Vampire Darkness Playtest – Quest 1 (2nd attempt)

This is my second playtest of quest 1. This time, a couple of friends played with me, and overall they enjoyed the new rules better than out of the box Massive Darkness. The game still takes too long, though. After about 7 1/2 hours, we decided so quit. My goal is a 4 hour quest. To that end, I am going to change the rules to require 3 clues instead of 5 AND remove a tile. To add some excitement to the end game, I will add a spawn point that begins spitting out guards every round once King Tusk is rescued (Gold quest only).

There are some other changes I will implement:

1. Change the Bribe/Interrogate rules to provide XP and loot on successes
2. Fix totems. The Debris totem ground the game to a halt, which wasn’t my intent. I like the idea of having them, but they need to be an inconvenience but not a show-stopper. This means I will need to make new trap cards and reprint them. The Fire totem actually worked nicely, though.
3. Trying to Bribe slowed the game down (because Bribing is harder than Interrogating), and the players were unimpressed with the benefit of allies. Although they have their uses as-is, they aren’t as good as the pet allies from Friends & Foes, so I am thinking about buffing them. Possibly +1 melee hit for melee type allies, +1 range hit for range type allies, +1 magic hit for magic type allies, and +1 shield for defensive type allies. So there is a synergy is gaining an ally that matches your specialty, but they can also be useful as a complementary class (for example, an archer as an ally for a tank). I’ll have to mess around with this one.

I’ll post the revised quest once it’s ready.

In the meantime, here’s some picture from the second playtest: