Since its colossal Kickstarter success in 2024, grimdark horror wargame Trench Crusade has shot straight from being a 3D printed indie to a major wargame, complete with plastic kits and matching player expectations. Sustaining that growth means that publisher Factory Fortress Inc needs new talent capable of designing exciting new miniatures and rules at top speed. As lead designer Tuomas Pirinen explains to me in an interview, the games design team he's building to meet the task is in equal parts a revival of the iconic '90s Warhammer design studio, and an incubator for new talent.
So far in my career, Pirinen is the first game designer to arrive at an interview in opera formalwear. It's a coincidence - he's off to an evening of culture with his wife as soon as we're done. But it's a good visual summary of the man: neat, precise, extremely sharp, and just a little bit theatrical. Perfect for the designer of two of the most lavishly aesthetic, and arguably best wargames of all time, the grimdark weird war skirmish game Trench Crusade, and the 1999 Games Workshop classic Mordheim.
Factory Fortress Inc started more or less as a legal convenience to describe the partnership between Pirinen, lead artist Mike Franchina, lead sculptor James Sheriff, and project manager Jamie Parsons, as they launched the 2024 Trench Crusade Kickstarter. It was immeasurably more successful than any of them predicted. "We could have just fulfilled the Kickstarter and pocketed the money and sold the product that existed there, and that would have been probably - for my personal bank account - a very good thing", Pirinen says, "But I don't think I could look any hobbyist in the eye if I did that".
Is Factory Fortress just an indie company with a bulging pocket book, then? "I'd like to think of us as a boutique company", Pirinen says. "Our shield wall may be small but it is very old at war". Franchina is a storied concept artist who worked on titles including Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2, while Sherriff is a professional miniature sculptor of decades' experience. "Then we bolstered [the team] with Graham McNeill" - a Horus Heresy book author - "Jervis Johnson, Andy Chambers" - both former GW game designers - and "we just had Thomas Elliot join us" - an ex-GW concept artist.
It's an extremely talented team, but also a venerable one. "I think they have 100 years combined experience now", Pirinen muses. So while the business is young, the staff are not - what kind of succession planning is Factory Fortress doing? "We've brought on new talent", Pirinen says, "With our aim to build them into game creators in the kind of mold we like".
Trench Crusade community organiser Sammie Dae, and freelance game designer Brook Close, have both joined the team as junior designers. Their work has already appeared in Trench Wire, Trench Crusade's online journal of experimental expansion content.
"We want to take them through the kind of training there used to be when you went to, say, White Dwarf for a year" Pirinen says, "You learned all the aspects of the hobby: running play tests, rules writing, lore writing, modeling and painting as a game designer - because that's very different [from display painting], you need to be able to put stuff together quickly".
"Jervis acts as a project manager and leader, especially for the younger designers, and he provides structure, guidance, feedback", Pirinen says. "He's able to take the rules that people write and turn them into something that any player can read and understand easily". In contrast, "Andy thrives in creative chaos - he is the kind of person who creates something you didn't know you wanted but you desperately need when you see it".
"I've always been a game mechanics, systems, and lore person", Pirinen says, "I'm bringing my experience from the video game industry". "Mind you, Andy Chambers was also the creative director on a little game known as Starcraft 2, so it's not like he doesn't know anything about that side either", he adds.
While the junior designers are obviously getting the most tuition, Pirinen says that he's still learning. "I count Jervis and Andy as my mentors", he says, "I'm one of the company owners and on paper I would be their boss, but obviously I'm not going to work with [them] in that kind of a sense".
My main impression of Pirinen - other than that he is spectacularly well dressed - is that he is extremely serious about making the most of this unexpected chance to work on a game that he is enthralled by with a team that he respects. Obviously that's not all that Trench Crusade needs to keep going strong, but it's a hell of a foundation.
We covered several other topics in the interview, which I'm planning to write up in future articles, so watch out for them here on Wargamer. If you've got a Trench warband (or some classic Mordheim), come and show it off in the Wargamer Discord community!