Pimp My Advanced Heroquest Part 5: Specialist Skaven

My main problem with Advanced Heroquest was the lack of variety in the miniatures that came in the box. Aside from the 4 heroes you got 12 henchmen and 20 identical skaven. The idea being that you were 'encouraged' to buy more skaven, including the specialist skaven.

First up are the Skaven technomancer artillerists, the Jezzails and Warpfire Throwers.

A team of Jezzails and Warpfire Throwsers

The Jezzails consist of a skaven wielding an almost comically oversize gun and his assistant to hold the gun in place. These are quite nasty armour piercing fellows.

The two buddies out shooting hoops

The gun holder

The musket

Next up is the deadly warpfire thrower, a warpstone approximation of a flame thrower. Again there is a team of two to work this.

The Warpfire Teams

The Cannon

The ammo

 Then, as the adventurers progress through the Skaven lairs there is the Plague Monks.

Two Plague Monks, the one on the left is cute in my opinion if you excuse the blood.

And the Rat Ogres...

The Rat Ogres

... and their handler.

The Rat Ogre Handler, which can also double as a Plague Monk

Lastly as a bonus I got this two-headed skaven mutant:-

Mutie, mutie mutant

Pimp My Advanced Heroquest Part 2

Firstly, rereading the rules for Advanced Heroquest the system is definitely Advanced for a boardgame! It's a cut-down version of classic WFRP, with d12s used instead d100s. I've managed to cull the majority of the player-size rules into this handy guide. (As an aside can someone let me know if this link works, others have reported issues. You can also get it here). With the combination of that and the GM Reference Sheet running the game should be a lot smoother. You'll probably also need A LOT of these:-

Ah, the D12, the Charlie Brown of RPG Dice!
Never have I bought you in such large quantities before.

AHQ also comes with rules for generating your own adventurers, as well as playing the Heroquest heroes (so you could play a spellcasting warrior high elf, though those are severely nixed in the rules). There are a smattering of new adventures and rules in White Dwarf, including stats for Gotrex, Felix and other novel characters.

To this end I've picked up a few extra pieces to represent new heroes and henchmen:-

New heroes and henchmen for Advanced Heroquest

There's a crossbow wielding barbarian (actually a Dragon Strike goblin painted human), a knight (I like to think of as a higher level Heinrich), an elf Light Wizard (basically a healer), a near-naked(!) trollslayer who can serve as a henchman to any dwarf hero and a female swordswoman for me girlfriend to play.

White Dwarf/Terror in the Dark include rules for dwarf heroes hiring trollslayer henchmen, elf heroes hiring wardancers and wizards hiring apprentices. Warriors get captains to follow them. While I'm still looking for a cheap wardancer and apprentice I'm particularly "amused" by this piece:-

To misquote Del Preston:
"Didn't you think it was a trifle unnecessary to see the crack in the Trollslayer's bottom?"

Pimp My Advanced Heroquest Part 1

"Why did you get into roleplaying?"

It's a question I get asked a lot. Only by myself though when I hand over huge wads of cash for stuff that will inevitably sit on a shelf and see little use. But the answer is Advanced Heroquest was my gateway board game. Yes in true Kerrigan-tradition I started with Advanced Heroquest, not regular Heroquest. But then I always was truly hardcore.

At school in 1990 I was friends with a chap I shall give the not-so-subtle nom-de-plume Mr. Munro. One day I came over unannounced and he, his brother and his brother's best-friend were about to start playing a really elaborate looking game. I have no idea which character I got, probably the dwarf or the elf. I was however hooked. We played for about 2 hours, wandering around a randomly generated dungeon (which is one of the cool things about AHQ). I've no idea how we did, I do remember us finding a grate, seeing a room below it and deciding that as we didn't have a rope we'd go back to town and come back to investigate more fully on our next expedition.

Sadly we never had a 2nd expedition, and I spent a lot of time bothering Mr. Munro to dig the game out again and let us play. I think it put quite a strain on our friendship as he didn't like GMing. I remember one time my knight and 2 henchmen were pretty much wiped out in the first combat. I also remember us using the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay sewer floorplans and actually roleplaying non-combat encounters.

Naturally I wanted this game for myself. It cost a whopping £21.50 in 1990, and I got a mere 50p pocket money and could find no job beyond a few weeks temping as a paperboy. It's a testament to my frugality that I made it to about £18 before my uncle took pity on me and bought me it and the original Heroquest for my Christmas and birthday. Sadly both games did not survive the tender filing systems of teen-Stuart, along with Battlemasters.

Later during my PhD I made an attempt to recapture this game and memories with the magic of Ebay. I was scunnered, an 'appears complete' auction turned out to be missing half the game, including any doors hero figures. Then at Gen Con UK 2003, the one famously ran by Peter Adkison over Easter weekend (where I earned £100 in DMing vouchers, hardly anyone this side of the pond turned up and the trade hall ended up giving a massive slashing to its prices) I found another slightly more complete copy (still no doors). I also nearly discovered the concept of excess baggage on the flight home.

In retrospect I probably should have also bought Warhammer Quest as that's really shot up in price, but hey-ho!

On my most recent trip home I finally brought the boxed set and the expansion. I also decided that playing it with just the bog standard creatures is boring. In terms of miniatures the original Advanced Heroquest was incredibly limited.

On top of 4 heroes, and 12 sets of men-at-arms for the heroes to hire you got 20 identical skaven, with the option to use a different coloured base if an encounter called for a 'special skaven'. This could make the game get repetitive very quickly but they presumably assumed you had the original Heroquest which came with a varied assortment of monsters. By contrast Heroquest came with pretty much everything you needed in the box (hence why that game is probably more nostalgic for 99% of gamers). There are even rules to use everything that came with Heroquest, including the board!

Annoyingly I'm not sure where my copy of Heroquest is, but thanks to Ebay it is relatively straight forward to pimp by Advanced Heroquest and buy miniatures. Bear in mind, none of these are painted by me, and the majority of minis cost about <50p on Ebay. The aim was to get things that didn't come with HQ. This first post will cover mainly the heroes in the box and skaven.

Heroes

Firstly the main characters that came with my second AHQ box:-

The 4 heroes of Advanced Heroquest, Heinrich the Warrior, Torallion the Wood Elf, Magnus the Bright Wizard and Sven Hammerhelm the Dwarf

Currently only Heinrich Lowen, the Knight (and my favourite character, which is why I bought this game at Gen Con 2003 with its expansion) is painted. I need to get the elf, bright wizard and dwarf painted. These are also the only 2 henchmen I have painted.

I don't have my Heroquest, but I'd love to also get the 4 heroes (a barbarian, another dwarf, a wizard and a high elf) from that painted as they are also playable options in AHQ.

Still Heinrich looks cool, if a bit constipated

Skaven

3 out of the 5 monster stats pages in the rulebook are dedicated to Skaven!

As I noted above, fighting hordes of unpainted identical plastic skaven bashing is a bit boring. The game does assume they are the primary antagonists, as evidenced by these 3 pages of monsters. You also only get 20 identical basic warriors, so the game was clearly geared towards collecting Citadel miniatures.For me in the 90s this wasn't possible. I didn't have wads of cash, and I couldn't paint very well. My skills have likely deterioriated since then, but thankfully there's Ebay!

Firstly for about £15 I managed to buy a ridiculous amount of painted Skaven that match the Advanced Heroquest skaven, as well as some new types. Firstly a small number of your bog standard splods:-

Painted Skaven Warriors

I've made the next lot Skaven scouts (basically in AHQ scouts are monsters who can open doors in an attempt to summon more monsters) as they look distinct from the warriors above, and I only have a few of them (scouts are understandably a rare encounter):-

Skaven Sentries

Next up, Skaven Champions, basically your above average skaven fighter:-

Skaven Champions

Next we need a Skaven Warlord:-

Probably going to get replaced with a better picture. Might serve as Prazangar, Prince of Agony, so I can use my amazing Warlord mini below.

I don't currently have any Skaven Gutterunners or Skaven Nightrunners, but I do have a rather nice assassin for Clan Eshin.

Skaven Assassin

Skaven have a lot of weird rules for gunners, such as Jezzailachils teams. Currently I'm still in the market for some of those, but in the interim this warlock with a pistol can serve as the gunner, and I have a few broken skaven missing weapons to serve as his assistant.

No, that isn't smoke, just a reflection effect from the flash.
Shortly after bagging him up his flaming staff broke... again!

Finally an overall leader, either to serve as Prazangor or the Clan Mors Warlord. I actually really like this piece (metal, got it for £1.99 fully painted as the sword was broken. The judicious application by the missus of superglue fixed that).

Skaven Big Cheese

I really like this piece. The Spanish Toledo style breastplate (Estalian Toledo in the Old World) makes this guy look overtly bombastic and OTT. I can imagine him taking it from the corpse of some poor Estalian Diestro.

Anyroads, enough for now. Next time, more heroes and the hordes of Chaos!

RPG Maps 3: The Town

I've moved on to mapping a town (~500 inhabitants, though I suspect I will have too many buildings at this rate). This is the first set of districts I've done - the poorer houses on the southern edge of town.

Newest Batch of Renders...

... are not about to all be posted here. I have been really busy lately and I should make like this guy...




(Alright - here's one. Spoiler Alert!)

This Week's Renders

And this weekend's shorts are...

Computer Game Project Update

And some more screenshots charting the evolution of this game...



I've created a GUI with appropriate icons (though I need to stop it obscuring the action text onscreen), as well as fully animated the 8th Doctor sans coat.




There's also my first NPC, Stohl the Sontaran, who will act as the companion in this adventure in lieu of any blond chavs or posh received pronounciation radio stars.

More Game Mucking Around...

In case you were wondering if my Daz3D graphics are paying off...

Evolution of a 3D Model Part 2

Yet more tinkering with the 8th Doctor model. It seemed it didn't look much like the character so with some advice and a morph file provided by CD2010 for reference I rejigged the face (and thankfully I would add, saved the resultant morphs).

Although I felt the morph I was given looked a little like it was more like Rocky Balboa I used it as a reference to modify my original model... (here's a morph video that shows how far CD2010's morph was from my original model)



Then I had a complete Daz3D crash (probably due to me trying to rearrange all my assets into a logical filing system) and had to work from the ground up again - which in the long run was good as I used a slightly different ensemble to create a more accurate costume...



which I then modified the material of to make it appear to reflect light and give off a more subtle green (or any colour I wished)...





Then I played around with lip-syncing, although rendering these movies was an overnight job.





Lately I've replaced the hair with... er... one that fits. It's a little too OTT on the curls for my liking but it seems to do the job - especially when you play around with the lighting on Daz3D to create some rather nice scenes.

Couple of More Models

Here's a couple of more models I may use in my game... if I don't stop playing in Daz3D.

One is a potential companion for the Eighth Doctor who's costume is designed to compliment his...



... and the other is this guy. Hmmm...



(Actually I used a morph made by a nice chap called Charles or CD2010 for this one but getting the rightish clothes took a while.).

Evolution of a 3D Model

Recently I bemoaned my inability to produce some decent graphics for my games and twittered about finding a decent package to render walkcycles (making the walkcycle for TARDIS Trouble was tough using a pretty awful freeware walk cycle editor for AGS). Thankfully Korvar aka Big Mike of DURPS fame came to my aid - he does visual effects for the USS Intrepid fan films and like many of the other Star Trek fan films the special effects are state of the art - and recommended Daz3D.

The main drawback of Daz3D is that it comes with minimal content preinstalled - Victoria 4.2 - their female model - and a few (skimpy) outfits for her to wear. Daz makes most of its revenue off the model addons it produces and vends for 3rd parties. Thankfully the base models were free for the moment so I was able to install a male model (Michael 4) and with some browsing on their site I was able to find the content I needed for my model.

I decided to model the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann. Surprisngly there's a derth of Doctor Who models on Daz3D.com and other such places - I've seen a really good Chris Eccleston model, numerous Tennants and even a really good Matt Smith, so I decided to give the neglected 8th Doctor a whirl.

Here is where things went a little squiffy - oddly (IMHO though in Naomi's opinion this is unsurprising) there is a lack of male clothing packs for Daz3D compared to the dearth of female packs. You certainly don't get any male stuff with the default Daz3D install - though the Daz3D book I have later acquired gives you a lot of base stuff to work with.

Firstly I installed some packs allowing me the use of a frock coat, frilly shirts and waistcoats. I then fit these to the 3D model and after being told by Korvar how to prevent the "bleed" problem that persists when you try to dress a model in multiple layers of clothing.

My next problem was that despite the effectiveness of my ensemble my model looked like Ken from Barbie:-





(As an aside I do like the pose in the last image there - very Ascension-like).

However the good people at Daz3D were able to give me some hints (the face should be thinner, the chin longer etc.) Truth be told it would really be the hair that made or broke the model, as Doctor Who is a hairjob.

I then morphed the face - which basically involved turning dials until it thinned the face and made the chin more pronounced. I got carried away...



Then I managed to go from that baseline to something looking a bit more realistic...


And here is a comparison with images of the source face... which I think shows I did a fair job for someone who'd never used Daz3D before.





After that it was mostly touching up the model - changing the hair colour slightly, reworking the clothes. I decided I didn't really like the original waistcoat I'd given the model so I swapped it for a silvery "tuxedo" vest. I even found some ready made walk-cycle poses which has enabled me to generate a walkcycle...



and FYI don't ever have a character wearing a frock coat... talk about a nightmare to make a walkcycle...



Next I want to make a better cravat, create more animations for the character and trying to get rid of the jaggedy edge on the transparent renders.