Just wanted to say that I'm really liking this game and am utterly impressed how you managed to fit so much depth into such a simple game. I just have a few points of confusion below.
If I am playing alone and don't have any bonuses, if I encounter a 7, 8, 9, or 10, do I just auto-lose since it would be impossible for me to roll any of those numbers on a d6? This creates a weird situation in places like the Hard Lands where if you fail the roll, you have to stay there. So, if you encounter a 7 or 8 and you have no bonusses, you essentially auto-lose the game. I was playing with a group and we just house-ruled that you could roll 2 dice when you had no bonuses as it otherwise felt a little silly to lose the entire game on one unlucky encounter.
Another thing that I found weird is that the supplies are defined as "Needed to live, travel, and tend to wounds" but nowhere does it say that you can use supplies to heal injuries. Is the only way to heal an injury by someone using the Holy Rod on you, using the Healing Herbs, or you paying for removing injuries at a town? I found it a bit annoying having to circle back to the town over and over every time I got too many wounds and it made my supplies dwindle quickly so all my treasures would be spent on supplies and the injury healing fee. Is the game designed for you to keep going in this loop of venturing out and returning to town every few turns?
Hey, thanks for writing! I’m happy to answer some of your questions. First: yes, playing solo is very dangerous and 7s and up are considered deadly without the right equipment. The solution in the core game (RAW) is to prioritize carrying a compass, but if it breaks you would be dead. We also have 2 house rule solutions that can work pretty well:
Every day spent lost in the hardlands, reduce the difficulty of the hardland by 1. So you will spend at least 2 days in an 8 and 1 day in a 7 lost, but eventually, if you have enough supplies and few enough injuries, you will escape.
Easy mode: every day spent in the hard lands add a bonus die. This basically makes it very unlikely to spend more than 1 or 2 days in a hard land and works well if you want to have a game where you are more continuously exploring.
Supplies are used to tend your wounds in that if you are injured, you require additional supplies. You are correct that there are only a few ways to heal injuries, though you have ignored the oracle (Jack of Clubs) who offers healing. Also, the Holy Rod technically allows you to remove an injury from one player, by adding an injury to yourself. So its not really healing in the traditional sense. It is the intention of the design that you do exploration loops, each time you come back to town you get an opportunity to purchase a random magic item, and the need to choose whether you will stock up on supplies or spend your treasure another way is one of the critical strategic anchors in the game.
It’s also worth noting that as you get more powerful and flip more cards you become better able to venture farther. Knowing where beasties and hardlands are so can avoid them, or knowing where goodlands are so you can resupply on the way can be the difference between dying on a run or ridding the realm of the unearthed evil, or even, the end beast! Scouring the land for the weapons of legend and using maps to reveal difficult to reach sections all play into the fun. You should also remember that the beasties and the good lands are always there, so once you are equipped to defeat a beastie, or find a weak one (a 3 of your suit for example) farming it for treasure is a good way to prepare for an deeper expedition into the wilds.
Once you have acquired enough power and magic you will not need to return home as frequently, or at all. But then once you have acquired the last quest, you can not return home without facing the end beast. So you will have to rely on the second town for healing services, and then only if you have defeated the City of Thieves.
As you can tell, I love this game so much. I could talk about it for hours lol. You might be excited to know I just commissioned a bunch of new human-made art to fill a new version of it for a print run and an expanded edition. We will be packing in lots of optional rules, house rules, fun alternate play styles, and all kinds of fun in the upcoming release, so check back. In the mean time we wrote a blog post about doing QuestDiving to add under sea exploration to your QuestCrawl game: https://watcherdm.com/2025/04/08/questcrawl-underwater-rules/
Hey, thanks for the clarifications. I didn't know that defeated monsters are still technically alive after defeating them (since it's not stated anywhere). The rules made it seem like anything that's been flipped over already counts as a blank territory.
Also if you can 'grind' monsters. Do you have to step out of the card the monster is on then back on to fight them again or can you just stay on the card and fight the monster for as many turns as you want?
And for the Megabeasts: If you defeat one of them and get the rewards, I'm guessing there's no point to ever trying to fight any of the other ones since the rewards state they can only be collected once per game and not once per game per megabeast. So, if I defeat the Hearts Megabeast and collect the reward, I will get no reward for defeating the Clubs Megabeast, right?
Yeah, no worries. So the Random Encounters section lists which cards become blank on defeat. King, Queen, Jack, and Nine can all become blank. Turning blank is explicitly stated in the rule for each territory when it happens (except queens). All other cards retain their effects. Also, you have to defeat those cards (or activate them in the case of Queen and Jack) as they can be flipped remotely by map, oracle, or mountain climbing and in the case of Jacks, there are special rules per wonder. For instance, the Garden of Plenty only goes blank when the party rolls a one or two on a spoil check, and the vault only when it has been opened with the vault key and looted. The oracle never goes blank, nor does the Twisting Pyramid.
Grinding does require that you move and come back, think of it as restocking the dungeon. You have hunted the beast in its homeland and need to clear the area so they have time to repopulate. The rules for this are in the play procedures; each turn, the party token must be moved, unless prevented by a hard land.
Megabeasts are actually once per game, per beast, as each Megabeast is a different creature with a different Weapon of Legend in its hoard. This allows each of the four players to collect the weapons needed to defeat the end beast. Also, it’s super satisfying to go back to each of the lairs with your specialist (suited character) yolked out with Elven Cloak, maybe a holy rod and a spell book to really add some dice to that encounter and mission impossible the treasure out from under them. Also worth noting here, you cannot kill a Megabeast, they are too large and powerful for that. This is why magic swords and weapons of legend provide no bonus there. The idea is you are robbing their hoard.
Hey, thanks a lot for clearing everything up! Yesterday I played it for the first time and took it to a friend's place and we all played together and it was a lot of fun. Very much looking forward to any updates you have in store for this game!
Just curious if there’s any community copies of your cool game available? The Australian dollar is worth half the US$ at the moment so everything’s costing double here in Australia
So, I live in Canada, same hat. Also, the entire game is just the two pager you see in the screen shots. There is a 20 page zine version you get by buying it (also available in print) but if you want to play, just download the screen shots. They have all the rules. That said, I’ll throw a couple community copies up. Nobody buys anything on itch anyway.
Great, I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please feel free to leave a review and tell us about your sessions. One of my favorite things about QuestCrawl is seeing all the cool stories arise out of the geography created from card placement.
I picked QuestCrawl up in the Trans Rights for Florida bundle and my group and we had a good time with it, even online! It'd be great game to take camping or on a trip where you might need a TTRPG-flavoured hit -- you just need a deck of cards, some d6s, and some way to take notes. I'm just wondering whether you might add some scaffolding tools to encourage roleplay between the characters? My group and I improvised it. We discussed what banded our characters together in the starting town. Then, the person turning over the card would introduce the scene. We'd interact as our characters, deciding on who was going to do a Champion Roll if needed, then roll our approaches depending on what the card asked. Then we'd sort of do a "Closing Shot" of our characters on that day depending on the outcome. It would be cool if this could be added to the list for the roleplayers among us. But otherwise very cool and well done! I especially love the beastie slaying and faction card mechanics.
I love all those suggestions! Honestly, one of the big appeals for us during playtesting was how thin the line was between in-character talk and strategy talk, but obviously, each group will find their own style. Gabe Hernandez wrote QuestionCrawl as a sort of Worldbuilding addendum, but perhaps we should circle back and add a more character-centric version.
I bought the game because I was looking for something to fill gaps in our DnD game (sometimes we go a month between sessions). After reading everything I found myself looking for a tutorial to answer questions like: challenge 9… so, a d6? So you need +4 mods from items AND roll a 6 to succeed? That’s a hard one then, right? What about a challenge 12 then, how is success even possible? Or is this a d8 we are talking about? Or a d20, which makes this much easier. Also, are we laying out the whole deck on the table to build this island? A tutorial, or example of play would be helpful for us rules-interpretation challenged people :) Thx!
So bonuses give you additional die. So yes to succeed on a challenge 9 you would need at least 1 bonus (but more helps). There are no plus modifiers in the game. Just more dice. Yes you lay out the cards face down during island construction, then move around them and flip them face up. A video is coming soon, recorded but editing is painful ;)
I really the island-building component of the game and I'm looking forward to trying it out! The issue I was experiencing earlier with the PDF looks like it was related to the way Firefox rendered the file, because other apps load it fine. Not sure if this is just an issue with my PDF viewer or what, but the second page doesn't have anything on it other than the section about what the Queens represent, but the promo images on the project page show other text in addition to the stuff about Queen cards.
So it turned out to be Firefox only? Weird. Thanks for the heads up. Let me know if you have anymore issues. We are probably releasing another patch tonight.
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Just wanted to say that I'm really liking this game and am utterly impressed how you managed to fit so much depth into such a simple game. I just have a few points of confusion below.
If I am playing alone and don't have any bonuses, if I encounter a 7, 8, 9, or 10, do I just auto-lose since it would be impossible for me to roll any of those numbers on a d6? This creates a weird situation in places like the Hard Lands where if you fail the roll, you have to stay there. So, if you encounter a 7 or 8 and you have no bonusses, you essentially auto-lose the game. I was playing with a group and we just house-ruled that you could roll 2 dice when you had no bonuses as it otherwise felt a little silly to lose the entire game on one unlucky encounter.
Another thing that I found weird is that the supplies are defined as "Needed to live, travel, and tend to wounds" but nowhere does it say that you can use supplies to heal injuries. Is the only way to heal an injury by someone using the Holy Rod on you, using the Healing Herbs, or you paying for removing injuries at a town? I found it a bit annoying having to circle back to the town over and over every time I got too many wounds and it made my supplies dwindle quickly so all my treasures would be spent on supplies and the injury healing fee. Is the game designed for you to keep going in this loop of venturing out and returning to town every few turns?
Hey, thanks for writing! I’m happy to answer some of your questions. First: yes, playing solo is very dangerous and 7s and up are considered deadly without the right equipment. The solution in the core game (RAW) is to prioritize carrying a compass, but if it breaks you would be dead. We also have 2 house rule solutions that can work pretty well:
Every day spent lost in the hardlands, reduce the difficulty of the hardland by 1. So you will spend at least 2 days in an 8 and 1 day in a 7 lost, but eventually, if you have enough supplies and few enough injuries, you will escape.
Easy mode: every day spent in the hard lands add a bonus die. This basically makes it very unlikely to spend more than 1 or 2 days in a hard land and works well if you want to have a game where you are more continuously exploring.
Supplies are used to tend your wounds in that if you are injured, you require additional supplies. You are correct that there are only a few ways to heal injuries, though you have ignored the oracle (Jack of Clubs) who offers healing. Also, the Holy Rod technically allows you to remove an injury from one player, by adding an injury to yourself. So its not really healing in the traditional sense. It is the intention of the design that you do exploration loops, each time you come back to town you get an opportunity to purchase a random magic item, and the need to choose whether you will stock up on supplies or spend your treasure another way is one of the critical strategic anchors in the game.
It’s also worth noting that as you get more powerful and flip more cards you become better able to venture farther. Knowing where beasties and hardlands are so can avoid them, or knowing where goodlands are so you can resupply on the way can be the difference between dying on a run or ridding the realm of the unearthed evil, or even, the end beast! Scouring the land for the weapons of legend and using maps to reveal difficult to reach sections all play into the fun. You should also remember that the beasties and the good lands are always there, so once you are equipped to defeat a beastie, or find a weak one (a 3 of your suit for example) farming it for treasure is a good way to prepare for an deeper expedition into the wilds.
Once you have acquired enough power and magic you will not need to return home as frequently, or at all. But then once you have acquired the last quest, you can not return home without facing the end beast. So you will have to rely on the second town for healing services, and then only if you have defeated the City of Thieves.
As you can tell, I love this game so much. I could talk about it for hours lol. You might be excited to know I just commissioned a bunch of new human-made art to fill a new version of it for a print run and an expanded edition. We will be packing in lots of optional rules, house rules, fun alternate play styles, and all kinds of fun in the upcoming release, so check back. In the mean time we wrote a blog post about doing QuestDiving to add under sea exploration to your QuestCrawl game: https://watcherdm.com/2025/04/08/questcrawl-underwater-rules/
Hey, thanks for the clarifications. I didn't know that defeated monsters are still technically alive after defeating them (since it's not stated anywhere). The rules made it seem like anything that's been flipped over already counts as a blank territory.
Also if you can 'grind' monsters. Do you have to step out of the card the monster is on then back on to fight them again or can you just stay on the card and fight the monster for as many turns as you want?
And for the Megabeasts: If you defeat one of them and get the rewards, I'm guessing there's no point to ever trying to fight any of the other ones since the rewards state they can only be collected once per game and not once per game per megabeast. So, if I defeat the Hearts Megabeast and collect the reward, I will get no reward for defeating the Clubs Megabeast, right?
Yeah, no worries. So the Random Encounters section lists which cards become blank on defeat. King, Queen, Jack, and Nine can all become blank. Turning blank is explicitly stated in the rule for each territory when it happens (except queens). All other cards retain their effects. Also, you have to defeat those cards (or activate them in the case of Queen and Jack) as they can be flipped remotely by map, oracle, or mountain climbing and in the case of Jacks, there are special rules per wonder. For instance, the Garden of Plenty only goes blank when the party rolls a one or two on a spoil check, and the vault only when it has been opened with the vault key and looted. The oracle never goes blank, nor does the Twisting Pyramid.
Grinding does require that you move and come back, think of it as restocking the dungeon. You have hunted the beast in its homeland and need to clear the area so they have time to repopulate. The rules for this are in the play procedures; each turn, the party token must be moved, unless prevented by a hard land.
Megabeasts are actually once per game, per beast, as each Megabeast is a different creature with a different Weapon of Legend in its hoard. This allows each of the four players to collect the weapons needed to defeat the end beast. Also, it’s super satisfying to go back to each of the lairs with your specialist (suited character) yolked out with Elven Cloak, maybe a holy rod and a spell book to really add some dice to that encounter and mission impossible the treasure out from under them. Also worth noting here, you cannot kill a Megabeast, they are too large and powerful for that. This is why magic swords and weapons of legend provide no bonus there. The idea is you are robbing their hoard.
Hey, thanks a lot for clearing everything up! Yesterday I played it for the first time and took it to a friend's place and we all played together and it was a lot of fun. Very much looking forward to any updates you have in store for this game!
hi here fabulous creator
Just curious if there’s any community copies of your cool game available? The Australian dollar is worth half the US$ at the moment so everything’s costing double here in Australia
Thanks in advance
So, I live in Canada, same hat. Also, the entire game is just the two pager you see in the screen shots. There is a 20 page zine version you get by buying it (also available in print) but if you want to play, just download the screen shots. They have all the rules. That said, I’ll throw a couple community copies up. Nobody buys anything on itch anyway.
thank you so much for your kindness and generosity
You’ve made this old disabled pensioner very happy
Great, I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please feel free to leave a review and tell us about your sessions. One of my favorite things about QuestCrawl is seeing all the cool stories arise out of the geography created from card placement.
I picked QuestCrawl up in the Trans Rights for Florida bundle and my group and we had a good time with it, even online! It'd be great game to take camping or on a trip where you might need a TTRPG-flavoured hit -- you just need a deck of cards, some d6s, and some way to take notes. I'm just wondering whether you might add some scaffolding tools to encourage roleplay between the characters? My group and I improvised it. We discussed what banded our characters together in the starting town. Then, the person turning over the card would introduce the scene. We'd interact as our characters, deciding on who was going to do a Champion Roll if needed, then roll our approaches depending on what the card asked. Then we'd sort of do a "Closing Shot" of our characters on that day depending on the outcome. It would be cool if this could be added to the list for the roleplayers among us. But otherwise very cool and well done! I especially love the beastie slaying and faction card mechanics.
I love all those suggestions! Honestly, one of the big appeals for us during playtesting was how thin the line was between in-character talk and strategy talk, but obviously, each group will find their own style. Gabe Hernandez wrote QuestionCrawl as a sort of Worldbuilding addendum, but perhaps we should circle back and add a more character-centric version.
Oh absolutely, it will vary between group. I'll definitely take a look at QuestionCrawl next time we play. Thanks for the game!
I bought the game because I was looking for something to fill gaps in our DnD game (sometimes we go a month between sessions). After reading everything I found myself looking for a tutorial to answer questions like: challenge 9… so, a d6? So you need +4 mods from items AND roll a 6 to succeed? That’s a hard one then, right? What about a challenge 12 then, how is success even possible? Or is this a d8 we are talking about? Or a d20, which makes this much easier. Also, are we laying out the whole deck on the table to build this island? A tutorial, or example of play would be helpful for us rules-interpretation challenged people :) Thx!
So bonuses give you additional die. So yes to succeed on a challenge 9 you would need at least 1 bonus (but more helps). There are no plus modifiers in the game. Just more dice. Yes you lay out the cards face down during island construction, then move around them and flip them face up. A video is coming soon, recorded but editing is painful ;)
thanks! I will be looking for that video, all the best to you on it!
Took me all day, but I finished it. Thanks for the pressure ;)
The island building is alot of fun. My son and i like the game alot.
Oh, that’s so wonderful to hear! Yeah, I think it’s a great game for families :D.
I really the island-building component of the game and I'm looking forward to trying it out! The issue I was experiencing earlier with the PDF looks like it was related to the way Firefox rendered the file, because other apps load it fine.
Not sure if this is just an issue with my PDF viewer or what, but the second page doesn't have anything on it other than the section about what the Queens represent, but the promo images on the project page show other text in addition to the stuff about Queen cards.So it turned out to be Firefox only? Weird. Thanks for the heads up. Let me know if you have anymore issues. We are probably releasing another patch tonight.