We wouldn’t be talking about it today.Īnd how much would it have cost? The DW books were £1.75 each – in the mid-80s, a little less than $5. There might have been a corner of the shop where Jane’s Fighting Ships and Formula One books were stocked.
Adventure never happened because GW picked up the UK Runequest licence, but it had penetrated even my business-blind consciousness that we could sell ten times as many copies if we got a paperback RPG into high street bookshops.Īnd where would a chain like W H Smith have put a single-volume rulebook anyway? Not alongside the FF books that all the 10-13 year-olds were snapping up. The value to GW was mostly that they could sell figurines on the back of it. What if we had done DW as a single rulebook? I’d been working on an RPG for Games Workshop that they planned to call Adventure (yeah, not my idea) and that would have sold about 2000-5000 copies. So Oliver Johnson and I took ourselves out to Ealing, where Transworld had their offices, and the game that was to be known as Dragon Warriors was born. I figured that all those tweens and teens who’d now discovered gamebooks might also be waiting for roleplaying. They pitched it to Penguin Books and lions were shook into civil streets. The red-braced MBAs among you will have noticed that Ian and Steve didn’t publish Fighting Fantasy themselves, despite owning White Dwarf magazine and a chain of game stores. ‘Do something like this for kids and we could have a breakout hit.’ ‘Know what, lad?’ I can imagine Steve saying – or maybe it was Ian.
#FABLED LANDS CORE RULEBOOK HOW TO#
How to get them out of the shadows and into the mass market bookstores? The lightbulb moment must have come while playing a Fantasy Trip solo adventure. They could see that fantasy games potentially had a huge market but had so far failed to escape the niche of sweaty hobby shops. What happened in the early ‘80s was Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson had a epiphany. (We’d hoped for twelve, but that’s a detail.)
After the discussion, an interesting point was raised about whether DW would have worked better as a single rulebook, the way games like Runequest and Champions were released at the time, rather than as six standard-format paperbacks. I’m on the latest of those, mostly chatting about Dragon Warriors and Jewelspider but with a bit about the early days of roleplaying. Mike and Roger on Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice, Ralph on Fictoplasm, Jeff and Hoi on Appendix N Book Club – and not forgetting Dirk the Dice on the Grognard Files.
It’s flattering because he does a fair few himself and he’s very good at it, but the field is so crowded already. I have a friend who keeps telling me I should do podcasts.
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