Hello! Today a long post to share my last hobby/gaming moments which are revolve around the famous Dungeon crawler, Heroquest. Hasbro reedition is fairly good and I was charmed by the plastic furnitures. So, coupled with my fantasy miniatures collection, I saw an easy way to introduce my kids to miniatures games with a bit of retro fantasy role playing game.
Kids and wife have a very low fantasy rpg/wargame culture and my main objective is to present them a dungeon crawler with an easy board game rules system and a touch of rpg create o good ambiance . Heroquest is a very good tool to achived this task.

Role playing Game : The point is to let my gaming group discovered the way to play a cooperative game and introduce a new concept : the Game Master. Meaning, the guy hidden by a screen who represent the game/background/rules/map/monsters/etc... I take the time to give background for evey mission, I also give description of rooms and key actions. To stimulate the rpg description skills of the adventurers, I reward them with bonus die when they provide a good description of death blow, jump over trap, etc... But the rpg style stop here, players haven't the opportunity to refuse a mission or kill a npc, it's a quite linear story.
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Necromencer Bastillon |
The board Game : Here, I would like to introduce another new concept to my gaming group : The fog of war. In the same way of the old Dungeons floor plans. To do it, I covered the board game with black pieces of card board. Pieces are maintained in place by Black balsa borders than I sticked on the board. I progressively remove the black pieces function of the adventurer progress. I machined the bottom of the doors with a dremel thus I can stack them on top of the balza borders.
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Balsa borders |
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Machining with dremel |
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HQ board fully covered |
Plastic furnitures : The range of furnitures developped by Hasbro is probably the key factor of my compulsive buying. I completed with a mix of ebay Item and things from my own collection to obtain a full set of material for dungeon crawling.
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DM material |
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Foam from Feldherr range |
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DM set up |
The DM screen : The one supplied in the original box never really inspired me. A rpg screen must provide to the adventurers a good supportfor their imagination, when the GM describe a situation. I took 8 pieces of fantasy art from the early period of J. Blanche. Those had a huge influences on my imagination in the 80's and I hope they will also work on my gaming group. The screen have a technical interest as well regarding the capacity to give precious information to the GM during the game but for HQ this aspect is very low. I used four horizontal A4 sheets.
In game pictures : We play HQ games on sunday afternoon at bi monthly frequency and since the summer period we started to run some games on friday evening. I prepare a final scenario for the end of August in order to prepare the worst moment of the year for kids... The return to school!
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In game picture |
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Kids appreciate evening game! |
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Rpg moment! |
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LED candles |