Blackstone Fortress Thread

[The Other Dave]

Jus suggested a thread over in the "what are you doing" thread, and I have too much time on my hands at the moment (as I suppose many of us do) so here goes.

Blackstone Fortress: What's the Deal?
In case you've been under a rock for the past year and a half, Blackstone Fortress is GW's adventure board game set in the 40K universe, centered, unsurprisingly, around intrepid explorers and a newly-discovered, mostly-inactive, Blackstone Fortress, ripe for the plunder. If you know your 40K lore, you know this is big news. (The galaxy is one fortress short, as Abaddon crashed one into Cadia, which destroyed the planet. That's how powerful they are.)
Here's a supercut of all the pre-release trailers that give the basic background of the game, mostly from Rogue Trader Janus Draik's point of view.

The Game
There are lots of how to play videos out and about, including a slick one from GW themselves, so you can get the idea pretty quickly, but basically it's a narrative dungeon crawl with a "legacy" system. There's no destroying cards or putting stickers on things like Gloomhaven or whatever, but the expectation is that you keep track of each explorer's equipment and upgrades (and potential permanent death - pretty unlikely really, but the danger is there) for your games, and track quest progress and the increasing difficulties associated with your progress. There isn't really character advancement as such, aside from loot you gain and, again, the potential of dying, but the idea is that your copy of the game evolves as you play. You can "reset" and put all the cards back in the box and start from scratch too, and there are options for one-shot games.

The Quests
Each box or expansion has a quest in it, and certain upgrades to your game experience, equipment, new enemies and so forth associated with it. Some are more in-depth than others! Each has a sealed envelope that you get to open at the end, each of which includes one of a pretty large selection of bennies, so basically everybody will be getting a unique experience with "their" copy of the game.
The core box has the quest for the hidden vault, the "basic" game experience, fighting through all kinds of enemies to find the center of the fortress and *spoiler*.
The Dreaded Ambull and Traitor Command expansions have short quests and new enemies associated with their contents, and permanent upgrades to your base of operations if you complete them.
The Escalation expansion has four-and-a-half new explorers (one is a weaker "retinue character" who tags along but doesn't use the full explorer rules) and a new quest to stop the big bad from gaining control of the fortress. Again. It looks to be of similar length to the quest in the core box, and has dungeon mapping and everything.
No Respite has a Death Guard-themed quest, which looks to be a bit more in-depth than the ambull or traitor guard, but less than the core box or escalation. It's also the only expansion to use non-unique miniatures, re-using the easy-build death guard from First Strike. Some Blackstone fans were a bit salty about that, but eh.
Coming soon is the Zoat expansion, with said zoat as another ally character you can get, and the apparently final Ascension expansion, which adds some very large drones.
There are also a couple of card pack expansions, with new loot and new encounters but the reviews I've seen of them are fairly lackluster.
Basically, there's a lot of content out there!

Opinions and Chat
I've just recently finished up the core box quest playing solo (it took me a good few weeks of playing for a couple hours three or four nights a week), and have been having a lot of fun - I'll be starting the Escalation questline next. It's OK as a solo game, since the enemies all activate with semi-random procedural AI ("if this model is two or three hexes from an explorer, roll a d20 on this chart to see what it does" sort of things) so they sometimes act sub-optimally and, strictly speaking, you as the player controlling them can make enemies block each others' paths in a way that's advantageous to you - or you could not! It's not exactly totally dependent on luck, but the difficulty of a given combat will depend a lot on what particular enemies you draw, where they begin relative to your heroes, what they roll on the behavior charts, and who does or doesn't roll crits, so you might have a couple cakewalk fights and then suddenly one that goes south right out of the gate. All the same, I've had fun playing solo, even if you do miss out on the bants that come with, you know, playing a game with other people. It's also a really fun painting exercise, as you get a wide range of cool stuff to paint up - the explorers especially are very much special-snowflake PCs one and all, showcasing some rarely-seen bits of the 40K universe.

Balance and House Rules
Generally, I think balance is fine - having a proper antagonist player will probably help make things more difficult, but the biggest issue is the ability of some of the core set explorers to be permanently boosted after finding certain pieces of loot, which there's no requirement to ever give up. Everyone else has to work for it, fulfilling a usually-pretty-challenging condition, or killing enough enemies, to inspire on their own each time they go into the fortress. Some of the explorers are stronger than others on paper, too, although this is often balanced by support abilities and/or general squishiness. I haven't really felt the need to house rule anything yet, although I may think about requiring perma-boosting explorers to give up their [gollum voice]precious[/gollum] items and re-find them from time to time.

Just to finish with a "let me tell you about my game" story, my hairiest moment so far was when the Navigator got trapped alone in a small room (the door stuck behind him two turns in a row) with an angry chaos lord with a thunder hammer, with predictable results. Fortunately his friends were able to drag him to the lift and revive him after eventually taking the big guy out of action (and getting some hammer to the face themselves), but it was touch and go for a minute.

[jus]

Smashing overview Dave san.

I also think the perma boost is a bit meh. Having not played too much my self yet, I don't know if these suggestions for house rules would work or are too hard but....

New secret agendas:
Janus Draik - During an Expedition, collect 3(?) pieces of Archeotech or Archeotech counts as 1 point of inspiration . (Being a treasure hunting, profit hungry Rogue trader rather than finding that one discovery card and being boosted for life, makes the Janus player want to push on further each run to find that extra loot to get inspire) (only lasts for the expedition. Go find more loot or kill stuff)

Similarly - Amallyn Shadowguide (being the ranger that she is) - During an expedition, collect 3 clues or clues count as 1 point of inspiration. Thematic in that tracking clues gets her excited. Might be a bit difficult to get every time but might be just as well because her inspired self is a beast. Plus she is eldar. she takes longer to inspire, but when she inspires she really inspires!

Espern Locarno - For every 6 moved from the discarded destiny dice to the available destiny dice gain one inspiration point. He is scrying the skeins of fate.
How is Espern Locarno not bloody paste against a wall after a pow wow with the Chaos lord?

Not too sure about the ratling twins, how can they inspire?

Again, these haven't been play tested but I'll probably give it a try.

Another rule that makes the game a little more challenging, as suggested by folks over at boardgamegeek, is to make crits 2 damage instead of 3 damage. which makes more sense for traitor guardsmen to have a sergeant with them.

[jus]

Actually how about this for the ratling twins:

Rein and Raus: Start the expedition inspired if they have 5 or more resource cards. Inspiration is lost if resource cards fall below 5(Vintage amasec, rations, stimms, med kits. These ratlings like to hoard stuff and are loathe to share what is their's. Naturally the wouldn't be very excited by using an item to heal a comrade, so either uninspire to save someone's life or ...keep your stuff. Kind of fitting for the greedy little hoarders.

(NOT play tested)

[The Other Dave]

I think boosting enemy health across the board is not a bad idea, but only 2 damage on a crit is a solid start too. *Lots* of enemies have 3 wounds, and only a handful have any more than that. Doing both would for sure be hard mode.

For Janus I might be tempted to just copy the Escalation Rogue Trader's ability (since she's basically Janus-but-ranged) and say he inspires if he takes out three enemies with a single Flurry of Attacks. For the ratlings I'd be inclined to steal again and take something from the tech-priest's playbook and let them get inspiration points from successfully finding archaeotech (he gets a point on a 15+ after taking his special search action). I think starting inspired if they have resource cards is iffy since it means they'll never have a chance to inspire during their first expedition - and probably not their second either, as getting 5 items is pretty hard too IME. Maybe roll to get an inspiration point after finding archaeotech (and not clues), needing a 15 but getting +1 for each point of value on the card. Something like that.

Locarno was pretty well pasted by Mallex, yeah - out of action and everything. Fortunately on the last turn I rolled the "return an out of action explorer" result on the events table so I didn't have to roll to see if he'd die, which would have been risky since he had 3 grievous wounds.

[jus]

Ok, let's try the lowered crit rule and see how things go. Yeah you right about the ratlings not inspiring, still I would rather have more thematic narrative reasons behind their inspiring rather than being too similar to each other. That being said I'd rather Janus gain inspiration points from flurry of attacks rather than the perma boost for life. That goes for the rest of the perma boost characters. Back to the drawing board!

[Jye Nicolson]

I'd be less inclined to nerf crit damage or buff enemies, and more inclined to force tougher choices about gear - I found that's what largely got out of control.

The explorers are just not very tanky, it's a game where offence vastly outweighs defence*. So I think the balance of usually being able to wipe out every threat before it can attack you but being fairly screwed if you don't is intended; I think you want to keep up the tension in getting to "safe" but not make it too unlikely.

Gear is what starts taking you into "it is extremely unlikely that this random combat will result in any change in game state other than maybe inspiration farming". Maybe an aggressive slot system or something to force tougher choices about what's available for use on a given attack.

*Though tbf cover is really good, maybe people play smarter with it than I do

[The Other Dave]

Good points - one of the reasons I often leave Vorne behind, despite her ability to set everything on fire, is her lackluster defense die. (I still like the idea of nerfing crit damage, though.)

Thinking of it, you do sort of have to look at the expedition, not the combat, as the core unit of gameplay, and it becomes about resource and risk management, sort of like D&D - looking at your wounds, resources, and number of clues after each encounter and deciding whether to keep going or not. I *think*, not having started it yet, that the Escalation campaign will encourage pushing on with expeditions even after a few wounds have been taken, since the threat mechanic is so brutal - in the core box the Legacy card system didn't really put enough pressure on me to where I felt I had to risk another combat, and I'd often cut an expedition short as soon as someone took a grievous wound.

I do like limiting resources! My first instinct is that "three resources max" seems reasonable - you could even do like the Warhammer Quest card game and have a pool of everybody's unused resources to re-equip from in the elevator between encounters. Having to "equip" the auto-inspire loot in a "resource slot" for this would kill a couple birds with one stone as well. I think I'll give that a try moving forward. (I would be utterly unsurprised if there was such a rule buried somewhere and I've missed it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the "you can only use two destiny dice in a single explorer's activation" rule.)

[Jye Nicolson]

(I would be utterly unsurprised if there was such a rule buried somewhere and I've missed it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the "you can only use two destiny dice in a single explorer's activation" rule.)

Wait what.

I don't *think* I dumped the entire destiny pool on a single explorer too often but it appears I played like 95% of the content available for the game in ignorance of that rule.

I'm sure there's more.

[The Other Dave]

I know, right? It's sort of a testament to the weird layout of the rules that something so basic is so hard to spot.

I went through and brought all my explorers down to 3 resource cards - I had to make some interesting choices, which is maybe a good sign. Janus and Locarno in particular, since they each have their inspire item and one of the stronghold loot cards, only ended up with a single piece of ship-bought loot each. We'll see if it's too restrictive. I'm hoping to get into Escalation tonight, but painting has been distracting me.

[The Other Dave]

Did my first Escalation delve the other night, bringing Amalynn, the Ratling twins, Daedelosus and the Primaris Psyker. I had 4 combats and got to the room where the servitor can be recovered, did that and called it a night. The Ranger got her inspiration loot and the Ratlings already had theirs - but I still tend to find them lackluster. The techpriest is OK (although his being a force multiplier for the servitor means I'll probably keep bringing him along), but man oh man Aradia Madellan is on fire. The ability to just automatically delete one enemy as long as she or the destiny pool gets a 6 is sick, even limited to once a turn and with limited targeting.