Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Castle Ravenloft Adventure # 8: "Horror of the Howling Hag"

This adventure has a very different tile set up than previous missions. Only the corners and the center of a 5x5 tile grid are visible at the beginning, and the goal is to find a path from the corners to the center square in order to defeat the Howling Hag and disrupt her ritual. The adventure also uses the monster tokens, which means that tiles which would normally include a single monster could include anything from 0 to 2 monsters or the Hag herself.

The Wife and I got extraordinarily lucky in this adventure on our first try. We drew a normally bad Encounter card that requires the placement of a new tile on any unexplored edge and for the active hero to be transported there, with the other heroes having the option of jumping there as well. For us, this was awesome, as we were able to use the new tile as a bridge between the outer rim of the grid and the center square, and then have all four of our heroes move there instantly. From there, we were able to hang out on the center square until all the time tokens were gone while simultaneously beating the crap out of the Howling Hag. We finished with probably our most successful result ever: all heroes alive, and we didn't even need to use a healing surge.

1 comment:

The Wife said...

The other key element of this scenario that you left out is that your heroes (your choice of 2-5 heroes) all start on different corner tiles. That means that you can't back one another up until you build a connecting path.

In our game, that risk wass partially offset by something else that was supposed to be a bad thing, that actually worked to our advantage. We drew the Howling Hag from the monster tokens early and one of her attacks says that is she hits, she sends you to a random corner tile. That really helped us get our heroes together.