Avalon Hill's Chris Nadeau all but admitted that this rumored pack (a remake of the 1991 EU expansion) will be coming out at some point and their goal will not just be to use the NA rules but also to expand the original 5 quest version to 10 quests. I wonder what those 10 quests would be? Similar to the
other thread about 2024's remake of Against the Ogre Horde...
[ For those unfamiliar with this European expansion to HeroQuest, you can check out
YeOldeInn's page. Keep in mind, some things may be homebrew that have been made later by fans such as "Wizards of Zargon" an attempt to map it to NA rules by
Phoenix and some others many years ago now, which may be of interest to the AH team adapting this of course! Phoenix made some typos in his quest that are documented
here (may not be complete). Keep in mind editorial changes were made on these later pages as well]
Several suggestions come to mind and I'm sure there are others out there I'm missing but please share them here. Things I would expect:
The usual word replacement to keep it in line with the rest of the Remake stuff. Will "Morcar" be re-named "Zargon" or will he be introduced as a new character? Perhaps this is the name that Zargon is using? A plot twist that he's some new character and really it was Zargon all along? Or maybe a different evil wizard is hiring Festral to stir up the Ogres against the "Realm" and "the King" this time?
24 mercenary figures, if they don't re-introduce the bolt on weapons concept. The Mercs are cheaper but also less durable than the Frozen Horror Mercs. Would they simply be substituted in values or could some other tweaking be done here? None of them are used as badguys but there is a potion that lets you charm them to get a discount and they give a generous discount for surviving from one quest to another encouraging you not to "waste" them as cannon fodder. These might look the same as the FH mercs or they might be a whole new design.
Tweaked Spells. the Basic spells are just too weak if the Elf/Wizard are still dividing them up in sets of 3, vs. the Elementals. One suggestion is that the "cloud" spell could use a bunch of tiles and not just a single one, to spread the effect out. These spells could be tweaked in light of similar spells in other expansions and packs too.
Fix Unmarked Treasure Chests. Quest 5: 2 chests, central room (as in another thread, wallydubbs pointed this out in this pack and ATOH as well).
New plastics. I would expect to have the Entrance/Exit doors added. But what else? The magical walls in plastic instead of those big cardboards or maybe inserts yet again. There are no big new monsters this time, just the Mercenaries and the four evil Wizards. new "Wizard" furniture perhaps? Maybe an Alchemy system similar to Rise of the Dread Moon again, but perhaps with some different cards (you could combine the decks to make a giant one).
Perhaps a tweak to the magical traps. It seems these were geared towards the game mechanic that once you opened a door you had to enter the room and perhaps could not back out of it, if you happened to see a magical trap (but had to keep walking to the other side in hopes of escape or use pass through rock or else a tempest spell to disable to the trap). Under the NA rules they seem a little too easy to avoid completely.
I would expect to see an Alchemist Shop and some basic artifacts (even if they were just repeated from KK and/or ROTWL).
With emphasis on Magic, perhaps the Wizard's Staff, Wizard's Cloak, Wand of Magic and Spell Ring should be findable again (if they are not already in the possession of the heroes) in the quest notes?
Rules updated to explain "Pits of Darkness" and include some of those tiles in the set. These were put into WOM originally I think either by accident (and were meant to just be regular pit traps) or else they intended to include this mechanic from ATOH but forgot to document it it in the book.
Evil Sorcerer spells. Some say that because some of these spells that the bad guys have use the same name, but different mechanics to the "Dread" Spells in the Game System. I don't see the issue here. These bad guys have unique spells. Even if you tweak the name slightly, some of them are weaker than their GS equivalents ("Summon Mummy" and "Call Skeleton" from the necromancer aren't as powerful generally as Summon undead, then again you could say he has BOTH and so gets two opportunities to summon undead characters even if they don't all appear at once), while others are stronger (the High Archmage's Rust Spell destroys any one piece of equipment, not just a "metal" helmet or shield!). The artwork for the Lightning bolt spell depicts the Archmage when it should show the Stormmaster, however. Lightning bolt now uses a tile and some have questioned how that can be used diagonally but it could using the straight diagonal squares rather than an "off-axis" angle and this is how I think the GS version is intended to be played as well, probably. I think overall perhaps some slight tweaks here or there to the Wizards themselves and/or their spells could be good. Perhaps when defeated they drop magical artifacts?
Needs a better Epilogue. The quest kind of ends abruptly after you beat the last of the revived sorcerers. Yes, there was a cool prologue that assumed the completion of KK/ROTWL and ATOH (but you still don't need to play that one first).
Perhaps following in the footsteps of the ATOH remake with the "play the quests as a series" you could make it so that they are not able to shop between quests. Then again it seems you are actually traveling each quest to the hideouts of one of these evil mages and so in theory you would think it would be much more plausible that you could "shop" rather than thinking you were underground the whole time behind enemy lines as in ATOH, so maybe not.
Here might be another opportunity to include "fancy dice" assuming they haven't put fancy dice (like those seen at GenCon 2023) into other expansions before this one. Perhaps a bonus could be another red plastic hero of some kind if there was room to spare. But between the human mercs and the potential Ogre mercs, I think they could probably do well enough to fill up the pack and make it attractive to buyers on the shelf.
Maybe some monster cards for the four evil Wizard characters.
They probably don't actually need 23 Mercenary cards as in the original. The instructions even said they were only included if you lose some and were not used in gameplay. You'd only "Need" one for each Merc type, unless they introduce some game mechanic to use the cards. There was probably something about not wasting paper in the factory, to round out the number of cards in the pack as many have guessed.
More Skull tiles!