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And so this is kind of deep area of interest to me. And I came to that event because I'm as a personal project, they're not connected to any work I do working on a book which I have a publisher and everything for. And it's going to be about the creation of Warhammer 40,000. And what if you're an aspiring games designer or creative, what you can learn from that? Because, you know, a bunch of people came around and you know, created something in various places in Nottingham and around and that's gone on to be, I think the market cap of Games Workshop now is about 5.2 billion pound company. So, you know, they created something, they bottled lightning, you know, and I'm interested in what did they do that you can learn from that. Did that. And again, you know, as a longtime listener of the podcast and follower of yourselves on Patreon, I've always been fascinated by what you described, that period where you came into White Dwarf. And then as the war gaming part picked up, you know, you got pushed out a little bit. But for me is the kind of like that's the really interesting bit is because the first edition Warhammer 40,000 absolutely represents this really interesting transitional point. Because the first edition very much references role playing games. It has a Games master. Although it's a war game with two sides. First edition has a games Master. And the same with first edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle. The first published, they were modules, in effect, they were like adventures, things like macdeath. They, they had a scenario, you had factions, sides, almost like a party. You'd have released miniatures for it, there'd be a story, you would Play through that story, there would be a games master running the story. But because a lot of people were coming to gaming at that time, D and D was such a big thing. And sure, there were plenty of other games around that time, around this mid-80s, but dungeons and Dragons was the star around which they all orbited. And so its gravity kind of warped everything around it. And so, you know, D and D has a huge influence on the creation of Warhammer. You know, firstly, because Warhammer is created in a way, because Games Workshop knows they're gonna lose the exclusive UK distribution license. Again, this is a debated point. Exactly why for Dungeons and Dragons. So they need another product. Part of its creation as well comes around. You know, Brian Ansell was talking to. Well, I spoke to Alan Merritt, who was their production director, interviewing him for the book. And he's like, you know, what are they doing with all these wizards they're buying? What are they doing with all these goblins? And then that, you know, cause they're selling tons of goblins and wizards and it's like, well, what can we do to get. What are you gonna do with all of them? Well, you could play a war game with them. And so then they create this idea of Warhammer. But again, if you go to early Warhammer, there's loads of monsters in it. Why are there loads of monsters in it? Because it's envisaged. You're fighting monsters, and then over time, the factions emerge. So, you know, as Warhammer 40,000 develops, they drop the games mast. But for me, what's so fascinating is if you look at that, if you take a step back and look at that arc of history, Dungeons and Dragons comes out of wargaming. You know, Guy Gaxton, Arneston and all those other people, you know, orbiting who created Dungeons and Dragons, they're creating a war game. Initially, they didn't have a word for it, did they? They were like, this is kind of like a war game, but you've only got one soldier. And then it morphs into what we understand as role playing games now. And then that casts its own gravity on these emergent Warhammer war games. But they're kind of hybrid war games, role playing games, and then they kind of go off on their own way. And, you know, and that's why that period, you know, the huge amount of energy at games virtual goes into the release of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which while commercially doesn't do anything like the numbers that Warhammer Fantasy and then later Warhammer 40,000 does, but it absolutely sets the setting, it establishes the lore of what Warhammer is. And again, the thing we talked about, that event, it really establishes starts to establish chaos as this setting, which I would argue that becomes the really interesting thing that then Warhammer takes on both fantasy and science fiction as its own identity, which differentiates it from Dungeons and Dragons. And you know, that Tolkien esque fantasy high fantasy setting that been around, lots of people have riffed off it. But what Warhammer does is it adds this. Yeah. This element of chaos in it and then it does something interesting which it doesn't develop the law side of it, which if, you know, looking at Michael Moorcock and things like that, he's obviously got that balance of law and chaos. And while initially you could argue they bring out a box set of lords of warriors of Law and warriors of Chaos, but they soon drop the lore stuff and they focus on the chaos. A lot more skulls, A lot of skulls, a lot of horned monsters and demons and eventually that becomes the setting and I think that's what they've now created. Something that's really interesting is this setting where there are gods of chaos and there aren't really the opposite gods of law in the same way. They're nowhere near as powerful. And certainly in the 40 cases setting there aren't any gods of law. There are humans and there are very powerful humans like the Emperor, but they're on the press. But because they're human, they're fallible and they can fall to chaos in that way. And it's like that's the interesting thing of the setting, I think, is this perpetual entropy that threatens to wipe everything out. And that's. While you can find elements of that in say Lovecraftian cosmic horror, they've created their own take on it that is, and I would argue uniquely British as well. It's a kind of very, you know, it's a very British take on this Chaos law thing. We're almost like, well, you know, we'll ditch the law bit of it and we'll just have the. We'll just have the destruction, you know, the chaos.
