r/HardCoreHeroQuest

I have played English HeroQuest since its release in 1989.

The 1st Edition contains The Maze as its opening quest, & features Spears as a weapon type, as well as Traps in the Treasure Deck. (These were renamed Hazards in International HeroQuest 2021 to avoid player confusion over room traps & Treasure Deck traps).

All subsequent releases of HeroQuest, changed a few things for the sake of correction, clarity, or localisation.

American HeroQuest 1990 swapped out the spears for daggers, & changed the Equipment Deck for an Armoury Board.

Japanese HeroQuest 1991 changed the whole game, even making Grimdead the enemy rather than Morcar/Zargon.

There are actually 1000s of changes to the game over the editions, & regional releases, which is why it's nice to have International HeroQuest 2021 these days, as it attempts to unify the HeroQuest experience.

Still, even after 37 odd years, HeroQuest is basically the same at its core, with the Combat-Dice being the most iconic, & persistent practical element of the game, & the Body & Mind statistics being the most persistent mechanical element of the game.

It's for this reason that HardCore HeroQuest keeps to the Body & Mind statistics, & sticks with Combat-Dice, as without those elements, the game really isn't HeroQuest.

You can get everything done with very little if you are creative, & knowledgeable. You don't need multiple polyhedral dice, nor multiple different attributes to resolve game situations, you just need to use the tools that HeroQuest provides to their fullest, & your adventures can be as deep as any big-book RPG, with very little of the time, & financial commitment.

Suffice to say creativity is the greatest tool for any table-top adventure gamer, role-player, or war-gamer, & the systems within HeroQuest have never let me down.

Between 1989-1996 we played HeroQuest to the point it was uninteresting to us, as compared to Advanced HeroQuest, Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer Quest, World of Darkness, & Cyberpunk, it was too simple.

We all loved HQ though, so we decided to modify the rules for our club in 1996, adding elements from other games that we liked, both table-top, & video-games.

Table-top inspiration mostly came from World of Darkness (1991), Vampire: The Masquerade (1991), & Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1992).

Video-Game inspiration came from The Elder Scrolls (1994), Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (1996), Diablo (1996).

Later inspiration was taken from Demon's Souls (2009), & Dark Souls (2011).

A key element of all of the inspiration for HCHQ is the use of fundamentally balanced, mathematically calculated systems shown in charts, & tables.

Above you can see some examples charts in the Diablo, Vampire: The Masquerade, & Dark Souls books.

With a balanced system beneath the fluff on the surface, the game is easy to scale. Additionally we use a decimal system for money, making things cost 100s, up to 1000, as it keeps the economy easy to manage.

We also have the conversion charts for automatic HQ enemy statistics generation by assessing the equipment represented on the models themselves. This is another example of why an underlying system is better for serious players than pulling ideas out of nowhere.

HQ was a great game for us as children, but as teenagers it had to grow with us or be left in the past. We decided to carry HQ forwards as HCHQ, & still today we play our way, the way we've enjoyed HQ for 30 years, the HardCore way!