Stu: In this post a gaming buddy Dustan, talks about his current project - painting a set of HeroQuest figures for gaming with his young son.

Way back around 1989 Games Workshop and Milton Bradley got together and produced HeroQuest. Set in GW’s Warhammer Fantasy world it recreates the adventures of four Heroes who battle the minions of the evil wizard Morcar (Zargon in America). I decided to paint up this set as something to play with my son who is turning six soon. This is the fourth set I’ve painted, for some reason they always seemed expendable when it came clearing out the cupboards, now it’s out of production I wont let this one escape me!

HeroQuest is a game for 2-5 players and comes with 35 miniatures, 15 pieces of furniture, 20 doors, a large game board and a host of cards, counters and dice. The rules are brief and simple and the quest book contains 14 Adventures. There is no system for creating dungeons as you go however a blank game map was supplied and later an adventure design kit was released.

The board consists of a grid of floor tiles with fixed walls, rubble tokens would block access to some areas to help change the shape of the map. In later expansions overlays were used to radically change the map by adding grassy caves, chasms and other special features.

The Heroes (Barbarian, Wizard, Elf and Dwarf) move around the board with 2d6 movement and are able to search for treasure, traps and secret doors. Combat is resolved using a special set of combat dice, the number of dice thrown in attack or defense was dependent on the combatant’s stat lines.

Searching for treasure allows the players to draw a random treasure card which could be anything from potions, gems, gold, items and even traps or wandering monsters. Each quest has an objective for the Heroes to complete, if they failed either by leaving the dungeon or being killed the Evil Wizard claims victory.

The game is not without its flaws. These issues were addressed by the later GW release of Advanced HeroQuest, which sadly is a little to complicated for casual play. HeroQuest’s flaws are:

• It’s designed more as a board game rather than an RPG it seems to suggest the Heroes  are competing against each other for treasure, this is of course dependant on your players.
• The random movement distances can really slow down this game, particularly if you are a low roller.
• Due to the use of equipment and treasure playing cards expanding the game relied on MB releasing expansions.

Despite this HeroQuest is a good gateway game and I hope it will encourage my son and later my daughter into the hobbies that have permeated my life.

There are many resources out there with new quests, printable tiles and house rules. I have included a few of my favourites to get you started.

• Ye Old Inn - Build your own set with complete scans of all the card components and rules
• HeroScribe - Mapping tool for quest building.
• Old Scratch’s HeroQuest Forum - Dedicated forums, some of the 3d dungeons are neat.

In the next post I’ll show you my work on painting the Heroes and furniture.

As it’s been over six months since I last did any work on the Hirst Arts Cathedral, it’s probably time for an update. Particularly since I’m supposed to be finishing this project!

If you’re a regular visitor you may have noticed I haven’t got a lot of hobby work done this year for a variety of reasons and the same is true of this project unfortunately. I’ve done some minor work around the doors of the left bell tower and finished off the front-piece of the central hall as well as building the back-piece too.

I need to do some more casting of those cursed 1″ x 1/2″ flat gothic tiles to have enough pieces to build the next set of long inside and outside walls. I suspect may also be short of a few other pieces too so hopefully I can dredge up enough Ultracal 30 dust to finish casting.

I’ve given up using those gothic flats for the interior doorways and instead am using the joined gothic square pieces as I have an excess of them cast. I believe they’re meant to be used to build up the double floors needed for the left and right bell towers. However I’ll use painted balsa wood for these square floors as I’d like to make them removable so you can get figures into the towers during play.

The Cathedral is really starting to shape up and I’m considering painting some of the large pieces to keep me motivated. All I need is one big push and I’m confident I’ll be able to finish the major construction work before starting on detailing and finishing off bit and pieces like the flying buttresses etc.

Once that’s done we’ll have to play about 50 games over Mordheim to justify the effort in building this thing!

Another month has been and gone, so it’s time for a Hirst Arts Cathedral update! This has been a rather hellish month for me at both work and home for various reasons, so only a moderate amount of progress has been made since the last update.

Although it’s a little hard to see in this photo I’ve built up all four sides of the first bell-tower and glued them together into two right angled pieces. Considering my reckless disregard for the assembly instructions the tower actually fits together quite well! This tower is almost ready for painting too as only the interior doorways are lacking a handful of those precious and rare 1″x1½” gothic flat tiles to finish them off.

Speaking of which I’m still laboriously casting those pieces three at a time from the two Hirst Arts molds I own that include them. I now have enough of them to build both the front and back walls of the main Cathedral hall before starting work on the second gallery. I haven’t assembled the back wall yet, but you can see the front above, with the addition of this piece I’m almost a third of the way to completing the building phase of this project.

Now that the Cathedral is starting to come together I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have ruined the towers more while building them as it’s going to be very hard to get figures in there during gaming! I’m also beginning to wonder how the heck I’m going to store this large, fragile and alarmingly heavy building once it’s completed…

I’ve mentioned Scrap Dragon in the past and noticed a small story pop up on Tabletop Gaming News recently about how they’ve started carrying Pig Iron Productions lines.

So I jumped onto Scrap Dragon to have a look. They have the entire PI line including all of the packs of sci-fi 28mm heads which are very tempting at $11.09nzd each. I might just have to pick up a pack of the Kolony Rebel heads as part of a long standing plan to scratch together a Necro Scavvie gang. The PI heads mix very well with Games Workshop plastics, which you can see showcased in their gallery.

While I was on there I also noticed Scrap Dragon have also started carrying Hirst Arts molds, Avatars of War figures and even some Forgeworld kits! Clearly I should visit here more often!

This post continues from the previous Cathedral post and I continue to make slow progress on putting this building together. The bottleneck is still the lack of enough 1″ x 1/2″ x 1/4″ flat pieces. I guess this is what the Cathedral instructions may be hinting at when they say “certain blocks may need an additional 20 casts or so”!

The photo shows another dry fit of the various pieces I’ve finished assembling. You can tell it’s a dry fit because if you look at the exterior low wall, you can see it’s leaning out of the base a little. Everything fits together reasonably well, but that’s all. I suspect some rather heavy sanding will be required on a few of the pieces to get them to glue together well - in particular the tall vertical pieces that go between the bell tower and walls.

I’ve almost finished assembling enough pieces to complete this first gallery + bell tower, except of course for those cursed gothic flats. I’ve also laid out the pieces for the two large central end walls and most of the second gallery. Looking at the plans and it’s obvious I’m probably a little over 1/3rd of the way through assembling this ‘Cathedral of the Damned’ for Mordheim as the centre of the building is basically just empty space.

I’ve developed something of a love/hate relationship with this building. It’s starting to come together nicely, but I’m still not entirely sure the amount of effort required to build the thing will justify the final result, nor the amount of game play it’ll see since my gaming group has basically given up on Games Workshop games!

Mick, the owner of Scrap Dragon was good enough to leave a comment on the previous post about GW NZ Pricing. I’m repeating it here because I found it interesting.

We have been reading your comments with interest and we can assure you that Gamers in Australia have the same issues with GW retailing prices. However, to address several issues raised in this thread:

- We are currently looking into the services our website/shopping cart provider provides, so GST is automatically deducted for foreign sales. We have had issues in the past where non-residents have purchased products and wanted them delivered to an Australian address and they thought they did not have to pay GST.

- As Stu states we charge shipping costs via weight. Please keep in mind there can be some differences when comparing for example battlion boxes where there can be a difference in weight.

- We have been selling online (mainly ebay) for 5 years and have over 12,000 positive feedback comments. Our ebay user name is scrapdragonau.

- As for our pricing policy. We are able to offer a 20% discount as we are a home based business (no rent and no staff) and we keep a very close tight control on our stock levels. Our discount from GW Aust is a little more than stated above (not much though)

If you are after something which is not on our website please email us with the list and I can give you a price.

Also if anyone is interested I work less than 10 minutes away from the Gold Coast International Airport and pick ups are more than welcome if you are visiting Australia.

I’ll definitely be using Scrap Dragon for any future Games Workshop purchases and it’s nice to see they’ve been trading so successfully on eBay. Every web seller I’ve dealt with to date has resulted in a positive experience but it is always comforting to view a track record before making your first purchase.

It really is a pity I didn’t discover Scrap Dragon a couple of years ago!

First up this isn’t an attack on GW’s prices as such. At the moment GW’s New Zealand prices are actually on par with GW US prices if you factor in our local 12.5% sales tax, the US/NZ$ exchange rate and add a little for shipping.

However in my opinion this still makes them too expensive to be good value locally. For example I priced up the 1500pt Eldar army that appeared in White Dwarf 323 (Asia Pacific, page 28 sidebar) last year. It works out to $924nz locally, while costing $477USD in the States. In my particular industry salaries are on par in both countries. I used to work in Silicon Valley in 2001 and was paid a similar figure to my current NZ salary. The USD simply has more buying power due to economies of scale.

So I think it’s worth noting that there are several Aussie online retailers that sell Games Workshop box kits below retail. Scrap Dragon for example seem to sell with 20% discount, with the Eldar boxed set costing $120AU instead of the $150AU GW Aussie sell it for. Their shipping fees airmail to NZ equate to about 16% too.

New Zealand citizens ordering from an Australian company are not required to pay Australian sales tax either, which equates to another 10% discount, although it’s hard to say if Scrap Dragon will give you that additional discount or not, or state their prices already exclude Australian GST. The later is more likely since they’re a web store, but I couldn’t find that particular detail on their site.

It is also worth noting that Customs New Zealand generally won’t bother trying to collect GST (NZ sales tax) when the value of that GST is $50nz or less (see Advice for Importing Goods from the NZ Govt site) which effectively means items worth $399nz or less can be imported without incurring GST on arrival.

So assuming we buy from Scrap Dragon and ship airmail to NZ we save…

-20% discount
-12.5% GST
+16% shipping

For a discount of 16.5% all up which is not bad at all, considering delivery times between Aussie and New Zealand are fairly prompt, usually around 5 working days in my experience.

Addendum: I’ve just received an email from Scrap Dragon that states their prices DO include Australian GST which means if you set up an account on their web site and inform them you’re a New Zealand citizen shipping to New Zealand you’ll get an extra 10% off. That pretty much means I’m never purchasing GW figures locally again.