Sometimes you want to game on a regular old Tuesday, but your buddies aren't spontaneously available to come over and play another game of Shadows of Brimstone. Even the wife was busy finishing work stuff and not interested in a weekday pick-up game of Brimstone. So I took it upon myself to take my Level 2 Indian Scout, Mingo, into the mines for a bit of a Solo Adventure. I wanted to see how well the game scales to a single adventurer as well as use some of my newly-constructed minis from 'The City of the Ancients' Core Set. (Our previous game sent us into the Swamps of Death)
Proud and (over)confident Level 2 <PERSON>, ready to take on the City of the Ancients!
I decided to go with one of the early, "easier" missions: Seal the Void Gate. After a cursory read I saw that in this mission you search through the mines for two Clue Tokens. The first Clue Token represents your discovery of the 'lost posse' who had a magic book (let's call it the Necronomicon) they were going to use to seal a Void Gate in the mines. Then you are supposed to continue exploring until you reach a second Clue Token, at which point you find the Void Gate and have to close it. 118
Easy peasy.
However, just a few steps in I found a random Void Gate in the mines. Checking the scenario it says to ignore all Void Gates to other dimensions, but where's the fun in that? I desperately wanted to see what the City of the Ancients tiles were like, so I decided to alter the mission goals just a tiny bit. I mean, what if the lost posse had gone through the Void Gate and died there, and the Necronomicon is just on the other side? Seems foolish not to check it out, just in case...
Magic portals in underground dark mines? I'm sure just a quick look won't hurt...
I pulled the world card for the Targa Plateau and found it to be a very harsh place, and I took quite a few wounds from rolling 1's as I stomped through the snow.
Blah blah blah...wait, double the chances of free Grit?! Count me in!
First thing ol' <PERSON> came face-to-face with was some sort of Alien Cryochamber...
I'll just check out these levers and buttons over here...
And sure enough, he unleashed a "Snow Terror" (alien Yeti) and a Laser-armed Stone Pylon defense turret thing popped up from the ground.
The Snow Terror was not only an extra-tough SOB, but the Terror effect it has makes it blast your Sanity every round. That constant sanity needling is almost worse than its obscene damage value or defense capability.
Even one Snow Terror is a pretty major opponent for a low-level solo character.
Yeeowch!
Eventually <PERSON> had had enough of trying to shoot at a Defense 4 monsters with his piddly carbine rifle, and threw his sole stick of dynamite into the creatures.
Ka-blooey.
That took care of the Snow Terror, but left the Pylon for him to have to hack apart with his Indian Hatchet (+1 Damage helps get through their obscene defense).
Hack hack hack.
YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS
The loot take from that battle seemed pretty lame at the time, but that sole piece of Dark Stone became a life-saver later on.
A few map tiles later, <PERSON> found himself his first Clue Token!
Hooray! I found the book. This is going to be easy...
To save myself the trouble of actually reading too many words at once (who's got the time?), I never did read the rest of the mission beyond the goals before starting my solo game. Only at this point did I look up what actually happens when you get the first Clue.
Crap. It says you have to battle a combat at one threat level higher than your level. (to represent what killed the previous team, I guess.) There are four separate Threat decks in the game (Low, Med, High, and Epic) that correlate to the number of players. Well, One Threat Level Higher (Med) resulted in a bunch of Void Spiders jumping down and going to town on poor <PERSON>.
*Gulp!*
Dooooooomed!
<PERSON> killed an average of two Spiders per turn for his part, but being surrounded and attacked by 5 spiders each round with more moving in to fill in any spots you clear out, meant <PERSON> didn't have much of a chance against so many poisonous bites. 17