Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Back in the days of Troll Boss Bob's Bargain Basement there was a lot of Gorka Morka for dirt cheap.

I saw a couple of armies of GM orks and even Digga pop up.

Dunno if it "nearly bankrupted them" but I think they seriously overestimated people's love of Orks, Mad Max and vehicle games.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Back when they could be proud of their work, I imagine.

Zenithfleet wrote:

Spoiler:

 Strg Alt wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

RazorEdge wrote:
Also there isn't enough Terrain which let the set look awfull.

Not enough terrain in a game mostly based around mounted combat in giant ash waste deserts?

Take a look at vehicular combat in Borderlands how it is supposed to be done. Absence of terrain looks awful. Guess people need to build it by themselves which I will do.

Not having played Newcromunda (aka Bookromunda ), or Borderlands for that matter, I'm curious as to how GW will handle the deadliness of ranged weapons in the open spaces you need for vehicle combat. This was an issue when developing Gorkamorka, which was originally intended to be an Ash Wastes supplement for Necro.

The designers solved this problem by artificially weakening most ranged weapons compared to 40K and classic Necro:

Rick Priestley and Andy Chambers, Gorkamorka Designer's Notes, Da Uvver Book, 1997 wrote:
One of the major differences between Gorkamorka and Necromunda, for example, is that shooting is not particularly deadly. Worry not because this is completely deliberate. Why? I hear you cry with frustration as your shootas bounce off the enemy's wartrak for the nth time. Because you're fighting on vehicles in a desert, so they are big targets with little to hide behind. If weapons fire were truly deadly both sides would get vapourised as soon as they came over the horizon. Our worst nightmare was two mobs [of Orks] tooled up with 'eavy shootas parked on opposite sides of the table blasting each other--this would make the game a simple exercise in dice rolling with no tactics. Instead we wanted Gorkamorka to be a game where both sides fought for position and manoeuvred to gain an advantage, so weapons tend to be short ranged and relatively weak but ramming and close combat are quite nasty.

(Of course it also helped that your basic Ork had a higher Toughness than a puny humie.)

I'm not sure how the old Ash Wastes add-on for classic Necromunda handled it.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Back in the days of Troll Boss Bob's Bargain Basement there was a lot of Gorka Morka for dirt cheap.

I saw a couple of armies of GM orks and even Digga pop up.

Dunno if it "nearly bankrupted them" but I think they seriously overestimated people's love of Orks, Mad Max and vehicle games.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On GorkaMorka, it was also meant to be the first in Xenos equivalents of Necromunda.

There’s also the claim that due to foreign language overproduction it nearly bankrupted GW.

I do know that when they axed it, you could walk into a GW and pick up Spanish (maybe German?) copies for very little money. Like, a few quid.

Whether that is the source of the claim, or proof of the claim I don’t know - but I suspect it’s just the GW equivalent of a Conspiracy Theory.

Rick Priestley: Warmaster was a slightly odd project for me. During its development the situation within the business shifted from a position where the creative staff within the studio were coming up with the plan for product to one where the sales staff were beginning to dictate what product should be made and when it was released. It was a political shift within the business, which had always been led by its creative ambitions up to that point. In many ways it was a factor of growth and the issues that growth would bring. In very broad terms, I would say that Games Workshop would go on to be led by its sales divisions and then for a time by its manufacturing division and broader supply chain management.

These different factions within the business became key to success at different stages of growth. That inevitably meant other aspects of the business were obliged to conform to one faction’s capacities and evolving competencies. By the mid ’90’s the sales companies were fuelling our rapid growth, and the policy from the top was to give them their head. That meant the ‘sales’ view on new and proposed products was suddenly thrust to the fore. This shift in the focus of decision making would throw up inevitable problems. In the early ’90’s I would set the initial print quantities for products after talking requirements through with the rest of the exec. Once the sales companies gained control of their own print quantities they over-ordered like crazy because the last thing a salesman wants is to be out of stock of anything. On at least two occasions, this resulted in overstocks that would have bankrupted most similar-sized companies and which we weathered only with the greatest difficulty.

Against that background we had attempted to relaunch our ‘Epic’ scale range with a Titan combat game called Titan Legions. We had done quite well with the previous iteration of the ‘Epic system’ Space Marine (’91), so the plan fitted in with the general idea of relaunching our core systems every few years with new models, as we had for Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. The game was designed by Andy Chambers and new plastic Titans were created as centre-pieces. Sales were poor compared to previous years’ main releases. The sales companies were very quick to blame the product. Of course, sales numbers were targeted against previous years, so you were always comparing sales against Warhammer 40K re-launches, which would always outsell anything. It didn’t matter what you chose as your main annual release: sales numbers would always look poor compared to Warhammer 40K. There was also an issue with the French, Spanish, Italian and German markets being relatively ‘immature’, which meant the customer base for anything other than Warhammer wasn’t there in the same way it was for the English language product. Of course, we didn’t have to take account of such things in the ’80’s or until GW started to expand its sales arm beyond the English language market.

After the poorly received Titan Legions release the sales companies became very antagonistic towards any ‘Epic’ based game. Insisting that all future products had to be 28mm. This diktat posed something of a problem. The studio had already started work towards the fantasy ‘Epic’ system that would become Warmaster. This was scheduled to come out in 1997 in the main release slot in the autumn. The sales companies insisted that we drop the Warmaster proposal and do a 28mm game instead. By that time it was very late in the day to come up with a new game. Way too late by the terms of our normal operational deadlines. So we looked to cobble together a game that used whatever other work we had in progress at the time.

As it happened the studio had already started work on a series of Ork releases that included a bike and buggy. That gave us a starting point to work from. The result was Gorkamorka, an Orkish re-skin of the Necromunda game system. Using an existing game system and work-in-progress as the basis allowed us to hit the autumn launch slot. We could never have done it had we started from scratch. Gorkamorka was one of those games that the sales companies massively over-ordered and which would cause us great pain as a result. It was a good effort from the studio working against the tightest of deadlines, and had it been ordered in reasonable quantities and promoted in an appropriate manner I’m sure it would have been considered a success. It just wasn’t Warhammer 40K. But then what was?

Meantime, I had the design work for the ‘fantasy epic’ game Warmaster, originally planned to take that ’97 slot. It was imagined to use 8mm models (like Epic 40K) arranged in ranked strips. The game would be a ‘big box set’ of the standard size, complete with plastic armies, siege equipment and fortifications. I’d already come up with the concept model for the plastic fortifications, and we’d designed some armies in metal to trial out the system. The game itself was partly inspired by the turn-over mechanic in Blood Bowl, and was based on the idea that you’d dice for movement whilst combat resolution would be relatively breezy. The core of the game was in the command element, the manoeuvre of armies rather than individual combat, as suggested by the scale. Although by this time I had moved away from a design role, the fact that I’d already designed the game meant that I was keen to see it published. It was eventually published in 2000, but very much in the teeth of opposition from the sales companies. All the plastic was dropped and the game was released as a book in a secondary release slot at Easter. The models were no longer ‘Epic’ scale but larger at 10mm to distance them from the taint of the 40K Epic range.

Something of a last gasp from that phase of creativity in the late ’80’s to early ’90’s, Warmaster is still occasionally cited as the best game I’ve ever written. It was certainly the only game I played regularly at that time, and which I continued to play to some extent even when I left GW, although I must admit it’s now been a few years since I did so. Black Powder (published by Warlord Games) was derived from Warmaster and, like WAB, was another project initiated by Jervis Johnson that I developed and completed. I did a version for ancients, published as a stablemate to WAB, which was well-received by ancient players and helped to establish the ’10mm’ size of figure in historical gaming.

Rick Priestley: Confrontation was a project of Bryan Ansell’s that never really gelled into anything tangible. I wasn’t involved in it creatively but I wrote-up Bryan’s old Laserburn rules for publication in WD as the ‘Confrontation’ engine. It was just a rules editing job really. I remember going over Laserburn and trying to rationalise some of the stickier elements. Laserburn has turns divided into fractions of time that allowed for detailed actions. It was quite complicated and I thought it was hard to keep track of. The fractions included both ‘thirds’ and ‘quarters’ of a turn, for example. I never played Laserburn (never played the Confrontation version either). The rules were just mechanics that needed sorting out as far as I remember. I did a lot of that kind of thing with rules put together by various folk. Usually when something needed turning round fast. I rewrote the Talisman game rules at one point for example.

Confrontation didn’t really have a games designer at the heart of it and I think that was the problem. It was the sort of project I would have instinctively avoided to be honest! I know it was abandoned at some point leaving quite a lot of artwork, including some crazy psychotic looking clown costumed gang concepts and other weirdness drawn by John Blanche. Tony Ackland produced a lot of very atmospheric artwork that explored the environment. Fantastic stuff really. But all quite mad. I suspect Bryan would have been trying to give the project some impetus through the artwork, but these things need a writer and games designer behind them if they are to work in my experience. I think the idea was that Confrontation would be set within the 40K universe to piggy-back on the success of 40K; however, it had nothing to do with 40K as far as I could tell. It was a capsular universe: very much its own thing. The 40K narrative was set up to allow for individual world backgrounds, and we’d exploit this potential later, but at the time I did feel it was like trying to shoehorn something into the 40K setting.

I don’t recall when Confrontation was abandoned, but it wasn’t on the studio agenda by the time that Bryan was actively selling the company. Once GW sold there was no champion for the game and we had bigger issues to deal with in terms of the future of the company and product development. We were left with some names – Necromunda and Lord Helmawr – and a little background information in respect of 40K that included a reference to an Imperial Guard unit. We had this general concept of a hiveworld with city spires sticking out of a polluted wasteland. And we had some artwork relating to those things. I rather liked the names Necromunda and Helmawr – I’ve no idea who came up with those – I guess they were coined by Bryan. Good names anyway. The central image of the city spires sticking out of the wastes had become ingrained and was powerful. I liked that too. Those were the elements I took from Confrontation when I wrote Necromunda.

Necromunda fitted into the new scheme I’d come up with for the product line. That must have been the back end of 1991. We had moved into a new studio building on Castle Boulevard in Nottingham. The move was part of readying the company for sale. The new shiny offices were much more impressive than the old shabby warren on Middle Pavement the studio had occupied since the mid 80’s. Anyway, I remember touring round these be-suited venture capitalists and the whole thing looked surprisingly clean and well-organised. Must have worked because soon after that the company changed hands in the shape of a management buy-out led by Tom Kirby. From that point we had to re-make the business in order to build turnover and rationalise production. We had a huge debt to pay off and we couldn’t just carry on as we were.

I came up with a plan for the product lines, and in particular Warhammer and 40K, that would re-define the ranges in terms of boxed starter sets with plastic models, dedicated army books and associated plastic and metal models to go with them. I know it sounds obvious… but that wasn’t necessarily how it had worked in the past. Looking to the future, I had this ambition to produce a series of games set within the 40K background that would explore either a particular world or a particular theme. A spaceship combat game would be one example of the latter. We – which is to say the creative team – had ideas for a number of 28mm miniatures based skirmish style games that would be interesting to do without creating a huge demand for new figures. The plan was that we’d have the core 40K game as our constant and then these other games, which we anticipated would come and go from the catalogue, much as games always had in the past. I also wanted to build the 40K story with a series of campaign supplements for which folks would use their existing 40K forces perhaps with the addition of personality figures and the odd special. These last would be easiest to do because they were mostly writing and artwork. Figure design was the pinch-point at the time – hard to imagine these days when there are so many talented sculptors – but back then it was a very rare skill indeed. Building up the figure design department was a real priority but would be a hard slog and never quite achieved until long after my tenure. The point is than we had to design games around smaller numbers of models or – more strictly – fewer designs.

After the relaunch of Warhammer and 40K we needed to produce a box game to go into the main release slot for 1995 and I thought the Necromunda setting would make a good basis for a ‘Wild West’ style game… in space…as it were. So, I pushed the setting down into the underhive, leaving the spires as functioning cities whose populations could play whatever role in the Imperium such worlds had always played. The underhive became a dystopic ‘Wild West’ and the game itself would be inspired by tales of the American frontier in the mid-nineteenth century. The underhive setting with its chemical wastes and mutants would become the land inhabited by a native population who lived ‘at one with nature’ and had a strong spiritual relationship with the environment. Into that environment we planted frontier settlements and a landscape of interconnected domes, ancient and overbuilt, but often treasure houses of abandoned waste accumulated over the millennia.

The game itself would use the 40K mechanics – which I imagined would remain constant across all these games – something that would enable people to switch from one game to another fairly easily. The gangs were envisaged as all human because it was a human world – but each has characteristics I’d normally associate with a fantasy race. So the Goliaths are big, brutal and I some respects ‘Orkish’, for example. Six is a good number for variation of game play and I came up with the six ‘Houses’ which give you your basic culture types for the gangs. It was actually Tom – our boss – who was insistent about having a three-dimensional element to the games and he had this notion it would be played on a 3-D plastic construct with levels and ladders joining walkways together. This wasn’t really very practical for a number of reason, not least being the sheer cost, but in the end I took the idea and we produced a plastic frame into which card walkways and walls could be slotted. I remember making the concept piece for that myself out of mounting card, just to get the engineering as I wanted it.

The whole design team and quite a few of the staff started playing the game at lunchtime and we organised a campaign in the studio which anyone who wanted to join could do so. I think that’s where Andy and Jervis would have finessed the gang development and character progression design. Jervis had created something like that for BloodBowl, and that was the model I used to build the initial system, but when it came to getting the balance right and turning it into something workable I suspect Andy and Jervis would have taken a lead. Chris was actually our production manager – in charge of the guys putting together the products – so it just goes to show that these things are very much a collaborative effort. Of course, we didn’t have the actual models at that point, and we had to convert gangs from ordinary 40K models. I built my gang using the Catachan Imperial Guard models and everyone did something similar.

Necromunda was very successful. At the time there was so much demand for ‘new product’ that the studio was expected to churn out supplements for it, which we did, but I always felt this was over-egging the concept. There was a lot of, ‘When are we going to have Space Marines in Necromunda’ type of pressure that I thought was entirely missing the point. I always felt it would have been better to have gone on to explore Space Marine chapters with their own Necromunda style supplements rather than cramming Space Marines into Necromunda. And so on for other races and worlds. An Eldar Craftworld turned feral and fought over by rival Eldar gangs amidst ruins dominated by alien parasites was one we wanted to do. It was not to be though, and soon the opportunity fell away once the driving force behind product development shifted as I’ve already described elsewhere.

Andy Chambers: My only real contact with Confrontation was helping Jervis Johnson to run a participation game of it at my first Games Day at Derby Assembly Rooms in 1990. It might even have been a Golden Demon day but I’m not sure we’d started doing them then. Confrontation was… not easy to run, Jervis had come up with a nifty slide-rule like device for calculating the percentiles more easily – but the fact we needed one should tell you all you need to know. I recall asking him in the van on the way back whether he thought it might make a decent 40K skirmish and he opined that it would be too complex and just result in a set of dice rolls against armour. That was the last of that for several years. When Necromunda kicked off there was really no connection at all to Confrontation in my mind except that we played initial games on some enormous urban/tunnel terrain boards Nigel Stillman had originally made for Confrontation. Rick drew some inspiration from the old art and background I think but Necromunda was very much its own thing. Necromunda itself was great and a real treat to work on, 40K 2nd ed worked well with a small number of figures and a few tweaks like pinning and bottle tests rounded it off nicely. It was extremely popular around the Studio, so we ran a series of campaigns that gave us solid feedback for the campaign rules too. Great fun.


Holding with the original version of Necromunda, I asked Andy about Outlanders, the supplement that brought forward new gangs such as Scavvies, Ratskins and Redemptionists, amongst others. I wondered what the inspirations behind the new gangs and characters was, also if there were any favourites he had.

Andy Chambers: While Necromunda had been run with Rick and Jervis as leads I was more or less turned loose to do what I wanted with Outlanders. Many of the new gangs were ideas that had been suggested in the campaign like Ratskins and Scavvies so we had some great advocates for them when doing Outlanders. The whole idea was to take things more to the extremes than the House-based main gangs in Necromunda (hence ‘Outlanders’), Spyrers for the top end predator-like Nobility, Scavvies and Ratskins for the absolute bottom, plus Redemptionists for some insane, fiery zealotry with a nod back to the old Lazerburn game (which had bled into Confronation) and the Lone Sloane graphic novels by Druillet they were inspired by in the first place. The Redemptionists were always a personal favourite of mine and the comic version of The Redeemer is one of my favourite characters ever.

As I mention above Redemptionists brought me joy, although I’d run Goliaths forever in the campaigns prior to Outlanders – the infamous Dog Soldiers being the Goliath gang, who were mostly infamous because I called them infamous, although they did get pretty numerous by the end.

Moving from Necroumda to Gorkamorka, another game that still attracts a sizeable cult following, I was interested in gaining some background information on the game system and its subsequent add-on, Digganob.

Andy Chambers: Gorkamorka came as something of a surprise if I’m honest, it was clear Necromunda was popular and we’d half expected to do an Ash Wastes Mad Max type game to build off it. The decision came down as Orks instead and it came down pretty late as I recall so it represented a frantic eight-week period of building a campaign, gang lists, armouries and scenarios around the background and core vehicle rules Rick wrote. I don’t remember it too fondly as it was a strong contrast to Necromunda where we had plenty of time to finesse. I’m glad people like it, and it does have a fun premise but like I say it was a tough bite of a publishing reality sandwich for me. When it came to Digganob I was happy to pass the reigns along to Gav Thorpe so he could take the lead much as I had with Outlanders, I think it was his first big box supplement and they were a good learning experience.

An Eldar Craftworld turned feral and fought over by rival Eldar gangs amidst ruins dominated by alien parasites was one we wanted to do

 zedmeister wrote:

An Eldar Craftworld turned feral and fought over by rival Eldar gangs amidst ruins dominated by alien parasites was one we wanted to do

Oh, what could have been...

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I could see the next Warhammer Quest for 40K being Space Hulk Themed.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I could see the next Warhammer Quest for 40K being Space Hulk Themed. You can basically throw out a super-mega hulk infested with Tyranids and rough warriors who managed to somehow hold out; throw marines on top as the starter force and then expand each expansion with a new faction of aliens joining the fray

 Theophony wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I could see the next Warhammer Quest for 40K being Space Hulk Themed. You can basically throw out a super-mega hulk infested with Tyranids and rough warriors who managed to somehow hold out; throw marines on top as the starter force and then expand each expansion with a new faction of aliens joining the fray

At the enter would be an ancient necron tombship with a new version of the Nightbringer or Deceiver model only available in this set.

 PetitionersCity wrote:

Andy Chambers wrote:Redemptionists for some insane, fiery zealotry with a nod back to the old Lazerburn game (which had bled into Confronation) and the Lone Sloane graphic novels by Druillet they were inspired by in the first place.

Realm of Chaos 80s', 'The Imperial Knight' interview with AC wrote:
RoC80s: Do you have a single product or project that you feel represents your finest moment at GW? And is there anything you are responsible for that you would rather forget?

AC: Battlefleet Gothic is the project I view as my Magnum Opus at GW, because it was a complete package of art, miniatures, background and rules set in the 40K universe, but cut from wholly new cloth - except for the name which I hijacked from Hal's old project because it's a truly great name and there was already some anticipation for it. Nothing revolutionary, Necromunda had already done the same thing for example, but I felt it was also nicely done in BFG so I'm proud of the work we did there. The one's I'd like to forget are a toss-up between Titan Legions and Gorkamorka, which is a shame because there's good stuff in both and a lot of people enjoy them. I. Just. Didn't.

Andy Chambers interview with MM, at 14:13 wrote:
When we did Necromunda, we kind of had this idea that we might do, like, ash waste nomads traveling between the hives and all this sort of stuff, and a very Mad Max atmosphere to it. As it transpired, somewhat as a surprise to us, it was decided that we were going to do, you know, Gorkamorka instead, and do the same sort of thing but with Orks. On their own world. And not set it on Necromunda. I think there was a feeling that we didn't want to grow Necromunda into being its own bit of IP [intellectual property], as we'd call it these days, which I thought was a terribly missed opportunity, so ... I've got slightly mixed feelings about Gorkamorka. It's a lot of fun ... I would have preferred to have done a Necromunda variant like Gorkamorka but with humans rather than Orks. That said, the Orks did give it a character all of its own and it really lent itself to building your own vehicles. What's the one race where it looks good where if you just, like, cut up bits of plate and slap it on the outside? Orks, Orks, Orks!

Wiz Warrior wrote:
Thanks Zenithfleet for the *chef's Kiss* great background info. I miss Gorkamorka a lot and am not surprised to find out it was meant as the ash waste supplement since Necro was still a game in print by the time gorka was published. Though some of the zanier stuff in gorka might not have been an excellent fit in necro, so all in all, I am glad it was its own game (goes back to stuffing orks into wartrukks until they start spilling out, because thats the troop capacity of trukks accoriding to the rules)

Crimson wrote:I don't know if Gorkamorka was actually a good game, but I remember having a lot of fun playing it.

zedmeister wrote:

An Eldar Craftworld turned feral and fought over by rival Eldar gangs amidst ruins dominated by alien parasites was one we wanted to do

Oh, what could have been...

Gorkamorka is the second of what we hope will become a substantial series of games - the Warhammer 40,000 Skirmish Series - the first being the Necromunda game which some of you have already played. The idea of the series is to explore new aspects of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, taking a planet, craftworld, or some other environment and describing its inhabitants and their savage battles.

Zenithfleet wrote:
In Necro, the battles could be a little lacklustre due to the clunky 2nd ed mechanics (IMO), but the campaign play was deep and involving.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Zenithfleet wrote:
In Necro, the battles could be a little lacklustre due to the clunky 2nd ed mechanics (IMO), but the campaign play was deep and involving.

I disagree. I think that the 2nd Ed 40k rules came into their own with Necromunda. Finally they were applied to a skirmish game of individual fighters, rather than a wargame with squads. The scale of 2nd Ed's level of granularity just fit with Necromunda better than it did 40k Proper.

It was't perfect, obviously, but it seemed like the 2nd Ed rules (which were basically adapted Fantasy rules anyway!) really started to sing when applied to a smaller game type.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
I? 1d6 roll under stat. Barely ever used.
W? Hit points but everyone has only 1 which is exactly the same as having 0.

 ekwatts wrote:
Yeah, I loved Necromunda and Mordheim so much that I still managed to organise games under the old rules as late as 2016 or so. I couldn't have told you how it compared to the 40k rules of the time since I didn't play it, and I could no longer remember how tedious 2nd edition 40k was by that point, but I remember having an absolute whale of a time playing Necro and Mordheim.

I can see exactly how and why people might see the rules as clunky now.

An Eldar Craftworld turned feral and fought over by rival Eldar gangs amidst ruins dominated by alien parasites was one we wanted to do. It was not to be though, and soon the opportunity fell away once the driving force behind product development shifted as I’ve already described elsewhere.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

Zenithfleet wrote:
In Necro, the battles could be a little lacklustre due to the clunky 2nd ed mechanics (IMO), but the campaign play was deep and involving.

I disagree. I think that the 2nd Ed 40k rules came into their own with Necromunda. Finally they were applied to a skirmish game of individual fighters, rather than a wargame with squads. The scale of 2nd Ed's level of granularity just fit with Necromunda better than it did 40k Proper.

It was't perfect, obviously, but it seemed like the 2nd Ed rules (which were basically adapted Fantasy rules anyway!) really started to sing when applied to a smaller game type.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
I? 1d6 roll under stat. Barely ever used.
W? Hit points but everyone has only 1 which is exactly the same as having 0.

Initiative was a big deal when you were on walkways, or near ledges, which was quite often. And it didn't take that long to get a few multi-wound gangers.