Good timing

Warrior Priesty.

While looking around for Warhammer Quest alternatives, I found quite a bit of stuff about Quest itself.  This morning, Quest content fairly jumped off the screen to slap me in the face.  It started over at Blood of Kittens with a post about how Quest has fallen off the face of the gaming earth like so many of the smaller GW games.  Then there's a link in that post to a sort of petition/protest/yelling until things happen sort of blog about bringing back Quest and a link to an actual online petition for the same reason.  I'm sure I'll find more examples in the coming days. 

On the home front, I got to thinking about Quest at work last night.  Since my previous Quest companion asked again about the game, I got to thinking about ways to draw him further along the path to gaming.  Painting the stuff for Quest seems like a good first step.  I'd like to get the stuff that gets used the most painted first, which means heroes and dungeon portals/gates/doors.  The portals are pretty boring, while the heroes are detailed enough to be a bad place to start learning to paint.  Moving past that, the cannon fodder type enemies are the next step.  While the vermin (giant rats, bats, giant spiders) are where I'll likely start, goblins have a special appeal.  I'm missing a couple pieces from my Quest set, a giant rat or two and a bow-armed goblin, so I already use some alternate goblin models.  Considering Quest is something like 15 years old now, the models that came with it haven't aged well.  Everything is a single piece with a single pose, there's no variety at all.

With these factors in mind, a box of goblins looks like a good place to start.  Goblins are straightforward models to assemble and paint, especially night goblins, and a single box would cover the 12 goblins Quest requires with plenty left over to spare.  I could walk my friend through the whole modelling process, starting with clipping bits off the sprue all the way through basing and varnishing.  With the spare goblins I could set him loose in the kit to build whatever looked nifty.  Unfettered kitbashing is one of my favorite parts of the hobby, but one that I engage in rarely.  I'm too stuck in the minis-as-game-pieces mindset to do this too much, which is a real shame, but I could shoehorn that desire into this project and scratch a couple itches at once.  If the goblin experiment worked out then there'd be orcs and minotaurs to expand to, plus the heroes.  The big sticking point here is redundancy.  I already have a Quest set and I have all the pieces (somewhere), so there's no real need to "replace" them.  If Quest was still around I could just make this a very elaborate and involved Christmas gift, but that's not the case anymore.  All of that is down the road though.  In the immediate future, I think I'll prime up some of the vermin if I can get hold of a day that isn't horribly humid and go from there.  I'm on the fence about basing them, but I may end up jumping off that fence later today and getting a pack of square bases.  I've seen a couple people's quest to paint all the Quest contents in my search for Quest related materials so I have a couple ideas for basing.  The usual sand/ballast approach won't work so well for a dungeon crawl, while painting tiles on the bases doesn't work so well either considering all the dungeon tiles are colored differently.  If I tackle this sort of project I'll probably end up doing the bases differently, maybe building some rubble or something onto them, but for now this is (potentially) about getting pieces finished and luring a friend into the paint and brush side of the hobby.