Classic Heroquest is 'loosely based on the Warhammer World'. Some people claim that it fits neatly into the Warhammer background. Others say HQ takes place in an alternative dimension, timeline or parallel world. In any case, how exactly do Mentor, the heroes' teacher, and Morcar, the Evil Wizard, fit into all this?
I thought it would be fun to write a bit of background flavour text about this. Obviously it's unofficial and you are under no obligation to agree with it.
I'm using the original UK/European world and names for this, so the Evil Wizard's name is Morcar. However, people who grew up with the North American version might find one or two interesting things in here too.
For best results, imagine this is written in olde worlde Gaze font on the inside front cover of a questbook...
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"My friends, it is time I told you the truth of where I come from and what I am.
You know me only as Mentor. For that is my role: to guide and teach. A childish choice of eponym perhaps, but a necessary one. My true name does not matter. You would not recognise it. Nor would you recognise Morcar's old name if I were to speak it. Arrogant fool, he dared take his title from the first great Champion of Chaos, the mighty Morkar, who warred with the Elves of old. You have not heard of him either, of course. Few have, even in the land of my birth.
That is right, my Heroes; I am not of this realm. Indeed I am an exile and can never return to my home. But that is the least of the revelations I bring you.
Many times you must have asked yourselves how I can know so much. How it is that this great book, which it amuses me to simply call Loretome, provides me with near-omniscient knowledge of the locales you must visit in your adventures. How it is that I refuse to act more directly in your stead when I am capable of freeing you from prison cells and transporting new Heroes to your side when a trusted companion falls in battle. Why, indeed, do I need Heroes at all if I am so mighty in magic? Am I not the equal of Morcar himself?
Reasonable questions. I told you once that I may not intervene overmuch, lest a greater doom befall this world. That was no lie. But to understand the risk I run you must first understand another truth, one that you may find hard to swallow.
My friends, my Heroes ... not only am I foreign to this land, but to this world.
I was not born in this Empire, nor your Borderlands, nor your Elven realm of Athelorn, nor any place marked on your maps. The Empire of my homeland is a greater and prouder nation than yours. Yes! you object, you protest, but I must ask you to listen. For as my Empire is greater, so are the foes that threaten it, and the Dark Powers of Chaos most of all.
In this world much is preserved that is forgotten in mine. Yet many accomplishments and insights remain to be won. Yours is a simpler, harder existence, one comparable perhaps to the first few centuries after Sigmar in the world of my origin. Forgive me; you do not know that name either. He was our Rogar, if you like.
Your world knows little of blackpowder weaponry or the marvels of engineering that grace our own. Nor do you venerate your first Emperor as a god, as we do, and no works of that mighty faith dominate your cities or your days.
Your enemies too are less fractious, though no less dangerous. Orcs rub shoulders with uncouth Fimir, whom we know only as obscure denizens of a little-visited isle. Living dead march beside servants of dark powers. In my world they would destroy each other as eagerly as they do the realms of men. By that we are often spared greater troubles. Here they stand united in malice under their overlord, an overlord I must take much of the blame for creating. You know he was my pupil, but you do not yet begin to comprehend the responsibility I bear.
You accepted, or chose to humour me, when I claimed to be centuries old. In those days I reckoned myself a man of great learning and arcane knowledge, but I freely confess not the greatest. I studied the arts of magic in the hallowed towers of Altdorf. It was there that I took on the quick-witted apprentice who would one day become Morcar. And it was there, well before his fatal arrival, that I embarked on the greatest of all my works.
My home, my Empire, indeed my very world, suffered under the scourge of misery and corruption. The temptations of Chaos were everywhere and the future seemed bleak. In my desperation I wondered if perhaps a refuge might be made. A magical sanctuary sheltered from the touch of Chaos. The thought took hold of me and I began to experiment. After many years of cautious research I discovered possibilities far greater than I had dreamed.
I do not intend to explain how I came by the knowledge or the power to make such a thing feasible. Suffice to say it was no easy task. But in the end my conclusions were breathtaking. One could not only make a sanctuary. One could make a world.
Perhaps you have seen model ships in bottles over the fireplaces of old sailors? You have seen globes of glass with tiny forts and houses inside them, which one can pick up and shake and cause to snow? Imagine then, if you can, that the ship is no model. Imagine that the fortress is no carved block of wood or finely wrought metal sculpture, but a real building, composed of blocks of stone. Imagine that the snow within that globe is real frozen water, and the garrison made up of living men. To us they seem tiny as ants. To them we might seem giants, if they could perceive us, but they surely cannot, for what lies beyond the glass is indistinct and invisible to them, concealed by the bright reflection of their tiny sun.
Can you picture such a fantastical whimsy? Of course you can.
Now imagine that this very realm of yours and all its surrounding lands is but a decoration enclosed within a globe. Suppose that you cannot ride or sail to the edge of the world and reach out and touch that glass, for it is not glass but magic, and the world entire hangs invisibly suspended within it, like a fish suspended in its bowl. Suppose that beyond that boundary lies another world, a greater world, a world in which all you see and all you know might be grasped in the hand and carried to the mantlepiece over the fire.
I see by your expressions that you do not understand. I thought as much. Please understand that when I talk of globes and tiny worlds I not speak of literal truth but merely an allusion or analogy, by which you might more readily comprehend.
But now suppose it were possible to step from this world to that one.
Not by smashing the globe. It is not a tangible substance that I speak of, nor is it a measurable distance from the world's edge or an appreciable height in the heavens. These are difficult matters for one who is not a wizard. Indeed I see our own Wizard wears a puzzled frown. Nonetheless try to follow me through this thicket. Suppose that one could, with the proper magical assistance, open a door in the air, as one might term it, and step through that door, and find himself in the selfsame study where his world with all its cities and mountains and seas sits snug in its globe over the fireplace. Would he not marvel and tremble to see everything he knows and treasures balanced upon so precarious a ledge?
Ah, but I mislead you. One cannot do such a thing. One can only step from that world to this.
Your companion the Elf glimpses my meaning. I see the shock dawning in his eyes. Yes, that is why I know so much. I know it because I patterned this world upon mine. I know it because as it grew it assumed much the same shape, as the son resembles the father. I know it because I examined it intimately from outside, in my study above the baker's shop, as a man may gaze through glass. Once called into being it was as though it had always existed. Its history stretched back thousands of years despite the mere months since I had begun its making. What I learned I wrote down. I fashioned spells to bring more knowledge while I slept into the pages of my expanding chronicle and gazeteer. That compendium I brought with me when I came here; but I cannot go back. The door opens but one way.
Your kind words are a comfort, but understand I have few regrets. My apprentice had already passed through the portal. I had no choice but to follow. He knew much that I knew. Each night when he broke into my study he read not only my spell books but my tome of accumulated lore on this world, this lovely precious world that I had bestirred into being. He saw what I had made: a world like and yet unlike our own, with its own proud Empire and its own Dwarven and Elven nations, where names and histories were subtly changed. Athelorn, not Athel Loren. The Borderlands where our Border Princes lie. A world with troubles much like ours--bandits and wars, Orcs and Goblins, the restless dead--and yet a world where time had been kinder to many of its peoples.
The Dwarves still flourished. The Elves maintained ties of friendship with them. There were fewer madmen, fewer zealots, fewer scores to settle. With cooperation had come great victories. The Orcs had been vanquished and driven out, the dead sealed in their tombs.
Most of all the dread powers of Chaos were quiescent. In my world they roar and seethe in the north like a howling gale at a broken window. In this new world, this microcosm, their influence was baffled and muted as if by shutters and stone walls. There were wastes in the north, it is true, regions where one might say the walls were thin and the scratchings of those outside could be plainly heard. As above, so below. But considered as a whole, this world nestled within mine like an egg wrapped in many layers of velvet, hidden from their blind and groping grasp.
My apprentice saw all of this and ambition flooded him like hot poison.
In such a world he could become a ruler like none other. An ordinary fish of middling size, placed in a small pond, may terrorise it like a shark. Countless great and terrible lords have bestrode my world: the Chosen of Chaos, the Great Necromancer, the warlords of vast Orc migrations. In your world fewer of such stature had arisen. In your world, armed and armoured in the knowledge of it he had stolen from me, he could be not merely a lord, but the Lord of all he wished.
He had only to strike the most terrible of bargains. For the powers of Chaos desired this world as they desired mine, and required an instrument through which they might claim it. A man unable to climb in through a shuttered window may gesture and call out to his lackey inside. And the man inside may think himself the master, and his servile accomplice the inferior, never noticing the sly patient smile on the other's lips.
He fled. Not into the night, but into my creation. I followed him. I caught up with him too late. The rest you know. He became Morcar, self-styled Lord of Chaos, and brought pain and despair into a place that I had grown to love as I loved my own home.
In the world of my birth the great days of the Dwarf kingdoms were long past by the time of the Empire's rise. They fell into ruin long centuries before Sigmar, weakened by earthquakes and other cataclysms, and their enemies seized their chance. When I came to this world I rejoiced to find many of their holds and cities still populous and thriving. It was a marvellous thing to behold the glory of the Dwarf empire alongside the nascent realms of Men, and to learn that they still retained the friendship of the Elves from whom bitter conflict had sundered them in the world that I knew.
But a tree that seems strong and hale today may be blasted by lightning tomorrow. In this world it was Morcar who brought their doom. It was he who besieged their cities and broke their strongholds one after another with his army of Orcs and Goblins. Where the Dwarves seemed likely to hold out against the hordes he dealt the decisive blow himself, the flash and coruscation of his fearsome magic melting great holes in the very rock. In places he cracked open the bones of the earth and brought forth its molten marrow, pouring lava into the Dwarf cities from below. The Dwarves called him Zharr-Gon, Fire-bringer, and the infamy of that name has spread to many lands. Being of that greater originating world, as I am, his power surpassed anything this lesser world could muster once the Dark Powers pledged to aid his cause. The fish had become the shark.
You know of Kalos, the fallen city that stands upon the Plains of Death. You know of its accursed ruler, the Witch Lord, King of the Dead, whom only the fabled Spirit Blade can harm. He was already ancient when Morcar came. In my world there is no city by that name and no deathly monarch over it. Yet here too we find an echo and reflection of that greater world from which I came. In place of Kalos in my world there once stood a blighted city our oldest maps denote as Morgheim. Long ago its ruler discovered a mighty crown of sorcery, a crown forged by the first Necromancer. The man who found that terrible treasure was a mere shaman of his tribe, but with its power he took charge of his barbarian people and founded a kingdom that worshipped death. His name was Kadon and his fate was to be slain by an Orc warlord armed with an enchanted blade. These events unfolded long ago, long before I was born into my world, and yet they cast a shadow upon yours.
Thus it seems that your world is destined to follow a course much like mine. A new river upon the same hill, doomed perhaps to run down the same slope. Yet there is still hope. Still room for heroic deeds. Smaller and simpler I called it, and disparaging you might find those words, but I mean no insult. Do not think for an instant that your lives and your hopes matter any less than mine. It is Morcar who thinks that way, Morcar who regards you all as pale imitations and ephemera to be brushed aside when you defy him.
But I must take care not to tip the scales too much with my own magic, mighty though it may seem. For I wove this world into being and could unravel it were I to tug too hard on a thread. Morcar needs exercise no such restraint. Nor would he likely care. I must act through agents native to this world, and offer knowledge and guidance rather than battle magic, and risk only the more careful of interventions. Meanwhile our adversary may freely lead his armies to war and unleash his sorcery against the realm. Yet the foe that cannot be fought on equal terms may yet be outwitted and stymied before he can begin. The lord cannot ride to battle if his horse is lamed.
You have heard my tale. Maybe you do not believe it. There are days when I find it hard to credit myself. It has been so long, such a weary vigil... Still, it is time you knew. You have earned that much.
That is why I need you, my friends. That is why I need Heroes. There is always another vital task that I dare not shoulder myself. There is always another perilous adventure. There is always another Quest."
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Note: The Warhammer background I'm drawing on is from 4th/5th edition in the mid-1990s, the period that codified the coherent Warhammer world that lasted until 8th edition. HeroQuest was actually based on an earlier conception of Warhammer, 3rd edition, when things weren't quite so pinned down. If you know 3rd edition (I don't) then some of the examples of parallels I give above might not really work for you. For example, the Morgheim/Kadon business is from the 4th edition Undead army book, their first. (It was retconned out in later editions when the Undead background changed.) Still, it's the best I can do.
