, prices are different, and Treasure potions are lost between quests if not used up.

The Japanese edition gives the most gold, but then a lot of it is used to attempt to "level up" between quests (and all of a hero's gold is lost if he dies, even if revived the one time at the temple or later by the Talisman of Lore).

by **Longwing** » December 9th, 2023, 12:32 am

Technically there isn't an Alchemist shop in the US base game either, but I'm running these calculations because I'm working on some rules mods and needed to better understand the economic math.