u/EdgarVerona

Thanks folks for your advice and suggestions yesterday, I really appreciate it!

I've decided I'm going to go down the path someone suggested of making a "toned down" version for young kids, but since I was so close to finishing this "advanced" version I figured I'd take a stab at cleaning it up and getting it ready to playtest.

This is the v2, and hopefully ready to playtest version, which has:

* Ability uses moved to character card

* Using the AtOH rules for contested rolls

* Cleaned up all the tables of "Keywords" and put them in one alphabetized list (turned most monster and spell mechanics in the core rules into Keywords, and then added my new stuff to that list)

* A rule addendum with all the changes

* Moved from using getpaint.net to design the cards to penpot.app, which is making it a lot easier to change them now. I'm including my exported penpot.app design files in case anyone else wants to crib from them for cards. I made some reusable components that could be handy for people. It's a bit janky but hopefully useful.

Anyways, I hope folks who are interested enjoy!

Here's a link to all the files (the full rule addendum, the monster reference spreadsheet, the keyword reference, all the card images, and the exported design files):

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Za-h5D2VVwy4PQLh6Z7yrOqNVn-8-fqD?usp=sharing

From the rules addendum: "This mod was originally written to try and convince my daughter to play Hero Quest.  Things got a little out of control and here we are."

The kids in my daughter's school for the past year have been going absolutely nuts about K-Pop Demon Hunters, and as a result so has she. About a week ago an idea popped in my head: what if this is the inroad I have been looking for to get her to try a board game?

I thought of Hero Quest, and I started working on a mod. It's a pretty significant change: the new heroes use a money-based upgrade system instead of relying on weapons, and the power creep is likely going to be unbalanced for the base game content. But I'm thinking of making custom quests for it that are more K-Pop Demon Hunters themed, and I don't mind if there's no real challenge to the game because it's hopefully going to serve the purpose of "baby's first dungeon crawler".

I figured I'd share it here in its early form, just in case anyone is somehow in a similar situation and might get some use out of it (or use it as a starting point for something more generally useful).

My goal was to preserve the spirit of the hero quest system, but give her some interesting choices during combat and interesting choices for upgrading her hero. I tried to make most of the complexity be things that either I could easily guide her through, or that were managed by the DM so that she just had to worry about doing whatever I tell her to do after she says what she wants to do. We'll see in practice if that worked.

To go with the Player Hero and Ability cards, I made some other changes:

* Abilities have a "per encounter", "per rest", or "use once per quest" cooldown. Rest cooldown happens if you receive a treasure and choose to discard it in favor of resting instead. When you use a card, you flip it over and can't use it until its relevant cooldown trigger happens to restore it.

* Ability and character upgrades are tracked with bubbles you can fill in as you buy them. Not sure yet if we'll just use paper or if I'll laminate it so we can use wet erase markers.

* Abilities can have more uses purchased, which at the moment is tracked on the card as well, though maybe that should be tracked on the character sheet now that I think about it. I picture that if you do so, you'd get an additional copy of that card that you can then level up separately.

* Enemies are run by an algorithm, which includes "kung-fu" style limits on how many enemies can target a single player in one turn, and enforcing the Taunting mechanic mentioned in the ability cards. I assigned each type of enemy an "archetype" that determines who they want to prioritize attacking. All that complexity can be handled by me so she doesn't have to worry about it.

* New keywords ("Taunt" = "The enemy must target you", "Agile" = "You can move through enemies and obstacles", and a few others, "Mind Check" = keyword for the original "roll d6 equal to your mind points and if you get a 6 you pass" mechanic, "Contested Mind Check" for the original "Source and target both roll white dice equal to their mind points, and add up the skulls. The one with the most skulls wins." mechanic, and "Assisted Mind Check" where an ally can add half their mind points to the roll, but if it fails they both suffer the consequences)

* One-time treasure searching opportunity that happens at the end of every encounter, or when in proximity of a treasure or secret door when not in an encounter. If there is a trap, the hero will roll an Assisted Mind Check. If they fail, they suffer the consequences of the trap. If they succeed, they disarm the trap automatically and suffer no consequences. Either way, they proceed to pull a treasure card if there's no scripted treasure to receive, and any secret passages are revealed. If you don't want the treasure, you can choose to discard it to "rest" and restore your "Rest" cooldown abilities.

I picture the roles being that Rumi is meant to be the simplest one to play (as, of course, my daughter will want to be Rumi) and deals direct damage using her standard attacks with extra damage from her abilities, and ways to heal and defend herself in case she gets in trouble. My wife will choose between Zoey and Mira, who I picture being a ranged, evasive, ability dependent character in the former and a crowd control focused tank in the latter. If the automated enemy rules work well enough I might try playing the third character, but I am not going to trust that that'll work right away and I also don't want to accidentally ruin any surprises in the quests while being a player.

I'm still thinking through what the new quests should look like, but I think encounters should be some mix of larger pools of weaker mobs and big baddie fights where they get to drain their Quest abilities to take out something intimidating. They might have to rescue civilians who are being attacked by demons as part of their objectives (maybe as the primary way that they gain gold?), but I haven't fully thought that through yet.

Anyways, I hope someone gets some amusement from this. It's been fun to make it - I'm hoping in a couple of weeks we can do a trial run.

UPDATE: Thanks u/Non-RedditorJ for showing me that AtOH contested mind check mechanic! I updated the above to use that instead, I like that way more.

UPDATE: I added a comment with the details about my "automated Zargon Turn" algorithm/additions instead of putting it in the post body, so that this doesn't turn even more TL;DR than it already is