Advanced Heroquest Reborn - The Heroes

The clocks went forward this weekend which means lighter evenings and hopefully more miniature painting. Unfortunately the lens for my camera has sadly expired and all my spares are either zooms or fixed focus lenses, none of which are suitable for photographing miniatures. Because of that I'm trying to use a tablet for photographing miniatures as you'll see below. 

For the Advanced Heroquest Reborn project the first two heroes are now complete, actually more to the point, the first two figures of the project are complete!

They are, the human fighter Heinrich Löwen and the dwarf warrior Sven Hammerhelm. 

 

Sven underwent a substantial change from when you last saw him to bring him closer to the artwork found in the rule books.

 Source: Terror In the Dark - Games Workshop / Colin Howard (1991)

The parts I used for these two figures are:

Heinrich Löwen
Body - Empire State Troops
Arms - Empire Free Company Militia
Sword - Original militia cutlass removed, replaced with an alternative militia sword
Head - Empire State Troops (preceding 5/6th edition plastic box set, now out of production)
Feather - As above
Pouch (dagger removed, side re-sculpted) , bottle, treasure chest - Bretonnian men at arms set
Rope - Mordheim accessories
Shield - 1990's blank circle shield, parts from dwarf shield sprue (unknown)

Sven Hammerhelm
Body, arms - Dwarf warriors (6th edition, now out of production)
Hammer head - Dwarf warriors
Head, helmet removed - Dwarf warriors (6th edition, now out of production)
Helmet - Dwarf warriors

Backpack, self sculpted, bag - Bretonnian men at arms set

Next I plan to paint a few of the henchmen before facing up to the challenge of painting twenty Skaven.

Advanced Heroquest Reborn - The Heroes

I thought I'd kick off my Advanced Heroquest Reborn project by taking a look at the heroes that would be taking on the Skaven menace deep below the Old World.

Interestingly the box art featured the original set of heroes from Milton Bradley's Heroquest, along with the full set of monsters from the same game, the familiar zombie, scimitar wielding Orc and the shifty looking Goblin to name but a few. However beyond the box art and a set of character sheets they didn't really feature within Advanced Heroquest itself.

The Box art featuring the original adventurers - Source : Advanced Heroquest (1989)

The game itself introduced a new group of heroes who featured heavily in the artwork and fiction of the rulebook. While they followed the common fantasy adventurer grouping of a human, dwarf, elf and wizard one noticeable change was the omission of the human barbarian for an armoured human soldier. They were named Heinrich Löwen (the fighter), Sven Hammerhelm (the Dwarf), Torallion Leafstar (the Elf) and Magnus the Bright (the wizard).

The "replacements" in action - Source : Advanced Heroquest (1989)

The miniatures themselves were early Games Workshop plastics, at that time Citadel and Marauder miniatures tended to be of the lead variety. They were comparable to the plastic miniatures commonly found in table top games of today, fairly soft detail but enough to clearly reflect the characters in the game book artwork. Apparently they painted up well as shown in the picture below, although I have to confess I don't remember painting them myself when I owned a copy of Advanced Heroquest.

Miniatures; painted by Phil Lewis (image from Stuff of Legends)

These models still pop up on eBay on a fairly regular basis and I did originally think about buying myself a set. However common sense eventually prevailed and I decided not to play into the hands of profiteers and overpay for what are some old and fairly simple plastic models. In fact it was that decision that was pretty much the beginning of this project.

And with that mention of my project it leads us nicely onto my vision of the heroes. Taking the artwork and the original models I built up my first mock-ups of how I envisage Heinrich, Sven, Torallion and Magnus to be.

With the Elf, I'm really limited in parts and I'm honestly not sure if that's a male or female head on my figure! However one thing I wanted to do was to get rid of the highly impractical bow in one hand, sword in the other pose of the original figure. And yes, I know, you're probably thinking the dwarf, Sven, is not even close to the art work and so as I write this there's a head swap taking place.
 

Painting wise, I'm going to start with Heinrich the warrior. In my next Advanced Heroquest Reborn post I hope to go into a bit more detail about how I built and painted him.

Buried Treasure?

A while ago my father asked me to take some of the huge collection of old miniatures that'd I'd left behind when I left home, almost 20 years ago. Of course in recent years I'd built up a sizeable collection of my own which was filling my own home but I took a few figures that I'd found buried deep in a box and promptly forgot about them.

When I started painting metal figure were by far the best option, plastics were far behind the models you see today. But as time progressed they caught up and I found myself painting them and my vast collection of lead and white metal figures were discarded into boxes to gather dust. I remember at one point I'd do anything to avoid painting metals, so old and out of date was how I viewed them.

Back to the present and I wanted to try a new way of stripping paint and so I decided these old figures would be good for a test. The paint stripping was a success (and will feature in a future blog post). After reading an excellent blog, Realm of Chaos 80s, I began to to look at the figures and see them in a new light.

Sure some of them were certainly worth something on eBay, I'd seen some of the figures selling for between £5 to £50! But really I have no desire to sell them, I feel inspired to give some of them a chance to be repainted rather than cashing them in for a short term gain.

So what did I find?

Here's some of the highlights:

First up a set of figures from the 90's game Warhammer Quest. The Pit Fighter and Chaos Warrior were playable characters, the rest were NPCs from the Lair of the Orc Warlord expansion pack (left to right Gubbinz the Jester, Bogoff the Snotling and Growler the Squighound).

Next up was part of large group of undead, I seem to remember writing a lot of undead scenarios for Warhammer Quest. If my memory serves me well these are all 1990's Wraiths, with the exception of the figure at the bottom left. This one is a 1980's Wight, made from lead.

Finally we have a collection of hero figures that I used over several years. The Golden Wizard and the Dwarf Pirate were more recent figures. The 2 Dwarfs were part of a larger group I had when I played advanced Heroquest in the late 80s / early 90s (before playing Warhammer Quest).





So is nostalgia going to be all it seems? I certainly have happy memories of the times when I played games with these very figures and maybe I was wrong to write off these figures all those years ago. Will they paint up well second time round or have me rushing back to painting newer plastic and resin figures? Well keep reading and I'm sure future posts will hold the answers.