Unsung Heroes

Remember HeroQuest? It was basically a simplified tabletop RPG crossed with an adventure board game. Very much your classic dungeon crawling setup. BoardGameGeek describes it as "Milton Bradley's answer to Dungeons & Dragons", which is a pretty good description. It's been out of print for many years now due to legal issues (although a crowdfunded revival is currently in the works), apparently relating to co-developers Games Workshop, but still remains fondly remembered despite a second-hand copy of the game being likely to set you back at least £60 on eBay, quite possibly much more, to say nothing of the various expansion packs released over the years.

But there were also three -- seemingly pretty obscure -- adventure gamebooks based on the board game. So let's talk about those.

All three books were written by Dave Morris, who this blog's gamebook reviews have encountered once before, as the author of every title in the Knightmare adventure gamebooks. The HeroQuest books came from the same publisher, and were remarkably similar, using the same format of splitting the book between a non-interactive novella and a short adventure.

The first gamebook, The Fellowship of Four, is by far the most interesting from a game design point of view. The HeroQuest board game featured four playable characters -- the Barbarian, the Dwarf, the Elf and the Wizard -- and the gamebook portion features all four as a band of adventurers (they also star in the respective novellas, which are otherwise unrelated to the interactive half of each book). The reader can either treat it as a standard solo gamebook where they play as the whole band, or they can have friends with their own copies of the book each take on a different character (so the Wizard and the Elf have to agree to use their spells, or the Dwarf has to agree to buy anything as he's the one with the money). Much like the original game, the multiplayer option essentially allows the group to play a simplified version of an RPG. There's a full, if basic, combat and inventory system, codewords used to keep track of events, and the Wizard and Elf both have access to a rudimentary spellcasting system. It's impressively ambitious for a 135-section adventure, and the multiplayer format doesn't feel like anything I've seen done elsewhere.

The other two entries in the series, The Screaming Spectre and The Tyrant's Tomb, both have shorter novellas than the first one (about 60 pages compared to the first book's 100+), but also include an original adventure for the board game, both designed for a single player plus GamesMaster (which can get a bit tedious, but oh well, it's a nice idea). The gamebook portion of these latter two entries are also only designed for a single player (the Wizard and the Barbarian respectively), and are a little longer (the second book runs to 148 sections, and the third's to an impressive 193), although they use the same gaming system. The style of the prose is remarkably similar to Morris' earlier Knightmare books, perhaps aimed at a slightly older audience. The last two books lack the novelty of the game design of the first, and The Screaming Spectre feels a bit too linear at points, but they're all solid adventures all told, with some nicely dry humour:

The later entries are at intervals of one year apart -- always dated this night, Samhain Eve, when the spirits of the dead are said to walk the earth. The last reads:

"Awoke early and watched the daylight drain out of the carcass of the sky. Darkness and cold suround me still. Before cockcrow I must find another with rich full veins and the succulent bloom of life. Another little flower to press dry for my collection; another fruiting body to savour."

This doesn't seem as bad as some of the entries, you think. At least Grim Dugald is developing an interest in horticulture to balance against his less wholesome obsessions.

For one final mystery, the books feature a few sparse illustrations, but whoever did these is not credited at all, nor is anyone credited for the cover art -- the cover for the first book is the same artwork as used on the board game, which was done by Les Edwards, so I suspect he did the rest of the illustrations as well, and possibly they were repurposed from the board game and its various expansions rather than being done specifically for the books (apart from the character sheets and maps for the board game adventures in the latter two, which would have had to be specially done).

These are pretty well-written and well-designed, but as with most of the components of the original board game, they're pretty hard to come by these days for a reasonable price. My collection was assembled via second-hand bookshops, and I certainly couldn't justify shelling out for the prices they go for online.