There’s been a large Jervis Johnson-sized hole in Bedroom Battlefields’ list of interviews with hobby legends (such as Gav Thorpe, Tuomas Pirinen, Rick Priestley, and Alessio Cavatore). Suffice to say, that hole has now been plugged. Thank you so much, Jervis, for taking the time to respond to these questions.

That said, Andy still beat you to it. Some things never change, eh? 😀

Let’s get into it…

Q&A With Hobby Legend Jervis Johnson

Why do you think this hobby still exists?

Jervis Johnson: I think it exists because it offers a combination of things that other hobbies don’t, namely ‘collecting, painting and playing games with toy soldiers’ (or ‘with exquisitely crafted miniature figures’ if you prefer 😉). Digging deeper into that, hobbies like ours allow people to exercise their creativity; no one else will have an army/collection quite like yours, it is unique and only exists because you created it. Not everybody needs to exercise their creativity like this, but many do, and I think this is why the hobby is unlikely to die out in the face of things like video games and such-like. Although you can say that a tabletop wargames and video games are both ‘games’, they scratch very different itches.

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What’s your favourite book of all time? Doesn’t need to be hobby-related.

Jervis Johnson: I found it impossible to pick one, so instead, I’ve picked my top 5:

Dune: I first read Dune when I was 14. I recently re-read it, and it still stands up. The latest movie finally does it justice, and there are some great games based on it too (a particular favourite with my local boardgames group is Dune Imperium).

The Lord of the Rings: (though the Conan stories by Robert E Howard come a very close second). I read all of these at more or less the same time as I read Dune, and I still think they are great to this day. I’m also a big fan of the Conan comic book series, especially the early run with the artwork by Barry Windsor-Smith. The adaption of Red Nails by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith is one of my favourite comic books of all time.

Peter the Great: His Life and World: I read a lot of non-fiction history books and always have, but this book by Robert K. Massie is my favourite. I picked it up because it had such great reviews, knowing nothing about the subject, and it was a revelation. Never was ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ more apt! A fascinating man, an eventful life, and an extraordinary world.

Dreaming of Babylon: This is a strange little book by an American author called Richard Brautigan. He mainly wrote rather surreal short stories, but this is a proper novel. It’s set in 1942 and is about an inept private eye whose investigations are hindered by the fact that he keeps daydreaming about an alternative life where he lives in ancient Babylon. If that sounds weird, well it is, but there was something about the main character that spoke to me, because I tend to spend a lot of time ‘living in my head’ too.

Grendel: Another strange little book, this time by an author called John Gardner. It retells the story of Beowulf, but from the perspective of the monster that Beowulf ultimately kills. It’s just beautifully written and deals with all kinds of interesting themes, but I especially like the way it deals with issues to do with good and evil; in Grendel, the monster is not really an evil being, more a hopelessly alienated one.

Who or what is your biggest inspiration in what you do?

Jervis Johnson: My biggest inspiration would have to be Charles Grant (senior). It was his book Battle: Practical Wargaming that first introduced me to tabletop wargames, and the battle reports he wrote for Military Modelling magazine were the inspiration for the battle reports that Andy Chambers and I created for White Dwarf. I think he is probably the best pure writer about the tabletop wargame hobby there has ever been; I found (and still find) his writing to be witty, erudite, wise and helpful. When I first started writing J Files articles for White Dwarf, I tried to channel my inner Charles Grant, and I hope that I achieved that goal to some small extent, but for me, he is still the master.

What’s your best-value budget hobby purchase? (sub £20)

Jervis Johnson: I think I would go for a Daylight Bulb and a Hands-free Magnifying Glass. When I was working full-time painting during the daytime wasn’t usually an option – I was a rules writer, not a member of the ‘Eavy metal Team – so I, like most hobbyists, painted my miniatures in the evening after work. As I got older my eyesight slowly got worse, until I found it really difficult to paint miniatures. Someone recommended I get a good Daylight Bulb and a Hands-free magnifying Glass, which made things so much easier.

If you could live in any historical period, where, when, and why?

Jervis Johnson: Well, it’s sort of a historical period, so I am going to go for the village where Asterix the Gaul lives. I love the Asterix books, and I’ve always said that if I could live anywhere it would be in that village with the rest of the indomitable Gauls, where my only fear would be the sky falling on my head!

Do you think there are any under-utilised settings or periods in tabletop gaming?

Jervis Johnson: On the whole, no. I think that more attention could be paid to counter-factual history (e.g. British military involvement in the American Civil War), and I’d like to see more campaign-level tabletop wargames (e.g. where you refight the whole of the Waterloo campaign as a tabletop game, not just the individual battles), but I can’t say I’ll lose any sleep if this doesn’t happen!

What might people be surprised to hear you’re not very good at?

Jervis Johnson: I’m not sure how surprised they’ll be to hear it, especially if they read my battle reports against Andy Chambers in White Dwarf magazine, but I’m not a very good player of the games that I have designed. I know I’m not the only game designer who is like this; I think it’s because I try to play the game the way I wanted it to work, which isn’t always the best way to use the game system to actually win the game!

What have you recently changed your mind about?

Jervis Johnson: I used to be obsessed with watching the news. However, what with COVID and the war in the Ukraine, I found that the relentlessness of the (bad) news cycle was starting to really get me down. Then about 18 months ago, I came across a book called ‘Stop Reading The News’ by Rolf Dobelli, which pretty much explains why you should do exactly that. So, for the last year and a half, I haven’t watched the news, read a newspaper, looked at a news feed or even read a newspaper headline, and I feel much better for it!

When was the last time something in the hobby surprised you?

Jervis Johnson: I’ve been around for a while now, so not much surprises me. The most recent thing that really stands out is the success of board game cafes. There are three in Nottingham (not counting Warhammer World), and when the first one opened, I thought it was doomed to failure; I wasn’t at all convinced that people would be willing to pay money to be able to sit at a games table. My wife was of quite the opposite point of view and made the really good point that games cafes would be great places for people that want to go out and socialise but didn’t want to go to a pub or club. Fortunately, she was proved right and I was proved wrong, and the Nottingham’s games cafes are thriving.

Tell me something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

Jervis Johnson: Gosh, there are so many! As a rules writer, one of the things that you quickly learn is that things that seem self-evident to you are not nearly so obvious to other people! But to pick one, I’ll go with something almost none of my geek friends agree with me on, which is that it’s good to periodically clear out stuff from your collections. I’ve never been much of a packrat, and over the last decade or two, I’ve ended up moving several times; each time I moved I ended up culling my collection of hobby stuff – games, miniatures, comics and books – down a bit. To start off with, it wasn’t a choice but a necessity, but each time I had to do it, I found it liberating: a literal weight being lifted.

It also made me go through each item in my collection to decide which made the cut and which didn’t, which is an interesting and illuminating process in and of itself. After my last move, I have my own (small) study with shelves and glass cabinets, and I follow a rule that if I can’t put something where I can see it, then it has to go. So, no lead under the bed or in the attic for me! I will often tell my geeky friends that they should do it too – without exception, they look at me as if I am crazy!

Are there any common hobby myths and misconceptions that make you roll your eyes?

Jervis Johnson: Probably the biggest is the idea that errors in a rulebook or lack of balance in an army list is because the rules writer is lazy or incompetent, or because of a lack of playtesting. This is usually followed by a comment like, “After all, if we could spot these things within a few days of the rules coming out, how could they have possibly missed it?”. It shows such a complete lack of understanding about how difficult these things are to get right, and also of the actual process by which rules and army lists are written.

Anyway, for the record, I have never met or worked with a rules writer I’d consider lazy or incompetent. Furthermore (comrades!), rule’s writing is a process of constant iteration and rewriting that carries on until you hit a deadline. In my experience, almost without exception… actually, no, without exception, errors and balance issues are caused by things that were changed in the last set of rewrites before the deadline was hit, and they were made to fix issues that playtesting had revealed. Having written rules for 40-odd years and never managing to get a set published without at least an error or two, you learn to be sanguine about it and to be ready to get the errata and clarifications out there as fast as possible!

Tell me about a particularly satisfying mechanic you’ve created yourself or encountered while playing someone else’s game.

Jervis Johnson: One mechanic I came across recently and really like is used in a series of games called Table Battles, published by a small company called Hollandspiele. The games recreate various famous battles from history and use cards to represent the major formations of each army.

In your turn, you roll six dice, and then allocate them out to cards in your army; each card needs certain combination of dice to be able to carry out an action. So one card might need a pair of 5s to attack, while another might need you to place a 4, a 5 and a 6 on the card, and so on. Any dice that are placed on a card can’t be rolled again until they are used, so the dice are a limited resource, and you need to think hard about where to place them. At the start of your turn, before you roll the dice, you can carry out an action you have set up with your earlier dice rolls.

What I especially like about this mechanic is that sometimes, when you attack, you will force your opponent to make a reaction, and this will stop them from carrying out their action in their next turn (they are reacting to your attack rather than unleashing their own). These simple mechanics do a lot to represent command and control issues, and they also capture the idea of one side gaining the momentum in a battle, which is something I have read about in lots of historical accounts but very rarely seen recreated in a game.

Do you have any advice for those who want to follow your path?

Jervis Johnson: The advice I always give is to consider carefully that doing so could well lead to you losing your hobby, by turning it into your job. If you spend all day designing games, then, if you are anything like me, you will find that the last thing you want to do when you get out of the office is play the game you’ve been working on from 9-5. Luckily for me, I love all sorts of different games, so I was able to side-step this problem by playing historical games, non-GW board games and classic games like bridge and backgammon outside work. But if your hobby is purely, say, 40K, then you need to consider seriously that getting a job with the 40K rules team might kill your love of the hobby stone-dead.

What are you working on right now, and what would you like to share or promote with the audience?

Jervis Johnson: I’ve been working away with miniature designers Alan and Michael Perry on a set of historical wargame rules called Valour and Fortitude. They are available for free – you can download them from the Wargames Illustrated and Perry Miniatures websites. They started life as a sort of thought experiment to see if we could come up with a set of rules designed to fit onto just four sides of A4 (or, more specifically, a A3 piece of paper folded in half).

A similar design process was followed with the army sheets and scenarios needed to play the game. The army sheets are designed to fit onto a single piece of paper and contain all the information and special rules a player needs to use an army in a game of V&F. The scenarios also fit onto a single side of A4 and provide all the information and special rules needed to fight a battle. So, if you have the rules sheet, your army sheet and the scenario, you are good to go! The result is a tight little set of rules that, being only 4 pages long, are easy to teach and to use. You can download the rules from Perry-Miniatures.com or wargamesillustrated.net, and there is a V&F Gamers Group page on Facebook, too.

Huge thanks to Jervis Johnson for taking the time to chat. We really appreciate it!

Enjoyed this? Be sure to check out our chats with fellow industry heroes Gav Thorpe, Andy Chambers, Tuomas Pirinen, Rick Priestley, and Alessio Cavatore, too.

As Bedroom Battlefields continues its mission to become a digital version of a 90s White Dwarf magazine, the latest legendary presence to give us some of their time (and wisdom) is Rick Priestley. (here are the conversations with Gav Thorpe, Andy Chambers, Tuomas Pirinen, and Alessio Cavatore!)

Rick Priestley is a name that resonates deeply within the world of tabletop gaming. With a career spanning several decades, Priestley has earned a reputation as a visionary game designer and a true luminary in the industry. He first rose to prominence in the early 1980s when he, alongside Bryan Ansell and Richard Halliwell, co-created the iconic Warhammer Fantasy Battle, a game that would forever change the course of tabletop gaming. His imagination knew no bounds, as evidenced by the grim and captivating universe he unveiled in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader in 1987.

Post-GW, Priestley continued to shape the gaming landscape, lending his expertise through consulting work and involvement in Warlord Games, renowned for its historical miniature wargames. His influence extended to the design of the acclaimed World War II wargame Bolt Action in 2012, cementing his status as a game designer par excellence.

With an illustrious career marked by creativity, innovation, and a dedication to the art of gaming, Rick Priestley remains a beloved figure in the gaming community, leaving an enduring legacy that continues to inspire gamers and game designers alike.

It was a real privilege to be able to put some questions to Rick, and here’s what he had to say:

Why do you think this hobby still exists?

Rick Priestley: Wargaming – broadly – I can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t continue to exist, whether we are talking about tabletop, historical, board wargames, or video games. Historical tabletop wargames – my main interest – does seem to be an older crowd, but there’s plenty of younger players coming over from fantasy and science-fiction games.

Games Workshop has done a great job of bringing wargaming to the attention of youngsters; effectively recruiting new players and stimulating an interest in the model-driven tabletop wargame. The hobby as a whole has benefited from that, and I imagine will continue to do so for years to come.

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What might people be surprised to hear you’re not very good at?

Rick Priestley: I’m not sure there are any surprises there! I’m pretty bad at exactly the sort of things you’d expect me to be bad at. Years ago, when folk used to ask me how to get into working in wargames, I used to have a stock answer: be bad a something else. At that time all the people I knew who worked in wargames had basically failed to do whatever it was they set out to do beforehand. My boss chucked in a degree in Maths to start a wargames company. Jervis Johnson gave up a career as an undertaker (it takes all sorts). And quite a few of us had worked in archaeology, including me. I wasn’t a very good archaeologist because I hated being outside in the pouring rain, shovelling spoil in the rain all day, sleeping in a wet tent, and resorting to the countryside by way of toilet facilities. All of these things had limited appeal.

After that, I tried my hand as a figure designer, but I couldn’t make enough to earn a decent living, and so got dragged into the world of casual work at Citadel doing mail order, and then a full-time job, and so on. Hence, my advice to anyone starting out in the world of wargames: be bad at something else, because if you’re good at something else, you’d be better off sticking to it!

When was the last time something in the hobby surprised you?

Rick Priestley: I think the development of thermoplastic resin injection into silicon rubber moulds was a bolt out of the blue. I never expected that technology to work. Oddly enough, many years ago, Games Workshop did have a go at developing rubber-in-steel inserts to fit into plastic injection moulding machines. That experiment never worked out. Basically, the pressure behind an injection moulding press is so great it distorts the rubber, no matter how stiff a rubber you use. This was in the days of ‘black’ organic rubber, so you had what you had, unlike today when you can get different grades of silicon rubber.

The company that pioneered that new technology has built its own injection machines of course, and to be honest it has not been plain sailing either. Teething problems aside, it’s now used commercially by several wargames manufacturers, and the quality of materials gets better all the time. That’s been a real game-changer.

Tell me something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

Rick Priestley: There is nothing so unbearably tedious as sport, especially football. Why people take an interest in this kind of thing, let alone raise individuals to the level of celebrity on the basis of kicking a ball, skipping, jumping about, etc, is all a mystery to me.

Tell me something you once believed about the hobby that turned out not to be true.

Rick Priestley: Nothing springs to mind, to be honest. When we did the third version of Warhammer, I thought we could extend the range to include not only army lists for competitive gaming but also narrative-based scenarios and campaigns. This being the sort of gaming I’d always enjoyed, I thought there’d be a market for campaign packs, and we produced a number, including The Grudge of Drong, Terror of the Lichemaster, and so on.

The idea was to expand the range of gaming, or rather to cater for a style of gaming that had hitherto been quite successful in earlier versions of Warhammer, e.g. Ork’s Drift. The trouble was, we’d been so successful with the new format of Army Books complete with army lists, that the game had turned towards that style of one-on-one competitive play. The new campaign packs did sell reasonably well, but sales expectations had moved forward, so they were not judged a success at the time and were dropped fairly shortly. So, I guess the market wasn’t what I hoped it was, and what people really wanted was army lists and competition-style games.

Are there any common hobby myths and misconceptions that make you roll your eyes?

Rick Priestley: Are there such things? I suppose there are a few odd things folks say about games I’ve written that continue to do the rounds even though they really aren’t true. One is that Warhammer was originally a free set of rules given away with mail order. That isn’t true, but it was an idea that was floated at the time, and we used to include stats and rules for Warhammer on mail-order sheets, so you can see how the story got around.

The other one is that some folks cite Laserburn as an early form of Warhammer 40,000 or influence upon it. It certainly wasn’t, but Bryan Ansell, who was running Games Workshop at the time, wrote Laserburn, and he would go on to initiate several projects for 40K supplements, so I suppose there may have been some ideas or concepts common to both.  Oh – and Bolt Action is derived from 40K… it really, really, isn’t! Oddly enough, WH40K 3rd edition (and all subsequent editions that use that same basic mechanic) was derived from my home-crewed WW2 rules that John Stallard and I used to play 15mm WW2 games.

Tell me about a particularly satisfying mechanic you’ve either created yourself, or came across whilst playing someone else’s game (or both!)

Rick Priestley: I thought the turn over mechanic in Blood Bowl was an interesting way to sequence a game, and I took the idea and adapted it to my Warmaster system. So, to activate a unit you rolled dice to give an order; if successful you continued to move and order units, but if you failed, it’s turn over. It’s interesting because you have to decide which things to move first and which to leave until last and risk not being able to move at all. I later adapted the same mechanic to Black Powder and Hail Caesar for Warlord Games, so it’s had a good run!

Another mechanic that I’ve always thought would be interesting to adapt is the combat mechanism in a game called Warlord. Warlord is a game of nuclear warfare published in the 70s and later re-boxed and marketed by Games Workshop as Apocalypse. Anyway, it works like this:

When making an attack you take a dice and secretly select a number by hiding it behind your palm, you can only choose a number up to the total number of pieces you are attacking with. Your opponent guesses what number you have chosen, and if correct, you lose that number of pieces, if incorrect, your opponent loses one of their own pieces.

The attacker can stop at any point if things are not going well. Assuming things do go well, once an attacker removes the opponent’s last piece, you get to move into the space and take it over, but the number of pieces you move in has to be the number you last selected. Thus, the initial attacks can be random, although choosing a high value risks losing a high number of pieces, which encourages you to choose a low value… but your opponent knows this… and you know that they know… and so on.

When it comes to your last attack, the fact that you take the space with the number of pieces nominated means you want to choose as high a value as possible… but your opponent knows this… and you know that they know… and so on. I just like the element of double guessing and the potential for a lucky guess to unravel an attack.

Anything you’re working on right now that you’d like to share or promote with the audience?

Rick Priestley: I’ve hung up my spurs and can’t see me undertaking any big new projects anytime soon – retired now and enjoying gaming for its own sake 😊

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us, Rick!

Enjoyed this? Be sure to check out our chats with fellow industry heroes Gav Thorpe, Andy Chambers, Tuomas Pirinen, and Alessio Cavatore, too.

A Q&A with CryinMo of Tabletop Alchemy

My online name is CryinMo, my IRL name is Ignatius Fischer, I’m a filmmaker, video producer and a hobby podcaster. I used to play Minecraft a lot and I’ve just returned to all the tabletop gaming hobbies I used to do 25 years ago.

What originally brought you into the hobby?

All right, let’s see … so I got into Dungeons and Dragons when I was 16. I don’t remember how I came to buy this particular book, but my first real introduction to the fantasy genre was Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first book in the original Dragonlance trilogy, and I bought it one day in a Waldenbooks in my city mall.

I think ultimately my first introduction to the fantasy genre was the Disney movie Peter Pan, which I saw when I was 5, even before Star Wars. And later on I really enjoyed the Disney movie Robin Hood. When I was 9 or 10, my parents read us kids The Hobbit, but I remember just sort of tuning out lol, it did nothing for me, really.

It was definitely picking up that first Dragonlance book that hooked me into the sword-and-sorcery arena. Soon after that I learned that one of the guys I worked with at a movie theater was running a game of D&D and I asked if I could play and that was it, I was sold on the whole D&D thing.

I spent all my cash on D&D rule books which were relatively difficult to get, there was only one store in the mall that sold them and the selection was thin. After playing D&D for a couple years, I enlisted in the Army for 2.5 years and travelled to Germany where I ran games for fellow troops.

When I returned to the US I ended up living in an apartment down the street from a full-service genuine hobby store. It was there that I learned about miniatures and other games. That’s how I got into Warhammer and painting miniatures.

I actually painted miniatures first for D&D and then for Shadowrun, which we played for a year straight, pretty fun. Then came Warhammer and 40k and Epic and Blood Bowl and all that stuff.

If you had to pick between collecting/painting and gaming, which one would you choose, and why?

I would 100% select collecting/painting over gaming. The simple fact is that even though I like and/or want to game as much as I can, I have only played probably 5 game sessions in the last 2 years, those being D&D and Frostgrave.

I love painting and collecting miniatures and I do so with the idea that I’ll use them in multiple types of games whenever I can, but the “hobby” side of gaming is always available to me and the “gaming” side of gaming occurs at a very low frequency. And even if game sessions were more prevalent, even if they were once a week or twice a month, that means there’s still a ton of time on the hobby side anyway.

Fantasy, sci-fi, or historical? What’s your preferred gaming sandbox?

Fantasy by far. That’s not to say sci-fi isn’t on my radar or that I don’t like it, I just sort of lean more toward fantasy. Like I mentioned, I played Shadowrun for a full year (I know playing something for a year is probably a low bar for most of your audience, but for me that was a significant run!), but of course there are fantasy elements in Shadowrun.

Genre-mixing usually turns me off but for whatever reason Shadowrun 1st edition just worked for me. But my first love is D&D, after that I enjoy skirmish games set in fantasy realms, especially Frostgrave, which I really like because of its production value (the book designs, writing, rule set, etc) and its miniature-agnostic approach.

I haven’t played any of the current GW rule sets even though I have a lot of their miniatures.

Historical does nothing to capture my interest or curiosity – that’s been true of my entire reading hobby from childhood to now, I’d much rather watch or read a piece of fiction than a documentary. Of course there are amazing documentaries and historical books out there and I enjoy those when I come across them! It’s just that my attention is grabbed, for whatever reason, by fiction first.

Do you prefer to make your own terrain, or buy pre-made stuff?

I make my own terrain and this is an interesting thing – I don’t hardly do any miniature conversions, but if I purchase any terrain, which is a rare occurrence, I automatically assume I’m going to convert it or build it in addition to some custom terrain.

Prefab terrain I think gets real expensive real fast and that’s what keeps me away from that, although this is all considering only the fantasy genre. I think if I were into sci-fi more, like Necromunda or Kill Team, building terrain for urban settings is probably way more time consuming than stuff I do for fantasy-based or non-urban based boards. Purchasing terrain for that would become more cost-effective.

Do you have a favourite miniature wargame that you can play through in an hour or less?

Currently Frostgrave is my favorite and I’m about to start playing Blood Bowl again after 25 years away from it. I think Blood Bowl, while not necessarily a “war-game” is the fastest miniature-based game that I own.

I think Warhammer Underworlds is supposed to be even faster, match-wise, but while I have collected figures from that game, I don’t own the rule sets for it.

I’m also about to start playing Rangers of Shadow Deep in solo format and I’m very curious to see how that goes.

What are 3 tabletop, miniature, or hobby related podcasts you enjoy?

I’m a huge fan of the Paint All The Minis Paint Ramble (as if that isn’t obvious from my own podcast lol) and I also really enjoy Dungeon Master of None.

I’m gonna cheat and call out two podcasts that I’ve just recently discovered as a tie for the third choice: Trapped Under Plastic and The Havoc Cast. I’m actually really jealous of The Havoc Cast’s format and if I had known of it before starting my own, I would definitely have been inspired by it.

Which God of Chaos would you serve, and why?

So I’m not a Warhammer lore guy, and while I know who the four chaos gods are (I think there’s four lol), I would not be able to choose among them.

To answer this question, I might like to say that I would join the House of Black and White from Game of Thrones, but to be honest, there’s probably a D&D deity that would fit my bill or life philosophy best. Again, I don’t know much about the pantheons out there, but I would like to follow the footsteps of some sort of zen master who walks at twilight under the gaze of both the moon and the sun and practices some sort of balancing with universe.

I suppose if I were a Jedi, I would definitely be a part of the Gray Side. Maybe the Light Gray Side. (I’m sure I’ve angered all the Star Wars fans out there, just chalk me up as a heathen, I’m fine with that – big grin)!

You’re being evacuated to a space colony and can only take 3 games with you. What are they?

Minecraft. Frostgrave. Blood Bowl.

Do you have an outright favourite army or faction out of all the gaming universes?

It would be practically impossible for me to choose a “favourite faction”. I really like the aesthetics of skeletons and vampires (definitely not zombies), I like elves a lot and I like magic. I like half-orcs and half-elves. Hybrids, the way of the future.

I also like orcs and goblins. And humans. It’s probably easier to select a few factions that I dislike!

I don’t care for the Tyranids (this is nothing against folks who do, these are just my things I don’t wanna paint), I don’t care for most Khorne stuff or the new Ossiarch things, and while I like Plague Marines, pretty much everything else Nurgle is too gross for to want to paint ’em, lol. I don’t even really like Space Marines when looking at the lists of what I want to paint. Although I have two sprues of (I think) some Infiltrators I am actually looking forward to painting one day as a palette cleanser between fantasy stuff.

Is there a specific miniature wargame you tend to dig out when introducing a friend to the hobby for the very first time?

To be honest, the only miniature war-game I’ve introduced to anyone so far has been Frostgrave. And I would probably use that as an intro to new players. Really, D&D can be a good game to intro people to miniatures as well.

Tell us where we can find you online, and check out what you do.

You can find me and my podcast, Tabletop Alchemy, at CryinMo.com, where people can find links to podcast apps, my Facebook and Instagram, my Youtube, etc.

Huge thanks to CryinMo for taking part! If you’re interested in doing a Q&A on the site in future, contact us.

A Q&A with Dan Adam of Paint All The Minis

“Paint All The Minis is an online community that aims to celebrate and empower people to hobby sustainably. We do all we can to give you stuff to watch/listen to/think about whilst you are nerding about. We give a place for people to share their paintwork which is mature and positive.” 

What originally brought you into the hobby?

I was looking at a new sociable hobby unrelated to work. I had played a lot of sports but I kept on getting injured and it took up a lot of my time.

I tried video games which I enjoyed but they weren’t very social. I have 0 friends who game, and also 12 year old kids were trash talking me whilst they were schooling me.

I went to a game store and bought some models. I promised to paint them and play 3 games….I did, and have kept on ever since. 

If you had to pick between collecting/painting and gaming, which one would you choose, and why?

Painting for sure. I like all aspects of the hobby but collecting would cost me too much money and playing relies on someone else.

Sometimes I just like to pick up a model and throw a wash on it. Other times, I might take hours to paint one up. I do try really hard to fully interact with all aspects of the hobby though, to make sure that I am making it the best possible value for time, immersion, and money. 

Fantasy, sci-fi, or historical? What’s your preferred gaming sandbox?

I like all areas to be honest. It’s the community and rule set that entice me really.

I like a deep game but without having to remember to much needless stuff.

Alessio Cavatore games are always a winner. His sophistication through simplicity design is one I really love. You dont have to think to much about how the pieces move in chess, yet the game is really deep.

A Song of Ice and Fire is a game I have been setting about with reckless abandon over the last year and a bit, I really enjoy that.

Any game that allows me to make decisions and try to outwit my opponent is fun. Min/Maxing and too much emphasis on the list build doesn’t really do it for me. Relicblade, The Drowned Earth, and Frostgrave are pretty epic too. 

Do you prefer to make your own terrain, or buy pre-made stuff?

I have done both but I much prefer pre made stuff. It’s more robust as I move around. I have made my own though, which has been fun. It’s a great palette cleanse in-between paint projects. 

Do you have a favourite miniature wargame that you can play through in an hour or less?

Dude!!! Kill Team is probably the only one I can get cracked in that time.

What are 3 tabletop, miniature, or hobby related podcasts you enjoy?

I am not a massive fan of those sorts of Podcasts to be honest!!! haha, although Cryinmo’s Tabletop Alchemy is one I listen to. That’s good.

Don’t tell Ignatius Fischer that though, he’ll get a big head. 

Which God of Chaos would you serve, and why?

Nurgle for sure! Love the aesthetic, & who doesn’t want tentacles, horns, and a whole group of flies keeping you company?

You’re being evacuated to a space colony and can only take 3 games with you. What are they?

V Commandos, A Song of Ice and Fire, & Space Hulk.

Do you have an outright favourite army or faction out of all the gaming universes?

Fallen Dark Angels probably. I love the whole idea of they were having a great time on Caliban, Emperor shows up, and they toddle off to do his bidding, great times!! But wait, Emprah wrecks Caliban and ruins its natural beauty amongst loads of other stuff, cracks appear and some of the Dark Angels decide they don’t want in anymore.

I don’t know how much of that story is accurate or how much I made up but the idea that some of the faction may decide to stand up for what they believe and to reverse previous decisions going against their own battle brothers is just pretty interesting and deep. Then the fact that they could be bad, but actually not bad, and that their mates are hunting them down to keep the secret is all pretty interesting.

Is there a specific miniature wargame you tend to dig out when introducing a friend to the hobby for the very first time?

Space Hulk, sometimes Blood Bowl. Any opportunity I get to play them then I am all over it. 

Tell us where we can find you online, and check out what you do.

You can check out our Facebook community Paint All The Minis. Our community aims to celebrate average Joe’s doing their hobby thing, just painting, sharing, creating positivity & good will without negativity. We also have a website, YouTube channel, and podcast of the same name. 

Listen to the Paint All The Minis Paint Ramble Podcast

Huge thanks to Dan for taking part! If you’re interested in doing a Q&A on the site in future, contact us.