by Kurgan » Saturday April 27th, 2024 3:10pm
No man, and I mean this respectfully... you can start a thread, but you can't stop members who disagree with you in any way from participating. I'm not hijacking or derailing, but you seem to be trying to control the conversation by changing the rules then not applying them consistently. I'm saying it's logically contradictory to say that we can use a modern GWS product to amend the background lore of vintage HeroQuest (pick your edition), but we shouldn't do the same with Avalon Hill's official HeroQuest.
Now IF you wanted to assert that ONLY GamesWorkShop approved materials should be used with HeroQuest, okay fine, but then you also run into the problem that GamesWorkShop approved remake HeroQuest. They specifically sat down with Hasbro, the once-again owner of HeroQuest (after they bought back their IP from Chaoseum and GameZone) and hammered out what terms they wanted changed moving forward. HeroQuest 2021 literally would not have happened if not for GamesWorkShop. I'm not going down the rabbit hole of Advanced HeroQuest (is it set in a different time period than classic HQ even though the game lays out rules for using the exact assets of one game within the other?) and any relation to Warhammer Quest.
It's all well and good to poke fun at my supposedly negative rejection of Warhammer Fantasy as the actual "canon" of HeroQuest (bad fan, doesn't like the same things I do!?), but it ignores the fact that I'm perfectly open to people doing whatever they want with the game. I even supported the idea of using stuff published around the time HQ came out (though mostly before) as a mine for inspiration. Anybody can talk about Warhammer and why you should get into Warhammer, what's best about Warhammer, what's the hierarchy of Warhammer canon, etc... but we're all relating it back to HeroQuest. If you want my suggestion, don't limit what others can do with the game, but I can perfectly understand you wishing to limit yourself since we're dealing with mountains of material here and it could start to become hard for anyone to manage.
I look at old HeroQuest and new HeroQuest and I don't see a lot of actual changes. Yes, there are mentions of a few Orcs being good guys in a certain time period or isolated location. Yes, there is reinforcement of the idea that not all Ogres are out to kill the heroes (mention of Ogre mercenaries already existed in the original edition of ATOH). But what we generally see is simply substitution of names. Is the "Sea of Talons" located on a different planet from the "Sea of Claws"? I would just see it as an alternate name for the same thing, much like the "World's End Mountains" (World's Edge Mountains) or "Darkfire Pass" (Blackfire Pass), "Kabba Karn" (Karak Varn). You could say that calling the Emperor and his Empire "the King" and "the Realm" implies a smaller scale, but every Emperor is a King, and an Empire is also a Realm when you think about it.
Small little lore tweaks have occurred within remake HeroQuest as well. For example care was taken to refer to Zargon with generic pronouns (though the original HeroQuest called him a "man") while ATOH remake explicitly refers to Zargon as "he." Likewise the Orcs were sanitized a little bit in their monster description indicating the bad Orcs were the ones allied with evil wizards, while the description of the Orcs in "New Beginnings" (intended as an alternate first quest prior to the Trial) gives them a description word for word from the 1990 edition (though without the mention of them being enslavers of goblins). At least some Elven beliefs were presented in the Haslab release of Spirit Queen's Torment... a belief in the afterlife as well as invocation of "the gods." While it was always possible to imagine that these might not be some universal statement of Elf theology but simply the beliefs of certain individuals, nevertheless the reference to "the gods" was removed in the retail version of SQT. Rise of the Dread Moon introduced a "Temple of the Moon" and other lunar imagery (expounding on what was somewhat implied in the 1992 edition of Mage of the Mirror). Without getting on a whole side conversation about religion in HeroQuest, certainly the concept of an "evil god" was present in the Japanese edition of 1991 and spirits (of various kinds) have existed in HQ since the beginning.
The Wandering Monk introduced some type of "reverence for the elements" as some alternate application of Elemental magic by certain individuals (we have no idea the size or influence of whatever Order or monastery the Monk came from). The map is rather vague and for all we know, it might be "inaccurate" (like one could judge Dave Morris' maps, though his in-text geography is rendered nonsensical as even he admitted and I don't blame him for a piece of possible miscommunication from his publisher at the time).
Perhaps the biggest "change" in Lore might be the removal of the mention of "Chaos" and replacement with "Dread." But the Chaos Warriors were always called "Dread Warriors" even back in the earliest release.
So setting aside any old grudges or thoughts that I'm trying to derail your thread (not at all), I would say if one wishes, one can add the Warhammer background (however defined) to the Remake HeroQuest absolutely 100% if they wish.
After all, what Hasbro has LEGALLY agreed to do, does not stop fans from doing on their own, so long as they're not selling it with the HQ name. GamesWorkShop can't at this time release a new HeroQuest book either. But the previously released material all still exists if you can find it (or reference a scan in our digital internet age), thankfully.
I certainly have created my own "head canon" world for HeroQuest, that is not beholden to either anything written by GWS or Hasbro. However I certainly did consult the Illustrated guide to the Warhammer World as well as the 3rd Edition core rulebook when I was coming up with it. I do prefer a lot of the old terminology from HeroQuest '89-92 over the remake stuff, but I don't reject that either. If you had to pin me down, I'd say I'm using the classic heroquest as my foundation, adding the remake to it, and interpreting a few things through Warhammer eyes. I look at Battlemasters and Space Crusade as being connected here. But when it comes down to it I'm starting with HeroQuest and adding Warhammer (to a limited extent), not the other way around. But that's just me. Since I'm not reading all of the books I'm probably missing some cool things I might want to use, so I'm grateful when others point them out to me. That's not putting any burden on Warhammer fans, they don't exist to serve my game table, but if they're willing to share information with the internet, then I can draw from it if I wish, just like people can use my ideas to make their own mods (or decide they don't like it and so consider what NOT to do, lol). Collecting HQ can be expensive enough, I'd rather utilize WH fans as a resource than try to collect and sift all that data myself. Is that selfish or lazy or me? I guess, but we all have to set limits. I bet there's some fandom you might be casually a part of that you're not a leading expert in, and that's fine. And when I'm at your table, your "headcanon" rules the day when you're the GM, which I can fully respect.
Still I think considering the size and scope of the Warhammer materials, wouldn't anyone who is taking on the task of trying to make HeroQuest "compliant" with WHF be required to make creative decisions... artistic choices in how they reinterpret and blend the material? I didn't get the impression from the hardcore lore experts on here that it was always a 1:1 correspondence even if you limited yourself to a specific edition. I certainly feel that Warhammer is a lot less accessible to the average gamer just getting started, so holding them to a rigid standard on it I don't think is very fair or inviting. But the fact that there are fan wikis and lists and things out there does certainly help. You can't expect someone who doesn't own all those books to buy them up and rewrite them into one massive definitive compendium to stand for all time and only then do they get to play!
Taking a bunch of books written in the 80's and using them to come up with geographic locations to feature quests and pulling out creatures to serve as monsters sounds great or to inspire the introduction of new magic spells all sounds great. I'd never be against that. But mechanics wise, one would certainly have to pick and choose, or else you just end up transforming one game into the other. Now you're just using more Warhammer pieces on your HQ board, or putting your HQ figures on the WHF battlefield with new stats (nothing wrong with that either, but if the stated goal is to "use" the Warhammer lore more fully in HQ, it would seem you're setting boundaries within which you're still playing HeroQuest just with more Warhammer "flavor").
Does new HeroQuest "add to the lore"? Yes it does, but so far as I've seen (and I'm open to being corrected on that if you have specific examples), it treads carefully to stay within the main boundaries set by legacy HQ. Some experimentation was done with creating new content within the Haslab campaign with the Mythic tier certainly (Dragons were already present in the HQ world via the Dave Morris novels and I'm pretty sure that wasn't his innovation). At least one female Orc appeared in the official Marvel Winter Special of '91.
Most of what you find is in Rise of the Dread Moon that expands somewhat Mage of the Mirror. The new heroes really don't stray that far (draft notes indicate the Elven Kingdom of HeroQuest was intended to be portrayed as a matriarchy but this didn't make it into the release version, and the Rogue Heir is presented with options for both sexes) either. Guardian knights were mentioned previously but not explicitly defined (and who is to say a certain individual couldn't have taken a different path after his or her village was destroyed, or how Sir Ragnar did). We don't yet know much about Jungles of Delthrak (other than some association with Dwarves). The whole concept of the "Dread Moon" and its evil boosting abilities (which struck me as something out of "Avatar") seemed odd until I saw that there is Morrslieb in Warhammer lore. For a lot of this stuff because it is fantasy, I think it's much easier to blend things while imagining there is knowledge that has been obfuscated by the growth of legends, and the existence of rival interpretations of things via different religious or philosophical beliefs helps to explain why we can't always take sayings from characters like Mentor as 100% objective fact (if it contradicts your favorite Warhammer concept or idea for instance).
The Orc Bard (in Spirit Queen's Torment) was a sticking point for a lot of fans who disliked the idea of "good" Orcs. However in so far as the Bard is used at all (he's strictly optional) he could easily be viewed as a rare anomaly. The other Orc allies are tied into the fact in (remake) HeroQuest that some Orcs were once not evil, so whether that jibes with any version of Warhammer lore you can tell me. I've heard that Half-Orcs existed in the first edition as mercenaries, but were they always evil? There are some slight contradictions within SQT from the rest of remake HQ such as characters being surprised that the bad guys are using elemental magic alongside "dread" (chaos) magic, but this seems odd as elemental spells have been part of the "Chaos Spell" deck for thirty years (see Tempest, Ball of Flame, etc). I'm not saying its perfect, perhaps you could say that these characters are simply mistaken, far from being all knowing (AH muddied the waters a bit by putting out "official quest pack order" lists upon the insistence of fans, which I don't think always work the best).
I'm sure the Warhammer fan community is vast and all opinions can't be represented here by just a few individuals, so we'll do what we can with what we have.
I suppose you could here say no way no how and de-canonize Spirit Queen's Torment, but there's at least a lot of other material still to consider. But I'm not the Warhammer Lore expert. Perhaps there is something bigger I'm missing here. Ask me about HeroQuest, and I'll try to answer whether it can be reconciled with the particular lore you're using. That is, if you wish to have a dialog. But the bigger question is, can we, as fans, learn about Warhammer and use it in HeroQuest? Of course! But each table answers that question their own way, it can't be imposed upon them. So here you're going to get different visions, not just reinforcement of one person's particular interpretation.
Last edited by
Kurgan on Saturday April 27th, 2024 8:26pm, edited 1 time in total.