Ye Olde Inn

by **tb55555** » Sunday December 17th, 2017 9:29am

Has anyone transcribed the text below the stickers? I'm curious to see what the storyline is that it talks about.

Daedalus wrote:I found some other pics and a scan.

I wonder who the artist/artists were. Perhaps he/they were given a Hero Quest game and made his/their own deductions as to what Morcar looked like, deciding that the screen art depicted Morcar. Or perhaps he/they were told by GW or MB that the screen showed Morcar. Shouldn't someone from either GW or MB have been advising this throughout the process before the art was finalized? Then again, the same should have applied to the HeroQuest Marvel Winter Special, where Stephen Baker was advising. Either one or both communication lines were insufficient for supervising Morcar's look. Seems like in at least one case it was the plan to have the art finished in one go so as to save money and time. Maybe nobody knew what Morcar looked like beforehand, and it was left to the artists to decide. The Marvel art seems to support this lack of information, as the face is left unrevealed. The Merlin art went the other way and modeled him on previous art from the game screen.

Fascinating. I still contend that its most logical for a player to assume that the evil looking Santa Claus in the Dracula cape depicted on the Game Screen (appearing to command the monsters toward the player) is, and always was Zargon (Morcar). Most of us never had access to this sticker album or read the Marvel comic special. If that was intended to be MENTOR, that's an awfully big failure of communication, akin to swapping Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader.

Another place where there is "Confusion" is in the official PC game adaptation, where Mentor appears like a skinny wizard guy with purplish skin (may just be the lightning). So I don't see any consistency at this point, and even if Stephen Baker were to come out tomorrow and say "the face on the game screen is Mentor" (as he certainly could, they've already assigned "Mentor" to the Zargon "hero wizard" figure in the remake) I would politely ignore it.

Had I never been exposed to this forum, it never would have occurred to me to think anyone would have thought otherwise. But I'm generous enough with this highly expandable game, that if you grew up thinking it was Mentor, go right ahead thinking that, if you want! And who knows, maybe at that age and style, they look pretty much like brothers anyway. And you may get a lump of Chaos in your stocking this year...

by **lestodante** » Monday October 12th, 2020 11:40am

For me he's Mentor with no doubt, he's on the hero cards, in a frame. In Marvel Winter special he is Mentor too.
The pic on the screen rpresents Mentor reading Loretome and announcing the evil forces of Chaos attacking (he's seeing it through the Loretome pages).
Also the Evil Wizard Player acts as both Morcar (for moving the monsters miniatures and) and Mentor (guiding the players and reading Mentor's speech before each quest); so this is also why the screen is half goog (top part with Mentor) and half evil (lower part with the monsters).

by **Goblin-King** » Monday October 12th, 2020 12:18pm

Sarcasm: /Sarcasm

lestodante wrote:For me he's Mentor with no doubt, he's on the hero cards, in a frame. In Marvel Winter special he is Mentor too.
The pic on the screen rpresents Mentor reading Loretome and announcing the evil forces of Chaos attacking (he's seeing it through the Loretome pages).
Also the Evil Wizard Player acts as both Morcar (for moving the monsters miniatures and) and Mentor (guiding the players and reading Mentor's speech before each quest); so this is also why the screen is half goog (top part with Mentor) and half evil (lower part with the monsters).

And Hasbro is literally setting the record straight now |_P

by **Kurgan** » Monday October 12th, 2020 4:44pm

This is like finding out that Saruman and Gandalf were always intended to be the same person... *

Or maybe this is a question of regional differences. I grew up with the NA version. Sir Ragnar was never an executed traitor in our version, but he was for EU players. The "Morcar portrait" on each of the Hero cards was an EU thing. And as cool as the marvel comics fluff and the sticker pack were, they were outside the game. It's like when a popular movie has plot holes but people say read the comics adaptation or the novelization to explain everything. That's how I look at it. I'm not going to reprint my game screen and manual cover just to prove a point, but it would be easy to give that figure a blue cloak.

* Still, that reveal would make a cool twist in somebody's quest pack...

by **lestodante** » Tuesday October 13th, 2020 4:39pm

Kurgan wrote:it would be easy to give that figure a blue cloak.

Good idea! Here it is:

mentorbluecloak.jpg

by **Kurgan** » Tuesday October 13th, 2020 5:03pm

lestodante wrote:
Kurgan wrote:it would be easy to give that figure a blue cloak.

Good idea! Here it is:

mentorbluecloak.jpg

CANON

Re-watching the new Hasbro remake video, its there's hints that the new look for Zargon will be either a "Dread" (Chaos) Warrior with horns, cape and an empty helmet or something akin to the Chaos Warlock ("Dread Sorceror" a more generic version of the Witch Lord).

by **Kurgan** » Thursday May 26th, 2022 9:52pm

So we never found out what Zargon "really" looked like according to this version, and Stephen Baker intended "evil santa" to be Mentor. But again, to me, he'll always be Zargon/Morcar/Grimdead.