whitebeard wrote:HQ is all about one-time / per quest adjustments to the rules to make simple and exciting adventures. If you constrain yourself to "The doors are symbolic of passage, and somehow everyone is able to squeeze through them, period." then you are missing all kinds of potential for cool new adventures. Examine all of your strongest assumptions about the rules and game pieces, pick one, and create a justification to break it for one quest. Such quests rival the original base set.
The 1" squares are roughly 5 feet x 5 feet at 28mm and for a hero represents the area you do not want to stand inside while they are swinging a weapon. A dragon at 2x3 is more like elephant size for the main body with the addition of long neck/tail and wings. This is crushingly huge in a small space and incredibly dangerous, but not something which cannot be killed by swords and a bit of strategy / luck.
I'm saying FOR ME it's ridiculous to have the kind of popular "HUGE" dragon as a "boss" (four legs, plus giant wings, plus spits fire and has armor AND magic) for the four standard heroes to fight. I know several people have come up with their solutions to making this dream a reality, including giving it multiple attacks (paw, jaws, tail, etc), fire formations and so on. It would seem that it not fitting through a doorway would be the least of your worries. Make it outside, make the door big, say the castle was built around it, say it's a magic shape shifting dragon that travels through other dimensions, who knows!
You could come up with all kinds of excuses how it makes sense... healing fountains, magical weapons and armor that can harm it, etc. For me, the Dragon we've used (and would use) is 1x2, simple as that, not much bigger than the "canon" monsters. Even a 1x3 dragon makes a heck of a lot more sense as something the Heroes could realistically fight than something as big as a house. Heroes who struggle against a few Chaos Warriors may have a good time fighting something akin to Godzilla, but that isn't a good time to me, though you may disagree.
The type of dragon that looks cool that people want to use seems to be the sort of beast that you'd need an army to take down, or some kind of BS macguffin held by the legendary chosen one and his faithful squire (or you're not meant to fight it, only escape, trap it, etc). I want to keep it simple and neat, so my dragon is just like any other monster... yes, it can fly and shoot fire and use magic, and it's "big" but not the type of spectacle that may be popular in other types of games. I'm not saying ridiculous in the sense of it can't possibly work, but that it doesn't fit into the type of game I want to play and I've modified Heroquest a ton, just not as extensively as some have. I prefer to fit it into the simplicity of the official rules as much as possible.
Crazy gimmicks for quests? I'm all in favor, just on this one I disagree. 2x3 isn't THAT big, but to me 1x2 works just fine. Dragonstrike uses a few "large" monsters and none of them are really that over the top in terms of size. Rather than having a lot of surface area (only four heroes to corner and strike at it) I would focus on making it strong or tricky to beat (or use it as a gimmick to force them to flee/solve the puzzle). You could have it as a creature your summon too, come to think of it.
But in your game? I have no say in that.
In fact, the players might appreciate when they walk in and there's a freakin' dragon that they can go right back out the door they came in and the dragon can't follow… But almost none of HQ's corridors will accommodate a "wide" entity, so you're basically limited to the dragon in a single room. Only the central room seems reasonable. It just seems like a limitation of the HQ board which is otherwise pretty versatile if perhaps tight quarters in places. I think it's why games like Dragonstrike came with multiple boards.
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