The Army of Zargon

 Good evening Oldhammerers, HeroQuesters, and those here by accidentally clicking on the wrong google search result,

I submit for your consideration Warhammer Armies - Zargon. This is a fan-made army list designed to be compatible for Warhammer Fantasy Battle 4th and 5th editions. 

This is our fan army list, it does not connote any support, endorsement, or officiality by GamesWorkshop nor Milton Bradley. Used without permission. No challenge to their status or rights intended. All rights reserved to their respective owner.

All that out of the way, let's discuss what this thing is and isn't.

Objective

My starting point is that I found myself in possession of 3 copies of the original Heroquest board game and I am an avid Warhammer hobbyist. So my goal was to make these two things compatible. That is, I am (as of writing) converting the miniatures from Heroquest onto Warhammer bases and painting the miniatures. I have further designs to add appropriate command models and various heroes and wizards to make the army fully analogous to a proper Warhammer army. So the army list is tailored to this purpose - taking the minis from the original game and fielding them in a Warhammer battle. I also wanted to make sure that I was staying relatively authentic to the lore of HeroQuest (limited as it may be) in options that were available. 

This army book does not include any supplemental HeroQuest materials. No references to any of the expansion packs will be found here.

Methodology

The armylist

Zargon's army appears to represent a broad coalition of disparate forces: Orcs, goblins, fimir, chaos warriors, animated colossal statuary, and the undead. In some respects this makes it similar to the Chaos and Orc and Goblin armies. There is a lot of redundancy among the hero, battle standard and various wizard entries. 

However, the truly limited aspect of the army list are the troop types available. In HeroQuest we are presented a very narrow sampling of Zargon's forces - we only see one "loadout" of each faction. For example we only see skeletons with scythes. So this raises a design question: When designing Zargon's coalition how broadly do we include other coalition forces? For example, when considering the undead aspect of his coalition which entries are most appropriate? We might take the entire 4th ed undead armylist in its entirety - including chariots, catapults, carrion riders etc. Doing this for each entry would make Zargon's armylist overly expansive and result in such an army not actually fielding any of the HeroQuest monopose minis. The other extreme would be to limit the army list purely to the old minis - Skeletons can only come with Scythes, and orcs with light armor and hand weapons. 

The compromise that this list strikes is to present one limited entry for each of the monopose HeroQuest minis. The entries have fewer options than similar troop types in other armies, but there is some flexibility. For example the orcs have access to spears and crossbows but no double-handed weapons, bows, or halberds. Further, the armylist has a broad list of evil allies that could be used to fill certain gaps. 

The final choice of interest for the armylist is the general. Most HeroHammer armylists require the addition of a General who is an able fighter. However, Zargon's coalition is held together by a wizard. This is a fairly common sword and sorcery trope, so I decided to port over the rules and stats for a chaos sorcerer lord to replace the traditional general entry. (Though, perhaps, a human Wizard lord might be more appropriate)

The Fimir

The fimir are simple port over from Warhammer 3rd edition. Their basic statistics were copied over. For the heroes and wizards, I applied the standard stat modifiers. 

There were two complications for adding the fimir: character costs and fimir mist.

The fimir are relatively expensive infantry, so getting the cost of their characters right was tricky. 

The Gargoyles

Gargoyles are an ambiguous monster. It is unclear if they are off-brand bloodthirsters or if they are stone statues that look like bloodthirsters. The gargoyle mini featured in White Dwarf and the monster card have the appearance of a bloodthirster. Whereas the artwork on the GM screen and Kellar's Keep appear to be stone. I opted for the stone appearance. 

This meant that the stats and rules for the monster had to be invented whole cloth. 

I settled on the following stat line:

Profile	M	WS	BS	S	T	W	I	A	Ld
Gargoyle	5	4	0	6	8	2	1	2	10

These stats might be mildly controversial, so here's my brief explanation:

The most crucial stat is the T8. In these editions this means this creature cannot be wounded by common S3 or S4 attacks. T8 was chosen because the common T for warmachines is 7 and this commonly corresponds to wooden Chasses. Stone is generally regarded as harder than wood. However, since stone tends to shatter rather than absorbing blows like wood, I decided to give the gargoyle only 2 wounds. 

Additionally, gargoyles have high strength and few attacks suggesting that they are slow but powerful attacks to avoid. 

The points value for the Gargoyles is derived from the 2nd edition Warhammer rules. In that edition they provided a rubric for calculating points. This rubric was used, essentially unchanged, all the way through 5th ed. 

On top of this Gargoyles have some special rules:

Terror, Immune to Psychology, combat rules akin to ghosts, as well as following the rules for undeath. 

These rules are intended to represent the Gargoyle lumbering supernaturally across the battlefield as an animated statute, while being easily analogous to undead rules. 

The Special Characters

The special characters are all taken from the very sparse lore provided in the rule and quest books. Generally, they borrow from a common creature or character type, tinker with a characteristic or two, modify the points up or down accordingly and then add items that match the lore. The items are typically reskins of existing items with few minor alterations. 

The Spells

The spells are reskinned versions of existing spells with, generally, few and minor adjustments to match the spells from HeroQuest. The primary interest here was thematically matching the spells from HeroQuest rather than creating a balanced or powerful lore of magic. 

And the Army Special Rules

There are four army special rules to discuss: Thralls of Zargon, Treachery of Zargon, Magic, and Magic Items. 

Thralls of Zargon,

This rule isn't strictly canonical from Heroquest Lore. The purpose was to provide some post hoc justification for Zargon's coalition. Put another way, the existence of Zargon's multi-factional coalition raises questions about how this evil coalition came about. Is he manipulative with words? Perhaps he helps them find common cause? A violent hierarchy? Or maybe he uses his evil magics to bind his minions to his will? I went with the last one. The idea is that his magic is almost a type of necromancy that binds the will of his forces. As a result, while bound, his troops lose their wayward proclivities such as animosity or stupidity. And it breaks similar to the ways that the undead are broken in combat, the magic binding is lost when the minion is panicked or the general is slain. However, rather than crumbling like the undead, the army becomes a free for all as the minions come to their senses. The idea of the minions as bound in a manner similar to the undead is reflected with the addition of the "Will" spell that moves Zargon's minions (including the Undead) in the same manner as the Danse Macabre spell as well as the summon minions spell.

Treachery of Zargon

This rule is designed to be thematic to HeroQuest. A important mechanic of HeroQuest is the ability to search for treasure in the dungeons that your party goes through. This rule mimics this mechanic granting the possibility of prizes or dire consequences for the enemy. The distribution of results loosely mirrors the distribution of cards from the HeroQuest treasure deck. 

Magic

Zargon's army has access to a variety of wizard types, but to moderate the possible benefit this might entail, each wizard type has been nerfed into a sort of uniformity. The goal was to make sure I wasn't inadvertently granting some unfair synergy to the armylist. 

Magic Items

This rule was intended to demonstrate that Zargon's forces would have access to a wide array of magical armaments. I imagine that Zargon is very calculating and would not have qualms about equipping orcs with Chaos magic items or vice versa.