HQ(M?) Quest Idea: Space Hulk

[iKarith]

I sat down thinking to myself, "Self, a Quest where the heroes had to survive long enough to get to an artifact on some altar and destroy it would be fun. They could be up against wave after wave after wave of … undead! until they do it, that'd be cool."

And then I replied, "You're right, Self, that would be cool. Not terribly original as a story idea, but as a quest you've never played that in HeroQuest before. Except isn't that just Suicide Mission from Space Hulk?" "Well yeah," I answered, "But I don't have Space Hulk. And its rules don't quite fit into HeroQuest well. In HQ we can move a lot faster—" "—unless the Quest says otherwise," I interrupted. "—yeah, Quest could say otherwise. And there's no facing, doors stay open, and while Space Hulk's crampedness is a disadvantage in that game, it helps the players in HQ…"

"So why not play it on a HQM board? Double-wide corridors and you can lay out the rooms however you like."

Hmm…

Movement dice reduced to 1 due to the evil power, some metric where unknown undead enter the map. Double-wide corridors ensure you don't just barbarian-elf-wizard-dwarf plowing right through before enough undead get on the map to be a serious threat.

I was planning to use HQ rules here, so no overwatch, or move-and-fire, and ranged weapons only if the heroes have them. It might be more SH-like to have the heroes (except wizard) armed with crossbows on slings, and if they get too close to use it they fight with a dagger. But I'm not trying to place Space Hulk here, I'm trying to play tactics-focused Quest for possibly just one player and the EW where the monsters Just Keep Coming.

Whaddaya think? Does it work?

[whitebeard]

Try DungeonsDark Quest 7, The Temple Wingsong. http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=3223&start=20#p81597. You can get whole quest pack PDF on the first page... some Mac PDF readers had trouble, so I broke them out seperately at that link.

I believe there is at least one official adventure something like this in RotWL and probably a few more fan made ones.

[Davane]

You MAY want to consider my house rule for movement if you are going to limit the Heroes to a single die of movement, as this will increase their chances of rolling a relatively high number for their movement.

It's an intriguing idea to combine Space Hulk and HeroQuest. Here's an idea, if you want to scare the bejebus out of your Heroes - implement the idea of "blips" into your game. Basically, instead of placing figures, you place tokens which can be flipped over to reveal a NUMBER of undead. This is more useful if the Heroes already know the layout of the dungeon beforehand. You can imagine that this is the Hero "hearing" the undead moving about, but not knowing exactly what they are.

Whilst you could create a token pool for use with this idea, especially if you want to implement more Space Hulk ideas into HQ (it worked for Space Crusade, and Advanced Space Crusade), you may also find a die table and some scratch paper works well too - or you could just roll when the "blip" is revealed.

Two tables come to mind, depending upon the power level of your quest, and how many monsters you want a blip to represent, as follows:

1 Skeleton
1 Zombie
1 Mummy

This table essentially just determines the type of undead monster when a blip is revealed, if you want each blip to represent just a single monster. Alternatively, consider the following if you want to include groups of monsters:

1 Skeleton
2 Skeletons
3 Skeletons
1 Zombie
2 Zombies
1 Mummy

You can integrate this with the Wandering Monster mechanics by simply having Wandering Monsters equal 1 blip. After all, who says that they can hear EVERY monster in the dungeon?

[Anderas]

You could make them carry a four-piece-artifact.
While carrying it, they may only use daggers (ranged and close combat) because the stuff is so bulky. Also they may not move past each other while carrying it.

bing, there you go, Space Hulk Gameplay!

After, you print some corridor tiles to have that corridor-ish-feeling and assemble your map.


I once made a quest which was supposed to be a little bit tactical. Though it is not Space Hulk, at least it's a sneaking-in-the-dark concept. Take a look:

viewtopic.php?f=200&t=4319

[iKarith]

Try DungeonsDark Quest 7, The Temple Wingsong. http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=3223&start=20#p81597. You can get whole quest pack PDF on the first page... some Mac PDF readers had trouble, so I broke them out seperately at that link.

I believe there is at least one official adventure something like this in RotWL and probably a few more fan made ones.

#7 looks kinda like what I had in mind, more or less, without changing the HQ rules aside from making the pit traps into essentially Gauntlet monster generators. That serves my purpose. You know there's a treasure, but how much time dare you spend getting it? HQ doesn't have much by way of AoE. Doesn't have the vibe of Suicide Mission I was going for where the wizard or elf must be protected and escorted alive with enough magic left to reach the objective … but it's a good start for what I want and I think it might tell me how to do it.

You MAY want to consider my house rule for movement if you are going to limit the Heroes to a single die of movement, as this will increase their chances of rolling a relatively high number for their movement.

It's an intriguing idea to combine Space Hulk and HeroQuest. Here's an idea, if you want to scare the bejebus out of your Heroes - implement the idea of "blips" into your game. Basically, instead of placing figures, you place tokens which can be flipped over to reveal a NUMBER of undead. This is more useful if the Heroes already know the layout of the dungeon beforehand. You can imagine that this is the Hero "hearing" the undead moving about, but not knowing exactly what they are.

If I can work out how to do that, blips and spawning all over the place but not knowing what is where is exactly the thing I was after. With double-wide corridors so you can't just surround the wizard with the barbarian and dwarf, with the elf guarding the rear.

Whilst you could create a token pool for use with this idea, especially if you want to implement more Space Hulk ideas into HQ (it worked for Space Crusade, and Advanced Space Crusade), you may also find a die table and some scratch paper works well too - or you could just roll when the "blip" is revealed.

[… snip excellent suggestions for rolling how many undead Morcar has …]

Not real familiar with old WHQ yet, and Space Crusade is absolutely foreign on this side of the pond (too bad, I'm not paying £199 plus £80 for shipping) with more than 10 copies available. *grumble* My knowledge of Space Hulk is a bit limited to what I've seen of the 2013 printing, whose artwork I understand to be different in the same way modern WHQs are to the original 1994 game, which is to say that the art style is a lot more dark and a lot more digital. I just saw a picture of Space Crusade being played and it looks like some pictures I've seen which memory tells me were of OG Space Hulk—someone trying to get permission from GW to see about getting someone to reprint the tiles since GW clearly wasn't going to reprint the game. (They've reprinted it a couple times since, though I wasn't aware of that and it's as far as I know currently out of print again.)

I haven't ever found a resource like the Inn for these other GW games. Probably because the reason the Inn can have scans of literally everything is that MB gave no Fs whatsoever about this old HeroQuest thing anymore, and Games Workshop rabidly defends their IP including to things it's absolutely guaranteed they cannot and will not ever reprint, ever, like AHQ. Heroquest used fantasy generic fantasy races save for the fimir (and deliberately left out the fimir lore because oh, my Goddess little Timmy, 6, does not need to know why there are no girl fimir!), Space Crusade used Orks and Genestealers and Ultramarines, Blood Angels, … basically it was W40k. Not sure a Ye Olde Inn could exist for it.

You could make them carry a four-piece-artifact.
While carrying it, they may only use daggers (ranged and close combat) because the stuff is so bulky. Also they may not move past each other while carrying it.

bing, there you go, Space Hulk Gameplay!

After, you print some corridor tiles to have that corridor-ish-feeling and assemble your map.


I once made a quest which was supposed to be a little bit tactical. Though it is not Space Hulk, at least it's a sneaking-in-the-dark concept. Take a look:

http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=200&t=4319

I didn't really want to recreate Space Hulk. My subject line was a mistake, I realized as soon as I posted it. I mostly wanted to create the tropey run for the Bad Thing Generator—but Only Your Weakest Fighter Can Do It—how many Bad Things? ALL OF THEM.—They're Everywhere … thing. Space Hulk has one of those, Suicide Mission, and I've seen it played a couple of times.

I realize I could play the game by Space Hulk rules, but … I really wanted to play HeroQuest, just with that time limit. If the players don't MOVE IT, there'll be an army of undead between them and the objective. The wizard can't last forever, none of the heroes can. And since HQ's power is in melee, not ranged attacks, my plan was to use wide corridors to ensure the players couldn't just build a cage around the wizard and steamroll through whatever was in the way.

I figure these will be fresh heroes because … this quest is gonna be a meat grinder no matter your level if you don't get that wizard to haul ass to the sorcerer's table and destroy the book upon it.

[Davane]

Space Hulk had a simple premise - a limited squad of elite space marines, trying to achieve a stated objective with limited resources against a never ending tide of Genestealers. Genestealers were a match for the marines in melee, so the Space Marines had to use their ranged advantage to try and keep the Genestealers from getting too close, bearing in mind that the Space Marine player had a limited number of action points with which to command their squads, hence the tactics and the slow movement.

As you say, HeroQuest's focus is melee, and the Heroes are much more powerful than most of the "fodder" enemies, so without making the enemies tougher, your only real asset against the players is to overwhelm them numbers. Key to this is the use of spawn points, from which tokens representing monster groups can emerge, as you desire, and work to thwart the heroes in a never ending deluge of monsters.

Temple Windsong uses this idea well, with three seperate spawn points of never ending monsters, positioned to drive the heroes towards the exit. But spawn point positioning was key to providing the challenge of the scenario, as some maps would have spawn points and layouts which would allow monsters to surround the marines, either cutting them off from the objective, or from their escape route after they have retrieved whatever it is they want to achieve. Some layout had choke points, but since the marine's speciality was ranged attacks, these would often be in tight confines without the advantage of longs line of sight. Alternatively, if long lines of sight were desired, many junctions would be including, meaning that many marines would be required to control the board through overwatch, and it was often impossible to cover every route that way.

Given that the Heroes are better in melee than the monsters, you will actually want to consider a more maze-like structure to your dungeon layouts, probably without long stretches of corridor which the Heroes can adequately defend. Consider making sure that almost every room has multiple exits, allowing monsters to surround the Heroes. Even if the monsters don't really HURT the Heroes, what you are looking at doing is throwing bodies at them until they stall, as killing monsters isn't necessarily the objective. The evil wizard player should, ideally, never run out of monsters to play, so killing them all becomes a pointless drain of resources.

For the most Space Hulk type of monster rush, you should probably consider having a number of spawn points, and then allowing the evil wizard player to have reinforcement "blips" per turn equal to just over half that amount. The blips themselves represent a varying number of monsters, the idea being that until they are revealed, the Heroes won't know if the blip represents 1 monster or 3. Thus, the monsters will appear much more numerous than they actually are, although the average is still around two monsters per "blip."

Key to the game is line of sight, so make sure that you are aware of these rules extensively. Monsters stay together until revealed, although the evil wizard player does have the option of revealing blips early, so as to allow them to split up and spread around the map, to cut off the heroes.

You needn't worry too much about the Heroes forming a "wall" and surrounding the Wizard, since the evil wizard player should never actually run out of monster to play, even if there are times when there might be few monsters on the board. The key with the relentless tide gameplay approach is that the Heroes really need to killing every monster they attack, just to keep pace with the reinforcements. Each time they miss an attack, their advantage shifts towards the monsters, as the Heroes really don't have the resources to simply just stand and duke it out with the monsters AND complete their objective. As much as they may WANT to preserve the Wizard, with you drawing an average of 5 monsters in reinforcements per turn on a four spawn point map, every hero is going to have to be attacking and killing monsters just to say on top of things. That means that the Wizard will NEED to be in combat a lot too, else they will fail to keep up and drown under the weight of bodies. Remember that HQ favours the attacker, and do your best to set things up so that the monsters are always attacking...

[whitebeard]

Try DungeonsDark Quest 7, The Temple Wingsong. http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=3223&start=20#p81597. You can get whole quest pack PDF on the first page... some Mac PDF readers had trouble, so I broke them out seperately at that link.

I believe there is at least one official adventure something like this in RotWL and probably a few more fan made ones.

#7 looks kinda like what I had in mind, more or less, without changing the HQ rules aside from making the pit traps into essentially Gauntlet monster generators. That serves my purpose. You know there's a treasure, but how much time dare you spend getting it? HQ doesn't have much by way of AoE. Doesn't have the vibe of Suicide Mission I was going for where the wizard or elf must be protected and escorted alive with enough magic left to reach the objective … but it's a good start for what I want and I think it might tell me how to do it.

No, it's not a suicide mission, but it is a really fun trap. One of my players (elf) in location 4 abandoned his acolyte using the acolyte's Swift Wind and plus his own to dash for the weapons and got separated from him on Zargon's turn by the Chaos Warriors. And the Barbarian ended up in location 1 and spent a lot of time gathering treasures and would have been slain but rolled very lucky to barely escape! The abandoned acolyte was ALMOST rescued, but ultimately they could not hold room 4 and he was run down from behind.

A suicide mission makes sense for Space Hulk, because the story does not follow individual characters. In HQ this could be a great way to END a campaign... Otherwise you need to to make new heroes specifically for that session.

AoE? Age of Empires? Area of Effect? Why is this important? The only Area of Effect weapon in Space Hulk is the Heavy Flamer. Just give the heroes a single holy hand grenade they can throw up to 6 squares over enemies to hit the objective.

[Kurgan]

The idea of "endless enemies" has precedent in the classic Hero Quests, the only limitations are the number of miniatures you own... (I guess you could use cardboard subs!). There are some cool ideas in here.

[iKarith]

The idea of "endless enemies" has precedent in the classic Hero Quests, the only limitations are the number of miniatures you own... (I guess you could use cardboard subs!). There are some cool ideas in here.

I own enough undead for RotWL. That alone should suffice to overwhelm the heroes, even by UK rules with everything dying to being poked by a toothpick, if they dally too much and let themselves get surrounded with every monster they kill being replaced by another at the rear.

There are some GREAT ideas in here. I really like the notion of introducing the blip mechanic. I wasn't planning to before, but now I am. Thing is, I don't even think the Quest will be hard necessarily if the players just blast through to the goal. I think I need to introduce the idea of valuable treasure that must be found to lure heroes to their dea—er, I mean, create an incentive to take a risk.

[Davane]

There are some GREAT ideas in here. I really like the notion of introducing the blip mechanic. I wasn't planning to before, but now I am. Thing is, I don't even think the Quest will be hard necessarily if the players just blast through to the goal. I think I need to introduce the idea of valuable treasure that must be found to lure heroes to their dea—er, I mean, create an incentive to take a risk.

If you are worried about the Heroes blasting to their goal, simply give them more goals, or even a reason why they might need to split up to complete the quest in time. Imagine something like this - a reimagined Quest for the Spirit Blade, but the pommel and the blade are in two seperate pieces, in two different places in the dungeon. But, before the Heroes simply blitz from one side of the dungeon to the other, the Spirit Blade is protected so that it can only be collected by getting both pieces AT THE SAME TIME (that is, by two heroes in the Heroes' turns between two consecutive Evil Wizard turns). Once both pieces are retrieved, the Heroes THEN need to get to the spirit forge to reunite the two pieces (which takes 1d3+2 turns, so they have to hang around and defend this third location), after which they can then wield the Spirit Blade as they fight their way out of the undead that should be overwhelming them by now.

If you want to be REALLY MEAN, don't tell the Heroes any of this - Loretome doesn't have these details, and there's no time to wait. You could just let the Heroes discover this when they find the first piece of the Spirit Blade, or maybe there's something in the dungeon with information that the Heroes can find that tells them they need to split up.

I'm sure you can think of dozens of ways to keep the Heroes in the dungeon, with the monsters piling up as more and more reinforcements arrive. It may even be the case that reinforcements for the monsters start slow (maybe just 2 tokens per turn at the start, increasing to 3 tokens when they find out about the split Spirit Blade and it's dastardly trap, before everything goes BSC whilst they defend the forge as they reunite the legendary blade...