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The Alchemist's Bench: Archives Issue #4: April 21, 1999

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IN THIS ISSUE WELCOME NEWS New Material on Red Dragon site; Karnov moves QUEST and ATTACHMENTS ChaosWar and cave tiles. FEATURE Finding HeroQuest sets and used miniatures online GAMEMASTER HINTS Incorporating Other Game Components into Your HeroQuest Adventures IN THE STORES MicroTactix Games NEW MONSTERS Giant Spiders WELCOME! The Alchemist's Bench is a completely free e-mail based newsletter that exists to provide information, ideas and interesting new gaming material for Milton Bradley's terrific yet out-of-print HeroQuest boardgame. Also, feel free to visit our website for back issues of this newsletter and assorted other goodies. It's small but growing fast, and, like this newsletter, it's free! The URL is http://www.heroscribe.org/thealchemistsbench/ A WORD FOR SUBSCRIBERS WHO RECEIVE OUR ATTACHMENTS Different internet providers impose different restrictions on the size of attachments that their users can receive. If an attachment is ever too large to come through your server, or if it ever gets 'garbled' in the transmission, simply click on the links provided to download the files that were in the attachment. (These links are found throughout the newsletter, as part of the articles that describe the downloads. Several are in the "QUEST and ATTACHMENT" section, below.) NEWS Karnov has moved his site. Red Dragon ( http://members.fortunecity.com/ozgurhan/games.htm ) have added several new room overlays and a new link to their site. Work continues on the quests in the campaign pack they're developing.   QUEST and ATTACHMENTS CAVE TILES by Dewayne Agin The first quest pack that I ever wrote was called Chaos Wars. I was fairly pleased with the quests except for one thing. The first quest took place in a cave. I created a map for the cave using the regular HeroQuest board. As versatile as the HeroQuest board is, I just couldn't get it to work the way I wanted it to for this quest. There were several problems with the cave system I created using the HeroQuest board. In a cave, if you have never been in an area before or don't have a map, you don't know what is up ahead. On the regular board, though, you can guess what is up ahead - there could be a room there or there, the passage must turn left at the end, and so on. I wanted to simulate more of the feel of exploration than I could get with the regular board. The second problem I had with the regular board was darkness. I wanted the Heroes to have to carry a light source. When in a cave, your light illuminates only a little bit in front of you and a little bit behind you. I wanted to be able to place the passages and rooms on the board as the Heroes got to them to simulate this, instead of having the entire board laid out in front of the players. QuestGnome and I have been talking about releasing some tiles to alleviate these problems. After much discussion about the design, I went to Ron Shirtz for the artwork. He came up with the tiles that are included with this issue. I hope you enjoy them. With the tiles I am releasing the first part of my Chaos Wars quest pack, oddly enough entitled Chaos Wars. I hope to release more quest packs using the Cave Tiles in future issues of the Alchemist's Bench, along with the rest of the Chaos Wars quests. For those of you who receive versions of this newsletter that don't include attachments, the quest can be downloaded from http://www.yeoldeinn.com/downloads/quests/agin-chaos-war.zip Cave Rooms 1 - 5: http://www.yeoldeinn.com/downloads/tiles/shirtz-caves-cave-01.zip http://www.yeoldeinn.com/downloads/tiles/shirtz-caves-cave-02.zip http://www.yeoldeinn.com/downloads/tiles/shirtz-caves-cave-03.zip http://www.yeoldeinn.com/downloads/tiles/shirtz-caves-cave-04.zip http://www.yeoldeinn.com/downloads/tiles/shirtz-caves-cave-05.zip The tile art is Copyright 1999 by Ron Shirtz and Dewayne Agin, permission granted to print for personal use only. Please take note of the restrictions described in the enclosed "Read Me" file.   FEATURE QUESTING FOR COLLECTIBLES ONLINE by Dewayne Agin (some material by John Burnham and Nathan Stout)     GAMEMASTER HINTS INCORPORATING OTHER GAMES' COMPONENTS INTO YOUR HEROQUEST ADVENTURES By Lou Harland     IN THE STORES MICROTACTIX GAMES by QuestGnome     NEW MONSTERS GIANT SPIDERS by Dewayne Agin   End of Issue 4 See you next time!

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