If there had been an official Beastmen/Skaven expansion ...

[Zenithfleet]

Just a thought I've been thinking.

Two evil creatures common in the Warhammer world, but not included in Heroquest, are the Skaven (ratmen) and the Beastmen (goat-men).

If classic Heroquest had included these monsters, how would they have been presented?

(Yes, I know White Dwarf featured the Skaven in one of their magazine issues, but that wasn't a Milton Bradley release.)


My guess is that both Skaven and Beastmen would have been treated by Milton Bradley as creatures of the same 'monster type', and produced in the same colour of plastic. Brown, probably.

In the same way, Goblins, Orcs and Fimir are the 'green monsters', and Skeletons, Zombies and Mummies are the 'bone-coloured undead monsters'.

Skaven and Beastmen would probably have been included in quests together, in the same way that Fimir and Orcs are often in the same quests together.

After all, a rat-man and a goat-man are both a kind of beast-man warped by Chaos.


This may seem strange to anyone familiar with Warhammer, because there the Skaven and the Beastmen are separate factions/races with their own army books, model ranges and tendency to fight each other if they're in a bad mood (which is most of the time). Skaven have their own underground civilisation, worship the Horned Rat and don't want anyone but Skaven to rule the world, yes-yes. Beastmen are wild and savage and live in the woods, or accompany armies of Chaos Warriors. At first glance mixing them together may seem heretical.

But HQ had a tendency to take creatures that are separate factions in Warhammer proper and throw them all into the blender as servants of Chaos. Fimir, for instance, didn't really have much to do with Orcs as far as I know. Yet most of us first encountered Fimir in Heroquest, so we tend to think of them as one of the 'green guys' and expect them to show up in Orc-themed quests. Chaos Warriors happily hang out with Orcs and Goblins in HQ (or at least lead them), whereas they're often mortal enemies in Warhammer. Heck, there are Chaos Warriors and Sorcerers scattered through the Kellar's Keep quests even though you wouldn't really expect to find them living in the depths of an Orc-infested ruin beneath the mountains. This is a natural consequence of a game aimed at kids simplifying all the various monster factions into one generic bad-guy team.

If we had first met Skaven and Beastmen in Heroquest, would we think of them as mere different kinds of beast-men who naturally belong together, instead of separate factions?


I mention this as a suggestion to anyone doing custom quests. If you want Skaven in your quest, you don't necessarily have to include ONLY Skaven of various kinds. Same with Beastmen. You could instead mix Skaven and Beastmen together for variety. In Warhammer terms that would be weird, but in Heroquest terms it ought to make sense as a 'beast-men mix'. In that case, you wouldn't need six different kinds of Skaven to fill out a dungeon (stormvermin, gutter runners, rat ogres, etc). You'd just need generic Skaven, generic Beastmen, and a few other generic monsters to provide varying levels of strength and challenge.

If you want some more inspiration, in the Warhammer background, Karak Varn (the setting for Kellar's Keep) was overrun by both Orcs from ground level and Skaven from beneath ...


The other question is: usually there are three kinds of monster in each colour type. If we had rat-men and goat-men, what would the third 'brown' monster have been? A Minotaur? A winged Harpy? A Troll?

[BroccoliRage]

I could see a series of quests around one easily leading into another. I very much enjoyed Vermintide after discovering it this last October. Prior to that I was a 2e AD&D guy, and while my intro to gaming was HeroQuest, I wasn't really familiar with Warhammer. Even in my 30's it was something I was only vaguely aware of. But with the my discovery of the HQ re-release and Vermintide happening at roughly the same time, my imagination has been firing on all cylinders and I see a Skaven-themed series of quests in the future, maybe even a cameo from the Ubersreik Five. Could easily lead into a struggle against the Beastmen.

[j_dean80]

Just a hint…wait for the Wizard Quest Pack release.