Kickstarting Pastiche Heroquest Miniatures

[chaoticprime]

I have been itching to try out a Kickstarter for my miniatures company, Secret Skeleton Miniatures, and I love Heroquest. What kind of interest do you think I could drum up getting a crowd-funded line of Heroquest-a-likes? Higher quality, similar figures, would be easy to have done. I am not suggesting identical remakes, but as there are no existing copyrights or living trademarks, we actually could.

EDIT: Applicable to the US.

EDIT: As rules-sets for games cannot be the subject of a copyright, we could re-do the whole game.

[Sjeng]

make it International, please!

Most monsters are copyright free, such as goblins, orcs, mummies, zombies, skeletons and of course the 4 heroes.
Chaos warriors could be any generic dark knight figure, and the sorcerer could be any necromancer type evil wizard.
The fimir are difficult though, but bloodmoon miniatures did some remakes, and called them Bog Raiders. Try to google them, they're awesome.
You could even include the wizards of morcar easily, and some ogres too.

Come to think of it, you could make the special monsters, such as Sir Ragnar, Ulag, etc. as bonus unlocks for the kickstarter. Special minis, that are just a bit different from the standard knight or orc, so you can easily use them as specials.
And another higher tier or unlocks could be the Elf and Barbarian quest monsters (frozen horror, ice gremlins, yeti, polar warbears, wolves, werewolf, elven archer + warrior, sinestra, elven princess, prospector)
and if you beat that, female hero minis!

The ideas keep on coming!

Plus a custom PDF board to download for all backers. And a printed version as an addon option.

Man, just thinking about this makes me wanna join this project! xD

[Maike05]

If any remake of heroquest has to published, i'd like to be in! We should use a different board tough. Like the square ones in dnd from parker 2004!

[chaoticprime]

Alright, if you will all help me organize it, I will try my hardest to make it so. I would be no good at all at organizing the Kickstarter, but I can put forth some ideas.

Steps Needed:

>Plan basic project--what will be included no matter what, if the project succeeds. I would only be willing to sell it as gaming product, as to sell it as a board game would cause us to get roped in under Toys, and the US requires special insurance. Basically, it'd be presented like a build-it-yourself adventure wargame. Cool?

>Plan for stretch goals. Do the good ones low, but the best ones high.

>Remake the setting. I never cared for the old one, honestly. Let's have some fun. I have three professional graphic designers that work with me all the time.

>Customize the rules. I personally hate the character sheets--I think writing stuff down detracts from the game, so I would like an emphasis on card-use, and practical tokens. I don't like having forty different kinds of tokens. Body Points, Gold, and EXP (If we choose to use an EXP system).

I am friends with a lot of pro sculptors. I think Patrick Keith would be all over this--or Mark Evans, if he's up to it (he's had some eye problems).

Basically, let's sit down and grind out what the basic "game" will require to be complete--certainly compatibility with the old quest books. We decide which figures, which cards, which type of terrain--for the most part the rules can stay intact. I don't want to approach this from the perspective of "let's fix what was wrong with Heroquest," rather "what made Heroquest good."

Cool?

Lastly, a couple years back I got an itch to do this, and conceived of this title/logo.

Thoughts?

[Patroclus]

I think the main problem for finding miniatures for HQ and expand the game is that in the gameplay we usually need 3 miniatures for melee, 2 miniatures with bows and maybe 2 miniatures with spears. For example, if you got only Gnolls with bows are useless, or if you got only Gnolls with swords you can’t make a serious encounter with more strategy by placing the archers behind a table. Of course, there are easy monsters as goblins that we may need more of them, and some monsters like mummies that don’t have to use bows because makes no sense. But don’t spend your time for common type of monsters because we have tons of them.

These are 7 miniatures total. If we try to buy those from GW we should buy 1 box for melee (about 30 euro), 1 box for ranged attacks (30 euro), and try to trade some of them to reduce the cost or maybe search for hours or better weeks in ebay to find what we need.

If you make boxes of 7-10 minis it is the best for us. And no need for different poses, because if you are a GM it is better to know how the monster type looks to pick it faster when you need it.

Of course the height of minis should be the same with the original HQ, because the most of us have the basic set and some expansions, and we want to keep using them. Also, for the bases it should be nice if they are the same.

If you want to put stats for each monster, post a picture in the forum and you will have your stats asap. It’s nice to keep the balance as close to the original, and here in this forum is the best place for that, because the most of us are playing this game for decades and we know how things can affect gameplay.

If you are planning to make another game from the start. It is best to keep similar stats or maybe the same for heroes and the common monsters, because again most of us we don’t want to stop playing HQ and probably we will use the same characters for both games. A different board (or maze as it called) it is important but keeping the one square width corridors (other people may have different opinion for that) and a main central room for bosses or other things of high importance.

Also, the quests are very important and I think you can also ask help from some of the people here before production.

ps: make it international

[Patroclus]

There are two paths to expand the characters, Levels or Gold. If you choose Gold, like HQ, you will have to gain Gold to buy a better gear and maybe some training (for some skills like gaining artifacts expanding the original gameplay). If you want to add EXP you will have to add many skills, or else why you should try to gain EXP? in my opinion, the best option is Gold, because you can do both (buy items and gain skills), and not wasting time counting your EXP. But it is not a big deal if you want to add EXP.

About the type of monsters, if we are talking for the basic set, you should have goblins 7 (4 melee, 3 bows), orcs 7(4 melee, 3 bows). For undead you should have skeletons 6 (3 melee, 3 bows), mummies 2 melee. Adding the 4 heroes plus the final boss (a wizard probably) it is a total of 27 miniatures. It’s good to add more types of monsters for us who already have the most of those minis. 2 minotaurs or a group of dark elves 7 (3 melee, 2 bows, 2 spears), or anything else depends the setting of the adventure.

If you want to make a game like an expansion of HQ you can bypass the common monsters as goblins and orcs, and use lizardmen and gnolls or savages and panthers in an environment like Conan’s world.

[Blackthorn]

I see this as quickly getting very convoluted.

• If we want it to be like the original HeroQuest, everything you need outside of the miniatures, dice and furniture is right here on this website
• If we want an expanded version of HeroQuest, there are already half a dozen or so out there. Why go through another round of debates to create yet another one?

In short, I think producing a range of plastic miniatures suitable for use in HeroQuest and its published expansions should be the #1 goal. Let the consumer decide how they want to play the game.

If this comes to fruition, I'm in...and I already own a bunch of the original stuff

[el_flesh]

Call it Hero's Quest

people will ID with the title and you will get alot more to buy it.

[Sjeng]

I agree. stick to the original monsters, sculpted slightly different, and add the quest pack minis as bonus unlocks. If EVERYTHING is unlocked, including men-at-arms, you might always add goblin and orc archers, skeleton spearmen, etc. if you ever get that far. concentrate on the existing ones for now.

[knightkrawler]

Why the existing ones? I really don't get the point of that.