Sunday, October 11, 2020

Impressions of the Warhammer Quest Roleplay book

 I’m a fan of Advanced Heroquest. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a tabletop dungeon crawl, and that includes full fledged RPGs like AD&D. I’m of the opinion that Advanced Heroquest is like a reimplementation of OD&D’s dungeon adventures with different mechanics. In some ways the mechanics are straight better, such as it’s method for handling traps and random NPCs.

However, while playing it I felt that some important aspects of full role playing campaigns were missing, and that maybe grafting bits of OD&D on to Advanced Heroquest would result in a deeper game with more long term appeal.

The folks at Games Workshop might have had the same idea because their successor game, Warhammer Quest, does exactly that. The Roleplay book adds an over world, with point crawl travel between randomly generated settlements with their own random services, events, hazards, and expenses. Quests and Events can be picked up in town which would lead to a new dungeon, and characters can train to increase their attributes and upgrade their equipment.

It’s not as deep as Advanced Heroquest’s charts but it doesn’t require as much dice rolling and table lookup, because the charts are streamlined and provide immediate results. Warhammer Quest Roleplay adds a lot of depth to the chassis of the board game. It lacks the open ended ness of a full role playing game, but it has more concrete content than most rpg books. 

I’m of the opinion that if you just want to get a few friends together and tell a story, then you don’t actually need a game system, especially if you have a referee.

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