Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (with Graeme Davis)

Anyone who knows the RPG Blokes knows that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is the big one for us. It’s the game that traded shiny armour and high magic for mud, disease, and a healthy dose of Chaos.

This week, we are beyond chuffed to be joined by absolute RPG royalty: Graeme Davis, one of the original creators of WFRP and the architect behind the re-release of the legendary The Enemy Within campaign.

Tune in to uncover the brilliance and uniqueness of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying System and delve into the fascinating history of its creation.

Then check out Graeme at the following places. 

Monster of the Month Club
https://www.patreon.com/monsterofthemonthclub

Graeme's Blog
https://graemedavis.wordpress.com/

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/GraemeDavisAuthorAndEditor/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

So welcome back to RPG Blokes. Now, anyone who knows us knows that Warhammer Fantasy roleplay is the big one. Back in our youth, it was the system more than any other that tempted us away from DD and gave us a world of down-to-earth careers, social climbing, chaos, and corruption. It's all about surviving in a grim and perilous world. And we've been tugging our forelocks and fighting the good fight ever since. Woofrup is a true heavyweight, backed by the Global Minds of Games Workshop and the incredible lore of the old world. And we're here to wholeheartedly recommend it to you. But what is it actually all about? To help us answer that, we've got a special guest who knows the system better than anyone. He's an industry legend, one of the original creators who built the game from the ground up, and a key architect of the enemy within, the campaign that guaranteed this game's immortality. Joining us today is Graham Davis. Hi Graham, welcome to RPG Blokes.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

So DD is not our favourite system, and we like to introduce people at this stage in our podcast to new systems of people who have been listening to us for a while. Right. Warhammer is the game we have played the most.

SPEAKER_03 1:23

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Over the years, and it's been by far the system we played the most, isn't it? But we could we could probably make a case to say weekly for the last 40 years.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

That's not true for me. No. So Barry is our counterbalance.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Oh, that might be the nicest thing you've ever said about me, mate.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

So Graham, how did it work? How did you get involved in Warhammer in the first place? And what state was the system in when you first saw it?

SPEAKER_01 1:46

So by the time Against Workshop invited me to Nottingham to talk about the game that was going to become Wharfrup, I was a student. I was making my beer money writing for White Dwarf. And also for Imagine, the TSR UK magazine. They knew me, they knew my work, I knew my way around various role-playing systems. I've been writing, as well as DD stuff, called Cthulhu for White Dwarf. I did a thing like Dragon Quest for Imagine after TSR acquired SPI. Because when Brian Hansel took over from Stephen E and he wanted to move the whole operation up to Nottingham, which is where Citadel was, the whole role-playing staff, or pretty much all the role-playing staff except for Jervis and Mark Gascoigne, elected not to move to Nottingham. So they needed people who could write role-playing games. Another important thing about the timing was that because TSR UK had opened and they were printing Dragon and DD in the UK, Gang's Workshop had lost the license to print DD for the UK market, and that had been a significant underpinning of their early financial stability. So if they needed a role-playing game, they wanted to stick it to TSR. Also, timing-wise, TSR UK had shut down, at least as far as publications were concerned. So people like Jim Bamba, Phil Gallagher and Mike Bronton were available. And they moved to Nottingham. I was brought in from outside, I think on Paul Coburn's recommendation, the former editor of Imagine. But anyway, I did a couple of interviews down there. We're going to do a role-playing game. Interested? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

A lot of pressure then. DD is hard out to follow for. That's quite brief, isn't it? At the time, did they that they thought what role-playing was the future for them too, I guess. It was something that they were reliant on the time that underpinned a lot of what they did.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

It was one of the legs of the stool at the time. As time went on, though, Brian Ernest decided that paper products couldn't make money, or at least not as much money as he wanted, compared to miniatures. But you know, when 40K came out, then massive bike in miniature sales created for Games Workshop. And they held that up against how much money Wolfruck was making. And that was the point at which they started to lose interest.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

So there was a window here of opportunity to create a role-playing system for the Warhammer universe that may not have existed if if the decision was made slightly later. They would have made that commercial decision not to start in the first place, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 4:11

It was Definitely, yeah. It was it was all timing that happened start.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Yeah, for you for you too, right by the time I played. So when you walked into the room, what what state was the system in when you started to look at it and get to grips with it?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Well, Rick Priestley had put together a draft. There were also piles of notes from Brian and from Hal, Richard Halliwell. And a lot of stuff was there, the basis of the rules. Also, there were requirements, but it had to be 100% compatible with Warhammer Battle. 100%. So you could switch between systems depending on what was going on in the game.

SPEAKER_02 4:46

Did you achieve that? Because we didn't play the battle games where we wouldn't have known if it was or wasn't.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

We did and we didn't with first edition. Some compromises had to be made. For example, Warhammer Battle, second edition at the time, used a 1 to 10 stat system, pretty linear one to 10 stat system, and that was never going to be had to find enough resolution to work with a role-playing game. So uh we ended up with this hybrid where certain stats were on a 1 to 10 scale but were on a percentile scale. That was a compromise. Another thing in the system was that skills, you'll remember from first edition, the skills were uh you either had them or you didn't.

unknown 5:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

And they were usually like a 10% bonus to something. But they weren't, they couldn't be developed themselves as skills in the way that uh, say a basic role-playing skill, you can up your score, DD is tied to your level or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

And that I believe would hang over from the fact that the initial draft of Wolfrup was uh created by people who are primarily war games designers. And if you look at things like unique traits in a war game, they look very similar to Wolfrup first edition skills. You know, there were these constraints, but the biggest constraint was time. Because I I came on board in Jim and Phil and Mike came on between June and July, and we had to have the whole thing finished by November.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

No way. I th I thought you were to say the year after, because I remember it was a November release. That is incredible. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Well, we we had to get it done, I think, by the end of September. So we had a month at the printers and then a month for distribution, but it wasn't in the stores by Christmas then. God help us all. That was the message that came down the magic.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Yeah. It was so different to Dungeons and Dragons. It was no, yeah, we couldn't the the very few similarities pathway. It was a role-playing game. Was you under any pressure to do something that different to what gone before and was so popular? So many different decisions were made, but there's such a short period of time, as we we now know.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

That's right. Well, the verbal brief I got from Brian at the time was he wanted a product that would stand toe-to-toe with DD. And we were all into that. I mean, you have to remember this was the Statue of Reagan era, the raid on Libya, the cruise missiles. We wanted something 2000 AD, punk. We wanted something that was British. Also, a lot of us were history buffs. I'm I'm an archaeology graduate, so was Rick Priestley. A lot of the citadel starts were war gamers, historical war gamers, self-talk historians. So they found the American approach to the European Middle Ages, which is informed mainly by Hollywood, they found that a little frustrating. And we've been watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jambawalkie and stuff like that. We've been reading 2000 AD with all this kind of critic anti-heroic satirical stuff. So that all went into the mix along with these sort of compromises to the system that were made for the sake of speed, because we didn't have time to design a decent magic system or a percentile bait skill system or anything. We just had to keep the thing out. That's why in first edition you'll see all these references to realms of sorcery, which of course didn't come out for another 15 years.

SPEAKER_02 7:55

Yeah, that was that was a tease, wasn't it? We were born for that, wasn't we? That was heartbreaking.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Sorry, forgive my ignorance. Did you just say it didn't come out for another 15 years?

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Yeah. Yeah, Hawkes.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Well Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

It was one of those legendary products that never was gonna everybody's all would never happen. But at the time it was us just kind of shoveling the responsibility to future us and saying, okay, yes, we know the magic system is not very good. We are gonna fix it, we promise. But with Games Workshop's declining interest in World Propers are a commercial product, that uh didn't get the opportunity to happen.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Didn't happen within Games Workshop, it was later on. So we'll we'll get to the next evolution of the system and where you went from there. But we I just wanted to spend a little while talking about what makes Warhammer so different and so great. For people that have not played it before and looking at those differences. The careers in particular, boom, wow. I mean, the images as well, the drawings, that part of the book was definitely the bit that just fired my imagination off every time I I opened the page. Well, considering the time constraint that you had, what, 30 or 40 careers was was far more than we could have probably expected.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

It was far fewer than had actually been designed, actually, because Hal had got the bit between his teeth. Now, when he went off on something, he went off on it big time. And he would come in almost every day with a new career he'd drawn up, usually inspired by someone he'd seen stumbling around Nottingham when he got out of the clubs at two in the morning. Um but a lot of them were like one skill things. Uh they didn't really have the potential to be bull careers. So I I developed what I could. I cut a lot out, put some aside for for future supplements. That was Rickenhouse. I wasn't present when the decision was made to let's have lots of little careers instead of uh, you know, four or five main career paths like D had at the time.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

So it was a low fantasy then, wasn't it? It set the tone for everything. You play yeah, you could play your warrior priests and your wizards and Templars, and but you still had other careers, beggars, peddlers, yeah, peddlers.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

Right. And that was all part of the anti-heroic thing that we were going for. Yeah, and and it opened a dichotomy within Warhammer because the battle game got more and more heroic. The writing by mostly Rickenhouse was full of satire and sometimes childish jokes and you know anti-heroic stuff. I think that frustrated Brian a bit. He wanted a big fantasy battle game, you know, with lots of heroism and destruction.

SPEAKER_02 10:21

He definitely didn't get what he wanted then, did he?

SPEAKER_01 10:24

No. Jim and Phil and I took this up and and ran with it in the in the role-playing game because we felt it created much better role-playing opportunities and challenge.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

Just the move in between the careers we find to be one of the most brilliant narrative tools. And the career that you're going to go into with the one you exist in, you need to justify why that suits you and and play that play that career. And if you can't play it, then get out of it, find something else. You know, that's that's how we like to do it, and boot builds and drives narrative like nothing else.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Right. And it's also a great way to convey the look and feel of the world, society, everything. In a DD book, that would be a a chapter in the setting where a few people would ever read. Whereas here it's it's integrated into the gameplay.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

That's right. You never had those thoughts in DD. You might multi-class, but that'd be the best the best option you'd have for your character.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Otherwise you were just on a single rail.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

I mean it well to digress, you know, in in third edition of prestige classes might have been a nod to what Warhammer was doing. I can't say for sure.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

Uh Stephen, you know those better than than the rest of us.

SPEAKER_03 11:27

Do you Oh yeah, yeah, I suppose they did expand it a little bit to trying to diversify the characters a bit. I think they felt that it was definitely single track and they thought bring, yeah, more diversity, more splits.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

Yeah, backgrounds in DD fifth edition, I suppose if people listening to this.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

That too, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Do you think that's filtered through from Warhammer?

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Well, I can't say for sure, of course, but I I'd like to think we inspired them a little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:49

Otherwise they had to up their game a bit, yeah. I don't come down to come up with something new.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

Uh does anyone else I've got a list here, but if anyone else wants to introduce their favourite element of Warhammer to Graham and then discuss?

SPEAKER_00 11:58

Listen, I've I've talked about this on the podcast multiple times when we talked about it. I absolutely love the character development of spending your XP at the end of every session. So the first time I played Woofrups was during the first or the longest lockdown during COVID, and it was like genuinely a mental health saver. And it's the first time I really had a connection with my guy, and I think that was part of the you were kind of tinkering with him every week because you had a bit to spend. I also absolutely adore opposed roles in combat. Like to me, that just makes utter utter sense. You can throw the world's most perfect punch, and if someone moves two inches, it misses them. Or it's the difference between getting knocked out and ouch.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

Yeah, uh nobody's ever mentioned the uh the XP thing to me before, but I'm I'm very interested to hear it because I remember my early DD days. Confession here, playing DD for years obsessively in college, I never managed to keep a character alive past fifth level. Um and with the the sort of geometric progression of the XP requirement to go up a little, it just took longer and longer. As you said, Barry, sort of be able to tinker with your character and and keep developing that that sort of continuing sense of achievement.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Rather than waiting for like all of them, and don't get me wrong, when you're playing DD, you all look forward to leveling up. It's one of the enjoy it's one of the joys of the game, but you end up also kind of obsessing about it. People are curious, oh DM, when are we gonna?

SPEAKER_03 13:32

What's happening with it might not ever happen.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

One of the biggest things about it was unlike DND, you don't go wading through easy enemies build up to Mexico. You got nothing. Unless it was a plot point. I don't know if that was realised how much that influenced gameplay. That was intentional from the outset.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

I mean, at the time, story games to RPGs were a thing. I mean, Call of Cthulhu was kind of because it was investigative. We we wanted to reward progress through the story rather than as you saying this griminant slaughter.

SPEAKER_02 14:10

There you go, there's another decision made within the system, no levels, which at the time uh we had played, but we'd played Call of Cthulhu, there's no levels in that either, but it was fairly unusual. It it was it was a break from what we were normally experienced within fantasy games we were playing. And so that was a big call. Um a good one.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Yeah, we'd also been playing Call of Cthulhu, and some of them said play it were in quest of various other systems that had no level. I don't think we discussed it at the time, but having so many careers that took away the need for level, except in spellcasting classes, and they're level one to four because Warhammer battled the time was level one to four. And we intended to do something with it in Realm of Sorcery coming soon, we promised, but that never happened. And in the end, it was not written by anyone and ever been involved in the initial development of the game.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Oh, I know. And of course the fourth edition, which we love, and they've got career ranks and they've organized careers slightly differently. We we like that. But funnily enough, we do think that that's an improvement, actually. We we think it works really well and it's opened up a lot more careers.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Yeah, I do too. That was one of the things I really liked about fourth edition. And but they've kept the one to four. That's kind of interesting. That's good. That's yeah, I didn't think of that. Yeah, that's crossful decision from from 1980s three has just done.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Oh nice, yeah. I remember there was a conversion table in the back of I think it was first, it might have been second, about converting characters so you can play a a battle one to the role play and and with a subtle warning, don't keep converting them back. That's not a very precise conversion, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Yeah, this was something that came down from above, you know, if we couldn't have the systems be entirely a hundred percent uh the same system, then we needed conversion guides and the some of the later Flame stuff like Lichmaster, you know, we were told to put in an appendix about running the whole thing as a a Warhammer battle, because it had been devoted from a battle pack anyway. But there was a what's that pressure?

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Well, one of the things I absolutely loved was the law dumps for both the the religions uh and the the colleges of magic. All the crossovers and the the depth that you went into. I'm glad you uh glad you enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Yeah, at the time we were making it, Wolf Rup was one of a very small number of games that actually came with a setting. D D it was committed to being without a setting and generic because it made it more flexible, I think was the reason. But yeah, I had the time of my life doing the uh the religion chapter. I had all these big ideas. I've got some of them in there.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

That still stands up to s to test the time, I think, the religion section, particularly the the strictures. I always go back to first edition um when I'm looking at God's whatever edition I'm playing and look at that stricture list because we used to apply those quite forcibly. There was there's no um wrath of God supposed to I th there might have been in first edition, was there Graham? But there was, yeah. And um we loved that.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

It was but it was the good way of punishing priests if you needed to and uh Well this yeah, this was another example of us, me in the case of religion chapter, but we funneled all our frustrations with DD into making woofwap.

SPEAKER_02 17:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

And we'd all been playing it along. We all knew what our particular frustrations were. One of mine was the fact that the gods just didn't really mean anything. They were just a symbol that a cleric put on his shield. Gave you an alignment and everything else, yeah. That's right. So I I came up with the strictus and the the wrath of the gods to try and make that some sort of mechanic so that clerics had to at least try and follow their their deity in a practical way.

SPEAKER_02 17:57

We've had so much fun with that. Uh particularly the Allocan one where they have to obey superiors. That I enjoy that one as a DM quite quite a lot. When I've got an Allocan priest in my party, that's the one I always call on. The magic in the early games, it wasn't quite so well fleshed out. Was it the the eight schools of magic? How did that develop in the system?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

That was something that uh that John Blanch came up with just out of the blue. About a couple of years, I think, after uh the Corbell book was published. We were suddenly handed this this is this is how magic is going to work in Warhammer now. It was all art driven. John was on a big kick about iconography and symbology. Everything going forward through Warhammer had to incorporate that.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

So did that happen part way through the first edition?

SPEAKER_01 18:41

It did. Yeah. It did. It happened very close to the end of my time at Games Workshop. I think Flame was already underway at that point. So I can't tell you much about how that got the process of how that got incorporated into later products. Judging by what Hoggs had put out, basically it didn't. But when second edition was put together by Black Industries and Green Ronin, that had to begin. Yeah. Because uh, you know, it was already in the battle game and when established there. But I don't think it impacted uh first edition woof road very much.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Okay. Um, Stephen, what's your favourite?

SPEAKER_03 19:16

Well, the thing I mentioned is the uh idea of fight points. Whose idea of the fight points? That was something incredibly different from Dazes and Drader. That meant your characters didn't necessarily die immediately after character generation. Covered that by not living out fifth level.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah, that was Jervis, Jervis Johnson. Uh we were it was a sort of a water cooler moment. We'd realised just how deadly the combat system was, and we were racking our prince. You know, on the one hand, it's great because it means you don't go rushing in waving the sword like you would in DD. So you have to kind of think your way through situations. But at the same time, it was far too deadly. And Jervis came up with this idea of fate points. And you could tell how new it was because they were covered in such a scant way in the rule book that I then had to write a white dwarf article explaining what they were and how to use.

SPEAKER_02 20:15

Yeah, very useful article, actually, wasn't it? Yeah.

unknown 20:17

Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 20:18

Brilliant though. Like Stephen says, yeah, you still felt very precious about it. Oh, yeah. Nobody wanted to lose a fate point at all, did you? I mean, it was a disaster when you lost a fate point because I don't know. Closer to death, Robert.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

And it was great when you managed to work one.

unknown 20:30

Great.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

They're extra lives, basically, for those listening. Yeah. Yeah. Um now they're linked to fortune points too, so you don't want to lose one even more because you're Yeah, the made it even more important.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Yeah, second onwards, wouldn't it? So you had this diminishing return. You might have survived, but you're you're less lucky. So you you feel it. You're feeling your luck running out, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

Yeah, it's um it's inspired the fate point system. Um without it, yes, the system would have been just too too difficult.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

It would have turned a lot of people off at the time, I that's sort of emerging as a theme in the design of Warfruit First Edition, at least, is that all of these band-aids, you know, all these leaks we plugged with little ad hoc mechanics and so on, have come to define the game. Yeah. And the system.

SPEAKER_02 21:15

And another one I've got here is the social levels, because really the game is very dependent upon this, isn't it? That you need to feel well, you you you just can't go into a social situation behave how you like, because there are consequences to that. And the and the system allows those consequences to be reinforced because the power is with with the people that have the money and the status. And uh you get this quite quite quickly and early on. So from a D perspective, uh, where you might be used to just turning up, and if you don't like somebody, then you can just attack them, and that's the resolution, and that's perfectly fine. You were suddenly thrust into a far more complex environment. That that was all intended, I guess, because the scenarios played into that and it was so important.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

Yeah, I mean we we wanted to make nobody. Means something and social class. Perhaps because we were British designers rather than American ones. Again, you know, this was a time of just post-punk, a lot of anti-establishment feeling. We had the Bullington Club in Full Cry, Princess Diana's brother, Viscount Awful. Now Earl Spencer was one of them. Boris Johnson was another, but they're running around wrecking restaurants. And, you know, and that that informed a lot of how uh the younger nobles were portrayed in the earlier episodes of the Enemy Within campaign. You know, we knew that we wanted people to start from the bottom. So they had to have some way of navigating the society and the class system. And yeah, again, that was something that wasn't in the rule book. I think Paul Coburn first came up with it, but then Mike and I put something together for why I am a companion of flame white companion. It might have gone into White Dwarf first and been reprinted in the companion. I don't remember now. But yeah, it was another thing. It was uh something like the fate points, it's something we we realised we needed, so we wrote something to cover it. Okay, so that was Ren After. I remember that article now.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

I've kind of forgotten how much I enjoyed that element of it, actually. Like you say, your behaviour was enforced by social conventions and there were consequences. But I think one of the, and I don't know whether this is intentional or not, and you just said, you know, you had to start at the bottom, but having that social structure in place and having to start at the bottom makes the ranks to riches element of the game really rewarding. Yes, it does. And and I remember that as well. I do remember thinking at one point thinking, do you know what? This guy could retire soon. And I was genuinely happy for him. Like I was genuinely happy for him. He might make it and he might live out his dream and have the stables in the country where he raised his horses. It was I tell you now, it's a fantasy game. Even in the fantasy game, I was fantasizing about being able to give up work.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

It all it all replaces the level system as well, doesn't it? You're you're getting your your satisfaction out of rising in in many different ways throughout the narrative of the game.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Right. Yeah, it's another way of doing that. And that they kind of glanced at it in A, D, and D with the the little chapter on uh attracting followers and building a stronghold depending on your class and all of that. But it never really was played out. But to go back to what Barry was saying about retiring, I heard uh I've heard various tales of people's experiences with the enemy when in campaign. But one of my favorites is the party that, you know, saved the empire. They got granted noble titles and lands and everything, but the lands they were granted was the Wittgenstein, a chaos-written castle. A fixer upper. Very much a fixer-upper. We knew by the time uh the social levels thing came out that uh we were gonna be doing Power Behind the Throne. Carl Sergeant had been testing it. We knew it was gonna be, you were gonna be dealing with very high-born and powerful people. And we realized that the rules we had for that weren't up to the task. So that's why that had to happen at that particular time. Uh so it had to be in place for power behind the throne, which is uh, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a very complex adventure of political intrigue rather than actually running around killing one.

SPEAKER_02 25:27

It's an exceptionally powerful city city sandbox almost. I think it's the best, the best that's ever been written as a city-based adventure. And we played a lot of them. Just to finish off with the features of the Warhammer system, chaos is the main enemy when you play Warhammer. So it's not good versus evil. It's pretty much everybody against the effects of chaos. So there is evil, don't get me wrong, but chaos poses a far greater threat. Because the alignment system is there in first edition. How did that come together?

SPEAKER_01 25:56

Well, the the alignment system was one of the requirements that were imposed upon us. There had to be an alignment system, and I think Rick did it, but instead of the nine-point alignment grid like you see in DD, uh, it was just a mini-scale. You had you had good and beyond good was law, you had neutral, and then evil and beyond evil was chaos. None of us who had to work with it really enjoyed it, and we just kind of quietly met its fade into the background as far as characters were concerned. Now, chaos, of course, was the big enemy from the very beginning of Warhammer, and arguably even before Warhammer, when Brian was working at Asgard miniatures, he did a range of chaos characters, chaos warriors, and that sort of imagery passed into Warhammer. He himself ran a chaos army. He and John Blanche, I think, came up with the four powers of chaos between them. And it was very much at the core of Warhammer was it couldn't be Warhammer without it. And that was fine. It gave us, from the name of the enemy within campaign, we had that all the cultists and stuff, because we'd been playing call of Cthulhu. We were into cultists and tense investigations and you know, mad gibbering things and stuff. And we could we could import all of that, cross that with uh with D D's medieval fantasy, and that's how it became part of Warhammer.

SPEAKER_02 27:17

Some of the most interesting monsters you face, I think, in Wemoth is chaos, not just the demons and and but people that have been mutated in this mutation table that was eventually released. I think it used to be 1000. It was suddenly, you know, this is this is where the fun was to be had, because anybody could be a mutant, right? And and it used to be illegal, although Carl Franz had something to say about that.

SPEAKER_03 27:39

That's where it was disappointment.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

Yeah. Yeah, that was another thing I don't think Brian was expecting. You know, you wanted chaos to be the external enemy or these donky great chaos warriors and and so on. But with an anti-heroic game, that wasn't really gonna work. And like I said, we'd been playing a lot of cool of Khu, which at the time had revolutionized people's ideas of what role-playing could be. The the effect of it is probably not appreciated fully today, but it was revolutionary. So as well as giving us cultists and things to fight, as in Shadows over Boggenhart, for example, it also enabled us to create some moral grey areas and some difficult decisions for the players to make, you know, as this cute little six-year-old girl spolding her doll, her arm's a tentacle, what do you do?

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Um that sort of thing. What do you do, John? You smuggle the kid out. What characters seem to have sort of spot had stuff inflicted on them?

SPEAKER_01 28:40

Right, and that was it. They were victims, evil wasn't black and white. The moral complexity and choices of evils was a big thing.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Don't try the witch hunters. 2000 AD's Torkamada, I think, had a lot of influence on the witch hunters. Yeah, absolutely. Be pure, be vigilant, behave.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

Yeah. Does anyone else want to mention anything about the system in particular? This is quite a focus of the podcast because it's it's letting people know what it's all about and giving the flavour of the games.

SPEAKER_03 29:10

Yeah, I'd I mentioned the um the critical hit system is something I completely fell in love with when I first started playing the game. I love knocking people's heads off and rolling that 2d6, or was it 26 yards?

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Yeah, yeah, how far they fly.

SPEAKER_03 29:22

I mean, it doesn't get any better than that, did it? Let's be honest. You couldn't do that in DD, you'd have to pretend, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

No, no, well, DD at the time I was told by someone who'd been inside DSR they used the comics code to kind of moderate, you know, what was acceptable and what wasn't within DD. Whereas we were more like, I don't know, what, the Bash Street kids plus Monty Python, plus a dozen other things. Rick wrote the initial Critical Hits table and had the time of his life doing it. I think he borrowed it from Role Master, but I'm not sure. But he he definitely injected his own Avery and sensibility into it. And then uh Hogshead, when they did, I think it was beer character pack, I can't remember now, but I no, it's the GM screen, that's right. They I did uh uh a series of tables for various types of damage because uh, you know, one table that wouldn't do for a sword versus an explosion or magic or whatever. Perfect, you know.

SPEAKER_02 30:19

I I think we've already spoken quite a bit about the sense of humor that you've injected into this, and it would obviously be something that you all had a part in, and you must have got on so well working together if that is the product of of all of your little in obvious jokes, and you must yeah, it must have been so much fun to work on a project and to be able to put that in.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

It was, it was a lot of fun. People ask me what it was like in that writer's room, and I always go back to saying it was sort of a gaming version of the young ones, if you remember that odd sit on reading my own Adrian Edmondson. Uh, and we were just cracking each other up. We were seeing we could see past what we called the humour police in management without them noticing. And it was all very, very subversive and and ill-behaved, bobs.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

And now we're moving on to to the transition. The writing was on the wall then because the things fans were making their money out of selling miniatures, the role-playing game wasn't able to do that. And so you were sidelined effectively. You were you kept it on life support and um brilliantly so. That was a difficult time, assumably.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Yeah, it was. I mean, obviously uh it got harder and harder to get any new product greenlit. Empire in Flames is the perfect example of that. After power behind the throne, everything just kind of ground to a halt. Something rotten in Kirsleb, the Russian adventure, got shoehorned in because it wasn't what we were planning. We were planning an adventure called the Horned Rat featuring the Skaven, which we knew to what hammer because Jez had done an amazing job of hanging out and all that interesting weapons their obsession with Warfone and all the rest of that. And their culture. Jezz's uh notebooks are a thing to behold. I think some have actually been published, but they're really great world moving in action. But I digress. So something Rotten Hinkins level's done because Ken Ralston, a now renowned American writer at the time, wanted to come over to Britain for a little bit. And management thought, okay, it's not a big name American writer, and that might boost US sales, which were pretty flat at that time. So he wrote in this adventure, that got shoehorned in, but and Empire and Flames just never, ever happened. And people were saying, when's the next instalment? We finished, you know, we've got nothing to play. So eventually, I think the original idea belongs to Paul Coburn for a stripped-down, dedicated Warhammer subsidiary of Games Workshop, well, Wolfwood subsidiary of Games Workshop. Tom Kirby called me and Mike Bronton into his office and said, You want to do it? We weren't happy with their aspects of the way the studio was going at the time. And the feeling was actually quite mutual. So I think they wanted to have us Oxide. Tony Ackland joined us, who had done all those brilliant career illustrations in the war book. And so the three of us set up Sharp Oxide. They'd done the same thing with uh marauder miniatures, Aaron and Trish Morrison, when we were at one floor below then of the same building. So, yeah, the idea was that it was an experiment to see if paper product could be made profitable by it cutting every possible cord. Remand team, only one dedicated artist. Most of the art was to be taken from the existing Games Workshop archives, which is why in in products like Empire and Planes, you'll see Jiro Quest art reused and all sorts of other stuff from other sources. Uh, all of the cover art was reused from other things.

SPEAKER_02 33:51

But you kept it going, how long did that last for Flame Publications?

SPEAKER_01 33:54

It must have lasted two or three years. I lasted there for a little over a year.

SPEAKER_02 33:59

Right, and that that was that that that's the time you exited Games Workshop?

SPEAKER_01 34:03

Yeah, for various readings, both professional and personal, I uh I left in my US. Then Car Sgt. Mike left and went into video games for microprose, and so uh Robin Dews replaced him, but eventually the whole just did Peter Angle.

SPEAKER_02 34:21

Yeah, it was sad to see from our point of view too, especially with the the White Dwarf magazine. So during the Warhammer fantasy roleplay heyday, the White Dwarf magazine was just the best it's ever been. And we know it doesn't reflect that anymore, but it was very sad to see those kind of Warhammer articles slowly diminishing in number. And um you could see that you could see what was happening in real time.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

Yeah, and it was an important part of supporting product releases. I mean, not just for well Warfruit, of course. One of my jobs, as well as editing and developing the rules, was to produce support articles for white dwarf. We didn't get to do that so much with Wolfrup after a while. Although the best time I had was during the uh the Marion Burke serialized city. And I was inspired by something that I've been in, imagine called the City Read or A D and D. And if you go back long enough, you'll remember all the part works that used to be in W. H. Smith, you get a magazine every month, and you know, if you're stuck with it, I mean if the publisher's stuck with it, in 10 or 15 years you might have a complete encyclopedia. And we were going to do the same thing with a city pack, because people had liked um Middle Pine, um, and there were also other city packs out there, like GD and D had gone on for Fritz Lieber's um Langmar, um, which was overnay as I think one of the best ever published. I would enjoy that one.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

So, yeah, I would actually like to go back and quickly talk about the Enemy Within campaign, which of course has now been re-released in the latest edition, fourth edition, which is the edition I think will be the one that most people would be getting if they if they wanted to find out what the Sydney's all about now, head to Cubicle 7 and and look for the fourth edition rules. And the The Enemy Within has been brought back. So such an important campaign, like an iconic campaign, they're one of the best that's ever been written. And then it's not just me saying that, it goes on record, doesn't it? Quite quite constantly comes up in the top campaigns of all time. And you got the opportunity to rewrite it. So the first edition version, fantastic, and uh with the the sidetrack to Kizlev, which you pointed out, wasn't particularly pre-planned and perhaps not in hindsight the the best idea for the for the way the campaign went. You got to correct that in fourth edition. It's a 10-volume campaign, isn't it, now that you can get with the companions included. That was already there, was it, or did you did you have to do a hell of a lot of work on that?

SPEAKER_01 36:41

It took quite a bit of time, two or three years being my primary project. Yeah. It all came about. I met Dominic McDowell who runs Cubicle 7. Um, obviously, a new edition of Warhammer's interested in talking to me and when he kicked some ideas around. He mentioned the idea again within doing a director's cut. I thought great. And uh then people started asking, yeah, but what about one of stuff that appeared in White Dwarf? Or, you know, not in the main volumes. So we decided to do it's basically a five-part campaign, each part consisting of two bodies. There's the main adventure book, and then each uh adventure book comes with a companion of additional and optional material, which can be in rules to relate to whatever's going on in that episode. There can be side adventures, all kinds of stuff. For the first three, Anion Shadows, Death on the Rank, and Power Behind the Throat, the material was all pretty much there. There were some changes to make, you know, we've had people who've been playing this thing for 30 years. I've spoken to people who had played the whole thing through four or five times with different boots. So there was a lot of feedback out there, 30 years of play testing them, and it's pretty much a designer's breeze. So I was able to smooth out some of the rough spot, make prints and improvements here and there, improved clarity of information, stuff like that. And then four and five, which is the horned rat and Empire Ruins. The Horned Rat had never got made the first time round. I tracked down for your gallather and we talked about what he and Jim has planned for the Hornedrat in first edition, which wasn't much because it was by one paragraph on an overall four-page proposal. But uh got that information and I looked at, you know, how Skather had developed over the intervening for the odd years through the army books for for the battle game and everything, and came up with a scenario. I got daring interesting in sort of ripping off James Bond, these insane warp stone firing cannon blowing up Oh, hold on, spoilers for my players here.

SPEAKER_02 38:45

Uh tell us more. We're we're actually playing it at the moment, and yes, we're just they've just finished Power Be Underthrown, and Commander Schwarzman has them now in his office. Well, we know it's all about scaven though, don't we? Yeah, but Schwartzmann doesn't believe in Skaven.

SPEAKER_01 39:00

Well, I'm not gonna say any more than that. Yes. Oh, you guys, yeah. Because it was all new uh rather than existing material, you know, it got more attention from the developers at Keith Cool Server, and that goes double up or Empire. The original ended in a campaign Empire Lane, but was not well received and very good reasons.

SPEAKER_02 39:24

Not by Geist Workshop, but that the Emperor Karl Franz was a mutant, wasn't he, at the end of it?

SPEAKER_03 39:28

Wasn't that something that Well he was, they're the big figure, didn't they? Of Carl Franz, they probably wasn't happy with you killing him off.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

No, no, they were just starting to do the process that led to the army books and all the world building that those books accomplished. And of course, for the backward game, the emperor had to be big and mighty. You know, he couldn't be a a twitching, semi-mutating, feebled uh wreck. Um He could still be big and mighty, just be tentacles and ever changes to go back. It was it wasn't well received by the public either was uh was uh Empire and Flames because Carl Sargent had written it, I think, over a period of about a week. The the brief was it we it was Flames first project, even though it came out under the Games Workshop imprint. And you can tell because the production values are entirely flame, it's all weed art, it's all smaller pages. That was our first job with the bring this bloody campaign to an end so people stopped whining about it with Brian's attitude. So Car Sargent wrote this thing for presumably very little money in a very short time. Mike developed it as a sort of a drive run with the equipment. We were using early versions of Quark Express, learning that as uh as he went. Um, I was working on, I think, the first of the Doomstones campaign at that time.

SPEAKER_02 40:49

Was it yeah? Another another great little campaign you might want to dip your feet into. That Doomstones in particular seem to be a bit more reminiscent of Dungeons and Dragons. And so if you are thinking about coming across and giving Wime ago and you're worried about the adjustments lane, the Doomstone campaign science sits somewhere in between. That's what we always felt. Is that was that intended as well?

SPEAKER_01 41:08

I'd say that I'd say that's fair. It was written as a DD one, wasn't it? It was. It was called the Complete Gungeon Master via an alpha called Beast Enterprises. And Games Workshop had acquired it. Everything we published at Pine Birch Lane was acquired from outside, and we were told to get it out the door, finish it up, get him out the door. That was part of the cost cutting. And so, yeah, this was originally written for ADD. I think another freelancer, Brad Ringal, I think his name was, was fired to restat it. And then I was given it to develop and sort of inject the Warhammer flavor as much as I could, but uh if you're used to DD adventures, you'll be far more at home in the Doomstones. Yeah. That's the one to recommend, yeah. If you're used to called the third little adventures, you'll enjoy the enemy with it.

SPEAKER_02 41:53

But the Doomstones, uh no plans to rewrite that by yourself. They're not asking you to bring out a fourth edition version of that. No.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

No, no. Um Cubicle 7 seems to have I I haven't really been in touch with them since the end of the Enemy Riven Director's car. They've clearly got plans of their own. Um seems to be doing quite well for them.

SPEAKER_02 42:13

Yeah, it is. I mean, there's really so much stuff aboard it all. It's cost me a full-to-liga show. Uh we'd like to talk about um your other projects you've done, but particularly your current projects as well, which we'd like to give the majority of focus to for the rest of the time we're talking. And then I've got some final questions to ask you a little bit, a few curveballs just to get if we've got time for a little bit of fun. We should talk about basin. Come in the vampire, John, don't worry. You've done it right for us with basin. You brought out the the England, the the British Isles source book for Basin, and it's just brilliant. Wow, Mash Made in Heaven. Did you know much about the basin system before you were asked to do that?

SPEAKER_01 42:49

Well, when I saw Berson come out, I I wanted for years, nay, decades, to do an investigative, heavy role-playing, story-heavy game with unlocked the folklore because I'm obsessed by particularly British and Irish folklore, but folklore in general. And I I'd wanted to do something right now. When Verson came out, it was like, damn, someone else has done. But they'd done it in Scandinavia. So the British Isles are still open. So I fired off an email same day. It was a mixture of begging and threatening. Uh I absolutely need to do a British Isles supplement for you. And luckily they agreed, they threw it up on a Kickstarter job, and he didn't understand seven minutes.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Yeah, okay. I missed the Kickstarter.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

And so the result was Besson and Mythic Britain Isle.

SPEAKER_02 43:39

Yeah. Wow, good pitch. Well, fantastic. And this the system, I think, is a far better for it, and particularly from our point of view. But you you released a Fighting Fantasy book. Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

Yeah, I did a Fighting Fantasy. Almost everyone in Newsommark Shop it at some point because uh, you know, Steve and the M were still more or less involved with the company and uh that gave us an in really

SPEAKER_03 44:00

Night Rogue, wasn't it? Yeah, that was one of my absolute favourites. To be fair, I only just recently found out that you did that. Really? Yeah, uh, yeah, it definitely had a different feel to the others, so but it was 100% one of my favorites. Yeah. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

Well, definitely a different feel because I I think I was trying to force Viking Fantasy into being roof root. Yeah. You know, so I walked through that a gritty, grimy, thiefy adventure. And the first draft uh got sent back to me with where's the combat? Because obviously, if you're a thief sneaking around, the best thing is to avoid combat. And I remember the editor said, it is fighting fantasy, after all, fighting under my and John got an overture with a vampire.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

John, uh we don't we haven't played a lot of vampire the rest of us, but John, yeah, a lifetime, I think.

SPEAKER_00 44:43

So I'm more a werewolf guy. Yeah, you'd tell. My one of my groups still played second edition vampire, and it wasn't really, because I I only tend to read what my character knows. So I I didn't actually know how much you'd done for vampire. So what term edition did you come in?

SPEAKER_01 45:01

I came in from the very beginning. When I was getting fed up with Games Workshop and Flame, Ken Ralston, something wrong in Kislip, he introduced me to Mark Reinhagen, who had this idea for a game where you all played vampires, and no one had ever heard of such a thing at that time. And before I moved to the States, he sent me a draw and I commented on it. And then when I got here, I worked on a series of like I think probably everything for the first year or so of the nine's existence in some capacity or another. I edited Chicago by night, the source book. I wrote one of the adventures in the Soccer Club collection. When they give the players guiding storytellers handbook, I did various sections of supplementary rules there. And I think it was the second edition. I I did the GM screen story screen, sorry, and uh the book that goes inside that. Then co-writer uh uh GM Esther's. Um they they had this mommy uh game as well when they were building out the whole world of darkness. Jim and I did the second edition of that.

SPEAKER_00 46:07

Ah that that's a lovely game, the splat for for mommy. It's I can't see it working for a uh a group with its really good law white.

SPEAKER_01 46:19

Yeah, it built out the world in a very satisfying way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

So we're going to um talk about what you're up to now, Graham. So the the Monster of the Month Patreon that you have up and running. Tell us a bit about that and and how people can get get to see what that's all about.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

All right, well, firstly, Monster of the Month Club at Patreon.com. And it all started with when I was working on the uh with my arm and source book Govessi. I wanted to introduce far more monsters than the book would hold. And so fortunately, uh clearly the pub ministers have this community content program, and I put out a bunch of monsters through that, and I'm still thinking of that anymore. Uh, they're available on right through RPG if you get interested. And then I've written various bestiades for various uh chivalry and sorcery and various other games. Because I'm really obsessed by monsters. It all goes back to I think I was about six when I first saw Jason and the Arvanauts on the parents black and white television one Saturday morning, and those skeletons just changed my life. Uh and I got obsessed with mythology, I ended up doing traffics at school, archaeology, university, going into games, it's all that been talking. So another interest of mine in role-playing games is making things system agnostic. And I've been working for years on ideas for doing something with system agnostic monsters, but actually starting them in a system agnostic way. Which sounds like an impossible contradiction, but I actually came up with something that works. So I put out some of my guessing monsters uh using that treatment. Uh got the little paintrium going, and yeah, it's doing uh doing quite well. People quite like it. Presentation is fairly basic because I'm doing it myself. Uh I can't afford to pay an artist yet, and I refuse to to try and get someone to do anything for exposure.

SPEAKER_02 48:12

Can you say a system agnostic? You could apply this to Dungeons and Dragons, these can be played within, obviously, then the basin system you said they would lend themselves perfectly to.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

Yeah, what I've done, the that approach I'm taking. Stats are a three-corn table. I've I've chosen, you know, the basic stat, uh strength, intelligence, dexterity, slash, agility, willpower, and constitution. And they're common to pretty much every game under one name or another. And then each of those stats has three cores. There's uh one for a D20 or 3D6-based systems, there's one for Centile systems, and that covers a lot of uh a lot of stuff. But the third card isn't numbers, it's words. It's comparable stuff, and that's what makes it truly system agnostic. So I can say strong as a mox, intelligent as a dog, referring to something for which you've already got stats in your system, so you can just get them on the fairly sort of in addition to that. The thing about folklore is that no two accounts of a monster are the same. I have a virtue of that by breaking the traits and abilities down into basic and optional. So the basic traits every individual of that type has, let's say, take Icelandic Draugga, for example. If you just use the basic abilities, they're they're essentially Viking zombies with a bit of a twist. If you use some of the optional abilities, they can be shade changes, they can call up different weather. Some of them are unstable. You have to resolve their underlying conflict. So you can customize your heart's tonight, you can make things truly terrifying, and you've got a lot of flexibility there.

SPEAKER_02 49:46

And all all based on actual folklore, real historical accounts.

SPEAKER_01 49:50

Based on my research in in folklore around the world. Yeah, I've I've right now I've got things from Britain and Ireland, obviously, also from Scandinavia, South America, from all that.

SPEAKER_02 50:00

Yeah, for me, that's how I like my monsters to be. There's a lot of imagination that goes into some creatures, I'm I'm sure, but I like the ones that are grounded in reality in our in our own culture and and and other other countries too. It just brings them to life far more. So having yourself as an historian, through the experience you have looking into all of this, bringing together your favourites, your recommendations for people to bring through into their games. And once a month, is it you you guarantee one one a month?

SPEAKER_01 50:25

Once a month, yeah. It's a four to eight page treatment, depending on how complex the monster is. I always include, as well as the stats and the basic and optional characteristics, I include at least three venture seeds, one fantasy, one historical, one modern day. Because it's just an easy way for me to show you how a monster works. And where available, I include case studies from literature. So with the Icelandic Draco one, for example, I've got a couple of pages of retellings of the stories of where they've appeared in the Icelandic sagas, and also where available very there's this Scottish thing called the uh Gaelic speakers, please excuse me, I probably butchered that. But it's uh sort of an ogre type thing with one leg, one arm, one eye that bounces about killing people with a flight. That's all well and good. I gave that standard treatment. But in Persia there's a thing called a Naz Naz, which was actually written up in a very early edition of White Dwarf. And there are other one-legged things from across the world. So I I give a few notes on them. So if you want to adapt this basis to reflect one of them, you can do that. So as I say, four to eight pages of very accessible, very usable information, basically a kit to construct monsters of a certain type. There's also a blog on Patreon, certain levels of backing, you get to vote on what next month's monster is going to be, and I'm planning a bunch of other improvements as well.

SPEAKER_02 51:59

And do you get access to the old monsters if you were to sign up now? Would you get access to the ones that you've previously written? You do. The bottom tier is just the pound, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 52:07

I think um uh yeah, well, it starts at a a dollar. Yeah. So uh goes all the way out to however much you want to how much you want to throw into my tin mug.

SPEAKER_02 52:17

At the at the very least, a dollar for a monster is is pretty good value, and if you've ever played the basin game, then yeah, you you'd know what to expect, but Graham's writing there and the format in which they do the monsters too.

SPEAKER_00 52:28

So just as an aside, Vason is one of the prettiest books I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_01 52:34

It certainly is.

SPEAKER_00 52:35

Very fortunate a friend of mine very recently bought what's his name, Johan 98. Yeah, yeah. Um a friend of mine recently bought me two of his prints, which I'm sending off to get framed shortly. They're they're beautiful, they really are.

SPEAKER_01 52:49

Yeah, and when we first started working on this in Britain, I sent me a copy of his uh his original basic pure art book, the one that inspired the game.

SPEAKER_02 52:58

Oh god, that must have been his book. Something to see. Wow. So I've got some final questions here for you, Graham, just little curples, really.

SPEAKER_00 53:06

Now we move on to the fluff piece. Is it gonna be what is your star sign?

SPEAKER_02 53:12

No, it's raw hammer related. Okay, so what's the what's the thing that you got through that perhaps in hindsight you think that we went a step too far? Did it all get edited out? The tough the tough decisions were made. Is there anything anything there you want to reveal?

SPEAKER_01 53:24

Well, the thing I regret most, and I've been on record saying this before, is the the background for the FIMI. The Fimia, for those who are not familiar with the setting, are a reptilian marsh-dwelling race who have no females and must kidnap human women in order to reproduce, which is actually pretty horrible. At the time, I was obsessed with folklore and fairy law and the fairy abduction trope, the changelings, all of that sort of stuff. That's what I was trying to convey when I wrote that that element of the firm's background. But I would completely took my eye off the ball there, and yeah, kidnapping and rape are no joke, not even a fantasy game. And uh yeah, so I've uh regretted that pretty much ever since. And I think that's been played down considerably in in later editions.

SPEAKER_02 54:17

So the yeah, the Fimia don't exist anymore within the Warhammer system. Is that something that they eventually just they took out, you say it's later editions?

SPEAKER_01 54:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:26

Honestly, they've been in and out, um, as my granddad used to say, in and out like a fiddler's elbow. Uh there's they appear in some editions, they were in hero quest, they were they pop up in in an adventure here and an adventure there. You know, there are some people who like them so much they don't want to let go. You know what? They are in, I believe they are in the fourth edition war book, if Mamma serves, in the the the little beastary chapter that's in there. But that aspect of their their background and their biology has uh rightly been written out.

SPEAKER_00 54:59

For the setting, having just the mist and the sort of half-seen figures, and nobody knows what they are until it was really well done on that side of things.

SPEAKER_01 55:10

Well, thank you. I I I stole most of it from um Irish mythology. Obviously, Femir is derived from Femorians and uh the single eye battle of the evil eye and all of that. And there were Irish myths I'd read about floating islands surrounded by mist that just moved around. Uh so I incorporated a lot of that at the time.

SPEAKER_00 55:31

So w would that have been a a north towards possibly an Albion talk?

SPEAKER_02 55:35

But I guess you no sure we could talk about that now. Okay, so yes. Uh still waiting. It wasn't necessary in hindsight, but uh it's it's incredible really it didn't happen though, because the amount of talent the writers were there to do it. Was it Games Workshop that stood in the way, or was it just time constraints that meant that didn't come out?

SPEAKER_01 55:52

It was both those things, to be honest. Time constraints for sure. The enemy within campaign really opened up the empire to the extent that the empire overshadowed everything else, and there was very little incentive to uh to do an adventure in any other location. We had uh Howell's Lustria campaign, and there was always the thought of doing a Lustria source book. It was the 80s, so everything Japanese was terribly fashionable, and there was the Japanese equivalent on the Warhammer World. There was a supplement. We had a uh some external writers do a manuscript for it, but that just got thrown on a to be developed pile because they didn't really nail the tone because they weren't in that writer's room with us, and it never got developed, and then you know, interest just waned. But there was always this undercurrents like we're a British role-playing game, for heaven's sake, why don't we do how people uh Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 56:45

Now you couldn't imagine it happening. At the time, you could have got away with it, do you think, if you'd said this is where we want to go with it, there was a decision that could have been had?

SPEAKER_01 56:53

Uh I don't think so. Just the way Games Workshop worked at the time, one of the reasons a Japanese-themed area was gonna be opened up, was because Ali Morrison was making all the samurai and undead samurai and hobgoblins and so the miniatures were there. But we were told fairly firmly that the role-playing game didn't get to go to new territory. It had to be opened up. We're in the battle game, you know, there had to be an army because everything Warhaver, including the role-playing game, was being seen as essentially a marketing tool. And that's why in the early Enemy Within Adventures, if you get a mint copy edition, you'll find a flyer for a miniature deal.

SPEAKER_02 57:35

Yes. I wish I'd bought them. I mean, I could never have afforded them, but there can't be too many of those around. Do you have any do you have your own set of those?

SPEAKER_01 57:43

Uh unfortunately not. No, too many uh transatlantic moves will have it with my collection.

SPEAKER_02 57:49

I wonder how many exist. Yeah, just to have those would be fantastic. Those key characters out of all of those.

SPEAKER_01 57:54

Very collectible today. Yeah. Uh ironically, because they didn't sell at the time.

SPEAKER_02 58:00

What I'd like to talk about quickly is Lishmaster, because we've just done a Lishmaster live play, uh which we completed. And w what we discovered was the monks ended up being the bad guys in some respect because they they send all of these people out into the wilderness to look for tombs, knowing that the people that find the tomb that they're looking for, that there's great evil there, they're not really being clear on the objectives of what they're sending people out for.

SPEAKER_00 58:26

I can't help but feel that that's directed at me. Because I didn't I didn't have to get the um with brother, what was it, Jean-Luis? Jean-Louis Instrance, yeah. Oh, either you knew what you were sending us into and we were going to our death, or you suspected what you were sending us into and we were going to our death. He said, don't go in the tomb, put your whining. I stayed in the library.

SPEAKER_01 58:53

But as I remember it, I think that what he actually wanted was just confirmation. It what he wanted to be told was was actually it's all good and nothing evil's going on, you're fun.

unknown 59:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 59:05

But he he wanted someone to tell him that. But yeah, uh, it was basically intended to be a scouting mission, but then kind of events overtake the party.

SPEAKER_02 59:14

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00 59:15

Yeah, classic adventure. Well, and actually that element of it did work very well because I had no idea what I was walking into, just like my character didn't. I didn't have any prior knowledge of the campaign. And there was a moment was when we had the battle in the the the cottage and the bloke threw the cot out of the window. That was really good fun as well. But there was a moment where I thought, well, that escalated quickly. But well, I won't just sort of go and have a general look around, lads, and five minutes later you're fighting for your life with swellins. Oh, just like when you said earlier on about David and the Argonauts, I mean, it was hard to sort of in your head to go back to that kind of animation. That was how I saw our skeletons.

SPEAKER_01 59:57

Oh, that's how all skeletons move. I believe it to this day.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:00

Yeah, absolutely 100%. I'm with you. You you can't be that with CGI and everything else. When they scream as they ran in, that that that just gives you the goosebumps, even now. It's brilliant. Yeah, it still makes the hair on my understanding. Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:15

Yeah, it's an epic adventure and it's a low-level one too. So you this could be the first Warhammer game you play if you wanted. It hasn't been converted to fourth edition, but it's not too difficult to convert. It is um it's a game that you can play. It's a low-level adventure that that takes you to some pretty serious, serious places. So we enjoy playing that recently, and um we've got that up on our plus feed if anyone wants to catch up with it. If anyone else can think of a quick question to ask Graham to finish off, I've got my one here, which I will ask you, Graham. What is your favourite Warhammer career and why?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:44

Grave rock is my favourite Warhammer career because I was an archaeologist and I robbed a few grades in hats.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:52

It's not grave robbing if it goes into a museum. Any archaeologists.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:57

Right, of Indian agenda. So as you said.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:00

I mean, I was a bone picker. I don't think you can get much more lowly than that.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:04

Well, that's the thing about the Warhammer world is it can always get worse.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:08

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:09

You wrote recently the career Dong Handler, isn't it? Was it called the one that Dong Farmer Dong Farmer, yes. The Dong Farmer makes a living collecting excrement, human excrement. What a horrible career. Where the hell did you come up with that? Well, he started from the bottom quite literally, in that yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:24

In every sense of the word. You know, I was aware of the career from medieval sources, and then I read this great article in an archaeology magazine uh about how the night soil men's, another euphemistic name for the same profession, how they were uh organized in the Dutch city of Leiden and that gave me the basis for the four levels for the fourth edition career. And it's actually quite useful because you get all these immunities to things like disease, poison.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:49

Yeah, it's a good it's a good starter.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:51

Um so there's your challenge, listeners. If you want to play Warhammer, that's your character who can take up the challenge. I think you'll only find it on Graham's blog, won't you? That wasn't released in fourth edition role.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:01

That's right. Yeah. I I'm not licensed to do anything official for for Wolfrup outside of Pubicle 7. I put a lot of stuff on my blog, Graham Davis.wordPress.com, with uh the tag Warhammer or Wolfrup, and you'll find I've statted up a bunch of reiningly old signal miniatures for fourth edition, uh, some of which were never stated for Wolfrup ever.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:22

Uh huh.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:22

There's a lot of my memories of working games workshop on variance products. There are uh some of them at least arrayed like you know, silly names and end jokes and what have you from the Enemy Within campaign and other Wolfrup things. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff on my blog.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:37

Check it out, great resource, yeah. We'll put all of these links in the podcast notes so people can check you out and engage with you on those things independent of us. Anyone else got any little questions?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:46

Do you get time to play Tabletop RPGs still? And which if you do, do you which ones do you play? No way.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:52

Only occasionally I'll be able to sit in on a game at a convention. A couple of years ago, uh I played a demo version of the Marvel uh role-playing game because uh my friend Matt Bullbeck is in town and he wrote it. But yeah, no, I I don't really have the chance to to play.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:09

What about battle games? Do you ever play the battle side of it?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:12

Well, I get one story. I haven't played for years, and I I've still got my pile of unnamed my pile of shame, one person miniatures. But when the playtesting third edition Warhammer, the big orange book, I uh was playing Brian Ans or I think I was playing Mundell for once in my life I had each. I had my twelve dice to roll and I needed only one of them to roll three or hard. And I won the bat. I rolled twelve dice, I got it never once and no.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:48

That's the only time you could have possibly beaten him, man. That's just never meant to be, was it? That's when you wish you had a fake point to put explain that one away.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:59

I I explained with 20 or these guys are proper dice superstitious. Like I'm pretty sure they're forming a cult.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:09

Don't talk about the cult. Richard Hallewell before a game, he would try and roll all the ones off his dice.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:15

Good idea. That sounds like a really traumatic experience, actually. It it left a mark.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:19

That's that's put it.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:21

Um, okay, so we'll bring it to an end. Thanks a lot, Grant, for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. As you can tell, we're you know, we followed your career and let's all play your games now. John John Sean would correctly describe himself as that. No, it's it's been great talking to you, and thanks for coming on RPG Blokes. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:41

It's always been used, I'm a little humbled, you know, when when people come to me and say how much they've enjoyed the nonsense I win her.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:48

Thanks a lot. Thanks, Ray. Thanks, man. Thank you.