Family Gaming - the tale of the wandering gerbils

It was the end of the Easter holidays so what better to do than break out the dungeon tiles and the Heroquest box and have a game with the kids!

I've simplified and adapted the Heroquest rules to better suit my 10, 8 and 5 year old kids with these rules to also make it more of an RPG game:

• A character can move up to 4 squares. 4 squares is considered a sprint and no other actions can take place.
• Characters gain an action point for every square they don't move; ie a character moving 2 squares gets two actions, a character not moving gets 4 actions.
• Possible actions: 

1. Fight (2 action points)
2. Cast a spell (2 action points)
3. Search, Pick up, Interact, Jump, Disable etc (all 1 action point)

• Characters can move and fight diagonally
• GM decides how hard a task is, some tasks happen automatically some will require a 2D6 roll above a certain number depending upon the difficulty of a task. I.e jumping up to a great height may be 9+, charging down a stiff door might be a 4+. Picking up a potion would be automatic.
• The spellcaster has a range of spells (created from previous games - and new ones can be also be created)- they must rhyme (so she actually has to say the spell) and have a variety of difficulties rolled against 2D6. She gets 1 attack dice and 2 defence
• The boy warrior can use his flail to attack all enemies around him. He gets 3 attack dice and 3 defence
• The girl assassin can throw a knife from 3 squares away. She can also use sneak (tested against 2D6 - usually a 5+) to attempt to go unnoticed. She gets 2 attack and defence dice.
• The sequence of player turns is randomly selected; Tom the Cat is controlled by the first player each turn. He gets 1 attack and defence dice.
• The kids should be thoughtful about their actions and the consequences they may bring!

The scenario:

The children had been left home alone by their slightly neglectful parents(!) and decided to play with their new pets, the gerbils named Jeff, Joe and Larry. The gerbils were happily playing in their spheres, running around and smashing into the furniture when out of nowhere Tom the Cat appeared and leapt onto Larry's ball. Pandemonium ensued as somehow there was a multiple collision and all the ball's lids popped open and the Gerbils scarpered for it, running underneath the kitchen cupboards before Tom could strike. 

The kids were incredibly upset but decided to have a good look for their pets (once Tom was safely moved away). During their search they found a secret trapdoor under a rug in the dining room and carefully lifted up the door to see where it led; they slowly descended the stairs into the gloom. Tom running down with them... 

After some fruitless searching in the first underground room, Sebastian the warrior boy opens one of the doors to find a man running towards him in terror. Sebastian decides to continue walking past him, completely disinterested,  towards the door at the end of the corridor! Lily the Sorceress decides to engage him in conversation after calming him down. Bob (the man in terror) tells our adventurers that there are monsters down here that are all controlled by a witch and a wizard and that he was trapped down here after he was fixing some of the sewer pipes and he'd really like to retrieve his tools. When asked if he'd seen any gerbils, he replied (slightly agog) in the negative. He did offer to help them with their task though.

Willow the Assasin says she will accompany Bob and that he should stay close to her as she's the best fighter. Sebastian the boy warrior starts bickering about this comment. Lily the Sorceress opens the double doors to discover three skeletons and some treasure.

Sebastian the boy warrior charges straight into the skeletons swinging his flail, taking two of the boney foes down. Lily the Sorceress decides to leave her little brother to fight by himself and selfishly search the treasure. She draws a wandering monster card  and is attacked by a Zombie. Sebastian guffaws!

Meanwhile Willow the Assassin decides to search the corridor rather than help her slightly overwhelmed siblings. She finds a secret switch which leads into a small chamber. Using her remaining action points she searches the room to find Nothing! She has a bit of sulk. Bob panics a bit due to his claustrophobia.

Sebastian the boy warrior and Lily the Sorceress join forces to wipe out the undead in the room using a combination of spellcasting and flail damage. The boy manages to complete a difficult jump onto the remains of the next floor and searches the treasure chest to find yet another wandering monster - another zombie!

Lily the Sorceress this time comes to her little brother's rescue, dispatching the zombie with ease. No one got hurt (apart from the zombie).

Exploring further into the depths of the dungeon, Sebastian the boy warrior encounters a room with stairs, a crow, some barrels and a ghost in front of the only exit.

Sebastian the boy warrior does not hesitate to attack the ghost only to find that his flail does no damage. The ghost wails in sorrow. Lily the Sorceress decides to engage the ghost in conversation (I had a word with my son at this point about considering his actions and the consequences!) and finds out that a witch has put a curse on him! The witch is in the next room and yes he did see some gerbils running past him! The kids are happy!

Lily the Sorceress successfully casts a spell on the ghost, removing the Witch's curse. A handsome man by the name of  Peter is now standing before her and pledges his allegiance to their quest as a favour for his freedom. During all this storytelling, Willow the Assassin again starts rummaging around and again draws a wandering monster card - here comes a zombie!

Sebastian the boy warrior decides to explore the pile of skulls and finds some gems, whilst Lily the Sorceress has a chat with the crow. He is a very clever crow and can speak human and listens intently to their quest. He tells them that the witch is in the next room and that they should be very careful as she is powerful, but not necessarily evil. He admires the kids bravery and grants them all a magic mini egg (cadbury's) which they can eat at any time to gain a power. He then flies off.

Willow the Assassin meanwhile opens the door to the witches lair. Tom the Cat searches the gravestone and unearths another zombie. Willow the Assassin tries to engage the witch in conversation, but soon tires of the Witches impatience and disinterest in their gerbils. The witch tells them to leave her quarters and to leave her alone. Willow the Assassin tries one more time and is threatened to be turned into a frog. The assassin takes some umbrage at this and throws her knife at the old hag! She in turn starts muttering an incantation....

All the adventurers charge in (including Peter, Bob and Tom the Cat), but cannot do enough to stop the witch's spell. Three armoured skeletons are raised to do her bidding.

The foes are vanquished - great teamwork!

Some gems (jelly beans) are discovered amongst the treasure, but they also awake a Werewolf!

And so the adventurers, full of confidence cautiously approach the final room. They see an executioner in front of his rack, two female prisoners and the evil wizard (who looks suspiciously like me - the GM). All the adventurers eat their magical eggs and receive a random gift. Magical armour for the boy warrior, protective shield for the girl assassin and courage spell for the sorceress.

Willow the Assassin sneaks into the room and unseen removes the rope that is holding the prisoner captive to her pole. Sebastian the boy warrior charges into the wizard hurting him with his trusty flail, whilst Tom the Cat and Peter attack the executioner. The assassin, still sneaking around, ties the wizards hands without him seeing and stops him from casting any spells. Great RPGing by her!

Surrounded by his foes the wizard threatens to kill the gerbils that he has trapped in the corner of his room, awaiting to be experimented on. Tom the Cat looks at the gerbils longingly but instead attacks the wizard with his sharp claws, finishing him off!

The prisoners and the gerbils are saved, treasure is taken and they all live happily ever after.

Family gaming pt.2: the depths of the castle

The kids have been badgering me to play another instalment of our family gaming, continuing from the last adventure which ended in the adventurers finding a trapdoor in the ruined castle.

For a dungeon based game we used the Heroquest rules as a starting point, but used these houserules:

All characters can walk 4 squares. If they walk 4 squares then they can also complete two other actions: attack, cast a spell or investigate the area

Characters can instead run 6 squares but forgo any other activity

Investigating the area could trigger a wandering monster or the discovery of treasure, traps or equipment

The spell-casting character (oldest daughter) can cast any spell she can think of (she has to use her imagination). For it to be successful she has to use rhyme in her spell incantation and had to roll under a GM determined amount - dependent upon how strong the spell is deemed. She only uses one battle dice in combat.

My middle daughter and young son had two combat characters so could use three dice in combat. My daughter's character also had a mind control spell which she could cast on an 8+ but easier on a weaker character and harder on a stronger character. And she can throw a knife. My son could attack twice..

Plus lots of other rules I made up as we played to help the flow of the game and keep them interested. Oh and treasure was in the form of jelly beans!

The three young adventurers descend the stairs into a dank and smelly dungeon. The walls are lined with moist moss and there are mushrooms growing through the cracks in the cold stone floor.

Son runs ahead eager to explore and smashes open the locked door with his flail. At the end of the corridor he can see a couple of skeleton guardsmen. The female adventurers explore the room hoping for some early treasure. There is none.

The little fella's not phased by the two skellies, "let me at 'em" he cries!

And they were indeed quickly dispatched with a spell and a swing of the trusty flail. The spell went thus:
"Swords and daggers have us all,
Smash these monsters into the wall!"


Middle daughter decides to leave the fighting to the other two and open the door which was mid way along the corridor.

Inside she discovers a chef hard at work making gruel for all the dungeon monsters. In a bit of rpg fun they had a discussion:
Daughter: "can you help us explore the dungeon?"
Chef: "no I'm busy cooking"
D: can you give us anything to help us on our quest?"
C: "No, I'm busy cooking and I know your type, don't start rummaging through my stuff".
D: "You're not very nice!"
C: "Hmph".


The end of the conversation. So what did my daughter do? That's right with her last available action of the turn she rummaged through some barrels! She was given a 7+ roll to make to enable stealth, which she failed and the chef heard her and ran after her! (Some sort of lesson to be learnt there?)

Here you can see her legging it from the angry chef (sideways?)

As the party moves into the next room, they see a wealthy looking man standing next to some gold chests. Without any hesitation they ran up to him and started rummaging through his gold coin! Should I be concerned? Well they should be, the man is actually a witch who had cast an illusion and the chests of gold turned into zombies!!!

A slightly greedy older daughter faces off against a newly revealed witch and some zombies. She rummaged through those chests without even asking and now they're gravestones. The witch continues an incantation of sorts until my spellcasting daughter successfully casts a freeze spell on the witch with the rhyme:
"Frozen in motion that's what you shall be,
because you're a bad witch who smells like wee wee!"

My middle daughter decides to return to the chef and apologise (worried that he may turn against her). He is pleased with her apology and then warns her of the witch who haunts the nearby rooms. When he is told that she's raised some zombies against her siblings the chef becomes enraged and charges off to confront the old hag!

The Chef joins in the melee and soon all the zombies and the witch are no more. He returns to his cooking, concerned that a pot has boiled over. The kids discover some more chests of coin and gain some jelly beans too.

Intrepid son marches on through the adjoining door where a rickety old bridge spans the sewers. An agility roll was passed and he continues onwards.

But on ringing the bell at the portcullis, a giant stinking rat appears squeaking and trying to bite his ankles! Fight! 

Meanwhile his sisters continue to explore the witches room and in their thorough searching of the gravestones they unleash a wight! Thankfully spellcasting daughter makes up a protective spell whilst they attack the undead witch:


"I need a safety bubble to cover us three,
so we can get away from this witch who smells like wee wee"


A slight repetition of the witches unappealing smell, but successful spell casting none the less.

Middle daughter, trying to harvest as many jelly beans as possible, without actually getting involved in any fighting, notices a section of floor above the room. She nimbly jumps up on the successful roll of a 7+ and finds another treasure chest with gold coin, a battle axe and a scared cat (that used to be the witches familiar). But with the witch dead the cat has returned to it's normal self. She names the cat Tigger and they have a new model in the adventurers party (and a few jelly beans to eat).

Having slain the rat with ease the adventurers, led by the youngest boy approach the final room, a splendid throne room. They notice the ornate decoration as they enter but are soon stopped in their tracks by the sound of a whimpering princess and a nasty looking old dwarf with a walking spellbook. Behind all of this is a dead man on a throne and a set of stairs leading up and (hopefully) out.

I was intrigued by how they would approach this scenario, fully expecting my kids to charge in and fight and look for more gems/sweets. But they had a short consultation (away from me) and starting asking the dwarf some questions..:


Children: "Princess are you ok?"
Princess: "I'm scared and I want to go home"
Children: "Dwarf, why are you being horrible to the princess, what has she done to you?"
Dwarf (slightly taken aback): "Well I've kidnapped her and am awaiting my ransom, but it's none of your business"
Children: "That's quite greedy and not very nice. Do you know all the creatures we've defeated to get here? We're not scared of you and just think you're not very nice"
Dwarf: "Well I'm not scared of a bunch of kids and you can't tell me what to do".
Children: "You should be scared!" And on this note my daughter cast a spell to animate the skeleton!!!


"That old skeleton bring him to life,
we want to cause this dwarf some strife"


Now at this point as GM (and Dad) I was so proud of their approach that I let the spell be cast without a roll and decided that yes, indeed the Dwarf was scared by the skeleton and out-thought by the children. He asks to be spared.


My daughters both say yes and my son says no! At this point I let the dwarf run away and my son instead decides to free the princess. And they all get rewarded!


But possibly I got the biggest reward from playing this with them and watching them resolve situations in a range of different ways that showed a growing thoughtfulness (ie from running straight up to some gold, or rummaging in the kitchen when they had specifically been told not to - towards talking and challenging someone down from a difficult situation).


Oh and here's one of my daughter's spell-sheets. I'll be keeping them so she can use them in future games. Next time we're going to try a watered down Frostgrave.

Dungeon doors

So with a-level results day done for another year (one of my department's most successful too), I've been able to come home to an empty house and have a bit of time to finish up some painting and take some documenting photos and a few show-off ones too. Over the last few posts on my dungeon project, I've been referring to a range of manufacturers models that I've used; for example Grendel Scotia for their scenery, Dark Arts Studios for their treasure chests and Milton-Bradley for their original Heroquest furniture. Today it's the turn of Mantic and their relatively new dungeon doors which I picked up recently from eBay (after some poor attempts at scratchbuilding). You can see that I've added a magnetic strip to the bottom of the doors so I can incorporate them to my modular dungeon tiles:

They are really nice simple sculpts and you can see you get two of each door design. I decided to add some detail from my bitz bix  on some of these, that may help add an extra narrative later to my games:

"..at the end of the dank corridor you see a small, aging door with a white cross painted crudely over the bare wood. If you wish to open the door turn to page 231, if you would like to blow your bone whistle, turn to page 94 or if you have spoken to the hunchback,  turn to the appropriate page  number".

I've been rereading some of the dungeon based Fighting Fantasy novels - Creature of Havoc, Deathtrap Dungeon, Trial of Champions - actually in numerical sequence from 1-300, just to pick up some nice detail from the written word as much as the illustrations to add to my dungeon oeuvre. I've written a whole list of ideas that i can add to my walls, future doors etc and I've also noted down all of the monster encounters with this vague idea of collecting, painting and gaming with some sort of combo of 3rd Ediion Warhammer, Frostgrave, Heroquest and Fihhting Fantasy stats. More on this in a seperate post. Needless to say that my copy of Out of the Pit has resurfaced to be left in different spots around the house as I pick it up and put it down.

So back to the doors. These were painted very quickly. A quick tidy up of some small mold lines. Primed grey (the actual pieces come on a brown plastic) and then black washes on the stone. When this is dry I drybrushed some lighter greys over the top with the lightest colour (almost white) applied to the corner edges of each stone. For the wood I used a combination of lots of different washes from chestnut ink for the redder doors, to sepia, Browns and greens for the other colours. I usually apply the washes after highlighting, but I decided to work the other way around, and it was actually much easier.. So after the washes on the wood were dry and then chose the appropriate wash colour, mixed in some white and painted on no more than three accessibly lighter lines that followed the grain of the wood. Done. Details that I added from my Bitzbox and that were already on the doors, like hinges etc needed a bit of time (I always curse my previous self for going over the top on adding extras when my current self has to paint the bastards) and then some wearhering washes using the same colours as on the doors were applied over the stone. Not including drying times, I reckon each door took 20minutes tops.

I will return to my scratchbuilt attempts of doors, but I need to move on to some other manufacturers stuff to add to my stuff....

Goldhammer. A noble and his dungeon coinage

All gamers need piles of gold, either to expand their collecting habits in the man-cave or for a gaming focus in a dragon's cave. The gold tokens and chests I've used here are a combination of Dark Arts studios and an old citadel lead one (a contrast in weight and detailed texture) and painted simply before the addition of some craft jewels and some gold glitter to add the sparkle that all adventurers seek. I've seen a few other blogs do something similar and the affect is very appealing and easy to achieve and will look great for games of Heroquest, Frostgrave or even for a 3rd edition WFB scenario...

I've also painted up a Citadel merchant/noble to accompany the coins, who'll act as an npc in games, I can imagine him counting the coins with real lust and then commanding some underling dungeon minions to distribute them across the dungeon on behalf of Baron Sukumvit or some such ....

Dungeon scenery part 2 (Heroquest)

Having completed the first set of resin furniture from Scotia Grendel, I felt the urge to go all old school and paint up some Heroquest scenery too. I didn't want to touch my own boxed copy (there's nostalgia attached to the original plastic, unpainted set I own) so I picked up some broken and damaged lots from ebay and set about adding some extra details before painting them up. I have to say that painting such pieces is a real chore to paint (even after using grey primer to speed up the process) and it took all my willpower to persevere and not get side-tracked onto all the more interesting projects, like more npc's for example...

Here's the outcome. You can see that I've used some Styrofoam to add height to the tomb, added extra weapons and barrels to the tables and raised up the altar: 

The alchemists table came to me in good condition, if a bit sparse, so I added a scroll to the desk. The only fun bit is painting a few additional details, like the ink in the pot on the quill.

The tomb was primed grey so it only needed some drybrushed highlights and a load of weathering washes. I was tempted to add some decals to the shields but common sense and need to move on prevailed.

Very quick and easy paint job here, unfortunately the top of the halberd is missing and I forgot to add a new weapon in my haste to progress. Anyone for a metal pole as your weapon of choice/

I raided my bitzbox here and added a load of weapons and other artifacts that I can imagine are for sale from an appropriate merchant. I have now bought the merchant model....

I think this one will be added to the tavern pieces I painted last time around. Again I've got the appropriate npc's lined up (from Otherworld) to paint soon...



And the altar. It's a bit too tall now so the mage/sorcerer that I'll paint up for this will be stood on a step/plinth. I see this as a sacrificial altar (hence the blood) and I was very tempted to freehand an image from the Heroquest rulebook onto the blank page ion the right. Again, common sense prevailed (although it is the small, unique details that can set pieces apart..) I also have some slave girls which I'll paint up to accompany this piece.

Next up I'll paint some of the npc's I've mentioned in the post and I've got a few scratchbuilt bookcases that need some attention too. I'll play some games with my kids soon so I can get some nice set-piece photos with all the pieces included.