The Stephen Baker Interview Jan/2024

[Bareheaded Warrior]

Zenithfleet - I agree with you around the chest point and I'm not sure whether this is a recollection/retcon issue or a misunderstanding of the question as the 1989 edition of Steve Baker that designed the original quests clearly thought differently when he was placing traps adjacent to chests!

I also still don't agree with the "line of sight = seeing" interpretation for the simple reason that when a hero opens a door to a room the EWP is supposed to lay out the entire contents of the room (except hidden stuff) because they can be "seen" by the hero, even though the hero is not in the room and according to the line of sight rules does NOT have line of sight to all the squares in the room.

If the two terms are synonymous then how do they contradict each other in this instance?

Second point, as cornixt has already said, is that it feels increasingly difficult for me to reconcile the statements made in earlier interviews like Oct 1989 around how GW were ONLY involved with artwork and miniatures

How did Games Workshop get involved?
'Initially we just wanted them to do the plastic miniatures, but they've had so much experience in the fantasy field we decided to draw on their expertise.'

Were they involved in the actual design of the game?
'No. Their input in the basic version was the artwork and the manufacture of the miniatures,

and the more recent confirmation that the GW team involved included Rick Priestley and Jervis Johnson who would have had no reason to be involved with artwork and miniatures, but would have been highly influential in terms of the gameplay (especially Jervis Johnson who back in the day it was claimed by GW and not challenged by MB was a "co-designer of the game").

Once I had the new design, I met with the designers at GW. We played the game, and they liked it. My main contacts at GW were Bob Naismith for miniatures, Rick Priestly and Jervis Johnson for gameplay, John Blanche for art, and Phil Gallagher for rules and editing.

[Kurgan]

I would tend to put more faith in the accuracy of the modern interviews (in the Remake era) over those made in the interim period between the demise of the original franchise (sometime after 1992) and the Haslab campaign (2020). Not saying that Mr. Baker needs to be infallible in his comments, but he clearly had to vet these new questions with someone at Hasbro (which helps explain the delay between when they were asked and the interview could be published). Hasbro went through legal meetings with GWS back in c.2020 in order to secure the rights to HeroQuest while amicably extricating it from the Warhammer Fantasy lore embedded in the original versions. Mr. Baker could be forgiven then for making little mistakes or slips of memory in between without needing to go through that filtering & review process (even though you could say, surely his memory would be sharper a few years after the franchise folded, than three decades later).

He has clarified that the game went through many developmental stages, but even if he wrote every bit of those quests himself when the rules were finalized for each published edition, there's also the issue of the game being handled by other teams for the localized versions. Even so, isolating issues in the 1st & 2nd editions in English is helpful, but it doesn't necessarily tell us much, other than leading us to suspect he made mistakes that were never caught, or changed his mind but didn't want to own up to it (if we're going to impute motives to discrepancies like this). Again this is speculation, not fact. We've seen clear examples where errors have been copied even years later, despite oversight (granted, the republished errors in the remake versions up to and including Frozen Horror are more easily explained by a "don't change anything unless legally required to" attitude that seems to have been the driving principle AH was going with prior to receiving much fan feedback).

[Rafa_el_Vikingo]

Thanks HispaZargon for sharing it and for your contribution to this project.
I hope everyone enjoyed the interview as much as I did. Just wanted to add that Stephen Baker is a true legend and a great guy. Thanks again Stephen!

[Daedalus]

The only other OG designer on record about the design of HQ is Rick Priestly, and I wouldn't want to get into it with him online based on the tone of his leak and his reputation.

Do you mean Bryan Ansell (RIP)? He was allegedly the one who left that one notorious comment on a blog way back when, claiming that GW did most of the work to turn the prototype 'poor imitation of D&D' into a playable game. At least, the comment's username was 'Bryan Ansell' - it might not actually have been him. Nowadays it just says 'Unknown', but you can see the original in Jordan Sorcery's video on HeroQuest.

Bryan recently passed away so I don't think we'll learn anything more from him about that...

Yep--I was thinking of Bryan Ansell. Who knows--maybe Stephen can relax now and share some history . . . NAAAH!

I wonder what has/will come of Bryan's massive collection of old-school Citadel Miniatures?

[cornixt]

A lot of the old GW crew are giving rather frank interviews now, maybe someone could get some HQ questions in front of them.

[Kurgan]

I'd love to hear their side of things. Encarmine gave the impression there are good relations between the companies. If any no longer are working for either company there may be some kind of non-disparagement clause in their NDA or whatever so even if they did have a real beef with one or the other they might not be able to say it... even so, there's a kind of professionalism that may prevent them from burning bridges and casting things into the most charitable light possible. Makes me think of how practically every DVD has a disclaimer on the commentary track saying the views shared are of those individuals and not necessarily of the company or its affiliates, etc.

[Daedalus]

ReV: How about the Dark Company quest? Were you involved?

SB: I wrote this after leaving Hasbro in 1992. Hasbro wanted a bonus mega-quest to put into a new versions of the HeroQuest game. This was confusingly called the Advanced Quest Edition, even though it had nothing to do with Advanced HeroQuest.

Next time someone talks with Stephen, they should ask what a Ring of Brilliance confers on a Hero. Maybe he would recall . . .

[Tott]

Brilliant interview, what a Legend. Can you imagine being asked for a clarifiction on a rule that you wrote three decades ago! love it.

[Kurgan]

I could imagine him saying "whatever you want it to be..." but then he might remember what they originally had in mind for it.

Dark Company is presented as kind of a super challenge for players of HQ that might be the final quest people play before moving on... but then again it WAS packed in with a version of the game system, so in theory it would be the second thing people play before reaching out to other expansions. You could imagine it having some lasting perk rather than just a trophy to put on the wall so to speak. Leaving players to just make it up wouldn't be out of the question. RotWL was released in 1989 and it had a cliffhanger ending. Clearly the players were left with the option to make up their own "ending" or continuation of that (Crypt of Perpetual Darkness in the mythic set ends on another kind of cliffhanger, meant to spark your creative juices for future adventures...). It's even more pronounced now in the remake because you flip to the next page and boom... there's the blank map staring back at you. THAT is the next quest right there.

Dark Company is tough... it's like 4 or more quests in a series together (thought not nearly as tough as Frozen Horror or even Mage of the Mirror!). I've played it in modified form.

Stephen Baker is such a treasure trove of information, I hope his association with the company lasts and they continue to let him put this content out for fans who want to learn more.

[wallydubbs]

Next time someone talks with Stephen, they should ask what a Ring of Brilliance confers on a Hero. Maybe he would recall . . .

Maybe he kept it in mind for The Prophecy of Telor and replaced it with the Ring of Fortitude. It IS the reward for that quest pack. After playtesting his new game I asked for an interview at some point down the line. I think this would pose a good question.