HeroQuest: The Fellowship of Four was a real oddball.
It can’t be easy turning a board game into a book, though at least with a fantasy game there are plenty of fantasy novels offering a template to work from. You don’t get that if you’re asked to adapt, say, Power Grid. Given the task of turning children’s dungeon crawl HeroQuest into a book, Dave Morris decided to borrow from four existing templates: the verbose Vancian fantasy of the Dying Earth stories; the epic saga of Beowulf; the comic stylings of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld; and the twentieth century nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis.
No, you’re right. One of these things is not like the others.
HeroQuest has four heroes, so Morris began by giving each their own chapter written in their own style. The wizard Fortunato casts things like „the Spell of the Extended Instant“ and has to memorize spells in advance, just like the wizards of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories and the D&D class they inspired. Reminiscent of Vance’s Rhialto the Marvellous, he’s a fop and a dilettante who disappoints his master and describes his financial situation by admitting, „I had made several heroic sorties along the borders of fiscal calamity“.
By comparison, the barbarian Asgrim’s chapter is refreshingly straightforward, recalling Beowulf, an Old English saga so old we don’t know who wrote it. Beowulf famously begins with an Old English word that has no direct modern equivalent: „HWAET.
