INTERVIEW WITH RICK PRIESTLEY, PART THREE

This post continues my interview with Rick Priestley. The previous parts can be found here and here.

What happened to the first version of Realm of Chaos that you mentioned earlier, and how did it mutate over time into the final two-volume beast?

Well, I feel I have to repeat that it was a long time ago and memory does play tricks, so everything I’ve written here has to be taken in that context. Others may remember things I’ve forgotten or things I never knew, and you’d need to talk to as many of those involved as you can to get a fuller picture of that long and convoluted story.

I’m not at all that sure what happened to the original paste-up artwork for the first version – which is to say the spreads that Tony and I had assembled for reprographics back in Newark. I suspect it was just put in a plan chest along with the various other artwork that had been done for the project up to that time. I kept the hand-written notes that Bryan had given me for a while. In the end I must have cleared them out or handed them on, I don’t remember which. I then got on with whatever else I was doing. After that, I think Bryan must have tasked Alan Merrett with finishing the project because Alan took home whatever notes and work-in-progress existed. I do recall Alan once telling me the whole thing sat under his bed gathering dust for some years! To be fair, editing and reconstructing Bryan’s discursive notes and numerous diversions into an actual book was not exactly Alan’s skill set – there is no better judge of a model nor anyone more capable of running the miniature design team – but creating a workable text out of Bryan’s notes was something else entirely. You would have to ask Alan about that as I’m sure he would remember the details. As far as I know the project was revived at the time the role-play team joined us (ex-TSR). As well as games designers like Phil Gallagher and Jim Bambra, we also gained a very competent editor and fine writer in the shape of Mike Brunton. This obviously gave Bryan access to a corps of writers and editors, and hence an opportunity to revive the Realm of Chaos project and to expand its scope to include Warhammer role-play as well as 40K – which was doing great guns at the time.

Mike Brunton (left) and Rick Priestley (right) in Slaves to Darkness

I don’t recall having much to do with Slaves to Darkness. I guess I must have contributed bits and pieces because I note that I am credited with ‘additional material’, and there’s even a picture of me and Mike in the colour section! How young we look. I suspect Mike and Simon Forrest did the bulk of the writing. Reading it now, it looks like they took a lot of the text from the version I’d put together with Tony and treated it as a draft. Many of the basic game details and things like the descriptions of the gods, daemons, attributes, mutations and gifts had been completed in some form already, because I’d written that up from Bryan’s original notes way back. Of the new stuff, I’m sure Mike would have written most of it: I hear his voice in some of the descriptive passages and ‘colour’ text. I suspect I wrote the chapter on chaos and the warp that describes the role of chaos in the 40K universe: it reads like me anyway. I don’t know if Bryan contributed any new material. If so then he would have supplied notes rather than actual copy. Bryan didn’t write finished copy or complete games design. Instead, he’d talk into a Dictaphone, usually at home of an evening, describing background ideas or game concepts, and a secretary would then take the tape or tapes and type up his verbal notes into a memo. The resultant memo would land on someone’s desk. Often Bryan himself would pop round to the studio, and you could get him to explain or expound his ideas in more detail, which certainly helped.

Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness (1988) and The Lost and the Damned (1990)

I think the reason Realm of Chaos ended up being two volumes was simply because of the size and scope of it – what with including all that gaming material for three different systems and all. That’s what made the job so hard, and which meant it took an absolute age to get the first book finished. Bear in mind that both Mike and Simon had other editorial work to do. It was also very art heavy. I never really took much direct interest in the art side of things once we moved to Low Pavement, where the writers and artists occupied different floors. Artwork was just something that happened way after I’d delivered a manuscript and moved on to other things. Whenever I had specific art requirements to go with a piece of writing, I would insert the requirement into the text along with a description of what I wanted and hope for the best. On the whole, artwork was a mystical and unpredictable process as far as we writers were concerned, and trying to co-ordinate text and illustration not something to be relied upon. Looking at Slaves to Darkness I can see that a lot of time, money and effort has gone into the artwork and a very high level of production. I don’t recall where the impetus for that was coming from – possibly it was coming from Bryan himself. You’d have to ask John Blanche or Chaz Elliot about that as John would have been sourcing the artwork and Chaz designing the layouts.

At the time, I remember that the accumulated cost of Slaves to Darkness was a huge issue for the company. So much had been spent on it that Games Workshop’s Finance Director, who was Bryan’s business partner and hence our other ‘owner’, bundled us all into a room in order to explain to us how we’d accrued a record amount of cost on the Realm of Chaos project with – at that time – nothing to show for it. I think we’d spent over six figures getting a book together – probably the equivalent of at least ten man-years of studio wages at the time. Our old FD and I remain good friends to this day, and he often reminds me how – when he explained to the assembled studio staff how we’d spent more money on this than anything ever before, I leapt up from the back and shouted, “Hurrah! A record!” The truth was simply that it was Bryan’s project and he was convinced that it had immense value to the future of the business, which would ultimately belittle the actual cost no matter how great. The trouble was that the somewhat chaotic process of creating Slaves to Darkness made it a far harder, and therefore more expensive, task than it might otherwise have been, with no proper or fixed manuscript, additions and changes turning up out of the blue in the form of one of Bryan’s memos, and a revolving team of writers, all of whom had other things to do. By the time Slaves to Darkness came out everyone involved got pulled back into other more urgent projects. There was some material already amassed for the second volume, but no-one available to drive it forward as I remember.

I say ‘no-one’ because I was actively avoiding it like the plague (Nurgle himself being involved this time round). That much I do remember. With so many things of my own to get on with, I really didn’t want to get dragged into what was obviously a difficult project on so many levels. About this time – the end of the 80s – I was gaining a reputation as someone who could get things done when the rest of the studio seemed to be foundering in a sea of unfinished and overrunning projects. I’d been encouraged to set up a little sub-studio within the main studio area complete with my own small production team, and we were churning out discrete projects including – for example – the Mighty Empires campaign system. Bryan was still keen to see the unfinished second volume of Realm of Chaos, so somehow it landed on my desk. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I do recall that I agreed to sort out The Lost and The Damned on the understanding that I was given a free-hand and that the role-play content would be dropped, leaving only the two systems I knew I could deal with on my own: Warhammer and 40K. Although that would disappoint many customers of the first volume, at the time it seemed the only way to get the project finished in any form.

Work-in-progress pages from the draft of The Lost and the Damned (mid-1989, prior to Rick Priestley’s rewrite)

The Lost and The Damned was brought into my sub-studio and we finished it, drawing in help from the rest of the studio where needed. That’s why the production is so much more formulaic, and the illustration, although glorious, is strictly formatted: whole pages, half pages, quarter pages and fillers. I brushed-up my paste-up and camera skills and pitched in with the production team to help out. I wrote the core text, but I encouraged other people to contribute ‘colour‘ text – short pieces of fiction, sayings, and descriptions, and you can see how many people helped out from the credits including authors from our contemporary book line. That’s a writer’s solution to filling space: here’s a quarter page, do we have artwork, if not write a piece a short descriptive text, job done and move on. I was given access to the in-house artists so I could brief them directly and co-ordinate the illustration. I remember sitting down and talking to both Steve Tappin and Adrian Smith, both of whom contributed some fantastic – iconic – artwork that gave the finished book something of the lavish quality of its predecessor. Adrian’s pencil drawings were challenging to photograph using the process camera because the solid pencil would reflect the light and not always evenly. What Adrian had drawn black would come out a grey tone or with visible pencil strokes. You can see that on several of Adrian’s pieces if you look closely. We must have had a lot of art in hand, which would be reused, but I think most of it was generated from scratch. I don’t remember a great deal about the text although I suppose there must have been the material hung over from the initial iteration to use as a framework. I would assume I re-worked or wrote the majority of the text, apart from the fiction pieces already mentioned. I guess that Nigel Stillman would have pitched in with some of the army lists and other game related material. Bryan definitely added some new material himself. In particular, I remember the chapter on the Star Child and the Sensei were added by Bryan, which I wrote up from his copious notes. The Sensei is a typically Bryan concept – very conspiratorial and very un-40K I thought – I would quietly drop that aspect of the backstory when we re-launched 40K in 93.

It’s funny, looking back, I remember a lot about the production process, drawing together the artists, working out the formatting to make things work, and negotiating the scope to Warhammer and 40K, but I remember almost nothing about the material that I must have sat down and written! The things that do stick in my mind are the short pieces of fiction that I contributed, which I enjoyed doing, but the rest of the actual writing is a blank. I suppose that’s because the job was very much a case of channelling Bryan’s vision of a game, without anyone actually playing that game as far as I can remember. With our own games, we’d play them within the studio, often of an evening or at lunchtime, and they’d be an enthusiasm for those projects that was born out of participation and a mutual understanding of what was going on. To us games designers, there was a strong sense in which a game had to ‘work’ as a game. The Realm of Chaos project lacked that as a whole. It was a glorious piece of exposition brimming with ideas and something that was certainly inspiring and fun to read: a spur to the imagination rather than a gaming manual. I don’t remember that Bryan ever organised any kind of game playing or that anyone within the studio did either. Rather, it was a paper exercise with many of the tropes inspired by early role-playing games including those endless random generation tables. It’s possible that some organised play did take place without me ever being aware of it but I certainly don’t remember any – we didn’t have time!

The incorporation of 40K material must have been a big change, not just to Realm of Chaos, but also to WH40K itself, which initially did not have much connection to the Chaos gods. What did you think about this merging of ideas, and how did you go about it?

I don’t recall that it was ever an issue. I always imagined that the two games shared that same cosmology and I just gave the RT backstory a different slant on things initially: warp entities = daemons and so on. I guess the idea of ‘Chaos’ Marines must have sprung up pretty quickly – it’s central to the whole Horus Heresy story and the Adeptus Titanicus game after all. I don’t remember that being a big change – more of an obvious expansion of the game and backstory. There was a lot of that going on once the game took off and it did develop in interesting ways and very quickly – not always at my hands of course. There was Space Hulk which introduced Terminators and redefined Genestealers, the reworking of Tyranids and the introduction of Genestealer Cults, and so on. A lot of the work on the Chaos Marines had already been included in StD – and so probably done by Mike or Simon – and I would have inherited anything left over for LatD. I think the various Space Marine chapters were all worked out – as was the backstory for the Horus Heresy – so it would have been a case of dusting down what we had and finishing it off as necessary.

I’ve previously written on the blog about some of the leftover bits from The Lost and the Damned. What can you remember about the plans for a third book or supplement for Realm of Chaos?

Yes, I saw that – there’s a letter from Simon talking about how they had excess material and would need to have a third book. I don’t know anything about that. When I inherited the project, I would have sorted through all the unpublished material and I guess that would have included this extra stuff. I don’t believe the second volume got any further than disjointed manuscript fragments before my rework – although there might well have been a lot of it. Mike and Simon didn’t have the luxury of being able to decide how to cut the material – as I did – so I guess they might have decided they would need a third volume to cover some of what was being proposed. When you look at it, LatD isn’t exactly short, and it doesn’t include any of the role-play material of course.

Bryan Ansell said that in his conception the gods of Law were “even more ferocious” than those of Chaos. Did he share much of his vision, and was consideration given to developing the forces of Law in Warhammer?

I don’t think Bryan ever got any further than that! I think Bryan’s idea of Chaos and Law was essentially the same as Moorcock in outline. There was a Knights of Law boxed set in 1983 but the names of the Knights are very cod-Arthurian and I suspect they were made up by Tony or me – Tony might remember. It doesn’t give anything away about the gods – which makes me think there wasn’t anything to give.

I’d like to thank Rick again for being so generous with his time.

To read my interviews with other gaming figures, click here.

For some of Rick’s other interviews, see the following links:

Realm of Chaos 80s
Beasts of War
Grognardia (part one and part two)
Tales from the Maelstrom
Juegos y Dados
Wargames Illustrated
John Wombat (part one, part two and part three)
CigarBoxBattle
Jordan Sorcery YouTube channel
Filmdeg Miniatures YouTube channel (part one and part two)

Title art by John Sibbick. Internal art by John Sibbick and Les Edwards. Used without permission. No challenge intended to the rights holders.