Quest Lengths & Difficulty

There are three different possible lengths for any mission:

• Short: consisting of a handful of rooms, are the least risky, but also the less rewarding at all difficulties. Higher difficulties make for slightly bigger dungeons.
• Medium: featuring a larger dungeon with different branches, making bigger supplies of food and torches necessary for the survival of heroes. When facing medium sized missions, one unit of Firewood will be provided to allow for one camp during the expedition, giving a chance of respite from combat stress and damage and possibly to better prepare for further encounters with camping skills. Boss missions are always of medium length.
• Long: especially at higher difficulties, long expeditions will feature much larger dungeons, with extreme branching and a big number of dead ends. Bountiful amounts of food and torches are essential and those, together with the two units of Firewood provided, prevent the party from gathering much loot at the start of the quest. Careful planning for exploration and camping, as well as good stress control, are mandatory to make long expeditions successful.

Mission length acts as a sort of multiplier for the difficulty level, making hard expeditions even harder with longer quests; short quests, however, do not allow any instance of camping, potentially making unfortunate encounters and events more punishing since no camping skill can be used to mitigate the negative consequences.

There are three different levels of difficulty an expedition can have, each corresponding to a certain hero Resolve level. Heroes that are two or more levels above the expedition level will refuse to take part in it. Heroes of any level below the expedition can participate, but low level heroes will suffer severe stress damage from partaking in it and will obviously be at a general disadvantage with the dangers thereof, and will protest to the player to warn them. Entering a dungeon will give each hero 20 stress damage for each level above his own.

• Apprentice: corresponds to Resolve level 1 and is the least challenging difficulty, with monsters being weaker and dungeons being smaller. Apprentice missions are colored green.
• Veteran: corresponds to Resolve level 3 and presents a bigger challenge; dungeons get bigger, posing for a larger consumption of supplies, enemies get stronger, and a broader variety of monsters are introduced, with some of them possibly being champion monsters, harder to slay and control; additionally, many monster attacks gain the chance to apply status effects. Veteran missions are colored orange.
• Champion: corresponds to Resolve level 5 and is the most challenging difficulty: dungeons can be very long and intricate (especially on long expeditions), monsters are of the most dangerous variety, and the chance of encountering bigger monsters is a significant threat. Enemy attacks on this difficulty are more accurate and dangerous overall. Champion missions are colored red.

A higher difficulty grants more challenge, but also more valuable rewards for money, heirlooms and trinkets rewarded, with loot found during the expedition becoming more plentiful and valuable also.

Each of the locations outside the Hamlet will have a number of different types of missions to accomplish, with various dungeon sizes, objectives, and difficulty levels. Greater mission length and difficulty make expeditions harder, but also increase the rewards for completion. Each mission's objective, difficulty, and size are generated randomly, with size and especially difficulty being weighted depending on the heroes of the current roster. Regardless of the composition of the roster, there will always be at least one apprentice level mission possible, in case the player wants to recruit new heroes from the Stage Coach.

Every expedition has a set of rewards that are given to the player if the mission is concluded successfully. Every mission has:

• A reward in gold, with an increasing amount the more difficult and long a quest is. Gold is used to finance hero management and improvements as well as provisions for future expeditions, but the loot collected during expeditions will most often surpass the amount given as a reward, hence the gold reward is not the topmost priority in choosing an expedition to undertake, unless the Hamlet verses in very poor economic conditions.
• One or more heirlooms, used to improve buildings in the Hamlet. Every location will reward a different type of heirloom, but particularly dangerous quests such as boss slay missions will sometimes reward more than one type. Additional heirlooms may be collected as loot during the expedition, but some types (such as deeds) stack in very few numbers: when explicitly in search of heirlooms, quest rewards with a large number of heirloom rewards should be prioritised.
• A trinket, able to be either sold for gold or equipped by heroes for various improvements, usually with one or more drawbacks. Trinkets, especially rare ones, are hard to come by, so this kind of reward is usually the main factor in deciding which expedition to attempt.
• Progress towards unlocking the boss of that location. The longer the expedition, the more progress is made towards unlocking the boss.

In addition to the rewards listed above, characters will earn resolve points for completing a quest.

Expeditions always start from the Hamlet, where the heroes rest between missions. An expedition is formed by four heroes recruited through the Stage Coach, with various possible compositions of classes and formations. After choosing the heroes and the location to approach, provisions must be bought from the Caretaker before departing.

An expedition can be abandoned at any time when not in a battle. During battle, it is necessary to retreat from or finish the encounter before being able to leave the dungeon.