More Niceness About Heroes Against Darkness

The Boulder himself over at the Impossible Boulder blog took a look at Heroes Against Darkness for his series of posts about beginner-friendly free RPGs:

Heroes Against Darkness: Beginner Friendly?

Once again I shall take quotes out of context to increase the appeal of the game (J/K):

"Heroes Against Darkness is a free fantasy role playing game wrapped up in an attractive package and stuffed with style."

"The choice to strip feats and skills from d20 is really the first place that the game starts to move into more old school territory."

"The real beginner-friendly jewel of Heroes isn't found in the rulebook at all. The Sundered Tower is a solo adventure done in a choose-your-path style that teaches the basics of the system."

"Heroes Against Darkness is one the of the slickest free RPGs I have seen yet. Don't let the $0 price tag fool you, this is the full package."

"This is a game that feels like 0e/1e D&D with a more robust tactical framework and a unified system. I get a feeling that Heroes Against Darkness will appeal to fans of the E6, Fourthcore and people that subscribe to the OSR ethos, but not necessarily the games."

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You heard the man, don't let the price tag fool you, feel the quality:
Heroes Against Darkness: Downloads.

The Sundered Tower Solo Adventure

The alpha version of the first solo adventure for Heroes Against Darkness, The Sundered Tower, is now up on the rules page (which I probably should rename to the Downloads page).

The solo adventure has pregen characters, a gamebook section, five combat encounters (each with their own maps) and a bunch of ability tests. It's still alpha at the moment as it'll go through a bit of playtesting before we call released.

As ever, drop me an email or comment with any feedback.

You can find The Sundered Tower and the full rules over at the downloads page: Heroes Against Darkness - Game Rules.

Gameplay Tuning for Solo Adventures...

It's been a quiet week here on the blog, not because I've been slack, but because I've been working on the solo adventure for Heroes Against Darkness.

The adventure itself is adapted from a location that I used with my players at the start of our current campaign. The players were washed up on an island, having escaped from enslavement on a trade galley. While exporing the island, they can across an abandoned tower that was said to be the original home of a powerful sorcerer.

So I've taken the tower map and adapted that adventure for just one character, which is proving tricky.

I was up late last night running through the first encounter with the pregen Warrior character that comes packaged with the adventure. The first time I ran it, there were three monsters in the encounter. Without using any healing, my character survived the encounter 65% of the time (after 20 runs). This isn't great for the first encounter of an introductory adventure, so I removed one of the monsters and reduced the stats of the two that remained. When I ran through the encounter again, I survived the encounter 85% of the time (again after 20 runs). In the three runs where I died, it was mainly down to lots of bad rolls by me combined with critical hits from the baddies.

I think that 85% survival is a much more realistic and desirable rate, but it will be interesting to see whether that's too hard when combined with the rest of the module. The adventure itself has five full encounters, two against single monsters, two against groups of weaker monsters, and one final fight against a strong boss monster with some weaker minions.

Here's a preview of one of the encounter maps.  As you can see, I've tried to keep the style of a hand-drawn map you'd get from your GM:

As it stands, the solo adventure portion is finished, the encounter maps are done and the pregen characters are done. All I need now is an image for the front of the adventure (a sundered tower) and to tune the rest of the fights.

Wish me luck.

Head over to the game rules download page to check out the system: Heroes Against Darkness - Game Rules.

Solo Adventure Character Pregen Preview

I've just finished putting together one of the pregen characters for the Heroes Against Darkness Solo Adventure, so I thought I'd post it here for you guys to check out ahead of time.

The pregen contains a simplified version of the full character sheet (without all of the Ability Mod + ½ Level sections), a quick description of each of the sections of the sheet, and then a list of the character's relevant Level 1 Powers and Spells.

I think I'll base all of the pregens on the example character builds that are included in the Player's Guide.

The current stable version of the rules can always be found here: Heroes Against Darkness - Game Rules.