Daniel (@dungeondive) shares his house rules for Shadows of Brimstone — a deliberately short list, since the game already has plenty to track. Two rules he always uses: pooling XP and gold into a shared pot divided equally after each mission (faster, less bookkeeping, worth the trade-off of slightly weakening XP-bonus heroes), and requiring heroes to be in town or camping in the wilderness to level up rather than mid-mission.
The main event is Daniel’s Advanced Exploration house rule, designed to make dungeon layouts more interesting by mimicking Warhammer Quest and Darklight: Memento Mori’s branching corridors. In standard Shadows of Brimstone, exploration tokens form a single linear stack — you always push forward with no dead ends or meaningful directional choices.
Advanced Exploration divides the token stack among available exits at each junction, forcing players to choose left or right with real consequences. If a path contains no objective clues, heroes enter a backtracking phase — moving tile-to-tile abstractly without rolling for darkness, but with a 1-in-6 chance of ambush per tile. This creates sprawling multi-branch dungeons with dead ends and genuine exploration decisions, though it requires more table space.
The result trades the compact, forward-only dungeon for something architecturally richer — actual reasons to backtrack, meaningful route choices, and the satisfying tension of splitting your search across unknown corridors.