This is the transcription of the conversation with John Stallard and Rick Priestley
that took place in Nottingham, 5th December 2009.
Former Games Workshop staffers Stallard & Priestley talk about their own introduction to wargames, the early days of GW, the creation of Warhammer & Rogue Trader and the growth of GW in the late 80′s & early 90′s.
A few quotes about the first edition of Warhammer, which modern GW fans may find a little surprising:
RP: ...I think the reason why Warhammer took off despite its limitations was because it was full of energy and very gag-tastic. There was an element of fantasy gaming that was quite serious at that time, as the original splurge of roleplaying games of the late 70s had grown up a bit, and there was a very strong element who were into roleplaying games as a serious concept, and rules had started to develop into a very detailed, profound state, valuing mechanisms for their own sake, very furrowed brow. Chivalry and Sorcery was like that, and even RuneQuest had an element of that.
JS: And it’s undeniable there was a certain amount of American versus British feeling there – the Americans struck me as terribly serious at that time, and the gaming, in my opinion, seemed a bit dull, and when Rick wrote Warhammer, of course with some guidance from Bryan, it was irreverent, it was very funny. Dwarves were characterized as grim Northerners, Orcs were dodgy south Londoners, elves as not quite manly, effete southerners… It was all just such great fun!
RP: Well, that sort of characterization was driven by a very British sense of humour, very Pythonesque in places, and certainly irreverent, to the point of being a bit ‘sixth-form’ to be honest. That was definitely something that Hal and I brought to it, because Hal did a lot of the original writing on Warhammer.
HH: ...Simultaneous moves – Charles Grant, Bruce Quarrie, WRG Ancients, they all had simultaneous moves, with written orders.
RP: Oh yes, you’re right, which we did with WRG, but WRG orders became more and more formalized, because the system became complex. No, we did alternate moves with Warhammer, because we knew our audience. You can’t write a game based on simultaneous movement unless you’re going to have some element of hidden orders or direction. Well, no youngster is going to play that.
RP: You know, in my mind, Warhammer was always an ancients or medieval wargame with fantasy bits bolted on. I built it that way. The d6 was a prerequisite. Bryan did the brief on the game and he said that you have to do rules for everything we make; and it has to use a d6. So, right from the beginning, you’d got certain limitations. Hal and I thought that the idea of using a d6 was already quite primitive. We took our Reaper game and tried to convert it over into d6. What we found was that there weren’t enough modifiers in a d6 to be able to do everything we wanted. So we split the system down: instead of being a two-stage hit/defend, it became a three-stage hit/defend/save. Which is also inspired partly by the old Tony Bath and Terry Wise rules, which had saving throws. But we were very conscious that this was old fashioned, and clunky, but we kind of made a virtue of it.
HH: It’s hard to remember how many systems were d20 and percentage based back in those days.
RP: D6 systems had become old-fashioned and were seen as being primnitive.
