For some reason, I have always preferred Fantasy Flight Games’ map/wilderness oriented Runebound to its dungeon oriented sister game Descent. One thing missing from Runebound is the cooperative aspect of the latter’s dungeon crawling – Runebound has no adventuring party exploring the wilds together, rather it has a couple of lone heroes racing each other to complete quests before the others do. With this month’s German rpg bloggers’s carnival being dedicated to travel and the wilderness, we thought it a good opportunity to present a house rule for cooperative adventuring in Runebound which we have been using for some time now.
The actual rules are simple enough:
- All players take a single combined turn.
(Exception: During a market step each player may take a separate action with his hero.) - The heroes are treating one another as allies.
(So, for movement the slowest hero determines the overall speed. During combat, one hero may attack per phase and if no one attacks in a given phase one of them has to defend instead.) - Treasure and experience are divided among heroes.
(Rotation is an easy solution to deal with the unavoidable uneven shares.)
Now, obviously this potentially makes the game easy to beat to the point of being boring, so you might consider some additional changes:
- Allies are removed.
(The heroes have one another – that should be more than enough.) - Heroes who get knocked out are removed from the game.
(The player may decide to join in with a new hero.)
Apart from card expansions focussing on conflict between heroes, all of this should work fine with available expansions and optional rules.