It is April, and the sun is shining. Gav Thorpe is reclining and enjoying the sun streaming through the windows at Con-Quest. Con-Quest is Derby’s role-play convention where he was the Guest of Honour last month, and where I was fortunate enough to meet this esteemed gentleman.
Gav Thorpe is probably best known for his role as Lead Developer on the ground breaking narrative war-game Inquisitor, which revolved around the Inquisitor War first postulated in the Ian Watson novel of the same name. Gav later became a writer for Black Library, Games Workshop’s publishing arm for their licensed novels, before branching out into freelance writing as an independent author. He also apparently owns – or is owned by – a mechanical hamster called Dennis.
With his well-deserved reputation as a respected games designer, Gav Thorpe remains a keen gamer and self-confessed geek. Despite the interview running over an hour, I found Gav to be very forthcoming with both his time and his answers, which gave insight into how he became a game designer, and his decision to leave Games Workshop.
Pete: Firstly, can you tell me what first brought you into gaming?
Gav: I come from Stevenage, which is the most boring town in the world. There was one great thing about Stevenage, and that was that the indoor market had a hobby shop which sold toy soldiers and kits. It was my older cousin who got me into gaming, first with role-playing and later collecting miniatures. We started with first edition Warhammer, although we didn’t really play a lot, but there
was still lots of painting and collecting.
Pete: Was it the painting that first attracted you?
Gav: I was always a fan of fantasy as a kid; I loved Lord of the Rings and Airfix style toy soldiers, so there was immense satisfaction in finding these both together. I also enjoyed playing games, and I remember writing my first set of games rules at the age of ten. This basically involved me and a mate with our soldiers, where a six was a hit, with ranges for the guns. From there we would become more sophisticated and say “machine guns have three dice”. Actually it was probably one of the slickest systems I’ve written! I also had friends who were into American Football, so I persuaded them to play Blood Bowl. It’s cool being here in the Derby Assembly Rooms, as this was where I first played Second Edition Space Marine in a Games Day demo!
Pete: Have your tastes changed since you first got into gaming?
Gav: My preference is still for those free-form narrative based games, as I am in for the adventure role-play aspect rather than the competition. There’s always been a creative relationship in the gaming that I do. It is all about the adventure and the invention of it. Which is great as a Game Developer, as people pay you to do that. As for the gaming I do now, it’s back to my roots kind of stuff.
Pete: Have you seen a shift in the industry since you first started gaming?
Gav: It’s all quite slick these days with box-sets of pre-built armies, which is good in a way. But I think that free-form way of buying what you want for a game is great – having Ninja’s vs. Cowboys. Gaming is not about rigidity, but imagination.
Pete: How do you find current games?
Gav: It is strange, as I did a little bit of work for Battlefront, on their Flames of War booklet for the starter set. They sent me the rulebook and a copy of every sourcebook they had published. I looked at all of these books, but there was just so much there that I didn’t know where to start. With Warhammer you have the rulebook, and then you have all these army books which you think are great, but it is a hell of a lot to learn. This is the same with Flames of War, as where do you start? That moment made me feel how people walking into Games Workshop for the first time might feel, seeing all these games, and thinking “Great!”, then realising there were all these rules to learn. That is what puts me off games now, as I want to go back to that earlier stuff: where I’m going to have whatever I want on the table and I’m going to have fun. That was always the idea behind Warhammer 40,000, as the army lists were very flexible, but there has been a mentality that has come into the games about them being fair and balanced. There’s only so far you can go with fairness, as you have to balance versatility against restriction, and I will always go for versatility. My thinking has always been that if you want to play competitively, then everyone can abuse it equally. If you choose not then that’s fine, but that’s the environment you are playing in. I’m a laid back gamer, apart from Blood Bowl in which I am really competitive, as board games are very different. It is not because I am competitive by nature, but because board games are very defined and structured, and not about the adventure. I see board games as a tactical challenge which I have to figure out.
Pete: What games did you play when you were younger?
Gav: I had a real nerdalgia – moment of nerdy nostalgia – the other day when we were talking about D&D. So I dug out my original D&D, and the emotion I had of looking at the cover again: I remembered when my grandparents bought me and my brother this role-playing game out of the blue. Looking at the cover of the original D&D box sets brought back so many great childhood memories and the realisation that D&D was fantastic. No nonsense, just going down dungeons, kicking in doors, killing monsters, and stealing their cash; I mean, how cool is that? I immediately thought about calling around everyone to ask if they fancied a basic D&D Campaign.
Pete: Are you a fan of 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons?
Gav: Role-playing games are a bit of an odd one, as you have the rules, a cool bit of background, and you do not need anything else. But the way the industry works, and has to work, is they have to sell you something: so here’s a Fighter handbook and Mage handbook and so on. AD&D became ever more sub-divided, where you could be a Half-Elf Mage-Fighter-Thief; but I don’t care. I just want to kick down doors, kill monsters and steal their treasure. Some of my role-playing is more sophisticated than that, but the basic nature of role-playing and gaming, and the merger between the two, has meant more rules are being written. I do not want rules on how to role-play; I want rules on how to resolve conflict. When you look at the books and ask “Do I really need all these books to play?” and while you may not, you still feel that you need to, because we all have the collector gene. I’ve managed to avoid 4th Edition far, as I wasn’t into AD&D. From what I have heard so far, it seems almost of a step-back to where it is foremost a game, which some people do not like and others do.
Pete: What spurred you to find a career within the Gaming industry?
Gav: It beats working for a living «laughs». I intended to be an illustrator originally, as I had studied art. There are quite a few games developers and publishers who come from art-based or engineering backgrounds, as there is the imagery side of gaming and the systems side of it as well. I realised early on I wasn’t good enough to be an illustrator, as I applied to a college who said I couldn’t do a foundation course and had to study a bridging course first. As I was also planning to study a three year illustration degree at Manchester Polytechnic, I found it was going to be another five years in school, which wasn’t for me.
Pete: So how did it happen?
Gav: I went to Games Day in 1993. I had written some Blood Bowl rules for Zoats and Centaurs – quadrupeds in Blood Bowl are great, as you have to work out how to scatter them from two different squares – and showed them to Jervis (Johnson – original developer of Blood Bowl) who asked me to send them to the studio. At the time I had this very boring job in an off-licence which left me with time on my hands, so I typed out all this stuff with a covering letter and sent it in. Fortunately I managed to find a job as assistant games developer, and stayed with Games Workshop for fourteen years.
Pete: You were a staff writer on Citadel Journal as well, weren’t you?
Gav: I worked on Citadel Journal for a year. The best thing of working on Citadel Journal was that we actually had to make the magazine. It was not just the writing, but we had to do all the photography and layout. This was a real grounding in the basics of design and production. I was also one of the first people in Games Workshop to have a copy of Photoshop, which I abused. As well as working on the Journal, I was a staff writer in White Dwarf, which was part of my assistant games developer contract. I stayed with White Dwarf for two years before returning to being a Games Developer. Although the title was “Staff Writer”, you did everything; this meant I came up with an article, wrote the article, took photography for the article, and laid out the article.
Pete: What were your highlights of working for Games Workshop?
Gav: Writing and working on Inquisitor was awesome, because it was my sort of game in the combination of narrative and wargame. Inquisitor was basically Rogue Trader but with big soldiers. The main driver was that Games Workshop wanted to do a cool range of 54mm soldiers, all collectable in their own right. So I borrowed a load of Wild West game rules from Jervis for inspiration, and decided to focus the game on a divided Imperium, so the relatively small range could be used by everyone.
Pete: Has Games Workshop changed over time since you’ve been there?
Gav: When I joined it was at the start of the big expansion, after the management buy-out. There was a lot of recruitment taking place and stores opening. Games Workshop has changed a huge amount in terms of organisation and business, but also the products as well. It has become very slick. The layout and production of White Dwarf and the miniatures and kits are the best they have ever been. When compared to the original stuff, it was quirky but a lot of that was because it was the first time, and now it is very refined. This maturity is reflected in the imagery that has also settled down. I can’t not mention Black Library, as I started working for Black Library when it was still Andy Jones sitting at a desk not far from me doing this magazine of short stories and asked if I wanted to write one.
Pete: What was the teamwork like on Inquisitor?
Gav: John (Blanche) would draw fantastic sketches, while Alan Merrett and I would come up with weird names for stuff. I would then sit down and bring all this stuff together, as well as delve into one of the coolest things of 40K, which was the Inquisition, and introduced the radical and puritan Inquisitors. I went back to the original Rogue Trader, and decided we were having D100 tables and would use web guns and other nonsense that you can’t have in your typical battle game. The archetype of Arcoflagellant was the bit that pleased me the most, as their concept encapsulated the game and atmosphere. Working with the rest of the Inquisitor team was amazing, as it was the pinnacle of creative teamwork. In fact, teamwork is probably the biggest thing I miss about Games Workshop. Being a freelancer is great as I do what I want, but it is just me sat at a keyboard.
Pete: What made you decide to leave Games Workshop?
Gav: One of the things I love about freelancing is that whilst I loved working with Games Workshop as I worked with some fantastic people there was also a safety net, as there is this huge organisation designed to not make you fail, but it was too safe for me. The last couple of years were for me quite difficult because the future was more codexes and army books, which for business and the game is great as it is focussed upon support, but for me where I might end up writing a third Dark Elf book I felt my time there was coming to a natural conclusion. I like to be out there breaking new ground. I also felt I didn’t need Games Workshop any more as I wanted the excitement of walking the tightrope without the net.
Pete: Do you have any regrets on leaving Games Workshop?
Gav: I miss that raw creative moment where you mutually have inspiration with an artist or sculptor. Afterwards you are then turning it into reality. This is the difference between dreamers who say they want to be writers and game designers who don’t do anything, and those who do. I wrote a dozen games before I joined Games Workshop. None of them were published, and were never intended to be, but I wrote games and stories. You do it because you enjoy it, and if you are lucky someone will later give you money to do it, and you’ll become better from that point on. Oh, and a regular salary too!
Pete: Where does your inspiration come from?
Gav: Books and games are slightly different, as games tend to be inspired by the schedule. With Inquisitor we realised we would have only a finite range of toy soldiers, so we developed a system everyone could use. We couldn’t have alien factions, as there would have been only two models for a race. The solution was to paint the Inquisition in shades of grey with competing factions. The Horus Heresy had the same pragmatic start, where we had Titans and Space Marines and needed to have them on both sides. We took a throwaway comment of the Horus Heresy, and expanded upon it to become The Horus Heresy, until it became the biggest thing in Warhammer 40000, and the most popular series in Black Library history.
Pete: How about books?
Gav: Inspiration comes in two forms. There is the personal inspiration. For example, I love the Eldar and have wanted to write about the Eldar for a long time. I decided to write my definitive Eldar trilogy, and show you why they are so cool. The other source is professional inspiration, such as for Angels of Darkness. It started when I was asked in the Games Workshop canteen if I wanted to write a Space Marine novel, and said no as “Space Marines were boring”. Walking away I started thinking “but I could write a great Space Marine story”. Space Marines are not boring, but the stories about Space Marines had been boring. By the time I had returned to my desk, I was thinking about which Chapter had the best back-story, and that was it. Being a Games Developer, you do not get to choose what you’re going to write about next week, so you have to find what you think is cool about your subject, and channel that enthusiasm into what makes them great for you.
Pete: Passion is the key?
Gav: You have to be enthusiastic on demand. White Dwarf could ask you to write a Battle Report for Orcs and Goblins versus High Elves. When you have not worked on them for two years, you have to reconnect with that race, and remember what you liked about them. That connection is the key, because if you do not write out of genuine passion, then it won’t show in your writing, and others won’t be excited. There is no substitution for passion, and later on experience.
Pete: What do you see in the future?
Gav: I have a long list of Black Library novels I am supposed to be writing. I also have my first non-Black Library novel, so will be seeing how that goes. At the moment it is all about writing lots of books, about three or four a year. I’d love to write a role-play game one day, mainly because I’d like to invent something fresh. Most of my world building has been based upon physical imagery and whether you can make a toy soldier of your idea, so it’s nice to do something without that restriction. I’ve also been tinkering with other miniature rules in my spare time which might see the light of day in the future.
Pete: What do you foresee for gaming?
Gav: You never know how it will change until it changes. There could be a shift, such as a huge license deal comes up, not necessarily for Games Workshop, which will change the playing field. Games Workshop will keep doing its thing with Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Lord of the Rings, and whatever else comes along. In terms of miniature wargaming, plastic will be the material of choice as metal becomes more expensive, but there is not much else we can do. There is lots of cool stuff, but we do not have that surge in wargaming as we had in the 1980’s, unless it becomes mainstream – but that is unlikely.
Pete: Gav Thorpe, thank you very much.
Gav Thorpe was interviewed for Irregular magazine, and was published in Spring 2010 edition.