HeroQuest (and HeroQuest-Adjacent)

 

Some years ago, when I was making some dungeon tiles, a guy gave me these.

They'd taken all the miniatures out, but apart from that they appear to be complete.

Fortunately, I have large numbers of plastic miniatures sitting around doing nothing, and although they won't match the Warhammerish minis that originally came with the game, they'll do the job just fine.

So now, after years of basically doing nothing with these games, I can actually have a go at playing them.

I don't think I've ever played HeroQuest, but I have had a couple of games of Space Hulk way back in the dim, distant past, and that's basically the same thing... right?

Also some years ago, at a clearance sale I bought a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Adventure Board Game, of which BoardGameGeek has little to say except that it's "Quite similar to HeroQuest".

I've never played it.

When I first got it, I did flick through the rulebook, and found that it says very little about how to actually play the game. Which is one reason why I've never played it.

It includes a bunch of minis, some of which would be usable for HeroQuest, but I think it would probably be easier to just use some of the bajillion WotC collectible figures I bought back in the day.

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Next day...

It occurred to me that hey, I have 3d printers. So I jumped over to Thingiverse to see what people might have done about making replacement HeroQuest miniatures.

My optimism was fully justified; there are masses of them there. It looks like many of them have been 3d scanned from the originals, moulding seams and wonky weapons included.

I grabbed some and did a bit of clean-up — new weapons, new bases mainly, and removal of obvious mould seams — and pumped out some STLs which I will now print.

Sure, I could have just used old WotC pre-paints, but I kind of like the idea of having the old retro mini designs. Except for the Wizard. The old HeroQuest wizard just didn't look wizardy enough to my eyes, so I got a mini that somebody had made of Gandalf from the animated Rankin-Bass Hobbit cartoon, and whacked that on a HQ base.

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Next next day...

I've collected together sufficient figures for the base game. The orcs to the left are WotC pre-paints, as is the gargoyle at right rear and the sorcerer to its left. The two mummies at centre are Reaper plastics, and the two zombies to the right of them are hard plastic GW figures. Everything else is 3d printed, from a variety of sources.

The actual HeroQuest figures are those with the rectangular bases, everything else is a proxy.

Pendragon

 

Chaosium have, fairly recently, released a new edition of their Arthurian TTRPG, Pendragon.

This is the King Arthur of Thomas Malory, of the movie Excalibur or the book The Once and Future King, not the 6th century Dux Bellorum who defeated the invading Saxons at Mount Badon. It's medieval, but mythic medieval. Arthur's knights ride around in highly polished 15th century plate armour and have jousts and quests and what-not.

It's a generational game, in which time passes and your character ages and may die, of old age or the sword, and you carry on playing your heir. And so on.

Many, many years ago I was introduced to another medievalist game, Chivalry & Sorcery.

It was developed by a couple of medieval recreationists, and they wanted to be as historically accurate as was feasible in a game that included dragons and goblins and spell-casting wizards. We used it mainly as a resource for prices and wages and things like that, though a few of my friends have run C&S campaigns over the years. I still have a copy of my own around somewhere.

Although the idea of Arthurian knightly roleplaying appealed (and still appeals) to me, I found C&S too dense. And the typewritten text was really small.

Anyway, fast-forward to the present, and I got myself a copy of the Pendragon 6th Edition Starter Set from DTRPG in PDF form, just to have a look at it and see whether or not I'd be interested in playing it. It's only twelve YankeeBucks or so.

As a starter set, it's an impressive piece of work. However, it uses a different task resolution mechanic than any of Chaosium's d100 systems, which is a mark against it in my book, as I was really hoping for something that slotted into the generic BRP ecosystem.  I can't really be bothered learning a bunch of new systems any more — it's never really floated my boat, but I was (grudgingly) more open to it in the past.

It looks like, once again, this is an Arthurian game that would mainly be useful to me as a resource for home-brewed Arthurian gaming in another system. Which is a shame really, because what I've seen of it looks pretty good, if I only had the energy any more to figure out a whole new rules system. But life is just too short.