A bit about me and HQ:
Like most here, I got HeroQuest when I was young. I got it for Christmas when I was 13. Before that I had played a few board games, like Monopoly (I still think it's terrible), Sorry, Mastermind, and maybe a few other common ones, but none of them are very good and I wouldn't have considered myself into board games at all. I grew up on Prince Edward Island, on the East coast of Canada. It's relatively small, at the time the population was ~120,000, and it has only gone up by ~20,000 in almost 30 years since then. The city I was in had about 60,000 people, but I digress. I don't recall if I asked for HeroQuest or it was a surprise, but by the end of Christmas day I had forgotten all about my other gifts and was punching everything out and figuring out how to set it up.
Back then we didn't have a hobby store on the Island except maybe for hobbies like knitting. We had a comic store that was always struggling and they only had comics and graphic novels. I point this out because I had no idea "miniatures" were a thing at all, neither did most of my friends. If anybody on the Island was into anything like Warhammer or any miniatures games, we'd certainly never heard of it. I started playing HeroQuest regularly with friends on the weekends, I'd take it to sleep-overs, and it was in heavy rotation. Some friends that owned it would have me over to run the games because they didn't try reading the rules.
On a trip to the mainland in 1991 or 1992 I heard about some hobby stores that carried games and knew about Kellar's Keep and Return of the Witch Lord from the pamphlet in the HQ box and wanted to track them down. To my surprise, on one of these trips I heard about or saw information about the Barbarian and Elf Quest packs coming out and was determined to get them. We didn't get a single one of the expansions on the Island so I had to save up birthday money, etc and wait until our Summer trip to the mainland to go on the hunt. I still remember getting my mum to drive me to a bunch of stores in Halifax Nova Scotia and later that summer Moncton New Brunswick, hunting for those Quest packs, and I had just enough to get one of each... I've still got them to this day. I also saw a couple of blister packs of Games Workshop miniatures at one of these stores (they had maybe 10) with metal Chaos Warriors in them and they looked pretty similar to the HeroQuest ones, but they were "Citadel" miniatures. I thought it was weird that they'd have the same helmets and everything as the HeroQuest ones, but the metal looked all jaggy and had edges that needed to be cleaned up and it was bare metal... and over-priced ... so I figured buying that would be dumb
Oh what little I knew, eh? By 1993-1994 I only had a few friends who were still up for playing (we were mid-teens now), and I got this idea that wouldn't it be cool to paint the miniatures. Remember, I still had no idea about miniatures being a "thing" at this time. I hunted around at a couple of stores and found a place that carried paints used for making model cars... remember, this is before the Internet and it was a fairly small place with not much influence from the outside world. Anyway, I painted up my entire set with about 6-8 colours, no shading, and just about blew all my friends away with my cool painted HeroQuest set. We got quite a bit more use out of it by then.
In 1994-1995 we started playing HeroQuest every other weekend after karate on Sundays. There'd be about 7 of us, I'd run campaigns and 6 or so Heroes would delve into the dungeon in search of treasure and avoiding the backstabbing of their so-called allies. We often played across 2-3 boards using multiple sets and I had been lucky enough to buy sets of friends who felt they aged-out and were willing to get rid of them for $20 or so.
By the early 2000s I had maybe 10 HQ core games, all of the expansions, except the EU ones, had a couple of sets painted, and started working on a large campaign (The Gathering of the Hordes). I finished it around the time I finished a Masters degree, then worked on The Destruction of the Tomes when I was starting my PhD. With studies and research ramping-up I barely finished The Destruction of the Tomes, but the campaign had always been planned as a 3-parter. In 2006 as I was wrapping up my PhD I started into volume 3, Rogue Wizardry... but by 2007 I got married, we moved cities, I finished my thesis and got my PhD, starting working full-time in a research position, all the while picking away at a few bits of the Quests and backstory trying to get it finished... as even by this time it had been a long time. Then, before I knew it, we had 2 kids, it was 10 years later and still no Rogue Wizardry. Happily, the girls are very interested in HeroQuest. Our oldest is 10 and she's about half way through Kellar's Keep. Our youngest is 7 and just started her first Quest. For someone so claims not to like board games she caught on super fast. She's never watched us play and I didn't give her pointers, but she immediately decided to divide up the healing spells between the Elf and WIzard, and once the Quest got underway she immediately split the party up into Barbarian/Wizard and Elf/Dwarf and went at it. She even back-tracked at one point when one of the characaters ened up with two Potions of Healing and she decided she wanted the Barbarian and Dwarf to each have one so that everyone has healing... wow, that's my girl! Must have done thing right
haha.Anyway, that's where we are. I've gotten back into HQ in the past year or so (with some effort). I made a miniature travel-sized HeroQuest game that's magnetized so we can take it on trips, and I just finished up a shadow box display of the Les Edwards box art using some replica miniatures I picked up on-line, so I'm slowly getting back into it.
As for Rogue Wizardry - I think the biggest reason I didn't make time to finish it is because I didn't like the story I had been working from and I didn't like the Quests themselves that I designed. The Gathering of the Hordes turned out nicely and I did what I wanted with that one. The Destruction of the Tomes has a bit of a different feel and doesn't quite do as much as I felt the first volume did, but there were still some interesting bits in there and I tried to work through some interesting connections with Skulmar and the Witchlord's Tomes of Chaos Magic. By Rogue Wizardry though, I kind of painted myself into a corner. The plan had been to draw elements from the first two volumes together and have things connect up in volume 3, but looking back I see that I didn't have a great story and didn't flesh out the full details, and instead had just thrown together a bunch of maps and worked a poor narrative around them. So if I can say anything positive about Rogue Wizardry, it's that people should be glad I didn't finish it 10 years ago
What I can say that's positive about Rogue Wizardry now, however, is that I have been giving it thought off and on quite regularly for 10 years, and in the last 3-4 months I've finally realized what the story needed to do and why I was struggling... the REAL story was right there at the surface and I just ignored it so that I could have the Heroes do body work. Once I figured that out and how to work in a couple of key story elements everything else fell into place. I think it's shaping up to be the best out of the 3 volumes, by far. I did it without changing any of the Gathering of the Hordes or Destruction of the Tomes story or events, but the preview stuff that I put out at the end of The Destruction of the Tomes has been scrapped! Clean slate... and finally some excitement to get this put together
I've got the timeline completely written for all of the events going back to the time of the first Quest in the base game, through all of the key events in the expansions and my first two volumes and everything makes sense chronologically. I've written out story notes and have blocked it out into 3 chapters, and from there blocked each chapter further into what each Quest needs to do and accomplish for the story and for the characters. Oh my, it's coming... and I think it's going to be good!Thanks for reading and keeping HQ alive!
~N
Glad you're back.
My 21 year old girlfriend hates HeroQuest and won't play with me... 
No introducing new players here 
