There are two types of quests in Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Personal and Public Quests.

Personal Quests can take any form but often involve killing things (sometimes other players), going places, or delivering items or messages to other NPC’s. They pay well in items and experience, so get out your traveling gear, and get a leg on.

When you are playing Warhammer, any NPC with a little circle above their head with the image of a rolled up scroll in it is a quest giver NPC. Now when you find an NPC that is needed to complete a quest, you will see a similar circle above their head but this time it has a check mark basically.

note: In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, when you hover your mouse over the quest entry on the right side of your UI, the popup will let you know which NPC you need to talk to in order to complete the quest you are mousing over..

Another thing to note, any time you mouse over an NPC and the pointer turns into a comic book style text caption image, you can talk to that NPC by simply right clicking on them. That same mouse over pointer change can also show a sword which means that NPC can be attacked and a little hand image that you right click to grab / collect on the item you are pointing at.

Public quests are quests that everyone in the area can participate in at the same time. For instance, in the first public quest for Chaos, “Ruinous Powers”, the Sorcerers of Tzeentch are performing a dark ritual to summon a great beast of change. To finish the quest, players need to kill 25 meddling Thorshafn Militiamen. Each Militiaman that is killed advances the counter. Your reward when the quest is completed is based on how many of the 25 Thorshafn Militiamen were killed by you.

Many of the public quests are done in stages. For instance, in “Ruinous Powers”, once you have killed the 25 Thorshafn Militiamen, players will need to harvest souls from tombstones to bolster the power of the dark ritual. When you’ve harvested the correct amount of souls, a demon of dark power emerges, and you must prove the Raven Host’s supremacy over all other ruinous powers by defeating the denizen of rage.

When you enter an area where a public quest is underway, a message is displayed in the center of your screen. Progress of public quests is displayed in the top right of the UI.  The Public quests are a blast and are in an odd sort of way a method for people that are not guilded to get involved in multi group play and get better rewards potentially.  There us also supposedly a bonus to xp for completing these public quests for the first time each... worth your effort folks.