I have been slowly buying up Heroquest expansions, reviewing them, painting them up, and then moving onto the next. In late 2025, I disrupted this approach and decided to just go ahead and get a whole bunch of the expansions all at once, mostly so I could round out my collection of heroes. That means, I have several expansions that are sitting and waiting for me to review and paint this year. At the time of writing, the only one I do not have is the Wizards of Morcar. That means there is a lot more Heroquest content coming up in 2026. This may please or annoy you, but my backlog is my backlog!
That brings us to today's entry. Rise of the Dread Moon is one of the first expansions that is all new content. It is no longer the only new content, but this one kicked it off. Therefore, it is intentionally designed to build from the OG campaign in the core rulebook. So, let's grab our Potions of Healing, hoist our shields, sharpen our weapons, and prepare our spells. Time to go a Reviewing......
Things I Like
This is a big expansion with a lot of cards, miniatures, and cardboard. Plus, it has a new set of quests and monsters too. This is a chunky boy!
I am very happy to add the Knight to our group of heroes. He seems a natural fit into a fantasy game, and indeed Knights are referenced at the end of Kellar's Keep. Therefore, it makes sense that they would become more involved as a hero after the O.G. Quests. This guy's main thing is defense in the way that the Barbarian is offense. He has the highest starting defense score of all the heroes. In addition, he has three cards of special rules that emphasize helping others and defense. I got mine all painted up at the end of 2025.....
I like the addition of a few new enemies. The first is an Elven Archer. This adds some more ranged combat foes which is an interesting challenge for heroes compared to the usual melee foes. The second is Ethereal monsters that can move through walls and can pop-up and attack. Plus, they are hard to kill as they are not hit with a Skull, but a Black Shield! Finally, Cultists have some interesting abilities to cast Dread Spells that work better the more of them there are. Good new challenges that are not just harder stat blocks for the heroes to face off against.
Not every quest in this booklet assumes that you leave to town in-between quests. They are linked together. This is not the first time they have used this idea, but in other expansions you could still go shopping and heal up. Not so in Rise of the Dread Moon. Instead, they provided something called a Hide-out that is an alchemy table, some gear, and a chance to randomly heal up. This is a good mechanic to make resource attrition much more of an issue and increase the threat of the quests but still allow for updates in game.
Things I Do Not Like
This expansion really hinders Mind Points as an alternate way to attack Heroes. It is very clear that if Mind Points go to zero, the Hero does not die. Instead, they become "shocked" which reduces them to 1 red die, 1 attack dice, and 2 defense dice. Incidentally, unarmed Heroes also have 1 attack dice and 2 defense dice too. This muddies the water from previous expansions and as a Zargon, you will want to be clear how you plan on dealing with Mind Points in any given session or campaign. I could see different expansions using different rules in this area.
The Alchemy Deck is a cool and great idea. However, it seems to only apply to this expansion? It is unclear how this will work in say.... Jungles of Delthrak or Against the Ogre Horde. Are we supposed to assume that all special rules in an expansion only apply to that expansion or across the board, or only going forward in the "timeline"? Again, Zargon will need to decide how he wants to approach this.
This really needed a Sir Ragnar miniature. He is a key NPC in this booklet, and they do not have a unique miniature for him. This is something that Hasbro/Avalon Hill have been very inconsistent on. In some expansions, they offer unique villain miniatures and in others they do not. For example, in Return of the Witch Lord there is no Witch Lord. However, in Mage in the Mirror they have an awesome evil Queen mini. I honestly think they should make a "Named NPC" expansion with minis and cards for each of the big bads they have.
Meh and Other Uncertainties
There are other new rules for smoke bombs, caltrops, and unknown mercenaries. I am rather ambivalent about these. I love the Mercs miniatures, BUT the concept of Mercs I am more torn on. It is basically a indication that the Quest are much harder and they are having a tough time keeping difficulty up but still balancing the game.
Also, connected specifically to the Quests are Disguises, Strangers, and Reputation. Again, it does not seem like these apply to Heroquest games in general and only apply to this specific expansion and set of quests. I think they are interesting concepts and new things you can add into your own Quests.
This Quest clearly works best after you have played the OG Quests, Mage in the Mirror, and now this one. That means your Heroes might be pretty buff at this point. This is not an easy campaign and it ties in closely with the stories from those previous quests. However, in this one the Heroes are not welcome visitors and instead must infiltrate the city. This concept is cool, but it is a bit odd as they did help the Queen in earlier adventures. Therefore, the Elven guards you kill? Best not to swell on it friend, but the blurb in the back assures us they were corrupted by Zargon's power.
The first quest makes us of some water rules. This is not the first supplement with water, but this one focuses on waterways moving to drains. I think these waterway rules are more like wading through a sewer rather than swimming or underwater details. I like them better than some of the rules in Spirit Queen's Torment.
Final Thoughts
This is a lot. This is an expansion for a successful party of Heroes. It turns some of the dynamics of the game on its head with the disguises, strangers, reputation, and the whole concept of the Quests. This leans into the idea that the Heroes are not truly agents of the state, and much more "black ops" than we have seen, These guys are Mentor's hired guns and the campaign highlights it.
This expansion adds a lot of ideas and stuff. It is not entirely clear how these updates should apply in other expansions, BUT they are great tools for Zargons to put in their tool box for their own homebrews. There are also a lot of new cards and miniatures too. Overall, there is a lot of value in this box even though it is one of the thicker and more expensive expansions.
Until next.... oh.... wait..... you probably want to see all the miniatures in this set before we call an end to this review huh?
Until next time!
Or purchase all out games at the Blood and Spectacles Publishing Wargames Vault Page!
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