Fantasy games & GW history specialist Jordan Sorcery has recently performed a great live interview with legend Graeme Davis in his secondary You Tube channel Jordan Sorcery Pods. Graeme Davis has been one of the most prolific writers of roleplaying games material during the past century, including Game's Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, but he is actually most known in our Fans Community for being one of the authors of Terror in the Dark, the only published official supplement for Advanced Heroquest board game. He is even part of Ye Olde Inn forum as member GraemeDavis!!
The full interview can be found in the Jordan Sorcery's channel here, however, I took the licence of transcripting here just the questions and answers related with HeroQuest and Advanced Heroquest topics. Nevertheless, of course I encourage you to watch the full video since it is really interesting! If you detect any grammatical error in the transcription, please don't hesitate to tell me and I will correct it, remember that I am not a native English speaker.
On this extract of the conversation you may find some interesting details about the origin of the Fimir monster and its original metallic miniatures for Warhammer, and also he answers some questions to Jordan about the recently super-cool unpublished stuff by Grame Davis about how Terror in the Dark expansion could have potentially been back in 1991 according to his design notes (you may find posted in detail all we know about this topic here).
Thanks to Jordan again for performing these great interviews with historical game creators.
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EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH GRAEME DAVIS by Jordan Sorcery, published in Mar 2025 at his secondary YouTube channel, @JordanSorceryPods
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[Jordan and Graeme are talking a bit about the miniatures being produced by Games Workshop back in the day...]
Jordan Sorcery (JS): Yeah, yeah, that does make sense, and like you say, the engine room for the Company has always been, or at least once Bryan Ansell took over and Citadel became the driving force, it was the miniatures that were really pushing the Company forward. I mean in the miniature space and the folklore, there's a few fascinating stories out there about the Fimir and these sort of armies that were... kind of taken from folklore, in order to then create something that would feel more uniquely Warhammer, right?
Graeme Davis (GD): Yes, at the time Jes [Goodwin] and Tony [Ackland] and I were working on the Fimir, my theory was that something that was drawn from mythology or folklore had a more authentic ring than something that was just made up on the back of an envelope in the pub, a fantasy monster, because essentially it have been subjected to centuries of play testing, it refined itself through stories retold and retold, and we could see various aspects of it from different periods attend, depending on how the stories were viewed from the society of the day, and that changed quite considerably, so I looked to folklore, specifically the Fomorians from Irish tradition, there was a great illustration on the back of a book of Irish folklore tales that I had by Alan Lee, which Jes and Tony copied far more faithfully than I expected [Laughs]. I am still surprised there, but then of course I am not without sin because I was so enchanted with folklore tropes, and the abduction motif in particular, that I somehow managed to completely overlook that the Fimir actually reproduced through kidnapping and rape, right? which was one of the nails in their coffin, the other nail was when Nick Bibby took over the modeling from Jes, and the prototype, which I'm sure you've seen pictures online, was Orc size. I think it was the 25 milimeter base... Nick sculpted oversized things, so he made the Fimir oversized, they're on 40 milimeter bases, but they had 25 milimeter base stats, which meant that they were next to useless on the battlefield [Laughs], so between those two things they were doomed from the outset, unfortunately, although they keep popping up... the Fimir ruinous inheritance with some fan popular publication, they turned up in, I think the Marienburg adventure, "The Dying of the Light" from Hogshead, something about them appeals to the fans so much that they will overlook the weaknesses, but I guess with the roleplaying games the stats are what the stats are, you don't have to cross reference it with base size or battlefield effectiveness... then, to my immense surprise they were made in plastic for HeroQuest or Advanced Heroquest, I forget which.
JS: Yeah, it was in the original HeroQuest, the first MB Games collaboration, which is fascinating because they're obviously a great design, like it is part of the iconic, I think the reason that they continue to capture imaginations. I imagine another part of... it is exactly like you say, these are centuries old folktales that have stood the test of time because they do capture the imagination just inherently, they're interesting as a creature, and as a look and sort of feel, so it's perhaps no surprise that people are constantly, even now, still drawn to them.
GD: Yeah, I think as well. They're kind of an Easter egg in Warhammer lore, so people discover them and they have this kind of cache, if you know what I mean, because they're not front and center, they're not very well known, and once you discover them, you feel like you're a true fan, that sort of thing [Laughs].
JS: Yeah, I think that's a good point, absolutely it's definitely that sort of hidden arkana from deep in the histories of Warhammer, but I mean, it does feel like there is almost a sort of an example of how working with existing folklores, so these real tales can come with a few potential pitfalls, right? because you do have to adapt, and you do have to take them from... because a lot of classic folk tale is quite brutal and quite dark at times, isn't it?
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[Jordan and Graeme are talking about how roleplaying games were hosted in GW studio...]
JS: You've recently been releasing on your blog a load of like lost Advanced Heroquest material, that was from the Terror in the Dark supplement.
GD: That's right.
JS: I am really curious, why was it that flame was responsible for producing a supplement for Advanced Heroquest? like how did that come to be?
GD: Honestly, I don't know. I'd already left by that point... my theory would be that Advanced Heroquest was again in the roleplaying bucket, and the studio was wanted to focus entirely on Warhammer... well, at the time... I don't think they'd started the Lord of the Rings game, but for a long time Games Workshop was a three-legged stool, it was Warhammer, 40K and Lord of the Rings, three big miniatures games and that was where the studio wanted to focus, and got to admit it's done them no harm, so a lot of side projects, I think would have been shunted to flame, the only one I guess that saw the light of day would have been Terror in the Dark, and that was when Carl [Sargent] had taken over from me, and I think Robin Dews had taken over from Mike [Brunton].
JS: Right, but you did still do some work on that Terror in the Dark supplement though?
GD: Yeah I did. When I first moved to the States, and I was writing for Vampire and GURPS, as Mike said anyone else would wave a check at me... they realized that actually they didn't have anyone left to develop buffer products, so that's how I got the job to develop Castle Drachenfels, which Carl had written, so obviously couldn't develop it himself, because you can't edit your own work, it just can't be done, and that was followed shortly after by the commission for Terror in the Dark, which I submitted a detailed brief that was accepted, I wrote to that brief, and then they published something a little bit different, and I've forgotten about it until I was just wandering through some old disks, to be honest looking for inspiration for posts on my own blog, trying to spark some memories, and there was all this stuff from 1991 that I hadn't laid eyes on since, hadn't thought about since, and I hadn't realized how much of it wasn't used, so I thought well, just do the decent thing, throw it up on the blog and see if anyone's interested, and it seems that people still are.
JS: Absolutely, yeah, because it's fascinating. I think to get an insight into... obviously it's a different era of games design, and there's always a certain romance to a lost product, I think people are always fascinated by that. I'm curious as well just about how different it was working, because there's a lot of encounters and traps and things in that material, working on that... what is essentially a board game, in Advanced Heroquest to a larger degree there's roleplay elements, but is that different to creating things for the more theater of the mindlet role playing games?
GD: Oh, definitely. I was looking backwards for my sources at the time I was looking to, I mean, essentially Advanced Heroquest was a more heavily grid-based D&D, that just happened to use a derivative of the Warhammer rule set, but it was a straight dungeon crawler, and that's why people still love it today, so I was looking backwards to my early days of playing White Box D&D and then AD&D 1st Edition, and the sort of elements that made up a good dungeon, so that's what a lot of that material is about, and of course AD&D 1st was incredibly table driven. I remember there was an Appendix in the back of the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide. You might call an analog procedural generation system it was a bunch of dungeon creation tables, so you could just roll endless dungeons. That's kind of the mindset with which I approach Advanced Heroquest Undead supplement to be titled as it was known at the time.
JS: Did you come up with the title, or did someone else come up with Terror in the Dark?
GD: I'm pretty sure that was Carl. Terror and Dark are two, were always two of his go-to we had, Terror in the Dark was Advanced Heroquest. "Night's Dark Terror" actually was AD&D and wasn't Carl, then there was the one based on the building pack that I just mentioned, I can't remember the title of that now...
JS: Sure, "Death's Dark Shadow".
GD: "Death's Dark Shadow", yes, so you can kind of see Carl's thinking or Carl's titling strategy [Laughs]. Yeah, "Death's Dark Terror Night" [Laughs].
[Jordan and Bob continue talking about many others interesting topics and Games Workshop...]
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in this thread.
