by Zenithfleet wrote:I'm uneasy about the view that HeroQuest clearly and unambiguously fits into the Warhammer background.
That may be because I only know Warhammer from 4th edition onwards. Back in 3rd things were different. But I have a lot of trouble trying to reconcile HeroQuest's background with Warhammer's background as established from 4th edition onward.
Regarding earlier discussions in this thread, I found Cael Darkhollow's position particularly odd. Mostly Cael argues that HQ is definitively set in the Warhammer world, and that if you take it in any other direction, even by making your own quests that don't happen to fit Warhammer, you're no longer really playing real HeroQuest but some kind of pseudo-customised parallel imitation version. (Er, so what if you were an Aussie ten-year-old who had never heard of Warhammer and only had what was in the HQ products to go on?)
And yet Cael also said this, which I strongly agree with:Cael Darkhollow wrote:HeroQuest is a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon crawl simplified for boardgame play (D&D light) with a veneer of Warhammer setting applied for brand theme.
As far as I'm concerned the Warhammer theme is indeed a thin veneer. A well-chosen veneer that gives it a lot of evocative flavour, and a touch of that "Northern hardness and darkness" that Tolkien tried to capture. But a veneer nonetheless. If you scratch the surface it flakes right off.
HeroQuest was set in the Warhammer World, the problem is it was written at the tail-end of 3rd edition (it's publication dates straddle 3rd-4th edition Warhammer Fantasy) when that lore was still being standardized and in some aspects still far from settled. HeroQuest subsequently retains a lot of the quirkiness and contradictions of 3rd edition WFB compared to 4th and beyond. Also there really is scant information printed in Heroquest at all, if you line up every sentence printed in the MB/GW HeroQuest books, GW magazines with additional official HQ material and HQ game boxes you wouldn't even get more than a few dozen pages of script. Warhammer on the other hand has hundreds and hundreds of pages written about it's setting. What is written in HQ largely conforms to the Warhammer world, there are far more similarities with words, places, names, maps, figure models, art, and the game creators themselves etc. with Warhammer than there are contradictions or inconsistencies. Plus you have the clear game progression detailed in White Wolf magazines of the publication era showing HeroQuest quest conversions to Advanced HeroQuest which is unambiguously in the Warhammer setting; and Warhammer Quest board game as the evolution of this board game beyond that...all which share text, monsters and artwork tying them all together, especially HeroQuest and Advanced HeroQuest as the former board game is specifically mentioned by name in the rules of the later. Hard to imagine how anyone can deny the strong obvious foundational link between HeroQuest and the Warhammer world setting. It was clearly set in that world however much detail differs from Warhammer in general, to say it wasn't seems rather silly. Most of the supposed differences are actually omissions of information not contradictions anyway. Where's Morcar/Zargon in Warhammer? who is Mentor or the Emperor? are the emperor and the Prince the same person? How would it fit in the Old World time line? Good thing we have a thread named Overview of the Old World here on the forum dedicated to discussing these very points.
Beyond all that the authorship of HeroQuest itself is in question, as several statements by Games Workshop employees contradict the narrative that Stephen Baker presents for the the development of the HeroQuest game and just how involved each company or individual was in the development of HQ. How much did SB do? How much was Games Workshop? Who did what exactly? What precisely did SB write? What did he design? What if anything was edited or revised? By who? Who had the final say on the HQ line before it hit store shelves? what efforts if any were made to be consistent with other HeroQuest products or Games Workshop materials? What is remembered correctly from 45+ years ago? We may never know.
Enter Dave Morris who wrote the three HQ gamebooks, an author who clearly didn't have any depth of knowledge of the Warhammer World Setting and perhaps thought it was sufficiently different enough from HeroQuest to forge his own way maps and all, but then decades later tried to claim he invented the HeroQuest world and Games workshop just changed HIS things instead of vice versa, his statements in interviews clearly contradicting publications made before he ever printed a word. What if anything were his instructions provided by Corgi/GW/MB/his editor or anyone else involved officially with HeroQuest brand to write the HQ books? Did he take huge liberties with the material provided or was he given scant information to begin with? Was there ever a HeroQuest "bible" for the entire HQ property, a brand guideline or style manual at Milton Bradley or Games Workshop to follow so errors and inconsistencies could be avoided in the first place? By the time the NA expansion packs were released what were the relationships between any of the parties currently or previously involved? What if anything changed or was developed by new persons? When did Games Workshop cease involvement with HeroQuest? What did that mean for the brand? Which companies or persons were authoritative in any HQ product? We may never know all of it.
Official HeroQuest "Canon" was retconned in the very first year with the differences between the first 1989 and second 1990 European versions of the base game including deletion of story lines and alterations of narrative. Then the North American versions changed it yet again. That leaves 3 official slightly differing "canons" published and printed by Games Works/Milton Bradley, more if you consider White Dwarf HQ material a different version yet again, and even more for the Japanese completely different HQ version of the game or the many minor changes made in various language editions for the original game. Does that invalidate any of the previous versions? Or should we combine everything with HeroQuest printed officially on the box?
Then the Marvel Winter Special and the Corgi novels showed up with lots of contradictions and/or inconsistences both internally within previous HeroQuest published material and the larger connection to the Old World of Warhammer. The Sticker Album by yet another company added more inconsistency. Then finally the HQ Sorasil video game took a huge detour from any previous HQ material. What should be considered canon? Especially as far as a setting goes?
Does all of it fit nicely in the established canon of the Warhammer world? No of course not. Is it its own clearly developed setting differing from the Warhammer Old World? No it obviously wasn't that either. It's a mess.
But the inconsistencies, errors and differences between the two (HeroQuest and Warhammer) take far less work to gloss over or reconcile into a consistent narrative than the massive effort required to erase or ignore the huge influence of Warhammer on HeroQuest and it's overall development. It is and always was a Games Workshop Game in collaboration with Milton Bradley (a subsidiary of Hasbro, who may in fact have had little to do with the actual game development beyond the basic concept and/or distribution.) Only now with the current reboot version of the game can any valid arguments be made that the HeroQuest game is even remotely substantively different from it's Warhammer roots (and that cannot be said without an asterisk explaining the entire history of the game.)
So what do we make of all of it? Certain statements can be said as fact:
1. Games Workshop fully intended for HeroQuest to be part of their IP from their Warhammer Fantasy world. This is based on numerous lines of evidence; the Old World map printed on a HQ quest book, all the monsters used including Fimir and Chaos Warriors, but also GW style goblins and orcs, the numerous place names that align, the general world geography and societal structure, the follow up game of Advanced HeroQuest, the supplemental HQ material published in White Dwarf, GW employee statements etc. The GW Warhammer stamp on the HQ game and its overall development is much stronger than any perceptible Milton Bradley I.D.
2. No distinct setting that differs substantially from Warhammer Old World was put forth as an official HeroQuest setting by Milton Bradley or anyone else for the original game system or its expansions. The 3 Corgi gamebooks however that claim may be valid.
3. When Games Workshop stopped collaborating, HeroQuest languished for many years with Hasbro unsure how to proceed if at all with the brand due to GW intellectual properties heavily involved with every aspect of the HQ game. At one point they even lost the trademark.
4. The official Hasbro HeroQuest reboot removed all obvious GW trademarked material (or tried to with minor cosmetic name changes) to circumvent this very problem of the obvious established Old World setting for HeroQuest resulting in a generic setting at least for all the reprinted quests until they started to establish their own story narrative which could be loosely defined as new canon or a new setting in the new material. Legally they were in the clear but changing "Chaos to Dread" "FImir to abominations" or the "World's End mountains" isn't fooling anyone of the actual source world of the original HQ game.
Zenithfleet wrote:and that if you take it in any other direction, even by making your own quests that don't happen to fit Warhammer, you're no longer really playing real HeroQuest but some kind of pseudo-customised parallel imitation version.
This is true of any game's fictional setting, if you take it in any other direction [than the published setting material] or make your own quests that don't happen to fit the established game world you are indeed writing fan fiction/homebrew or whatever you want to call it. Only the printed quests and lore in officially published HQ are canon or "official HeroQuest narrative." Same can always be said for any game system or fictional franchise.
There is however a subtle difference when saying "playing HeroQuest" between using the established official narrative of a game and just using the established rules. If you are just playing only with the rules written for Dungeons & Dragons but are making up your own quests and worlds to play in it still is D&D, you are using their rules to play the game. But if you try to change their established printed mapped "canon" campaign worlds you are now homebrewing. Same exact thing with HeroQuest, if you play all the quests in the Questbooks your are playing HeroQuest. If you use the blank map printed in HQ to make your own quests you are still playing HeroQuest, but if you change the world setting established in the HQ texts and maps presented (or ignore them) in favor or your own world setting creations then you are homebrewing and no longer can claim to be playing proper HeroQuest, but a derivative or fan fiction of it. Unlike D&D, HeroQuest only has a single official setting. Can it really be argued you are "Playing HeroQuest" if you are just playing the rules of HeroQuest but not the world (like D&D)? Or instead are you using the game as the basis for your own created games? That's fine, but the subtle distinction between what is Official HeroQuest and what is fan created is there. You can homebrew rules or settings or even both but as some point it ceases to be the board game you started with and now is just loosely based on it. A few house rules doesn't break a HeroQuest (or D&D) game in fact it is encouraged in their respective rule books, but a drastic change of their established world settings for something completely new that you made up however clearly does as far as canon is concerned. Your Forgotten Realms campaign setting might differ substantially from mine or drastically from Ed Greenwood's or anyone else's but only the official printed FR version in Dungeons & Dragons materials published actually matter as accepted Canon. Same with HeroQuest, your homebrew HQ version may differ from my version of the HeroQuest setting, but only what is printed in official material matters as far as what can be accepted as canon and THAT is clearly derived from the Warhammer World. a Clear distinction also needs to be made when saying "HeroQuest" are you referring to the entire game including the lore and everything written or are you simply saying "HeroQuest" for shorthand of the rules of the game?
That said, Games Workshop and Warhammer unashamedly ripped off all it's source material to begin with namely: Dungeons & Dragons, Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, and most of all J.R.R. Tolkien. Warhammer fantasy has since then become its own world driven by numerous stories, products and established lore canon.
HeroQuest board game setting is really just a thin veneer of Warhammer World game setting which is just a thin veneer over D&D which is blatantly based on Tolkien/Moorcock/Howard and other authors of the fantasy genre establishing literature that came before. But those fantasy worlds have evolved to become well established recognizable distinct settings, while HeroQuest never did establish it's own setting beyond the thin veneer of Warhammer it started with.
Even those literary world creators such as Howard or Tolkien largely based their fantasy worlds on our real world. So did Games Workshop base The Old World on our own real world because that is the easiest simplest way to get anyone to relate to it, understand it intuitively and fill in the blanks of it's pseudohistory and maps perhaps with analogs our real world counterparts. Continents, regions and their inhabitants of all those fantasy worlds have their unmistakable counterparts in our own world. No one questions the physics in Middle Earth or Hyboria or the Old World because all are assumed to be the exact same as ours right down to the specific gravity, seasons and day/night cycle based on our star.
The whole point is you can play HeroQuest however you want, you can play the game as intended, you can use the lore provided or you can ignore it completely in favor of your own creations, but you simply can't deny where the original game lore comes from. It's Warhammer. Especially in a thread dedicated to comparing and discussing HeroQuest to the Old World of Warhammer it should be obvious.
I would so love to see (and read) some more of those early details of what the game was like before it came to store shelves, warts and all, and I'm sure many of us would too.
