In case you haven't seen it, Jody Macgregor has a review of HeroQuest: The Fellowship of Four on PC Gamer that's interesting for two reasons. First because the book came out 33 years ago (not that I'm complaining; a good review is worth waiting for) and second because Jody might be the first person in 33 years to spot the four literary antecedents that I drew on (oh, "swiped from" if you must) to spice up the narrative styles of the mage, elf, barbarian and dwarf.
That said, he did overlook the nod to Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses in the opening chapter, which begins with the narrator falling from an altitude of several thousand metres. I didn't attempt to emulate Sir Salman's prose style, which I'll confess is a mite too rich for my tastes.
There's little chance of the book ever being republished, nor the sequels, as the fellow from Hasbro really didn't like it much. Backers of the Jewelspider Patreon might have seen glimpses, but that's only a rumour and I can't possibly comment. And I see you can buy scans from HeroScribe.org. Failing that, listen to the insightful Mr H J Doom talk about it on Fantastic Fights.
It was interesting to see your inspirations. When I read this at age 11, I got a sense that the dwarf was a comic relief character. I like that your inspiration for the fae folk was the point of view of a psychopath. Makes sense, as there was not much feeling in the elf section as far as I can remember.
ReplyDeleteI also suspect that you put way more thought into the personalities of these characters than anyone at GW ever did. I suspect they created the Mind stat to try to balance the difference in the Body stat because it barely comes up in the original game. I then suspect they created the wizard and the barbarian first and then the elf, who was approximately 1/2 barbarian, half wizard and finally the dwarf who had the trap special ability. Bish bash bosch.
The elf in the book was more or less the kind I put into Dragon Warriors and Knightmare, indifferent to the fate of mortals. I don't know if that's the kind of elf the HeroQuest creative team (ie GW) had in mind, though. It could be another reason why the guy at Hasbro didn't like my HQ books.
DeleteAlso, I suspect that the battle order rules in The Fellowship of Four was what you wanted to do in Blood Sword until the editors forced maps on you. Is that right?
ReplyDeleteI was going to read the wizard chapter as part of the school reading competition audition, but forgot the book and had to quickly borrow something that had far too many words in that I hadn't seen before. Which is a shame, because if I would have got through, I think the dwarf section would have been good to read.
I can't remember now how I was going to handle Blood Sword combat before the notion of tactical maps got tacked on, but I reckon that battle order system would have done the job fine.
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