Ye Olde Inn

Many moons ago, almost 9 years ago to the day to be precise, I had the great fortune to be introducing yet another new generation of players to the awesome spectacle that is HeroQuest. A little online research and I discovered the Inn, the existence of the NA Edition and a vast wealth, accumulated over decades of debate, of rule modifications, problem fixes and house rules to mine.

I was like a kid in a candy store but I quickly realised that some self-discipline was required so I decided that I would document my version of the rulebook, partly for ease of reference but also to try and keep consistency for my players and to avoid giving the impression that I was making things up as I went along (only partially successful in that regard).

So I choose to adopt the NA Edition as my baseline and meticulously (I hope) copied out the text from the NA Instruction Booklet plus all the cards, armoury and similar material in the base set as my starting point.

As issues arose during play I mined the Inn for solution options, and chose hopefully the best solution (subjective), reverting to earlier version rules where appropriate, modifying existing rules, applying house rules or if I couldn't find any existing topics then I created a new topic and tried to describe the problem and potential solution options and then interpret the wealth of responses before play testing modifications and incorporating them.

The net result of all of this over the last nine years (and it still continues as we are soon to face 'Against The Ogre Horde'!) is my HeroQuest Gold Edition.

The rules are linked to in the post below, but I thought in addition to just presenting the rules as they stand, it might be more interesting to walk you through the journey, step by step, and reference the relevant topics here at the Inn as I do so, so that others can choose to follow the same well-trodden path or alternatively venture off into the wild unexplored areas but at least if they choose to do so, they can do it in the knowledge that a well-trodden path exists and they are willingly choosing to leave it at their own peril!

So please ensure that your weapons are sharpened, your armour polished, your healing potions primed and your back packs ... packed, take a deep breath and let the journey begin...

EDIT: I was asked some time ago to produce a summary document only a page or two long, summarising the key differences between HQ Gold Edition and 'normal' HeroQuest (HQ NA Edition was the normal one in the eyes of the person asking) so that he could have a brief read and decide whether it was worth diving into the details. Having produced the document I then decided to do a companion document highlighting the key differences between HQ Gold on HQ Second Edition and only having completed that and compared the two did I realise that HQ Gold was a lot closer to the Second Edition than the NA Edition!

This came as a surprise as I had based my rules on the NA edition originally. After a good think I realised that having unintentionally unpicked more rules from the NA back to the Second Edition than the other way around, I would bite the bullet and rewrite my rulebook using SE as the base so the next version of my rule book due fairly shortly will be based on the Second Edition!

Key differences between HQ Gold Edition and HQ Second Edition

1. Multiple BP monsters – whilst implemented partially and awkwardly in ATOH, the US Edition implemented this better and fully, so I have ported the monster profiles from US and the system for handling using skull markers

2. Chaos/Dread spells – another things that the US Edition brought to the table that is a clear improvement to the game is Chaos/Dread spells, so I have ported these over to HQ Gold also.

3. Combat Dice change – modified what the symbols represent on combat dice, (“skulls”, now “white skulls”) remain the same, (“white shields”, now “shields”) retain their function but counts as shields for both heroes and monsters, (“black shields”, now “black skulls”) become an additional type of skull that also activates push back ability. This modification increases damage dealt across the board, but this effect is partially compensated for ‘higher level’ monsters by the armour boost, making the game more challenging for heroes, and makes the door blocking tactic, whilst still a workable tactic, less of a game-killer for the monsters

4. Mind Dice replace Mind Points – Mind points are replaced by Mind dice and are now more utilised. This mitigates the flaw in the original game where Mind points are initially under-utilised and when they are finally utilised, they are unbalanced and game-breaking. Modifications also introduced to make more use of Mind dice, within spell casting and some monster special abilities.

5. The College – introduced a new ‘Between Quests’ feature that gives the Wizard, a parallel advancement mechanism to the armoury/equipment cards for other heroes, something to spend the Wizard’s gold on and expands the range of spells and in conjunction with the Mind dice changes enables the Wizard to carry more spells into later Quests. An equivalent “The Shrine” is also presented for the Elf.

6. Loot action – introduced a new distinct “Loot” action for handling chests, whilst excluding them from the general search for treasure action. This reinforces their distinctive nature and resolves the traps around chest confusion that exists in some later quests.

7. Search for Traps and Secret Doors action scrapped and handling of traps, through a detect and disarm roll, and handling of secret doors, incorporated into movement rules. This resolves several issues within the existing Search for Traps and Secret Doors action around assumed movement logic, including traps behind doors, traps in a row, open secret doors and the sheer volume of potential searches and the by rote handling.

8. Battle Rage special ability introduced for the Barbarian, equivalent to the special abilities that the Dwarf has around Traps and the Wizard and Elf have for spell casting. This means that the Barbarian gets an intrinsic improvement to his combat ability, although this is offset, that is not equipment based so he keeps that distinction even as other heroes level-up.

9. Poison rules – created distinct rules for handling poisonous attacks and their effects on healing and related potions as the original rules didn’t really call these out or handle them very cleanly.

10. Advancement - the existing HQ advancement system is fine (aside from the lack of an alternative one for spell casters covered above in point 5) but the balance in the SE was a little off*. Introduced a bunch of tweaks, stacking body armour, slight increases to equipment prices (more the high end stuff), ported Longsword from NA, new Bow and Throwing Knife, swap Borin's Armour and Rabbit Boots Quest Treasure placement and reduced the equipment give-aways within Quests.

*The changes introduced by the NA Edition, on the whole make the imbalance within the advancement system even worse, more equipment is given away in-quests, taking choice away from the players, more searching for treasure increases the rate at which Heroes advance making the game easier and the Heroes max out even quicker. The sell-back rule introduced in HQ2021, effectively doubles the Heroes advancement speed, destroying the advancement system entirely.

The HeroQuest Gold "Pack" consists of the following documents

The HeroQuest Gold Rulebook

This document, as you might expect, contains all the rules.

HQ Gold Rulebook

The HeroQuest Gold Scrolls

Split into two separate documents for ease of use, these contain all the modified card text.

HQ Gold GM Scrolls

HQ Gold Hero Scrolls

The Esoterica

Scroll bundle including Change Log, some text conventions, principles and other miscellaneous material

HQ Gold: The Esoterica

The HeroQuest Gold Conversion Scrolls

This section contains a separate document for each published Quest (or Quest Book) that covers conversion notes to make it compatible with HeroQuest rules, various errata and some suggested tweaks for improvement.

HQ: The Gathering Storm Scroll

And last and indeed least some A6 Character Sheets

A6 Character Sheets

EDIT: reformatted this to make the stated problem and solution explicit in response to feedback

20131209 “Inn-spiration Update”

A range of changes inspired by some commonly discussed modifications from Ye Olde Inn forum

Problem: Rules for passing items are partially covered in the rulebook and in various expansion packs but none of them are complete and they contradict each other. In addition, they contain a loophole that can be exploited by for example allowing someone to fire a crossbow on their turn and then pass it to another person who can then do the same

*Made giving an item to another Hero an action for the giver

*Created a ‘complete’ rule for passing items and included it in the rulebook, any number of item(s) can be passed in a single action, on the turn of the passing player, provided that both characters are in adjacent squares and neither has any foes in surrounding squares.

Problem: Moving through a room without searching it and moving through a room and searching it take the same amount of in-game time, one turn. Not only does this not make sense but it means there is no deterrent to searching rooms that have a penalty for staying in them like Blizzard Room, Ice Vault and similar

*Make the search action a whole turn action as it includes assumed movement i.e., on your turn you may MOVE and perform an ACTION (ATTACK/CAST/DISARM) - or vice versa - OR you may SEARCH because the logic for searching a corridor or room in general assumes movement

Problem: Even using the US Monster Stats the basic game is just too easy, outside of the Trial it is common to have zero Hero Deaths in the Game System Quest book.

*Monsters defend on white shields as they need a boost, and it removes the inconsistency between Heroes and Monster defence

Problem: No real problem to be solved here just my new player’s having no previous GW Mythos experience keep referring to them as Trolls. I didn’t include this in my published version of the rules at the time as there is no problem to be solved but since the 2021 Reprint and the scrapping of Fimir it seemed appropriate.

*Replaced Fimir with Troll (inspired by Marvel Winter Special – New Monster Troll) M6, A4, D3, BP3, MP1 armed with battle axe

As far as Search goes. If you wander around a room to search for treasure and there are undetected traps, I feel you would step on one and trigger it. If you had already performed a trap search then you could avoid them minus the traps surrounding a treasure chest.

P.S. why would you ever get rid of Fimir?

My whole rule set approaches searching in general differently that the official rules (that is one of probably only two or maybe three major differences between HeroQuest Official and my HeroQuest Gold rules) but I think is still aligned to your position but if you have a moment I have updated this thread Search – The Binding Topic with an attempt to summarise my new search approach and I would really appreciate you reviewing this and testing my logic as it really needs feedback from a different point of view than my own as I am obviously biased!

With regards to Fimir being replaced with Trolls, this really only come about by accident, as my third generation of player's had no GW exposure so kept referring to Fimir as Trolls, which gave me the idea of introducing Trolls into HeroQuest (re-introducing as it turned out later), I played with this idea lightly for years but only within that gaming group by when the New Rewrite/Reprint came out in 2021 with Fimir replaced by Abominations I thought I would make it my official stance as any new players of the 2021 Generation would never have been exposed to a Fimir, so Trolls seemed less of an abomination.

Bareheaded Warrior wrote:20131209 “Inn-spiration Update”
*Make the search action a whole turn action as it includes assumed movement i.e., on your turn you may MOVE and perform an ACTION (ATTACK/CAST/DISARM) - or vice versa - OR you may SEARCH because the logic for searching a corridor or room in general assumes movement

Realistic, but will certainly slow down the game in terms of number of player turns required to complete a quest. Also might encourage party scattering, unless you rule that the character performing the search may end their turn on any chosen square within the search area. (honestly, why would you search a room or hallway then return to stand exactly where you started?)
One could further complicate the situation by requiring a movement roll with the search action, and one can only search a number of squares equal to that roll and accessible with normal movement. Such a rule would definitely mess up the "first search finds the named treasure" dynamic unless 'roll and search' only applied to hallways.
Here's a really crazy thought. 'roll and search' but the search action is still separate from movement (even though they use the same die roll), so, suppose you're in a double wide corridor or at an intersection, you roll a 7 on the movement dice and can search any 7 contiguous squares from your starting position (this presumes the search still ends at it's starting point), but then your movement can be taken as normal, meaning that you could actually choose to move outside the area you just searched. This idea is probably overly complicated, but it's always bugged me that in a long hallway a hero can search a greater distance than they can move.

It is my intention to simplify and clarify the rules not add more complications, although things do not always go according to plan!

You are correct that rule in isolation does slow things down, but taken in combination with my other search changes which reduce the number of searches in a typical quest by around 80%* the overall effect is slicker and quicker.

*Assume a typical Quest has about 10 rooms plus some corridors, using four Heroes, under vanilla US rules that would equate to a maximum of 40 treasure searches (in rooms), plus another 20 trap and secret door searches in those same rooms, and lets say 6 searches for secret doors and 6 searches for traps in the corridors gives a rough figure of 72, under HeroQuest Gold search rules that would be reduce to around 12-15 searches in total as trap and secret door searches have been scrapped and you only search a room for treasure once (strictly speaking you can do multiple attempts but only one completed search, hence that 12-15 rather than 10 figure)

In fairness, most players figure out pretty quickly that they really don't want to max out their treasure searches due to the dynamic of good cards staying out of the deck and bad ones going back in. Especially when a hero's body points get down to about half, they become far less interested in risking hazards and wandering monsters.
I kinda like the idea of combining the searches into one and making it a full-turn action, but I would still want to incorporate the movement element by rolling the search area and allowing the hero to end his turn on any square in the area. This would put more work on Zargon, as named treasures would have to be assigned a specific location within a room, and one might desire to add in tokens or something to mark the searched portion of large rooms.
Floor traps in rooms would become mostly pointless unless a) they're located in a way that makes part of the room inaccessible without crossing that square, or b) some kind of check is added for a chance to accidentally set off the trap instead of automatically find it.
I don't agree with the idea that all chests (and possibly other furniture) are locked by default, but it can add a flavor element that when they are it takes an extra action to open them. One could require a check for this, making the same roll as if disarming a trap should a character wish to pick the lock, or some sort of attack roll to brute force it. Otherwise, unlocked (and trap-free) furniture would just be opened and examined whenever it fell within the search area.

One big bummer to all of this is that you can come up with the most brilliant alternative rule set ever, but can't use it with the companion app.

Markus Darwath wrote:In fairness, most players figure out pretty quickly that they really don't want to max out their treasure searches due to the dynamic of good cards staying out of the deck and bad ones going back in. Especially when a hero's body points get down to about half, they become far less interested in risking hazards and wandering monsters.

That is equally true of both the original rules and the HeroQuest Gold rules

Markus Darwath wrote:I kinda like the idea of combining the searches into one and making it a full-turn action, but I would still want to incorporate the movement element by rolling the search area and allowing the hero to end his turn on any square in the area. This would put more work on Zargon, as named treasures would have to be assigned a specific location within a room, and one might desire to add in tokens or something to mark the searched portion of large rooms.
Floor traps in rooms would become mostly pointless unless a) they're located in a way that makes part of the room inaccessible without crossing that square, or b) some kind of check is added for a chance to accidentally set off the trap instead of automatically find it.

The HeroQuest Gold rules do partially incorporate the movement element.

• When you search a room that contains one or more traps then the search ends with you being placed on the trap square (or the nearest to your starting position if there are more than one)

• When you search a room that doesn't contain traps but contains a secret door then the search ends with you being placed onto the square adjacent to the secret doors (or nearest to your starting position if there is more than one)

The HeroQuest Gold search rules don't fully implement the movement element in the way that you have suggested, precisely to avoid the additional complication that you have pointed out.

The HeroQuest Gold rules do include "b) some kind of check is added for a chance to accidentally set off the trap instead of automatically find it", this is the "Detect and Disarm check" (generally referred to as just a "Disarm" check for short) you step onto a trapped square, you roll your dice, either you fail the test/check and the trap goes off or you pass and it is disarmed. Not so much an "automatically find it versus accidentally set it off" but rather an "accidentally step on it, get chance to detect and make if safe, fail and suffer" but I think they are equivalent.

Markus Darwath wrote:I don't agree with the idea that all chests (and possibly other furniture) are locked by default, but it can add a flavor element that when they are it takes an extra action to open them. One could require a check for this, making the same roll as if disarming a trap should a character wish to pick the lock, or some sort of attack roll to brute force it. Otherwise, unlocked (and trap-free) furniture would just be opened and examined whenever it fell within the search area.

This is a harder one to put into words, but the concept makes sense once grasped, I hope.

If, by default, you make the statement that all chests (large box made of thick wood, potentially reinforced with metal) are closed and locked, then by default excluding them from the general room search and instead having a specific Loot action, that automatically covers breaking them open, and if they are trapped then the disarm process kicks in as part of that Loot action, makes sense.

That is a clear and complete default position which means that all a Quest Creator needs to do as a minimum is put a chest icon on the Quest Map and include a statement as to what is in it or the fact that it is empty*. That can if they wish embellish and make exceptions to the general/default rule in the Quest Notes, for example, "A: The treasure chest in this room is unlocked and wide open so the Potion of Healing inside will be found automatically if the room is searched or can be automatically picked up by a Hero adjacent to the chest"

*and if you include the statement in the rules that a chest that doesn't state its contents or lack of contents then you draw a Treasure Card, treating any Wandering Monster or Hazard Cards as "Empty" then as a minimum default position you don't even need the statement detailing what is in it.

If on the other hand you start with the "softer" or more "open" default position of a chest can be open or closed, a closed chest can be locked or unlocked, can be made of balsa wood or reinforced steel, can be empty or not, and so on then the Quest Creator needs to remember to include ALL the necessary information every time they add a chest icon to a Quest Map. Every time they add a Chest then they would need to add a Quest Note detailing the Open/Closed state, the Locked/Unlocked state, the material composition, the contents, wind direction and so on. The gamemaster would then need a lookup table that compares all these different options and tells him which ruleset to use in that particular scenario - if open then include in room search, if closed then exclude from room search and use loot rules, if closed and locked then exclude from room search and use picking lock rules and loot rules.

This second option is pretty much guaranteed to ensure every Quest produced by anything but the most meticulous designer will have holes in it that the GM will have to either have to go through every Quest with a fine toothed comb and make up something to fill in the blanks, or will have to handle the situation in game on the fly (neither of which is desirable)

For me I prefer the standard rules and default handling to be strong, clear, robust and complete (as much as possible) to make the Quest creator's task easier (and that of their play testers) so that they can focus on producing more Quests and better quality and reduce the burden of interpretation from the GM (as much as possible)

Markus Darwath wrote:One big bummer to all of this is that you can come up with the most brilliant alternative rule set ever, but can't use it with the companion app.

True, but the Companion App by design it is fairly open, nothing stops a hero from doing a "Search for Traps", "Search for Secret Doors", "Search for Treasure" consecutively and in that sequence as part of the a single turn/action. Equally nothing stops Heroes marking a room on the board with a counter to indicate it has been searched so no one else searches the same room. For the Companion App you could just scrap the Loot rule and go back to chests just being another piece of furniture in the room as per the standard rules.

I see where you're coming from. I tend to view these sorts of things more from the perspective of my D&D heavy background, where the DM is expected to have a large role in making on the fly rulings and adjustments. I also just tend to enjoy discussing potential rules variants, always looking for that sweet spot that achieves immersion and playability in unison.