Between writing Warhammer books for Games Workshop's Black Library, plus freelance game design work on the Godzilla roleplaying game and a wargame called Zeo Genesis, and even work on a videogame themed around Welsh mythology, you'd think Gav Thorpe had enough on his plate. Apparently not: "I've been working on a dwarf skirmish game", he tells Wargamer.
The as-yet untitled miniature wargame is inspired by a range of dwarven miniatures and buildings called Karvenheim, created by a friend of Thorpe's at indie design studio Dragon's Forge. "With sci-fi and fantasy, I think you have to work a bit harder because there's so many tropes that are already done," he tells me in our recent interview. "How do you stand out?" he says - "and not just for the sake of standing out, but to do something that's genuinely different and fun?" It's a design question that's pushed him away from general, all-purpose game engines, towards one that's tailored to a very specific scenario.
The set-up for the game is "a dwarven, multi-sided, wars-of-the-roses civil war struggle for power", he explains. After being kicked out of their ancestral home by a dragon - one of the classic blunders - the dwarves are living in a city, something they regard as a temporary arrangement. "They will return and reclaim their rightful place, but they can't do that until they have a rightful king", Thorpe says, but "Unfortunately, all the paperwork has been burnt by the dragon". Cue a civil war, as bands of dwarves battle on behalf of their rival claimants to the throne.
Fittingly for a game inspired by a specific scenery set, "It's very turf war based - each player will turn up with an objective that defines their scenarios and some of their rules", so that "the fact that you've got a tavern, or the fact that you've got the Garden of Memorial, makes a difference to the games that you're playing".
Thorpe is also exploring ways to include Dragon's Forge's range of "non-combatant miniatures of bakers and blacksmiths and flower girls and all kinds of other cool stuff" in the game. A flower girl, he says by way of example, might actually be a spy feeding your forces information about the enemy position.
The project is at an early stage of development. "There's a bunch of notes in various notebooks at the moment and I need to type them up into one place and then just share them". Thorpe is currently "getting the basic system working to make sure it's got an interesting gameplay loop that I can expand on and then add all the narrative to, that's the way I like to do stuff".
He's shooting for relatively simple core mechanics, with D6 for combat resolution and cards for initiative. "One of the basic ideas is: when you're fighting you've got a pool of dice, but you decide how many are attack and how many you're spending on defense for the roll off," he explains. The cards might also see double duty determining how NPCs behave.
The first place you'll be able to look at the rules is likely to be Thorpe's Patreon. "There isn't a product attached to it at the moment" he says, "It's just a game system that I want people to play with and use". Though it's inspired by the Karvenheim range, he adds that it's strictly miniatures agnostic; "dwarves and buildings are dwarves and buildings".
If you're looking for a dwarf-themed wargame you can play right away, make sure you check out Torch and Shield - in fact, you'll frequently find that game's creator hanging out in the Wargamer Discord community, along with the rest of us incurable nerdlings! If you haven't joined our free wargames treehouse, well, now's the time - see you there.