Here's a Talisman "riddle" for you guys.

Your Craft value is 3. You have no items, followers, throphies, spells, Strength or Craft tokens. There are no Omens. The ending is not relevant. There is no innate character ability which is relevant.

You arrive at the Mines. You roll a total of six on your roll. But nothing happens! You may move on during your next turn....

What happened?

Maybe this is almost common knowledge, but this confused me for longer than I would like to admit, and I was staring at the recording.

One other weird thing: If you have Reaper enabled, Frostmarch disabled, you may choose which Warlock's Quest to take.

Was the portal of power replaced with another tile? If so that's a pretty neat mechanic.

That's an interesting bug with the the expansions. It seems the devs put the flag for getting a random warlock quest in the Frostmarch expansion.

Indeed.

This is actually relevant for a somewhat "consistent" Any% route with Ascendant Divine where you can more or less consistently start with a Terraform spell or cycle for one (there are like 6 in total), terraform the Portal of Power and then have about a 10% chance to traverse the Mines or Crypt even with base stats. More if you also terraform the Warlock's Cave and so on. Slightly slower than Dungeon or Eagle King so not necessarily for a real speedrun.

One thing though; once Cataclysm is released there is a low-key OP spell "Blink", where, unless they deliberately implement it wrong like with Scribe in the City, you can actually Blink past the Mines or Crypt (no other spell does anything like that). This route would actually be consistent to the point of being "viable" in an online game (mostly with CoC ending though). I guess you can also just open the Portal manually, so you only need Blink and a Talisman (and you start in the Middle Region close to the Warlock's Cave), but then maybe a real spell-cycler like Warlock is better.

The choosing of a Warlock's Quest is not a bug actually: https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Talisman/reaper%20rules.pdf

"When playing with the Warlock Quest Cards, when a character lands on the Warlock’s Cave space, that player chooses freely one of the available Warlock Quest Cards from among those available in the Warlock Quest Card deck, instead of rolling a die to determine which quest he is assigned."

Interesting. I've never played the physical game or looked at the rules. Blink looks like an interesting spell.