Over a year ago now, I set out to interview some of the people involved in the Realm of Chaos project. At that time, I thought I might get one or two people interested and perhaps get a paragraph or two of information out of them. Little did I realize that the project would turn into a behemoth that would see (at the time of writing anyway) fifteen completed interviews, with everyone from
Bryan Ansell to
Tony Hough contributing. However, there was one individual who proved rather difficult to track down. That was the subject of today's (the sixteenth) interview, Mike Brunton. For it was Mike who actually wrote the draft that became Slaves to Darkness and for a long time he was the missing link in the picture. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, I was in discussion with
Graeme Davis about some WFRP material when he suggested asking Mike if he was interested in talking to us. I leaped at the chance, as you would imagine, and within hours Mike was in contact and everything fell into place quite simply.
Without any further ado, I shall hand over the reins of this tiny part of cyberspace to Mike who will fill you in on his story.
Enjoy.
RoC80s: How did it all begin for you in the world
of fantasy gaming? Lord of the Rings? Robert E Howard? D&D?
MB: I started out as a
traditional wargamer, thanks to a lot of Airfix soldiers. Finding a Dungeons
& Dragons boxed set in a Bradford wargames shop was just lucky. Quite how a
“wooden-box” 1st edition ended up there… Well, it was one of a bunch
of games that I played instead of doing Latin and Greek homework. Fantasy was there
because I seemed to read Michael Moorcock’s entire output at around the same time,
but being a wargamer was probably enough to qualify as being odd. Being interested
in games and D&D just meant that you were nerdy and odd before nerdy and
odd were even English insults. Nowadays, I’m quite surprised that Nerdy and Odd
haven’t turned up as pair of ill-matched-but-they-respect-each-other-anyway TV
detectives… I started playing D&D regularly at a games club in Huddersfield
in 1978, and got properly bitten by the bug. Tom Kirby, long before he was GW
supremo, was a regular and very good DM at the same club.
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| The magazine on which the vast majority of the WFRP team would originally work, and some individuals beyond too. |
RoC80s: You started off working for TSR, if
memory serves, and you worked on Imagine Magazine too. What are your memories
of the British D&D scene in the early 80s?
MB: I started at TSR because
they wanted a miniatures painter and someone to run their computer system. It
never occurred to me to turn down a job in games. So I was in, as Tom Kirby had already joined TSR
and remembered that I was a better-than-average D&D-er, and a really-not-
shabby-at-all toy soldier painter (I got asked to stop entering Games Day painting
competitions at about the same time, as I’d won too many).
I mostly remember
how not-very-corporate we all were back then. Games were a cottage industry.
Everyone was on at least nodding acquaintance with everyone else. Kev Adams,
for example, used to drop in every once in a while: he just fancied a chat
about games (this was before he’d become a full-time figure designer). The
business was like that, because we were gamers who were really lucky to be paid
for messing about with games.
Another example: TSR
used to host games at the Cambridge office on occasional Saturdays, and I’d go in
to open up and get things started. It wasn’t a selling thing, just a day for
people to meet up with like-minded strangers and have a day of complete D&D
indulgence and a Chinese from round the corner. I do remember one mum, who
ferried her son over for the day, thanking us for getting him interested in
reading and maths: I seem to remember he had some kind of learning problems. He
wanted to read and do hard sums so he could play, and his schoolwork had really
benefitted from obsessional D&D. (Once she was happy he wasn’t going to be
sacrificed by weirdoes, she went shopping). Still, not many companies these
days just ask a bunch of folk over to play games.
I did eventually end
up working on Imagine Magazine. And it is now time for a small confession: I
didn’t always go by my own name. I was cheerfully informed that “Your name is
appearing too bloody often…” and that it was time to adopt a pseudonym. Or two.
Or more. So I was myself, and “Mark Burroughs” and “Fiona Lloyd” among others.
This last choice of name caused a fluttering among some readers (A girl! A
roleplaying girl! Sigh!). It turned out that I had a bit of a talent for
reading new rules sets, and then doing short, snappy adventures for them to
order and at speed. The result was that I got, say, Star Frontiers, Marvel
Super Heroes, or Bushido dumped on my desk and a few days to write a new adventure
mini-module for that system I’d never seen before. And then I got to do it all
over again a couple of weeks later with another new game. The external
contributors – doing this stuff as a hobby, remember – would never have agreed
to such stupid time pressures. In and amongst, though, the high pressure thing
paid off through a shared by-line with Michael Moorcock, something I’m still
chuffed about. It was also good training, although I didn’t know it, for later
work.
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| I've seen copies of this go for quite a bit online in the past! |
RoC80s: Was 'Up the Garden Path' your only work
for TSR?
MB: It was the only “proper”
module that I had a hand in, because I wasn’t part of the TSR UK design group; after
Imagine was killed I was mostly attached to marketing. I was probably more responsible
for the general level of silliness than Graeme Morris, who was a terribly nice
chap but not given to gratuitous daftness. It was done as a promotional item, so
I think we were allowed to get away with a lot of surreal elements, far more
than if it had gone through the regular TSR publishing process. Up the Garden
Path is best known today as (a) the D&D module that no one has seen
(because of the small print run) and (b) for the extraordinary prices it can
command when a copy does go on sale. I financed a lot of nappies thanks to that
extraordinariness, so I always think kindly of it. It was fun, and it has
really good artwork by Jes Goodwin (see: the business really was small and
incestuous back then). I didn’t get chance to do any other modules, because I
left TSR just before it was published. By that time two-thirds of the design
group were gone as well.Most of the
published games material that I did was for TSR was in Imagine Magazine. And I
just talked about that in the previous answer.
The “invisible”
things I did while at TSR were writing a lot of ads, and answering the rules
queries. The rules queries were actually quite a big job. There was a policy
handed down from on high that all rules queries should receive a personal
reply. This was in the days before email, and the pile of letters was pushed in
my direction. I dutifully assaulted it every day but thanks to rising sales it never
got smaller, even as I got faster at formulating rulings for DMs faced with characters
wielding “Tridents of Everything Slaying +57”. I hope I didn’t mess up anyone’s
game too badly with poor interpretations of the game systems, but there were
always a lot of holes for rules lawyers to use. Some of those holes were large
enough to conga through, and players did.
RoC80s: Did you 'jump ship' with Paul Cockburn in
1986 or was your arrival at Bryan Ansell's GW handled differently?
MB: As I understand it,
during 1985-86 the money ran out at TSR in America and instructions were issued
to batten down the hatches. There was also a lot of political infighting
between Gary Gygax and the Blume family. In the UK, Don Turnbull chose to load
as many costs on Imagine as he could, then shut it down. As a saving being
made, it must have looked good on the balance sheet, and… well, let’s not speak
ill of the dead. After sending the last issue to the printers, all the magazine
staff were called in and dismissed. A couple of hours later, someone realised
that they’d just sacked me, the chap writing all the advertising and marketing
copy as well. Cue a search for me, who had naturally assumed that dismissal
meant dismissal and had gone to the pub. So, everyone else got the bullet...
Paul started
GamesMaster. I wrote a couple of things for GamesMaster (or rather, that nice lass
Fiona Lloyd did) to help out. Then he went up to Nottingham and GW, and that
was that. Or rather it wasn’t.
The first person to
go directly from TSR UK to GW was, I think, Tom Kirby. Jim Bambra, Phil
Gallagher and Graeme Morris then organised their own expedition to Nottingham
to talk to GW about moving there as a unit. Tom’s move had been a real shock
for them, as he had been a strong influence on the UK-produced D&D
adventures. I asked if I could tag along on their road trip. I really didn’t
expect very much to come of it, but GW offered me a job as well. I really
couldn’t see a long-term future in writing TSR’s ad copy, so I took it. And,
with all the migration towards Nottingham, Don Turnbull was a little bit…
tetchy towards anyone who might be labelled creative… and it wasn’t exactly as
if I’d be working with strangers…
The only person who
stayed in the end was Graeme Morris, and he had good reason to do so. He and
his wife were archaeologists, and they wanted to stay in Cambridge to keep
their close contacts with the university’s archaeology department. Come to
think of it, archaeologists were not uncommon in games at the time: I’m pretty
sure that Graeme Morris, Graeme Davis, Rick Priestley and Nigel Stillman were
archaeologists.
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| Issue 84 of White Dwarf, the first to be edited by Mike. Fantastic Ian Miller cover to boot and even Christmas was acknowledged! Christmas pud and Sanity Claws. |
RoC80s: You edited White Dwarf for a while, what
are your memories of taking the helm of the magazine in those early days?
That there was a
lot to do.
And that Paul
Cockburn looked terribly relieved he could hand the magazine on to someone
else. He didn’t quite skip down the corridor to his new desk and job, but it
was close. Editing White Dwarf
was not a plum job at the Nottingham studio: it was something that needed
doing, but virtually everything else was regarded as more glamorous and fun.
This was probably true, on one level, because magazines must have a (necessarily
dull) regularity about them. Boxed games and rulebooks are real “events” in
publishing terms, and they are few and far between. Or, to put it succinctly,
magazines are “work” because they have deadlines, and games are “fun”.
The earlier move
from London hadn’t gone smoothly, so there was still clearing up to do:
hundreds of articles from hopeful contributors to go through. In the end, I had
to go in for a merciless triage if only so that I had some space in the office.
Lots of material that didn’t make the grade; with more time it might have done.
However, eventually I managed to get to a point where White Dwarf was doable
each month without too much fuss. I had to be sneaky, though, in one respect,
and get too many pages ready for printing each month so that I could build up a
“war chest” of ready-to-go material in case anything went wrong. It mostly
ended up being wasted effort, though, when the decision was made to only cover
GW products. Such is life.
The good bit was that I had a relatively free
hand when it came to most of the content. Pages were reserved for GW figures
and products, of course, but the rest was largely my choice as editor. This
meant I could cover games like Paranoia, Dredd and AD&D (all of which were
still sold by GW during my time as WD
editor). I did get a certain amount of (in retrospect) childish enjoyment from
printing one Paranoia adventure without any maps, and another upside down: I
thought this was in keeping with Paranoia’s level of insanity, and quite a few
people wrote in to say they’d enjoyed the joke.
The bad bit, for
me, was realising that even then, in the pre-Internet dark ages, you could also
be disliked/hated/despised (delete as considered applicable) for doing your
job. This was not a universal opinion, but a few readers would have quite
cheerfully attended my funeral. And it wasn’t like they even knew me! No matter
what the content of WD over time, someone was going to be convinced you were
making their lives a misery by printing too much (or not enough) about game X
or Y. In the end I came to realise that there was no winning on that one. And
never had been. Anyway, disgruntled readers never got as far as death threats,
for which I am rather grateful, looking back.
As my time on WD
finished, there was a change of direction and all non-GW content was dropped.
The change of content and the change of editor (goodbye, me!) are not entirely
unrelated. I thought the decision was unwise as circulation and ad revenue were
both climbing. But WD managed to last another few hundred issues…
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| Inside spread from Slaves to Darkness. Can you spot Mike? |
RoC80s: You were the chief writer on Realms of
Chaos: Slaves to Darkness. Rick P described the project as a 'breaker of games
designers'. How did you succeed where others had failed?
MB: If I succeeded it
was thanks to (a) #Cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women#; (b) long hours
hunched over the keyboard and blind luck; or (c) I’m still writing it and this
has all been a dream. I suspect mostly (b), with a little bit of (a) is the
answer.
By the time Realm
of Chaos landed in my in-tray it felt like all the other writers and editors
had either had a go, or suddenly looked terribly busy on other projects. Realm
of Chaos was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy inside the studio: it was awful
job because it was expected to be awful. I was apprehensive, but actually glad
to have something a bit bigger (well, a hell of a lot bigger) than a White
Dwarf editorial to write. It wasn’t like there was nothing there: Graeme Davis
had been the last one to assault the North Face of Mount Chaosspikeydeath, but
he’d run out of ropes, pitons and tea. Quite a lot of mutation ideas, for
example, were from his fevered wee brain in an early draft. And then he made
himself busily indispensable on other projects. Sensible chap, that Graeme. And
there was other early material that it turned out Bryan didn’t like to kick
against. It wasn’t like I was starting clean: it was more like I tore off the
last layer of wrapping paper when the music stopped.
In the end, not to
mention at the beginning and in the middle, Realm of Chaos was Bryan’s baby. A
baby covered in pus, maggots, tentacles and eyes on stalks, but his disturbing baby
nonetheless. That meant that whatever version of Realm of Chaos came out of someone
else’s head was never going to be as good the book that Bryan had imagined in
his own head. It couldn’t be. Ever. In an ideal world, he’d have written Realm
of Chaos himself, but he was kind of busy running GW, and that was just a bit
more important for everyone’s futures.
Bryan certainly
tried to communicate what he wanted, as we had weekly sessions where he’d talk,
I’d scribble notes, and then off I’d trot to my corner to spend the next few
days writing up material. He was also given to turning up in the editorial office,
plonking himself down on the battered old sofa and just chatting to anyone
nearby about anything and everything. And sometimes Realm of Chaos. Bryan would
have a weekly session where he’d pull my hard-won words to bits, or be
satisfied and we’d start on the next bit. This was where my previous experience
on speed writing for Imagine adventures came into its own. I do remember I was
given a fairly free hand to do what I wanted with the 40K stuff like the Horus
Heresy and the Grey Knights, but I did try to stick to the tone and grimness of
what was wanted. At the same time as I was writing to Bryan’s sometimes
shifting requirements, artwork was being done too, and I had to match words to
good pictures. I think this produced some good stuff, like the wee snippets
that went alongside Ian Miller’s dark and disturbing ink drawings for each
chapter.
In the end, I think
what I produced was good enough to, or close enough, to what he hoped for, to
go out of the door as “a” Realm of Chaos. But I have the sneaking suspicion
that he always wanted something else, a bit different, a bit better, or just closer
to his (to be all pretentious) “vision”. That would have been “the definitive”
Realm of Chaos. And that’s fair enough. What he got was a book that was big,
impressive, and sold out almost immediately. And, miraculously, it still seems
to be quite well regarded. At the time I thought it was a solid effort, but I
honestly thought it would go out, people might like it, and that would be that.
Something new and shinier would come along.
It’s also fair to
say that, by the time I finished doing the hundreds of thousands of words
involved, I never wanted to see or think about another tentacle. Ever. And
other than a box of books arriving in the studio I don’t remember much fanfare
or even congratulations when it was done. That was a bit of a downer.
It took me a long
time to realise that it’s actually OK, as it was very hard work for what seemed
like a very long time. About a year ago, I went back and read it when a fusion
of Warhammer and Total War PC games (I was working on those at the time) was
being planned. With twenty-odd years’ detachment, I came away thinking I hadn’t
done too bad a job with the words, all things considered.
RoC80s: Can you recall which material you worked
on for RoC? Or was it simply the case of doing the editing?
MB: As I remember it, I
wrote most of Slaves to Darkness barring a few of the army lists and the
painting section. I know I wrote some of the WH40K army lists, because some of
the Chaos Marines are armed with pointed sticks (which is all a “spawn goad”
is, after all). It’s silly, so it probably was me during one of the long, dark
afternoons of textual horror. I can’t be
more definite than that, because it’s a few million words and a couple of
decades ago.
I also did a pretty
complete first draft for Lost and the Damned as well, although by then my
interest in all things Chaos-y and spikey had waned somewhat. Simon Forrest did
the copy editing on both books, so anything spelled properly is entirely to his
credit. My fingers were seizing up!
And by then, I’d
moved on to have a crack at “Necromunda”, a skirmish/gang warfare spin-off for
WH40K (in the version I worked on). My version was shelved, but then along came
an interesting opportunity to keep WFRP alive with Flame Publications. I
have the suspicion that without Flame, WFRP might have been abandoned as a GW
product. While it was popular in itself, I remember hearing on the grapevine
that it didn’t meet the internal standards of being a success, which was
measured largely in miniatures sales. Roleplayers just didn’t buy armies, and
roleplaying products cost just as much to write as rulebooks that did sell lots
of models.
RoC80s: Later you helped set up Flame and began
work on WFRP supplements. How did the studio operate and what did you work on
exactly?
“Studio” is a very grand way of describing Flame. I like it. There were three of us (Tony Ackland, Graeme Davis and me),
a big jar of instant coffee, and an Apple Macintosh. Plus a shedload of
targeted enthusiasm, a rather good local close by, and desire to show our
erstwhile colleagues what could be done without any bureaucracy. And no, we
didn’t give the Mac a name. We set up in a couple of rooms in a rather grand Georgian
(I think) terrace house away from the main GW studio, with Trish and Aly
Morrison’s Marauder Miniatures one floor up. It was all very “GW trying not to
look like GW”. Looking back, I think these small companies were production experiments
without risk to the main studios.
The idea behind Flame Publications was simple. The three of
us had to produce a book every eight weeks and 8 pages of material for White
Dwarf every month. We were budgeted a bit of freelance help for maps, if we
needed it. We had to deliver books that were typeset and pasted up ready for
the printers, a minimum of 64 pages long (and because of the printing machinery,
extra pages were always in multiples of 8). The cover prices were to start at £6.99
or equivalent (pocket money pricing, considering the schedule, and really
rather good value), and we were expected to achieve sales that covered our
costs and sold out of stock. This was deliberate so we didn’t tie up money in
stock. We would handle our own mail order. Nothing there that’s too outrageous,
really. The main GW studio looked after printing for us, although not always
without pain: one finished camera-ready (i.e. ready for the printers) product
“went missing” between its delivery to the studio and the printing works. The end
product looked bloody awful as someone (and no, I never found out who) decided
to print from a photocopy rather than ask for replacements.
Flame worked as well as it did because all three of us
wanted to work there, and we knew that we could rely on each other not to
bugger things up. We organised ourselves fairly ruthlessly to get products done
without messing about. Central to the process was getting the machinery to do
as much of the drudge work as possible. The Macintosh and its desktop
publishing software were utterly brilliant, and these were what really allowed
us to work as well as we did.
We also persuaded an Amstrad PCW (horrid, horrid
machines, but they were what GW had settled on) to squirt text over to a
Macintosh, and to replace text formatting codes with matching DTP tags before
it went. Text got keyed in once, copy-edited by Graeme or myself, and then I
could typeset a 64-page book to galley stage in a few minutes. After that it
was a question of art and map requirements and allocation, putting it all in a
pleasing layout, and Bob was our metaphorical Uncle. The time consuming bits
were making sure the layouts worked well, would accept text automatically, and that pages didn’t look awful or too busy. We wanted our
stuff to be books that people used in games until they fell to bits, not bought
and didn’t bother reading.
We had complete access to Tony’s archive of Warhammer
imagery, which was immense. Although most people probably never noticed, nearly
all the smaller artwork in Flame books came out of Tony’s previous work. That
meant he could spend his time doing a few double-page or single-page
illustrations with real impact; the rest of the art was from stock. Tony was
also a wizard with a process camera, and could manipulate his archive images
with that as well, something that was definitely not trivial then. Now it’s
different, of course, with Photoshop and the zillion other programs. Doing that
stuff back in the day was deucedly clever.
The system worked well enough that we got to the point of
always having spare, finished (ready for the printers) products in hand every
time we completed a production cycle. I insisted on this just in case anyone
fell ill, or went under a bus, or something equally stupid. As far as I can
remember we managed to do a character pack, rework the four Doomstones books
for WFRP (I had fun working out the paper models for the crystals), put
together a catch-all “compendium”, rewrite a couple of other adventures, start
work on getting Ken Rolston’s Realm of Magic ready for printing and do some
pre-production work on a second edition of the Judge Dredd RPG. That list is
not bad for three people! We also delivered a shedload of WFRP material for
White Dwarf as well, sometimes more than the 8 pages per month we expected to provide.
If there was one thing I missed doing it was writing original stuff, as I was quite
busy with all the editing and production work, not to mention dealing with the business
end of things and, on one memorable morning, persuading a bunch of bailiffs
that we were nothing to do with the fly-by-night double-glazing company one
floor down. And no, they damn well couldn’t take our computers away…
Anyway, for me it all came to a close when Graeme Davis left
to move to the US. It made me take stock, and I realised that I wasn’t going
anywhere inside GW. So I went to MicroProse and the wonderful world of PC
games. Tony was always going to be secure inside GW, so I didn’t have to worry
about leaving him behind. There was an effort made to keep Flame going, but it
didn’t last.
A few months later, MicroProse UK looked like a sort of “GW
in exile”, because Graeme Davis, Jim Bambra and Steve Hand were all working
there as well; the pool of experienced UK game designers was really quite small
back in 1991. The pool is a good bit bigger now, but I’m lucky enough to be still
working away, designing games and having fun.
As always, I would like to thank Mike for taking the time out of his busy schedule to contribute to Realm of Chaos 80s. It must be rather strange having some random internet chap knocking on your eDoor wanting to talk about stuff you did over twenty-five years ago. As with all of our interview subjects, Mike graciously provided answers to my random, rambling questions.
I am sure you will all thank him as well. Oh, and big thanks to Graeme Davis too, for setting this opportunity up!
Orlygg
