I vote for the crystal tower
Turn 10
Movement Phase:
Camp, Cautious, Normal or Reckless and where to? If you are on the Remnant during Event phase each of you will be Irradiated (5), although your Food Rating will shield you to a degree. You’ll also skip Circumstance.
I vote for cautious movement toward boss 4 to grab those bounties, but staying on Remnants so we can harvest crystals, so south 2, south east 1.
I’d recommend going anywhere you want to go expeditiously. The Ravager will actively try to land on your tile in this Act, or an adjacent tile if there’s already a remnant on yours, and that will happen again at the end of next turn. Also, you have a pretty decent chance of being able to navigate at this point.
Well, I’ll take that as sticking with Matt’s plan, so:
Skills
Cheya rolls Explore and Survival, needing 6, 6: 2, 3. Success, Success. 2 gold gained.
Akbar rolls Explore and Survival, needing 4, 6: 1, 4. Critical Success, Success 3 gold gained.
Orion rolls Explore and Survival, needing 3, 2: 3, 10. Success, Critical Failure 2 gold gained. 2 food consumed.
Chimminy rolls Explore and Survival, needing 5, 5: 9, 4. Failure, Success. 0 food consumed.
Circumstance
Skipped.
Event
Each hero is Irradiated (5). This is Energy Drain equal to 5 minus the hero’s Food Rating. In addition, each hero will be Mutated unless they test against their Food Rating on a d10 and get double their Rating or lower. You may choose not to resist and automatically gain the Mutation. They’re often pretty awesome, but they permanently reduce your max energy and you will trade the Purity bonus on some Power Ups (which requires no mutations) for a plus one to any power ups of a specific stat, based on the mutation.
Cheya suffers 2 Energy Drain. Are you resisting mutation, @Matt_W ?
Akbar suffers 3 Energy Drain. Are you resisting mutation, @Ormus ?
Orion suffers 3 Energy Drain. Are you resisting mutation, @Thraeg ?
Chimminy suffers 5 Energy Drain. Are you resisting mutation, @ArmandoPenblade? Haha, too bad, you’re FR 0, you can’t.
You also harvest a d4 of Ravager Crystals, plus an extra 2 from the Tools: 2 + 2 = 4. And because this Tower is in the Wastes, you each get a powerup.
Cheya gets:
Akbar gets:
Play or stash, @Ormus ? (you have 2 stashed cards)
Orion gets:
Play or stash, @Thraeg (0 stashed)
Chimminy gets:
Play or stash, @ArmandoPenblade ? (0 stashed)
Ravager Phase
It disappears once more below the sands.
Turn 11
Movement Phase:
Camp, Cautious, Normal or Reckless? And still headed to boss 4?
Technically does a Hex on the resistance roll still succeed even with 0 FR? Figured it’s worth checking!
But I’m still on board with the Boss 4 plan. I will stash the power up.
The rulebook specifically says it’s a special stat test and you need to get equal to or less than double your food rating, which is still 0 and it’s impossible to roll that on a d10, so, I don’t think so. (I want to say if you have a stat reduced to 0 somehow that’s an automatic failure, also - but it doesn’t say so under the skill/stat test rules so if I’m right about that it must specify it somewhere else.)
I will stash mine.
Resisting mutation?
I’ve got a Sphinx Blood Booster. I will not resist.
I will stash and not resist
All right! Team Mutation here for some action finally!
Okay, I guess I’ll assume Ormus isn’t resisting and y’all are going after Boss 4.
Cheya’s mutation is:
Akbar’s is:
Orion’s is:
Additionally, Orion a while back got an Evolve Power Up card that hung around until he got a mutation, so he counts as having a second Extra Eye and gets a further +4 energy.
Chimminy’s is:
How this works is each mutation costs max energy ranks of the amount in the upper left corner. You get whatever ability is listed. And if a Power Up increases the stat listed in the lower right hand corner, you’ll get an additional rank of it. Extra copies of a Mutation do not further reduce your energy ranks or increase the Power Up bonus, but they’ll improve the new ability however the ability specifies.
I apologize for not also resolving the boss battle, but I think you should have some input into how that resolves, especially since you have these new toys. Let me know!
(PS: Someone on one of my other Discords asked if I could teach a friend to play Sands of Shurax since the friend backed the KS and needed a boost into it. So I did a demo earlier today, and for once the caravan journey went really, really badly. The initial available caravan master was Baal the Slaver, and the first Caravan Event did a Size Matters stat penalty to two stats he doesn’t help (+2, in our cases). The newbie only had a 1 and 2 in 10 chance to succeed respectively, and I had none whatsoever. so Baal ate a full -6 energy drain right off the bat…and then it had boss 6 attack. I include him for your reference.
We had zero chance to kill him, he cursed one of us off the bat and hit us with his plague before the combat even started, and then we both failed our Flee the first round so he poured a nice hearty helping of Scarabs out for us. We succeeded the second time…but if you run away from an encounter on a Caravan Journey, the Caravan Master eats Energy Drain equal to opponent level + a d4. Baal was very dead…)
Added a reference section for Mutations in the first post. They are unfortunately an element of tracking I failed to account for when planning this. If you end up with lots I’ll probably slap them in an Imgur album.
In our second caravan journey when my friends and I played IRL last week, we hit the event that makes you fight Astonal or go to his Arena Prison Camp. Our stats were way too low to fight the boss…but also too low to succeed enough in the arena enough to get to the minimum Fame level to escape (made worse by the fact that we’d lost our backpacks so had no items).
We entered a death loop in the arena and had to restart the game.
Sounds like you should have chosen to fight and then immediately beat feet. It’s possible some of you would have lived. Not the caravan master, but, y’know. His fault for steering that way.
Iirc, fleeing Astonal is what generates the imprisonment, but I don’t have the cards in front of me cuz I haven’t had the energy to unpack my boxes (other friend had a copy that we played).
At least in the moment, we were pretty confident that the event we drew guaranteed a loss, but I could be misremembering.
I don’t know if the Caravan Event has special rules, but you can run away from Astonal like anyone else. It’s just that per his boss sheet, you have a special option to surrender - that’s different from fleeing. The reason you might want to do that is anyone who’s already died gets Revived, far as I can tell. The reason not to do that is because, well, you get stuck in prison until you’ve fought your way up his Arena, like you saw.
ffffuuuuuuuuu
fuck u discoruse that is a complete sentence god wumpus is the worst
Just a reminder that I’m looking for boss strategies before my next update.