Quest 5 - The Rescue of Sir Ragnar

"Sir Ragnar, one of the Emperor's most powerful Knights, has been kidnapped. He is being held prisoner by Ulag, the Orc Warlord. You are to find Sir Ragnar and bring him back to safety. Prince Magnus will pay 200 gold coins to the character who rescues Sir Ragnar. The reward may be split between several adventurers, but no reward will be paid if Sir Ragnar is killed whilst escaping".
                                                                                                                                            Mentor


It's been a while since the last quest and there's been a few developments. We are going to continue alternating between quests from the original game system and the fan-made 'Chronicles of Sir Ragnar', using two different groups of players, but the original Barbarian can't commit to regular games, so we have a new one. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the last Barbarian being slaughtered in the last game :(.
Rather exciting for me is that somebody else volunteered to play Morcar for this quest at least, and I get to play as the Barbarian. Even better, we are playing with a variant map so none of the players know where Sir Ragnar cell is. The variant maps are by Zenithfleet and can be found here http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=1463&hilit=all+heroes+die


Anyway, my new Barbarian is called "Rend". As a brand new Hero he has no equipment as yet. The Dwarf Grimgold is unchanged, as we decided to double the price for all equipment and he doesn't have enough gold even to buy a shield.
Amazingly, Bretal the Elf decided to keep the treasure chest and the 250 gold inside that belonged to Prince Magnus! This means he is now outlawed and will never become a Champion. After the bloodbath in the last quest the Elf figured he needed the gold more than he does his love of the love of the Emperor. He's never cared too much for humans anyway and his priority is to stay alive. Bretal has bought a shield and now has 3 combat dice in defence rather than 2. He still has 150 gold from his ill gotten gains left over for later.
Merkai the Wizard bought a staff, and can now attack with 2 combat dice, including against enemies that are diagonally adjacent. With a dagger already in his possession that he can throw if needs must, he is arguably now the most powerful Hero at the moment, with his Fire, Water and Air spells beefing him up.




To recap, Sir Ragnars companions managed to escape Ulag's dungeons in the previous quest. Mentor has thus sent the regular Heroes in to bust out Ragnar himself.
Rend takes the first turn, searching for treasure in the large central room and finding 20 gold. Nice start.

A gaggle of goblins right inside the front door. They were dealt with in short order by all four Heroes acting in concert.

And then, true to form, the group starts to split up again!! My Barbarian ducked around the corner to the eastern corridor, but the Dwarf goes the other way and the Elf, never a team player at the best of times, goes south and opens the door to find to two orcs. He casts Rock Skin on himself in anticipation of the orcish attack. Fortunately for him the Wizard follows him that way, and helps the Elf by killing one of the orcs with Fire of Wrath.

Rend continues east and confronts another Orc guard. I'm more than happy with my first attack, rolling 3 skulls and not even giving Morcar a chance to defend. Rend is living up to his name so far.

Flushed with my success I went through the door alone. The room was empty (except for another door), but a Potion of Strength was found. Grimgold decides to follow me this way but is taking some time on his stumpy little legs.

Bretal scouts on ahead and finds a secret door into a small room, that has a pit trap just inside. Without a tool kit (or a dwarf), the Elf and Wizard have no choice but to jump it if they want to continue that way.

....whilst Rend and Grimgold open the door to a find a Orc and some potential goodies...

The Elf opens the door to the second small room and we all hold our breath as this is the room where Ragnar is found in the official quest. But only a zombie is there. A nice opportunity to use my newly converted Zombie.

Merkai deftly jumps the pit trap, runs to the aid of the Elf and destroys the Zombie with a precise blow from his new staff.

After slaying the Orc we greedily move on to the furniture. I decide not to search the chest for traps (as I didn't want to 'waste' an action and let Grimgold to steal the treasure from under my nose on his turn, and promptly lose 1BP to a spear trap!). The chest itself is empty :(.
Grimgold searches the cupboard and gets hit with another spear! Morcar is in stitches at this point.

After an easy start the quest starts going badly, and all because we wouldn't work as a team. Again. Merkai draws a wandering monster card, and the Elf has already moved away beyond the pit trap. Thankfully the orc botches his attack.

The dwarf also draws a wandering monster! This orc rolls three skulls and Grimgold suffers two wounds.

 He kills the wandering Orc but opens the door to find all these...

Merkai is also in trouble. Having used Sleep to avoid the orc and try to put the pit trap between them, he just falls in instead. Whats more, Morcar rolls well and the orc wakes up after just one turn of slumber.

The situation looking across the board. Grimgold has slain an orc and retreated back to the same room as Rend. The recently awoken orc tries to hit the Wizard down in the pit but misses. Merkai then flees and the orc is killed when it fails to span the pit in its pursuit move.

The Fimir leads his small orc warband into combat with the Barbarian. Rend is now down to just 4BP, so I swig my potion of Strength. This helps Rend bring down the Fimir in one attack. The two Heroes then finish off the orcs, taking one each, but not before my Barbarian has suffered another wound.

Bretal is off on his own again, this time scouting the dungeon towards the west. He slays another goblin and pockets the gold stash from the chest. No sign of Sir Ragnar yet though.

I search for treasure hoping to unearth a potion of healing and take yet another hit from an arrow trap shooting from the wall. Down to 2BP!
Not a moment too soon Grimgold locates a secret door and finds Sir Ragnar! I don't think any of us were expecting to find the cell in a corridor space. The special tile is by Valnar Nightrunner.

The alarm goes off but luckily Morcar informs us that there are no more monsters to fight. We've slayed them all and Sir Ragnar's cell is in fact the last unexplored area on the board. We call it a day, happy that no Heroes have been killed this time. All have suffered wounds except that pesky Elf. Grimgold decides to split the reward with me, as we fought all those greenskins together. Merkai and Bretal get only what they found in the dungeon.

This was a nice variation to the quest, and we plan to use some more of Zenithfleet's maps for other adventures.
To be continued...

Monster Menagerie

I realised that I didn't have a posted dedicated to my rank and file bad guys, then decided to show all of them ranked up together. I plan to repaint all of their bases to match each other over the coming weeks. Then I'll post close up photos of the different monster 'groups'; chaos, greenskins, ogres etc.

Edit; I soon realised that this isn't even all of my monster figures. Not even close! I also have a lot more Undead, such as skeletons, including archers and "champions", Ghosts, and Wraiths, many more orcs (archers, crossbows, Warlords etc), tons of warhammer Dark Elves & Beastmen, plus all of my big monsters (Dragons, Hydra's, Giant's etc). This could end up being a long post!!

These are my Black orcs (not pictured above).

Their much darker skin tone can be seen in comparison to the orc crossbowman which has the standard orc fleshtone. This crossbowman is a very old school warhammer metal orc boar-rider. The boar went missing long ago, and I thought it would make a good HQ foot soldier instead.

Cultists! They came in a blister by Reaper miniatures along with the ritual circle. I plan to include the circle in a quest somehow.

Something a bit different from anything I've painted before, Mimic Monsters by Deep Cuts. I believe this monster type originates from Dungeons & Dragons, but it makes a nice addition to Heroquest too; woe betide a Hero who now neglects to search for hazards before plundering treasure items...

I have to say that might be one of my favourite models ever, rivalling many classics from the HQ era of Games Workshop models. It was a joy to paint, and screams fun in a way that many modern miniatures usually don't.

A very surprised Dwarf!!!

A special series of comparison pics for the mini's that came in the old Warhammer Fantasy Regiments box, next to their HQ counter-parts.

Conversion therapy

One of my favourite things in this hobby is modding existing models. There is something very relaxing about planning and executing a nice clean conversion.
In another thread I began showcasing some of the alternative figures I'll be using for the official HQ expansion packs. In this thread I'll be plotting my painting progress through a big batch of previously converted models that I plan to use for HQ. These will be additional heroes, monsters etc that might get a run out in some of the fan-made quests. The whole lot is shown below, assembled on homemade bases and ready for painting.

These are figures that I've been slowly gathering from gaming events, model shops and online sellers. Much kudos will be given to any enthusiasts who can identify these models, as I am not even sure about most of them myself.
Stay tuned for regular updates.


A couple more here. Ogres from Against the Ogre Horde that I converted (quite badly) some years ago, and could now do with some TLC. In particular the sword arm of the ogre on the left needs extending in order to match his other arm, and the messy fellow on the right needs to have his bloody bib altered.

This is just a close up of the Wizard Hero from Advanced Heroquest, to show the home-made bases. Very simple (and cheap!), just a cardboard square cut to size as the bottom layer, then a thinner cardboard layer cut slightly smaller, and then both layers glued together. I think it matches the original HQ base design pretty well, once painted.

A close up of the converted dwarf hero, before painting (the model came with this paintjob when I got hold of it). The Hammer and shield was added by me, although I'm not sure yet whether I like this arrangement. Fingers crossed that this conversion makes the grade once painted.

This was a much more successful conversion, to my mind. It's a female barbarian character intended for the Frozen Horror quest pack, made using a plastic wood elf archer with added sword and shield. Unfortunately so far this model has proven very difficult to photograph, but I can assure you she looks bad ***!!!!

This is going to be a female elf for the Mage of the Mirror expansion. She has a plastic dark elf lower half and a metal elf top half (model currently unknown). I also added a plastic quiver and plan to model some boobs to make her look more feminine. Looking forward to see how this one paints up.

I intend to use these two characters for the same two expansions just listed; a barbarian elder and an elven Princess. Both of them have to be rescued in the official quests. Again, I am clueless about the origin of these metal models, having picked them out of in a random assortment at a games convention. The male looks a bit "cossacky", whilst the female might be an ancient greek, but I think they'll work as intended.

This was another fun conversion. A Warhammer 40,000 ork that I feel will make a great boss orc (i.e. Ulag or Grak) now that he has a replacement arm. Placed next to two standard HQ orcs as a size comparison.

Next up we have the mercenaries. The guy on the left a the conversion from a Warhammer halberdier. The shield and halberd were removed and a hole drilled ready for mercenary weapon insert. Any of the pieces of equipment shown below will fit this model now, just like the original HQ mercenary models!

Some more mercs. The two on the left were damaged Advanced Heroquest mercenaries that had their original weapons snapped off. The guy on the right is another Warhammer Empire halberdier (but a different model to the previous one shown, and not a conversion). The yellow and blue uniforms ties all these different soldiers together on the game-board.

These are the four heroes that I'll now be using for the Chronicles of Sir Ragnar quest pack. From left to right; Sneeks the scout, Sir Ragnar, Sarymoor the crossbowman and Garmin the Swordsman. All of them are conversions, except Sarymoor (a metal miniature). I've painted them to resemble a unified band of professional soldiers with a different colour scheme to the mercenaries. Sir Ragnar, one of the Emperor's most able lieutenants, is painted red, blue and yellow to show his command status over both these heroes and the mercs.

A close up of Sneeks and his commander.

I'll be using this converted figure for Grak, the Orc boss. In the US version of the game Grak was an orc wizard complete with spells and artefacts, whilst in the original UK version he was known only for being "Ulag's foul offspring..." It's the latter character that I have created here.

I decided that I wasn't happy with my previous attempt at Sir Ragnar as he was really squat and stumpy looking. I extended his legs and painted his hair and beard black in order to better match his incarcerated self on the left. I think they are quite a close match. Now I just need a model to represent the fallen, traitorous Ragnar who serves Morcar, and I'll have a complete set.

A variant of the Elf Hero, this is the model I'll use as my Ranger. He will have a trio of powerful new spells, which I'll cover in another post.

I believe this model is a plastic warhammer wood elf archer, to which I have just added a shield. The detail on the shield is shown below and is based on images of the Green Man from mythology and folklore.

The Dwarf Hero from Heroquest doesn't really lend itself to elaborate conversions, so I've opted for a simple arms swop.

I picture this guy captured in the moment of a brief rest, stealing himself just before he powers into action smashing monsters to bits with his lethal hammer...

This is one of the Heroes from Advanced Heroquest. I've been trying to get hold of these for a while and finally managed to pick up all 4 Heroes on the cheap. They were all in good condition except for this one - I had to add the plume, shield and an entire new sword arm (hence his inclusion on the conversion thread).

And the whole gang together;