Grab Your Lantern, Adventure Awaits!

Warhammer Quest si the classic adventure game by Games Workshop. Recently, Games Workshop annouced that they would be continuing their re-releases of Warhammer Quest with Shadows Over Hammerhal.  With that in mind, I thought it’d be nice to have a look at where Warhammer Quest started, as well as reflect on my own personal experiences of it.

The original Warhammer Quest was released in 1995. I was too young at the time to have played it then. I have since however, procured a copy. The original Warhammer Quest gets a lot of love from older gamers and from my experience with the game, that love does not fall completely down to nostalgia. It really is a great game. You and your fellow players create a party of heroes; elf, wizard, dwarf and barbarian and set off on your quest. Several expansions did add extra character options and anyone looking to get hold of copy shouldn’t ignore those. The game does support the use of a game master but does not use one by default. Instead it uses a series of esoteric rules, cards and tables to allow you and your friends to go on a quest in a fully co-operative way. You explore the dungeon together, placing down the rooms one by one and finding out what horrors or treasures lie down each passage and within each chamber.

The goals of the quests are determined at random allowing for a staggering amount of variety. I’d like to stress that Warhammer Quest is the closest thing to a truly Game master-less roleplaying game I have ever come across. It’s not simply a boardgame, but an epic adventure in a box. Want to betray your team mates? You can. Want to nobly sacrifice yourself to save the party? You can. It’s a game that lets you play your character how you want to.

It originally shipped with an extra book, the roleplay book and might I say, this veritable tome is one of the greatest publications in all of tabletop gaming. It added a staggering amount of options and variety to an already solid game. Among the additions are rules for travelling to settlements and the encounters of the journey there and back. It expands the encounter rules with full d66 tables, ensuring you never know what’s round the next corner. Literally anything can happen when playing with the roleplay book. Your party might have gone into the sewers of a town to defeat some Skaven that are poisioning the wells only to realise that they have slammed a portcullis down behind you, blocking your party’s escape. You might run into wretched prisoners and have to decide what to do with them or have part of the tunnel collapse.

I really love the original Warhammer Quest, I might, if I were in the right mood, even claim it to be my most favoured game of all time. My favourite memories of the game include me

using the Witch Hunter expansion rules to create my zealous witchfinder, Friedrich von Salazar. Many a heretic, demon and monster hath died on his holy rapier or through a shot from his flintlocks. Spending many late nights, half-forgotten through inebriation, Friedrich and his companions have saved the fates of many a kingdom in the Warhammer world.

Games Workshop recently rereleased the Warhammer Quest, in an Age of Sigmar variety. I can’t say I was taken too much on it. The models were awesome and the general quality of production is what we’d expect of Games Workshop. The problem was however, that the setting, Tzeentch’s ‘Silver Tower’ was an utterly boring adventure locale. The dungeon tiles that came with the game were whimsical and arcane but thoroughly bland and failing to conjure up any meaningful sense of place. Even worse, the newer version of the game failed to include anything like the roleplay book of the original, which is a huge shame and a real missed opportunity in my humble opinion.

As I said at the start, Games Workshop have announced another remake that expands on those things found within the Silver Tower remake, only this time it’s not even co-operative; it requires a game master. Shadows Over Hammerhal will however, have rules for characters travelling into the town and gaining more equipment with a more consistent and ongoing feel to it generally. I can’t in all honesty say I’m optimistic, but I’ll try to be. What I’d really like to see would be a straight reprint of the original. I’d buy that without a thought.

I hope you enjoyed my trip down memory lane. Have you played WHQ? What about one of the remakes? What do you think? Drop a comment below and let me know!