When Dice Were Made of Flint #19

Sunderland, in the winter of 1985-6. The miner’s strike was over, the shipyards were rusting, and the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin were Doin’ it for Themselves.

Officially, I was still a Ph.D. student in Durham University’s Department of Archaeology, but the project had got the better of me and my confidence and morale were both at an all-time low. I threw myself into writing for games, including two six-part gamebook series, but TSR UK’s Imagine magazine had been closed down, losing me my most reliable market. That was when I decided to look into Warhammer.

I first became aware of Warhammer through advertising in White Dwarf, in 1983. It billed itself as “the mass combat fantasy role-playing game,” but it was clearly a fantasy miniatures wargame.

So why “role-playing”? Those were different times. It has been said that in the 80s you could put the phrase “role-playing” on a mouldy banana and it would sell, thanks to the growing popularity of D&D and others. Fantasy games that weren’t roleplaying games were at a definite commercial disadvantage. To be fair, there were some roleplaying elements, especially in the character advancement rules, but that wasn’t enough to make Warhammer a roleplaying game in everyone’s eyes.

Warhammer didn’t receive much coverage in White Dwarf, and even less in imagine, so I didn’t pay it much attention - at least, until the second edition was released and battle packs started to come out. I got the second edition rules and Blood Bath at Orc’s Drift, and played a few games against myself on the floor of my flat, using the carboard tokens that came in the box. I thought I’d got the measure of the game, so I put together a proposal - with a Japanese theme, following the fashion of the time - and sent it off to Citadel Miniatures in Nottingham.

I got a polite but non-committal reply from Rick Priestley, but I was on Citadel’s radar. I looked at their publications - the annual Citadel Compendium and the more sporadic Citadel Journal - and thought about what I could write for them. However, events were under way in Nottingham that I could never have foreseen.

As Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson were increasingly occupied with Fighting Fantasy, Citadel’s Bryan Ansell had taken over the running of Games Workshop. His move to merge GW with its miniature-making subsidiary resulted in the London offices being moved to Nottingham, but as might be expected a lot of the London staff chose not to come. That included a lot of roleplaying specialists at a time when GW was already hurting from losing their lucrative deal to print and distribute D&D to TSR’s UK arm.

As Warhammer was the strongest wholly-owned brand that GW had in its portfolio at the time, it was decided to develop a roleplaying game within that IP, to compete directly with D&D. But who would develop it? A crew of seasoned RPG designers was set to move to Games Workshop from TSR UK, and perhaps because everyone involved had heard of me, I was invited down to Nottingham for discussions.

Tune in next week for another thrilling instalment!