Featured Artist: Staz Johnson (Legacy of Sorasil)

HeroQuest II - "Legacy of Sorasil" was the sequel for the HeroQuest videogame.
It was published in 1994 only as a videogame for the Commodore Amiga and Amiga CD32 by Gremlin - link here. No official boardgame was ever released as a sequel or with this title, so I don't know if this was a Gremlin only project or if it was involving someone else from Hasbro staff but then remained an unreleased expansion as the Wizard and the Dwarf Quest Packs did.

The game box had a stunning cover artwork painted by artist Staz Johnson, featuring the four classic heroes from the original boardgame, Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf (with a new haircut) and Wizard plus four new entries, Knight, Ranger, Cleric and Mystic (last two are female characters).

(more of Staz Johnson art on DeviantArt or ArtStation)

Gremlin Archive website stores high quality scans of the individual artworks for four of the characters: Barbarian, Ranger, Knight and Wizard - link here
I dropped a couple of comments there asking if they could upload more but seems they are lost somewhere. It is possible if more peole ask them for updates, they will find the time to perform a new search and eventually upload the missing ones. These individual artworks were also painted by Staz Johnson.

The rear of the box featured individual artworks for all the characters but the Mystic was missing. While looking at this character in the game and her line art inside the rulebook of the game I noticed she is only dressed with a chainmail bikini and a cloak, so I guessed she may have been removed because of censorship.

Going deeply into this, I contacted artist Staz Johnson asking if he also drawn an artwork for the Mystic and if he could remember if any kind of censorship was affecting her. Staz Johnson was s o kind to reply me and his answer was very interesting:

"Hi, yes I did do an individual painting of the female barbarian. She was the cause of a lot of problems, in the initial layout for the Sorasil cover she was right at the front of the group in her chain-mail bikini. However, it was felt that her look might offend a lot of potential Muslim buyers so she was moved to the back of the group with her back facing toward the viewer, however this still wasn't good enough because her butt was on display, so I was asked to add the blue cape to cover her completely. This is probably why she was left off the cover, because the individual painting I did of her was from the front."

 

characters line arts