Quests are the good counterpart for challenges: deeds for Heroes to further their aims or harm yours. Quests are either set by an event occurring that can have a response or specifically created by an AI entity.
The Anatomy of a Quest[ | ]
Example of a Quest
The image at the top shows an example of a political quest. Quests are visible to you if you have infiltration, but heroes can essentially look for Quests around them. Heroes have better vision of quests that appeal to them. On the Map Quests are shown as a circular icon showing what type of quest it is.
Quests have indicators what the most useful skills will be to pass the quest (in this case Diplomacy and Politics) and which Desires are met by the quest (the heraldry and scroll icons).
A quest may also have rewards (shown in green), which may lure a hero to go tackle the Quest and failure conditions (in red).
They have Danger values (both a real value and a public value, the hero sees the public value) which will help the Hero decide if he can tackle this Quest or if he should go get help, there are different types of dangers to each quest. In the image above there are three Dangers: Seduction of Power, which has a gold border, indicating it is a special danger (in this case caused by the skill of the Target) and which is fairly rare. The second is "Noblesse Oblige", your basic political danger that can result in the hero getting arrested, and then the third is "Knights of the Court" which is one of the other more common political dangers, which is notable because any Noble hero immediately "Dismisses" this danger when encountering it.
Each quest will also have Threat value that determines its importance - more powerful Heroes will ignore low threat Quests, and in the case of multiple available quests will head towards the higher threat first. The threat is shown by the number under the image. Heroes have a greater "range" to seeing Quests when they are in a city or with some other POI modifications present.
Finally quests can also have a target, in this case a hero. The target influences what sort of dangers the quest has, and what their power will be.
Questing and its perils[ | ]
When a Hero gets to a quest he encounters a varying number of "dangers" which range from things that simply make him waste time to actual combat. Agents can interfere with Quests either directly by fighting the Hero, or indirectly through various means. You can increase the danger of a Quest, you can recruit additional factions to the POI to make it more challenging, and you can even directly add a danger to an ongoing quest. A failed quest can either have no repercussion or may have an impact on the POI or Hero - Campaigns have granular levels of success ranging from epic failures to epic successes.
Campaigns[ | ]
Campaigns are longer engagements made up of many quests that can involve multiple parties of heroes spread throughout the world.