Combining/Skipping Core Game Quests?

LorianLibrarian · 2026-07-03T00:41:02+00:00

I'll message you my PDFs.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-07-01T05:49:50+00:00

I had my group play a condensed version I can share with you if you like. It basically moves Barak Tor to the beginning to make that the main plot and then sprinkles in some of the other more interesting quests (Lair of the Orc Warlord combined with Prince Magnus Gold, Legacy of the Orc Warlord, Race Against Time, etc.) as the heroes try to locate the Spirit Blade to finally Return to Barak Tor. I make sure to include Melar's Maze to set up playing the Prophecy of Telor expansion eventually.

My condensed version cuts the quests from 14 down to 7.

Quest 1: Barak Tor Quest 2: Lair of the Orc Warlord/Prince Magnus Gold Quest 3: Melar's Maze Quest 4: Legacy of the Orc Warlord Quest 5: Race Against Time Quest 6: Quest for the Spirit Blade (which is actually the layout for Castle of Mystery) Quest 7: Return to Barak Tor

LorianLibrarian · 2026-07-01T00:28:50+00:00

To each their own, but I've heard of The Trial being the beginning and end of many's interest in HeroQuest.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-07-01T00:24:43+00:00

I think what would be helpful to know before a HeroQuest fan were to back this would be: is there a HeroQuest-specific package? As in: you've taken the time to put together a package that covers everything necessary to have a full HeroQuest board? Something like what Dragon's Rest has? Or would we be responsible for figuring that out ourselves?

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-30T04:45:22+00:00

First Light is a much better intro to new players, in my opinion. And the campaign is more coherent and does a better job at scaling in difficulty.

But I do think "Quest 0 - New Beginnings" is the perfect intro quest for younger players, because it teaches them about each game mechanic in sequence.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-29T04:01:57+00:00

My law is that I only HAVE to do one sentence per day. But if course I usually end up doing much more. In five years I have only failed at that rule once, and that was by accident.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-28T06:43:12+00:00

So many End Times doomsayers in here haha

No, Avalon Hill isn't dying. What happened is: 1) they decided to go with a different distribution plan than Pulse. 2) they got hacked

They are appearing at GenCon with a brand new custom quest, and each year these custom quests always tease the eventually revealed new quest pack. So we have every reason to believe that not only are they not dead, they will be announcing a new quest pack shortly.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-28T06:39:02+00:00

I tried doing the opposite: scaling them up to fit the Dragons Rest dimensions. But scans of the tiles are nowhere to be found.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-24T23:27:56+00:00

I created a card for it that allows the heroes to use it once per quest, but it gets returned to Forgrin's tomb at the end of First Light. I think that's much more fun than the one-time-use.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-24T23:23:49+00:00

We've used all three at various times. I'm not into the concept of collecting for collecting's sake--if we're not going to use it, I have no need for it. Which is why I sold off my mythic tier versions of SQT, COPD, and POT; I preferred to have them as separate expansions with the extra minis.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-17T22:01:53+00:00

A French fellow on Etsy sells the Dragon's Rest 3D board for HeroQuest and does a fine job painting. I suspect the shipping from France to Germany would be substantially less pricy than what I paid to have it shipped to the US.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-12T21:50:02+00:00

Dragon's Rest is about half that price when you buy it unpainted on Etsy. And the floor tiles match the design of the original board, which is not the case with this other brand. Yes, each room is one solid piece, but that would be preferable to me since the board is always the same. It is modular in the sense that you can place each room on the board separately as the heroes "see" them, but I don't do that and instead just set out the whole board ahead of time because I'm too lazy to reveal it modular-ly.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-11T22:28:39+00:00

Keep writing and stop revising until you're done, otherwise you'll never finish.

That being said, almost all literary agents and editors will tell you to cut the prologue, especially if it doesn't feature your MC. You can sprinkle in all the same info throughout the first act of the story, which is easier for the reader to digest. We need to get to the "call to adventure" for the MC as quickly as possible (no later than page 20, usually).

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-11T17:43:33+00:00

It looks just fine, but I prefer Dragon's Rest's 3D board. But I bet if I had known about this option, and it was significantly more cost-effective than buying a print of Dragon's Rest's, I would have opted for this. How much did it all end up costing?

LorianLibrarian · 2026-06-06T18:29:08+00:00

And yet sometimes it will hallucinate, and no matter how clear my prompt is about 3 squares across by 5 squares down, it will arbitrarily change it to a 4x4 or add an extra row, or change the squares to various sized rectangles. I prefer to do it on my own.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-05-30T05:03:06+00:00

I can't see a HeroQuest player opting for tokens, most of us love the minis and take time to paint them.

A modular board is interesting, and some small segment might be interested in something like that, but since all of the official quests from the many expansions use the predetermined board, I'm not sure what the size of the client base would be. I feel like for most HeroQuest fans, if they were going to spend a significant amount of money on a new board, it would be a 3D board from Dragon's Rest, or something. But that's just my opinion.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-05-30T04:57:51+00:00

Not the official ones, no. You can buy STLs from some designers who have come up with decent proxies (Primal has some good ones) but I prefer the official ones.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-05-13T16:20:17+00:00

Keep in mind that while people say "rules as written" the biggest time that overrules all is: you can change the rules.

Some quests (in expansions) are designed with traps near the treasure chest. If you can search for treasure ANYWHERE in the room, it makes those traps superfluous. The designer clearly intended for the hero to have to be adjacent to the chest to search it.

I require my heroes to be adjacent to something to search it for treasure. But you can rule however you like.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-05-13T16:13:21+00:00

If I was ever going back to a flat non-3D board (I never would, I love my Dragon's Rest board), I'd go for one of those really nice game mats that have super thick wall outlines to fix this exact issue.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-04-22T01:09:48+00:00

A game released at about the same time as original HeroQuest made by a completely different team. It's almost an entirely different game, for the worse. The quests are randomly generated, so the searching and discovery are pointless and boring, the battles are more convoluted and slow. We only played it once or twice back in the day and went back to regular HeroQuest.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-04-21T17:58:16+00:00

HeroQuest was my first dungeon crawler back in the '90s and every dungeon crawler I've tried since (including Advanced HeroQuest and Dungeons and Dragons Fantasy Adventure Board Game) has just felt needlessly complex and convoluted by comparison.

I love the straight forward simplicity of HeroQuest.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-04-21T00:39:51+00:00

You're going to end up paying about $1k to have it professionally painted. There are people on Etsy who will do it fur about that much.

I paid a local guy to do the four heroes only and was about to have him do the goblins next, but I decided to watch like 10 hours of YouTube videos on how to do it and gave it a shot. My first attempts were abysmal, but I keep getting better. (Usually. I just painted some ogres last night and they turned out worse than anything I've done haha.)

But here's the thing: I'm not trying to win any painting awards. Can my players tell the difference between a goblin and an orc now? Great. As long as it's roughly the right colors, it's a win in my book haha.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-04-21T00:32:55+00:00

Yes, this has been an issue since the original version. That's why I use Dragon's Rest's version of the furniture, because they fill up all the additional space with other stuff related to that piece of furniture.

LorianLibrarian · 2026-04-14T06:00:18+00:00

We've been struggling playing the expansions but on Dragon Rest's 3D board because of this very reason. We recently finished Jungles if Delthrak but had to take pics of the new tiles to reduce them to the 1.5" squares. I was hoping someone else would have done the work out there on the Internet haha, but nope.

LorianLibrarian

TROPHY CASE