Trench Crusade is the grimmest, darkest, nastiest wargame currently on the market, and it stems from the mind of one man. Mike Franchina is a well-established concept artist in the videogame industry, whose baroque, grimdark designs influenced the grimier elements of games including Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2. Trench Crusade started as his own personal imaginary universe, a place for ideas too grotesque even for his work. Imagine my surprise, then, when I get a chance to interview the man at Adepticon, only to discover that he is unbelievably chill.
I speak to Franchina before the convention has properly started, while the teams working each stall are manically hammering their booths into shape. We sneak past the trucks shuttling in and out of the loading bay to get some fresh air and, after I get over my excitement at meeting one of my artistic heroes, I ask him about the birth of Trench Crusade. "I was working on Diablo at the time, and [the designs] were, like, pretty good, I would say", he begins. "But there was just, like, a certain level that you couldn't cross - so I wanted to cross that line and, like, you know, offend people, or whatever".
He's almost a stereotype of the laid back Californian. As Franchina tells it, his universe, a nightmare vision of hell on earth that ultimately inspired eager backers to pledge over $3 million via Kickstarter, "Was just me blowing off steam after work and drawing stuff". "That's what we're still doing, you know?", he adds.
Franchina initially collaborated with UK-based sculptor James Sheriff for a very small Kickstarter in 2022, which offered a handful of sculpts based on his designs. Midway into that campaign, the duo roped in Tuomas Pirinen, ex-GW game designer and lead creator of Mordheim, considered by many one of the best miniature wargames ever made. After a year in open development with a Discord community, and with the help of project manager Jamie Parsons, the newly minted Factory Fortress Inc launched the Kickstarter for the full Trench Crusade wargame in 2024 - and it blew up.
"I think that we were all hoping it would do well enough for us to quit our jobs", Franchina says, "But it's gone way beyond that now". "It's hard to believe, like a year ago it was just like a hope and a prayer, and now we're going to plastic [miniatures]", he reflects. "We have like 16 employees now".
Franchina will be the first to tell you that the success of Trench Crusade relies on collaboration with other creatives in the team. Take the utterly gorgeous rule book. "I am not a graphic designer or a book designer", Franchina says. "Victor Pushkarev was one of the graphic designers on the project, he's a legitimate genius - he did all the calligraphy, he made [wood cut style linocut prints] for the book, he hand cuts them with a chisel".
While lots of Franchina's original artwork features in the rulebook, many other artists are involved. "As far as an artist goes, I'm mainly a concept artist, right? And mainly a character designer", Franchina says. He elaborates: "I'm not good at things like cool poses - concept artists just have to show somebody standing [still], you know, so [posing] is not a skill I have learned because I didn't have to". "I leaned on the guys who know that stuff for the book - I had opinions, but I would mainly let them do what was right".
The studio has since hired ex-GW illustrator Thomas Elliot as part of the permanent art team - a fact that has me utterly squealing with excitement, since I can now daydream about Factory Fortress launching a second game based on Elliot's homemade sci-fi universe. Elliot's work will appear in the upcoming Carcass Front starter set, announced on the same day I conducted the interview.
Carcass Front is a great example of the sheer growth of Trench Crusade. It was originally planned to be a downloadable narrative expansion just for Kickstarter backers. Now it's a full two-player starter set, complete with two campaign modes, and brand new plastic miniatures for the Heretic Naval Raiders and Procession of the Sacred Affliction.
The Sacred Affliction featured in some of Franchina's earlier artwork for the project. "I like those guys a lot; they're one of the weirder Trench Pilgrim processions". He explains their gross backstory: "They purposefully contract a disease out of devotion to God as a form of flagellation, right? There was a founder who had it, and then he passed it on to the next guy, and so on and so forth, so it's been going on for like 400 years".
We'll apparently get to learn a lot more about them in the Carcass Front rulebook. "Andy Chambers wrote a really cool entry about this phylactery that stores some of the sores… they eat them [like communion wafers]".
The world of Trench Crusade has grown well beyond Franchina's initial descriptions, which were just short snippets to accompanied the original illustrations he made in his spare time. "I considered it more like flavor text on a Magic card, right, where it's not like this long, elaborate backstory, it's maybe like a sentence or two", Franchina says. "Sometimes I would write a couple of paragraphs, but I'm really not a writer, and I can't write long things". He adds: "All I wanted to do was just write something really evocative that got your juices flowing".
Juices have certainly flowed. I mention one of my personal favorite lore tidbits - the entry in the timeline at the front of the rulebook which simply reads '1899: Church Space Programme Commences'. "I dream of being cool enough to write something like that!", Franchina exclaims, "Tuomas [Pirinen] was the one to start the timeline, he wrote most of the things and I would [say] 'I want this in there', and, like, chuck it in after he'd written his ones".
My lasting impression of Franchina - aside from him being so laid back he's practically horizontal - is that he is continually amazed by the situation he's in. "It's been really cool to see, like, all the team members come together", he says, "I'm just always impressed, because there's nothing [at the start of a project] and then at the end, there's a book that you can buy." It is, as he says with characteristic understatement, "pretty cool".
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