Over the weekend, I played a solo two-hander of Hexplore It: Valley of the Dead King and squeaked a narrow win on Easy with a Vengeful Centaur Beastlord (who only got a single creature for his pack a turn before the end of the game) and a Strong-Willed Halfling Vagabond, both very effective and fun combinations. I actually managed to get out one of the Quests that leads to a legendary item (or companion, in this case) but doing it required getting successes on all three skills on one character and neither character had a strong enough skill suite to warrant attempting it, especially when it has you fight a pair of encounters every time, and especially with the Dead King 4 cities into his campaign of conquest and like two spaces away from the quest location. Still loving the heck out of it and still just so much I haven’t seen or gotten to encounter - for example, there’s never seemed like a good time to tackle the majority of the bosses. I’ve won against the Dead King himself three times now, and he’s theoretically the strongest boss in the game, so probably I could have tackled lesser bosses as well. But the gap between being able to take on bosses, say, 7-9 (plus the necessity of locating them) and being able to take the Dead King has never felt that big and usually by that point there just aren’t many turns (or gameplay time) left. Possibly I’ll just need the right set of heroes, or have to tackle a Marathon game, or I’ll start feeling differently as I start to get confident enough to tackle higher difficulty ratings.
Ah, but then tonight we played a four player Hexplore It: The Forests of Adrimon, with a Somnabulist (I didn’t catch his Trait or Race tbh), a Heroic (something) Guardian, a Stealthy Ivy Knight Stormcaller, and my own Survivalist Sidhe Druid. Such a different setup, so many cool tweaks to the baseline formula. My goodness. I have to say, even with the revisions for the second edition of Valley of the Dead King, Forests is obviously a more confident, experienced design that really builds on the formula established in Valley. Less Roles, less Races, but the Roles we played were really really good and cool and felt just that little bit more nuanced than a lot of the Valley Roles. Adrimon is a very different threat, a less active, more insidious one, and the quest for her defeat at once feels like advancement is significantly faster (and a bit more controlled, with Fragments providing the majority of it and offering two fixed options or a Power Up card or two rather than merely the latter) and yet you have significantly fewer crutches, as the cities aren’t your friends, healing from the battle sites is once per game, and even at Wayposts you can’t simply allocate gold to advancing specific stats, and those are only found through exploration. We tackled our first high level boss this game (the level 7 Wendigo) and came out on top thanks to some really amazing masteries. The Druid’s Fey Touched, for example, which Raises Health and Energy both by half your Defense rank for one energy and can target any hero (and be used once per hero per game turn out of combat as well) is pretty silly powerful once you’ve gotten some Defense upgrades, and gets super broken if you successfully do a particular Destination that adds the Fate die to either the Health or Energy Raise you do each time and is Druid specific. I love that the game does this sort of uber-specific powerup that is really strong but effectively balanced by the unlikelihood you’ll even get access to it. Oh yeah, and we never found a full set of fragments for any of the relics we had ready to forge, but we managed to take down Adrimon on Easy anyway, because the Somnambulist burned through her Soul Shield in a turn-and-a-bit and then her energy in like, another turn and a half, and the Stormcaller chopped through her health in 40-50 damage bites, I kept everyone at or over maximum vitals (or close enough to be put back up as needed), and our Guardian tanked the majority of the incoming damage anyhow. We woulda been fucked if she used her Reflect ability when we were actually targetting her (the soul shield is a separate target), though. Glad that didn’t happen.
In summary, these games are fucking great and go out and get them now kthx. (Or just back the Sands of Shurax KS starting 8/1, that looks crazy from the previews, and you can probably add on the previous volumes there too.)
