INTERVIEW WITH GRAEME DAVIS ON HIS LONG CAREER AS A GAME DESIGNER

It was about 1976, and I was a member of a small theatre group in my home town in England. Some younger members, recently graduated from university, were talking about a game that was 50% miniatures wargame and 50% improvised theatre. No one had heard of D&D or roleplaying at that time, so to me, games were either boardgames or miniatures wargames. I could not understand how this weird hybrid of game and theatre could possibly exist, and I decided that the only way to find out was to play. It was white box D&D, and I was hooked immediately.

My first published article appeared in White Dwarf 32 in the summer of 1982. It was a short piece for AD&D, proposing a system for handling drugs (including alcohol) and addiction. Looking back, I guess I was always attracted to the grim and gritty rather than the heroic or shiny, which I guess made me a good fit for writing Warhammer!

In the winter of 1985-6, when I was commissioned to write two series of six short fantasy gamebooks for kids who had difficulty reading. They were ultimately published by Oxford University Press under the title Quest Adventures, but they are almost impossible to find today. The prestigious publisher, and the generous (for the time) payment convinced me to try and make this my profession.

I contributed to Games Workshop's 1987 UK supplement for Call of Cthulhu, which was titled A Green and Pleasant Land. I wrote a chapter on British archaeology in the 1920s (I was an archaeology student at the time), and contributed some adventure outlines and descriptions of prominent people of the time.

Always just a freelancer, writing for Imagine magazine. Editor Paul Cockburn would tell me what the theme of a particular issue would be, I would suggest some ideas, and he would commission me to write whatever we agreed on. One thing I should note: Graeme Morris was a full-time employee of TSR UK, until the time their design team was shut down. Rather than joining Jim Bambra, Phil Gallagher, and the rest in going to Games Workshop, he chose to remain in Cambridge and pursue his academic interests.

When did you start working for Games Workshop and were you hired specifically for handling (along the other team members) the work on the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay/WFRP project?

I started in May 1986 after about a month of interviews and collaborating on early drafts of WFRP. I was hired specifically for my roleplaying expertise. I like to tell people that because Graeme Morris remained in Cambridge, the design team needed another Graeme and I got the job!

For the WFRP core book, about 6 months. We had to get the book to the printers in October so it could be in shops in time for Christmas - which explains why there are a few rough spots in the 1st edition rules. We then started to build the Enemy Within campaign. As an employee of Games Workshop, I stayed until October 1990.

Yes. When I arrived in Nottingham (a few weeks ahead of Jim and Phil) there was a fairly extensive draft written by Rick Priestley and piles of notes from Bryan Ansell and Richard Halliwell. 

We remember reading something in White Dwarf about delays and problems...

I don't remember any specific delays with the core book - quite the opposite, in fact, because we were constantly reminded of the October deadline. For other WFRP products, delays were standard, especially after the company management were disappointed in WFRP's performance as a driver of miniatures sales and WFRP products slipped lower and lower down the list of priorities. Also, White Dwarf's news page (called "Awesome Lies" at the time for good reason!) would always announce a project far too early, and some took years to release, or were never finished, or were never even begun. There's now a whole sector of the blogging community devoted to tracking the history of these "Lost Warhammer" projects.

Was WFRP an immediate success?

That depends who you ask. The initial critical reaction was very positive, though I suspect that in Britain it was partly because WFRP was a British product and at the time we were in the Reagan-Thatcher era and there was a strong current of anti-Americanism in British society. People liked the tone and the setting, and seemed willing to overlook the weaknesses of the rules system. To Games Workshop, though, it was seen as less successful because it failed to generate miniatures sales at the same level as 40K, which was released at about the same time.

I don't know.

It was a lot of fun. The writers' room was home to a lot of strong personalities, and was always full of laughter, banter, and insults. We strove to top each other's jokes as well as each other's ideas, and we felt a little like an anarchist cell in the middle of the company, resisting the serious, humorless management as we subverted and satirized everything from the contemporary political and social situation to the games themselves.

Very few. Occasionally they would come up to Nottingham for a meeting with Bryan, but they took no part in the day-to-day operation of the design studio. They were busy with Fighting Fantasy at that time.

See above.

Very few people actually moved from London: just Marc Gascoigne and Jervis Johnson as far as I can remember. A major part of the perceived move to make White Dwarf a house magazine came from the fact that TSR UK was now publishing D&D, which had been a staple of White Dwarf previously. Almost every article that ever appeared in White Dwarf was for a game that GW sold at that time; D&D was replaced by Chaosium and West End Games products for as long as GW had exclusive printing and distribution deals with those companies, while games from GDW, FGU, and Steve Jackson Games (for example) were seldom if ever featured because GW had no deals in place to distribute their products. So in that sense, White Dwarf was always a house magazine, but after the move to Nottingham the focus shifted more and more toward Warhammer and 40K.

As a roleplaying writer, I looked on with concern as roleplaying games became less and less important. By the time Flame Publications was spun off (and moved out of the studio building) to produce WFRP material at the lowest possible cost (and never mind the quality), I was so frustrated and disillusioned that I started looking around for other work, and that's how I came to be introduced to Mark Rein-Hagen and work on Vampire: the Masquerade. I also sent an unsolicited proposal for GURPS Vikings to Steve Jackson Games, and in the end I wrote three books for them, and contributed to several others.

No. I heard about it from someone else in the studio. I forget who, though.

It was a tiny operation, aimed at cutting every possible cost. I developed manuscripts that had been commissioned from the cheapest possible freelance writers by GW management, Mike Brunton did final editing and layout, and Tony Ackland provided any unique images that were required - although we were under strict orders to re-use art from the GW archive as much as possible - which is why, for example, pictures from Advanced Heroquest were re-used in some WFRP products. It was clear that management believed that roleplaying products could not be made profitable because they didn't sell miniatures, and we felt like the unwelcome stepchildren banished to the woodshed. We still out-produced the main studio, in terms of products brought to market per year, but I knew it couldn't last and that's why I resigned in 1990. Another factor was creative frustration. I had been told that I would never be allowed to write anything for GW again, because I was too valuable as a developer of other people's work. This was not the career path I was looking for.

I left GW mainly because of the frustrations and sense of insecurity mentioned above. I was looking to the United States because there was nowhere else to find work that wasn't with Games Workshop, and also because of a girl I had met at university a few years previously. So I moved to Denver in October 1990, and began working as a freelancer on titles for White Wolf and Steve Jackson Games, as well as a couple of contracts from TSR.

My involvement with WFRP continued, but at a lower level. Carl Sargent, who took over my role at Flame, commissioned me to edit Castle Drachenfels and write a supplement for Advanced Heroquest (I recently found a trove of unpublished material from the latter project, which I'm posting for free on my blog). I also did a couple of things for Hogshead Publishing when they had the WFRP license, such as editing Apocrypha 2.

When WFRP 2 came out some of my work was reprinted with updated stats, and I wrote the introductory adventure in the rulebook as well as Ashes of Middenheim, the first instalment of the Paths of the Damned campaign for that edition.

My involvement with 3rd edition was similarly modest: I wrote the adventure Edge of Night and co-wrote The Enemy Within, in both cases to very detailed briefs from Fantasy Flight Games. I should point out that the 3rd edition adventure titled The Enemy Within has no relation to the 1st edition campaign of the same title: I suspect that Fantasy Flight re-used the title in the hope that, coupled with my name, it would generate additional sales. I don't know whether it actually did.

As soon as 4th edition was announced, I contacted Dom McDowall, whom I knew vaguely from a previous project, and expressed interest. Our discussions led to the Enemy Within Director's Cut, which I compiled, updated, and expanded, plus the adventure book Rough Nights and Hard Days. At this time, though, I have no plans to write more for Cubicle 7.

Your latest book is (we think) Mythic Britain & Ireland, for Free League's Vaesen RPG. In what projects are you currently involved with, apart being a guest of an Italian convention ;-)?

For the last couple of years, I have been working as the lead narrative designer and loremaster for a mobile geolocation fantasy roleplaying game called MythWalker, dealing primarily with world building, story development, and English-language text. The game was released late last year, and more information can be found at MythWalker.com.

Also, I have just launched a Patreon-backed project called The Monster of the Month Club which is something I've wanted to do for a long time. Each month, members receive a 4-8-page treatment of a monster from world myth and folklore, presented in a system-agnostic format which I have been perfecting over the last decade or so. As you see from Vaesen: Mythic Britain and Ireland, creatures from myth and folklore are a lifelong interest of mine. Free memberships are available, and some free samples are posted on the Patreon page.

Did you ever see the Italian edition of WFRP, especially the one published by Nexus Editrice in 1993?

Yes, I did! I managed to get a copy of Martelli Da Guerra and a few issues of Kaos magazine in trade for some articles that Nexus translated and published. It was in the pages of Kaos that I first saw the name of Roberto Di Meglio, and read some of his work (very slowly, with the aid of a dictionary!).