Feature: TSR's Figure-Friendly New Direction

by QuestGnome

A few weeks before Hasbro announced plans to buy Wizards of the Coast ("WotC"), WotC subsidiary TSR revealed several new product lines of potential interest to fans of HeroQuest. In the next few months, TSR plans to release a line of 30 mm miniatures based on Dungeons and Dragons characters and creatures. Next August, TSR will begin publication of a substantially revised (and possibly more miniatures-friendly) version of the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying rules.

Both announcements, which will be discussed further below, took place at this year's GenCon game fair, held August 5th through 8th. This is a HeroQuest newsletter, not a D&D newsletter, so we're only going to focus on selected aspects of this story. If you'd like to read Wotc/TSR's announcements in full, take a look at http://www.wizards.com.

Coming This Autumn: New D&D Miniatures

Rather than continue to license its properties to an outside miniatures manufacturer, TSR has started a miniatures division of its own. The resulting figures should work well for HeroQuest because, unlike past D&D and AD&D minis, they will adhere to the 30 mm scale.

The photos that have been posted on the web suggest that the new figures will be excellent, but we haven't had a chance to see any of them first-hand. Naturally, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, we'll run reviews of them here in the Alchemist's Bench.

According to TSR, the first releases should be available in the next few months. It will be interesting to see if TSR uses its clout in the book trade to place figures in the shopping mall bookstores that carry their games, or if we're going to have to seek these out in hobby shops like other minis. Now that Hasbro is part of the equation, toy chains may also be a possible outlet for obtaining the new figures.

Coming in August 2000: D&D 3rd Edition

With great fanfare, TSR also announced plans to release an updated Dungeons and Dragons Roleplaying System, starting a year from now. The new line will be called "Dungeons and Dragons, Third Edition." Early reports suggest that many of the system's longstanding inconsistent and silly rules are actually being replaced by consistent and sensible ones.

(A settlement reached with D&D co-designer Dave Arneson has enabled TSR to drop the "Advanced" from the game's title. Just the same, this is a revised version of the game formerly known as AD&D, not another iteration of the older D&D game.)

Why should this matter to HeroQuest fans? Well, apparently the playtest version of the new D&D rules contained substantial miniatures support in its combat system. Indeed, a stated design goal for Third Edition was to allow the roleplaying system to better translate into a tabletop miniatures system and computerized versions.

Later drafts of the rules have since been revised to feature miniatures less strongly. Even so, TSR has said that Third Edition still supports miniatures use far better than any previous edition, and that the rules will support conflicts with up to a few dozen participants well. This, combined with TSR's new miniatures line, may herald a new level of source material, figures and scenery that we can use in our HeroQuest games... even if we choose not to buy the Third Edition rulebooks.

Dragon Back Issues on CD-ROM Coming Soon

Nearly a month before the GenCon announcements described above, TSR conceded that the Dragon® Magazine Archive CD-ROM had been delayed due to technical issues. The product should be out sometime in the next few weeks.

The CD-ROM product contains all of the first 250 issues of Dragon Magazine, representing twenty years of publication. The product supports bookmarking, linking from the table of contents to articles and the ability to search through the full text. Support for updated material via the World Wide Web is also planned.

Although Dragon has been strongly focused on TSR games throughout its history, many of its articles are of potential use to HeroQuest players and gamemasters. The Archive CD-ROM contains hundreds of articles about equipping characters for expeditions, designing quests, gamemastering effectively and so on. It should serve as an excellent source of ideas for alternate Hero types, unusual spells, artifacts and treasures, and plot ideas. As soon as it is available, we will begin working on a review.