18. Impossible starting location with rocks at sea?

[soygreen]

Impossible starting location with rocks at sea?

[Corbon Loughnan]

Wild Vortex.

green start is between two rocks, so limited movement sideways.
Current is red dice westerly. EVen if heroes move maximum seed and
spin teh weel to be hard against easterly rock, they can still be
forced by the current on to westerly rock.

Gap between rocks is 7 spaces. Revenge is 6 spaces wide... First rock
is 5 space out so must 5 spaces forward to avoid it.

[jorge medina]

Doesn't Anchor prevent all movement?  It leaves the level to a die roll, which is just this side shy of impossible...

[Corbon Loughnan]

Indeed. The heroes must either successfully drop anchor (a surge, so 1/3) or suffer the red dice, which has 1/3 chance of killing them no matter where they are and 2/3 if they didn't use the wheel successfully to move one space.
Basically that is a guaranteed 2/9 chance of sinking the Revenge no matter what the situation is and what the heroes do, and if they survive that first turn they still aren't out of the woods. Unless they have a very fast ship (maximum sails and Elvish sails) they have to repeat next turn. So it is 32/81 chances of the Revenge sinking no matter what they do really.
Note that if they do drop anchor the only way they can get out of the encounter without raising the anchor and going through the same risk is to kill the encounter Leader - who can sit back and accumulate infinite threat while waiting for them to raise anchor and come forward (unless the heroes all leave the ship behind and swim out to attack the monsters - and trust me, this is not going to work without some very specific skills/feats/abilities and/or a stupid OL!)
Therefore I would argue that dropping anchor is not effectively a viable solution so it is really 1/3 chance of a TPK regardless of what the heroes do, 5/9 chance of a TPK in truth, over the first two turns.
If they do manage to survive the first round of current for two turns and get past the first rock, there are more rocks a couple of extra spaces west further along! So they can still be shipwrecked unless they continue to spin the wheel east and roll low range on the red dice.

It's just a botch job by FFG...
It would be fairly simply cured by changing the current direction to N/S so not into the rocks!

[jorge medina]

True.  This issue is further compounded by the fact that you can't raise and drop anchor in the same turn since you can't use a station more than once.  An alternate solution could be to remove the eastern rock, so that the heroes can escape certain doom through their efforts (instead of making the western and eastern rocks largely pointless).

[Corbon Loughnan]

That is probably a better solution by far as it doesn't contradict the 'vortex' theme...

[Corbon Loughnan]

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