INTERVIEW WITH PAUL COCKBURN, PART ONE

Paul Cockburn is a name well known to UK gamers of the 1980s for his work at TSR and Games Workshop. He very kindly agreed to be interviewed for this blog and share his memories of working on WFRP‘s first edition. It was a great pleasure chatting with him. His energy and enthusiasm really made the interview, and I’d like to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to him for giving up his time so freely and putting so much effort into this.

Hi, Paul. Thanks for speaking with me about your time working on WFRP.

Thanks for asking me. This crops up every now and then, with people interested in those halcyon 80s days. It’s fun to play the nostalgia game.

How did you come to be involved with WFRP?

TL:DR version. I had been editor of White Dwarf’s smaller cousin, Imagine magazine, for TSR UK until that got folded. I freelanced for a spell, self-published GameMaster Publications, and so on. I had an interview with GW that went nowhere, but then Ian Livingstone introduced me to Bryan Ansell and I was hired to work in Nottingham as ‘Publications Manager’. There was a lot of product being worked on at the Design Studio by the likes of Rick Priestley, Jervis Johnson, Richard Halliwell, etc, and one of those products was a part-formed WFRP. I joined in, what, April ’86? The idea was that we’d have WFRP on the presses by September…

What was Bryan Ansell’s plan for WFRP?

BA wanted roleplaying product alongside the battle stuff at the time, and so had already considered what this might be. In retrospect, he wanted miniatures-based rpg, like AD&D 4e was later, based on the existing Warhammer setting. WFRP’s genesis lay in stuff that had been seeded in Warhammer Battle, and there was a ‘draft’ of sorts, that was mostly a collection of ideas and stuff ‘ported’ across from WFB. Originally, I was supposed to hammer this into shape, but I got side-tracked over the drama of the guys who created White Dwarf in London all leaving instead of coming up to Nottingham. So, I had to find bodies to do the work.

There was something I’d characterise as a misunderstanding in how Bryan’s view of a separate RPG would work. BA is all about miniatures – Citadel took over GW, not the other way around. What that existing draft did was throw more roleplaying layers over WFB; it wasn’t a game in its own right. At the same time, WFRP was going to be in stores for Christmas come hell or high water, so…

You are credited as the editor of the WFRP1 rulebook. What did your work involve?

I’d liken my role to being more like a film producer than a director. I tried to help the guys create this thing out of next-to-nothing, and to keep the production side of the gig off their desks. Like I say, I was yanked in to keep White Dwarf running, so I wasn’t as hands on as you’d think.

My main task was to find bodies to create product. I argued from the outset that not only would WFRP have to be a complete game, it would need support material really soon after launch, especially campaign material. I knew Graeme Davis from having commissioned his work several times for Imagine. He turned up barely a month after I did. Phil [Gallagher] had helped me out with GameMaster Publications, so we were in touch. He remembers that he called to see if there were any jobs at GW after Tom Kirby left TSR (joining GW! It was a shock to me to see him in the Studio!). Bryan hired him, Jim Bambra and Mike Brunton, so we basically recreated TSR (UK) in Nottingham! Phil and Jim had already proven themselves writing the UK series of modules for AD&D at TSR, so I knew they’d get some great stuff together. I was also sifting through freelance guys, to see who could create product to deepen the WFRP line fast.

Editorially, I pushed for WFRP to be more Renaissance than Medieval, to make it more distinctive from what was going on elsewhere. Fewer dungeons and castles, more urban noir. I pushed for the Empire to have electors, so we could pull in politics. Michael Moorcock’s influence is all over Warhammer, but in this specific instance it’s not Elric, it’s Warhound & The World’s Pain which I riffed off (I geek off to the Thirty Years War). I also probably pissed people off for wanting it to be more ‘adult’ and less splurgle-chaos-spikey, which (a) did me no favours and (b) shows how much I know.

I also insisted it have a bare bones magic system. As I say, WFRP was a tight deadline job, and there was an enormous amount to do. Though there was some magic in the draft, courtesy of WFB, it wasn’t a playable system. Jim, in particular, didn’t think we had time to craft a magic system within the scope of a ’son of WFB’ game, but I felt we had to have something, and pushed hard on that, knowing we could put things right in the planned Realms of Sorcery supplement. Ooops.

Of course, Realms of Sorcery would not see the light of day until more than ten years later. What happened?

All the way through the Magic chapter of WFRP, we teased RoS, and there was the intent to get into that in early ’87. WFRP was obviously rushed, and we had to take more time to get RoS right, but then it went onto the back burner, then off the stove altogether. We’ll come back to this shortly, I’m sure, but even in ’87 Bryan was losing faith and interest in WFRP, and 40k was going to be The Thing. Various people took a stab at RoS; Ken Rolston, who was with us for an intense period of time, put something together, but it wasn’t quite right tonally. By ’89, I was gone, and the broad product line concept was buried. What happened after that, others can tell.

What memories do you have of the development of WFRP1?

That it was hard work. This thing came to life in a terrifyingly short period of time. I’ve seen Graeme and Phil talk about how the thing more or less existed in draft form, but I think they do themselves a disservice. There were ideas, but there was no product.

What was the WFRP draft like when you arrived?

It was in a very fluid state, to my mind. Richard Halliwell had written quite a bit of stuff, and Bryan and Rick Priestley had chipped in ideas. More importantly, those ideas kept arriving as first Graeme, and then the other lads got to work on the product. I wouldn’t call it a draft, from memory, but there were outline principles. I recall you could see where they were thinking about the careers system, for example, drawn from previously published bits and other ideas, but more kept arriving. Character progression as we’d understand it in an rpg setting was completely missing; we sort of grafted that onto the careers system. I’ve heard that part of the game described as ‘confusing’ and I wouldn’t disagree. You’d never willingly create a role-playing product that way, and not in four months!

Was there any tension between the skirmish wargaming perspective of people like Bryan Ansell and Rick Priestley and the role-playing perspective of the new arrivals?

It was just not clear to any of us what the final product was to be all about. Rick was fine, and was already/soon peeling off to do 40k. Richard H wasn’t, as I recall, that interested in doing any more work on it; he was busting with new ideas. Still, if you view WFRP though the lens of it having started as a possible supplement to WFB, but then developing into an out-and-out rpg, you can see where its development was flawed. Everyone got on just fine; I worked brilliantly with Rick and Jervis on other products; they are canny lads. But Bryan wanted something different, something we never grasped. He would chip in individual thoughts, but no real strategic direction. That was fine – we had our brief and the guys were working hard to craft something that would work. But whatever Bryan had in mind, WFRP wasn’t it.

Once it came out, it soon became apparent to Bryan that WFRP would not drive sales of miniatures anything like WFB did. Paper products didn’t interest him all that much, unless they drove miniature sales. He would say repeatedly how we would never make money from paper products. Note how 40k was never anything other than a battle game, and became much more successful in that environment.

What design challenges did you face?

Here’s what I think, with the benefit of hindsight. WFB is a PvP game, where interesting army design, well-played on the battlefield with zillions of miniatures is the key. WFRP is an rpg, where the emphasis is on story-telling, party cooperation, connected adventures and character progress. A game based on a wargame has to go through massive restructuring to be a successful rpg – look at how far D&D moved from its wargame roots.

So, we didn’t need scores of careers, we needed a solid core which contained good character progression. The tiered careers (or whatever we called ‘em) was a late effort to make that happen. The skills system was developed separately; it didn’t integrate well with the careers. Above all else, a battle game is designed for one side to defeat the other, and it doesn’t matter which. You kill off player characters like that, you don’t have a game at all. Some of the play-testing showed WFRP was massively deadly to PCs.

What did you think of the one-off skills system? It is not very suited to an RPG and seems like a wargame legacy.

It was. Skills were a bloody nightmare. On the one hand, we were following the brief and the careers system, adding in the development aspect. How, then, did that sit alongside skills, except where those were inherently part of a career? I personally don’t find the solutions all that elegant.

Why were changes made to attributes (switching from 1-10 to 1-100, adding Dexterity and Fellowship)?

I can’t remember if this was down to any one individual, but it was soon very clear an rpg needed way more stat flexibility than WFB. It was an easy decision to make, since the thought was always there that a ‘3’ in WFB was ’30’ in WFRP terms, so it wouldn’t jar. Not everyone was in love with d100 resolution, and this was before the advantages of d20 were evident. In reality, the attributes in the two games (WFB and WFRP) were very different systems for obvious reasons, but we didn’t establish enough clear water. The same with adding extra stats. We needed Dex and Fellowship to make any sense of what we were doing.

What did you learn from the playtests?

We were all decently happy that combat etc was fine, but deadly. I’ve been reminded that Jervis came up with the Fate Point system, a necessary but inelegant patch. I think playtests made me more certain we had to have some kind of magic system. But they didn’t and couldn’t show the flaws in character advancement. You would never design an rpg that way, unless you were in the situation we were in.

The interview is continued in part two, which discusses The Enemy Within, Tetsubo and more.

Title art by Rodney Matthews. Used without permission. No challenge intended to the rights holders.