Fan Scenario: The Devil Hunt

[Ron Lundeen]

Reposting cartmanbeck's scenario in order to add my analysis:

The Devil Hunt
The Devil Hunt scenario is intended for characters who have finished the first chapter of the Rise of the Runelords campaign, Burnt Offerings. The Sandpoint Devil is an extremely difficult villain to defeat, but the players will get the chance to reduce his power if they hunt down the henchmen in the other locations first.

The citizens of Sandpoint have been disappearing at an alarming rate, and the mayor thinks that the Sandpoint Devil is behind the disappearances. She has asked you to hunt down the devil and destroy it if at all possible. Several townsfolk have offered to help, and some of them even have valuable clues as to the best places to ambush the devil. Take out the Sandpoint Devil before it kills again!

Setup: Remove Ilosari Gandethus from the Allies deck. If that card is in one of the players’ decks, simply ignore the sentence about rolling to randomly summon the Sandpoint Devil.

Players Location
1 Junk Beach
1 Wooden Bridge
1 Glassworks
2 Waterfront
3 Goblin Fortress
4 The Old Light
5 Warrens
6 Town Square

Villain: The Sandpoint Devil
Henchmen: Ancient Skeletons

During the Scenario:
When any player defeats one of the Henchmen, place that Ancient Skeleton card in a pile next to the scenario card. For each card in this pile, the difficulty of checks to defeat the Sandpoint Devil is reduced by 1.

When you encounter an Ally card, instead of attempting to acquire it, you may attempt a Charisma/Diplomacy 8 check. If you succeed, place that Ally card in the pile of Henchmen next to the scenario card, and add a random blessing from the box to the top of the Blessings deck.

When you encounter the Sandpoint Devil, if either of your combat checks to defeat it do not have the Magic trait, the Sandpoint Devil is undefeated.

Ignore the first power listed on the Sandpoint Devil card (instead treat it as any other villain).

Award: Each character chooses a type of boon. That character gains one random card of that type from the box. In addition, each character may choose to banish any one card from their deck when rebuilding it at the end of this scenario.

[Ron Lundeen]

Goodness gracious, I love this scenario. It demands cooperation, but is deceptively difficult.

"What can possibly be deceptive about it, Ron?" is the natural response "The villain is a ludicrously difficult Combat 20 then Combat 20!"

Here's the rub: the Sandpoint Devil is a hand-killer that you must prepare yourself to defeat. This means that you must hunt for the minions (to reduce the combat difficulty of the Sandpoint Devil) and you must enlist allies (to further reduce the combat difficulty). You'll be saving Blessings much more so than usual to ensure the Diplomacy 8 checks to gain allies, so you're not exploring as much; further, since you aren't acquiring those allies, you can't use them to explore, either. So the timer is very likely to run down on you with this one.

I also note that the Glassworks, a mandatory location here, is one of the harder locations: you have to discard on every failed check, which is not only checks to acquire or defeat cards, but on everything: failed checks to recharge a spell, for example. So that adds to the difficulty here as well.

Defeating the Sandpoint Devil really requires teamwork; you likely need two people at the location when it's found, in order to share the load of the double Combat checks. Valeros or Amiri might be able to make both checks, but the requirement to have the Magic trait as well means even those combat monsters likely need some arcane or divine assistance. Fight the Sandpoint Devil alone, and you're quite likely to lose, running down the timer further.

We played this scenario twice: the first time was with Kyra and Amiri, and we noted that the setup of the game was against us: neither of us had stellar Charisma, so the Diplomacy checks to enlist allies was hard. Furthermore, neither of us had high Dexterity (Kyra's is abysmal), so the checks on half of the locations was quite difficult for us. We'd encountered the Sandpoint Devil only once (which was enough to wipe Amiri's hand), then lost by running out of time.

The second time, I swapped Seoni in for Amiri. We got lucky in that we didn't encounter the Sandpoint Devil the first time until we had an ally and a henchmen to help out and we could share the Combat checks: we only barely beat the Combat 18 checks, and fortunately Seoni's attack had the Magic trait. By the time we ran into the Sandpoint Devil again, we'd collected all 3 henchmen and a total of two allies. The Sandpoint Devil was alone at the Glassworks, the last open location, and we ganged up on him and took him out on the second-to-last card.

I'm definitely including this in our future games, particularly whenever someone comments that the game seems a bit easy or doesn't seem to require much teamwork.

Great design, cartmanbeck!

[J Scot Shady]

This sounds interesting. I'd like to give it a try after my wife and I finish the first Adventure deck.

I do have one question though. The second part of the reward, about banishing a card, what does that exactly do? It's been my experience that after reseting the decks you end up banishing several cards, meaning return them to the deck. Maybe I'm missing what this means.

Still, I think this could be a good scenario to try.

I am also working on a fan scenario myself. Think more traditional dungeon crawl with linear locations (close x location, move to y location). I'll post it when I work it out.

[cartmanbeck]

@Ron, thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

@J Scot: The idea of banishing a card is a way to get rid of something you've added to your deck (or is from the starting deck setup) that you just don't really like. The reason for this is that if you (as a group) have enough cards to make up everyone's deck at the end of the scenario, then you can't go into the box to get basic cards. This way, you specifically get to banish one of those cards back to the box, letting you grab a Basic card instead.

For example, the last time I played as Seelah, I kept coming up with a wooden shield even though all of my weapons were two-handed, so it was a useless card. However, our group didn't gain any new Armor cards during the scenario (in fact, I don't think there were any to get in those locations). If I had the option to banish that wooden shield, I could then go into the box and get Leather Armor, which is always better if you are using two-handed weapons.

Get it? :)

[1970Zombie]

I tried this scenario with a version of Valeros that had completed Burnt Offerings.

I was able to solo this scenario without too much trouble. I was not able to acquire any allies as the Charisma/Diplomacy check 8 required me to roll a 6 on my d6. The Ancient Skeleton Henchmen were not difficult to beat. I had bagged them before encountering the Sandpoint Devil.

In fact, as luck would have it, the Devil was the last card in the last open location. This location was the Glassworks and I did take some damage from failed checks but I had cards to burn. Achieving two 18 combat checks was not hard since I had two magic weapons, Sheriff Hemlock and a blessing in hand when it was encountered. The first check was done with a recharged +1 Bastard Sword (3d10+5). The second check was with a +1 Longbow plus Sheriff Hemlock and a blessing (2d8+1d10+2).

Got an Elven Breastplate as a reward to replace a Wooden Shield.

All in all it was a good scenario.

Your results may vary. My deck contained 4 magic weapons of the 6 within: +1 Bastard Sword, +1 Longbow, +1 Shortsword and +1 Warhammer. This made Valeros well equipped to deal with the Sandpoint Devil.

[cartmanbeck]

I just ran it myself with Lem and Amiri, and I won although both character's decks were at the point that if they had to re-fill their hands after defeating the Sandpoint Devil, they would have died!

I am definitely going for challenging for this one, and I think I did that part well! LOL

[Akasma]

We played this adventure and really liked it. By the time we were done the Sandpoint Devil was a 9/9 and we were lucky to find the boss early through an augury, put him on top then went else where to clean everything up. Lots of fun! Thanks so much.

[cartmanbeck]

Akasma wrote:

We played this adventure and really liked it. By the time we were done the Sandpoint Devil was a 9/9 and we were lucky to find the boss early through an augury, put him on top then went else where to clean everything up. Lots of fun! Thanks so much.

Glad you liked it!

[OberonViking]

My daughter and I just played this and failed on the last a Blessing Card. It was an exciting scenario, weighing up trying to gain more allies before we found the villain, and trying to keep enough Blessings in hand to help with the combating The Sandpoint Devil. It is a very good scenario. Well done.