Chaosium is ending its HeroQuest RPG series as part of a trademark transfer agreement with Hasbro. The HeroQuest RPG series will officially go out of print on July 15th, with Chaosium ceasing digital sales of the RPG system on its own site and DriveThruRPG. Chaosium also announced plans to eventually re-brand its HeroQuest products as Questworlds, with no changes made to the core rules or PDFs. Currently, Chaosium is selling the core rulebook for HeroQuest for $14.95 on its website, an over 60% discount off of its $40 cover price. Several PDFs for HeroQuest are also currently for sale over on DriveThruRPG.
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The transfer of HeroQuest’s trademark brings an end to confusion over two popular games with the same name. The first HeroQuest was a dungeon crawl board game co-published by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop in the early 1990s. Milton Bradley eventually let the trademark for the game lapse after it stopped publishing HeroQuest games in 1997, although Games Workshop continued to publish its own Warhammer Quest as a spiritual successor of sorts.
Afterwards, Issaries Inc. purchased the HeroQuest trademark and published its own HeroQuest TTRPG set in the world of Glorantha (which is notably also the setting for the popular fantasy TTRPG RuneQuest, which is also owned by Chaosium.) Moon Design Publications licensed HeroQuest and eventually bought the rights to the name and system. Moon Design then became part of Chaosium’s ownership and continued to publish HeroQuest through that TTRPG publisher until now. Last year, Hasbro announced that it had purchased the trademark of HeroQuest and would be re-launching the board game series through its Avalon Hill imprint. A crowdfunding game for the new HeroQuest board game raised over $3.7 million, with a fulfillment planned for fall of this year.
The rules system for HeroQuest isn’t going away. Chaosium has already published a QuestWorlds System Reference Document, which makes the core ruleset available online, which allows anyone to publish content for the game provided that it abides by the terms of the Open Game License contained in the document.
You can purchase various HeroQuest titles either on Chaosium’s website or via DriveThruRPG until July 15th.
