It’s All About the Game

Carl Brown of Second Thunder prepares to meet the charge of my Norman Knights in a game of Open Combat.

I love games. I must have driven my parents insane as a child, because all I wanted to do was play a board game or cards. After my dad first ran a couple of D+D sessions for me and my brother (thanks Dad, an experience that shaped my life!) I nagged endlessly to play more.

Clever little card games, magnificent ‘Ameritrash’ whole day gamefests, slinky Euro titles, RPGs, wargames… I’ll pretty much play anything. And the best news of all, I’ve been able to turn that love into a job. Writing novels and designing games is a dream combo (I just need someone to give me millions of pounds/ dollars to run a design studio or create a Mega-city One MMORPG and I’m set for life).

Most of my work has come from the fourteen years I spent at Games Workshop. From Assistant Games Developer through White Dwarf Staff Writer, Games Developer and finally Senior Games Developer (including periods with other job titles including the wonderful Warhammer Loremaster) it’s gratifying to look back at some of the projects I have been involved with and think of how they have shaped the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 games and universes today.

There’s so much to talk about, I’ve started writing some of my thoughts over on the Games pages – I’ll be going back through my development history to talk about more of my favourites from two decades of games design.

I used to be a full-time games developer and wrote fiction in my spare time. These days the roles are pretty much reversed, although I do dedicate work time to games design when needed. I find them to be two very different creative challenges, which complement each other well. Fiction is about raw ideas shaped into a narrative, while games design is much more an exercise in process and mechanics. Both test communication skills in different ways.

The same can be said for the world creation and world building work I have done for several companies – either directly by the creation of ‘world books/ bibles’, or through pieces of colour prose as I have done for Voodooworx. These types of projects remind me of the best times at GW, working with artists and miniatures designers on concepts and imagery, taking inspiration from each other to create something greater than the parts. For all the benefits of being a novelist, it is essentially a solitary profession and the opportunity to bounce ideas around and just swap thoughts with other creatively-minded folks is a welcome addition.

I consider my games design career far from over, even if it has taken a bit of a backseat to the fiction these days. I have several projects on the boil at any given time; at the moment I’m revisiting some World War 2 rules that will form the core of a much wider range of games, as well as a card-driven futuresport and a Wild West shootout game based on Poker hands…

I’ll be keeping the Games pages updated with what’s new, and of course I’ll be blogging about my gaming exploits and future work developments.