So I’ll be running issue 2 of the Starter Kit (Void if Broken) next week or the week after, and I have a question about the “final boss,” the Voidheart. Specifically, how the special actions work. Instead of taking a basic action, the text says the Voidheart can summon a new dark hero AND advance the scene tracker. Since it can also take two actions every turn, I would take that to mean that it could summon two dark heroes and advance the scene twice with every turn it takes, which seems very powerful. In the Tactics section, it mentions that Overcomes can disable one of the VoidHeart’s special actions, but by my reading it only has one special action, it’s just that the one special action does two things. So should the AND be an OR? Or do they mean the special ability and the fact that it gets an extra action? How have others handled it when they ran this issue?
By my reading, the Voidheart has two special abilities. One of these allows it to summon a minion and advance the scene tracker instead of taking a basic action, and the other allows it to take two basic actions per turn. I think each of those needs to be Overcome separately. It’s possible that the intent is instead that you can disable its summoning or its scene tracker advancing, but need to disable each separately.
Secondly, yes, it looks like the Voidheart does have the power to summon two minions and advance the scene tracker twice as one action. However, it’s not required to, and a GM who felt that this will move things too quickly should probably only use the summon/advance once, and then either Attack the heroes or Boost the newly-summoned minion.
If the players reached the Voidheart almost immediately, having it double-pulse on its first time is probably a reasonable tactical decision; this scene is a longer tracker with 11 spaces, presumably so that the players have time to shut the heart down. There’s also a good chance that they’ll be able to disable it pretty quickly, so it shouldn’t be a problem for long.