Blogger and HeroQuest lover Rafa el Vikingo recently published the 10th of March of 2025 a great interview with legend Gavin Thorpe, writer and member of the Games Workshop game design team during the 90's and a regular in the battle report sections of the White Dwarf magazine back in the day. He was co-author of many Games Workshop's games, but Warhammer Quest probably was one of his most relevant ones.
The full interview was published here by Rafa in his website. Rafa is also a big fan of Warhammer Quest, so of course the interview was basically centered in such game, however they also talked a bit about HeroQuest and Advanced Heroquest because Warhammer Quest actually was a natural evolution of them, so I took the licence of transcripting below just the questions and answers I thought more relevant for the forum. Nevertheless, of course I encourage you to read the full interview since it is really interesting for any fan of Games Workshop games and products history.
Thanks to Rafa el Vikingo for publishing this great interview.
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EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH GAVIN THORPE by Rafa el Vikingo, published 10th March 2025 at Rafa el Vikingo's website 'heroquester.eu'
- Rafa el Vikingo (ReV): When did you first hear about Andy Jones's idea for this game? What were your initial thoughts when he presented his brainchild Warhammer Quest?
Gavin Thorpe: I’m not sure how log Andy had been beavering away on the basic rules, but when I and the other Assistant Games Developers (along with Mark Hawkins and Ian Pickstock) were brought in to help playtest the game there was a full colour mock-up of the box and contents, including the floorplans and cards. So, a couple of months at least, I would say.
It looked a lot of fun. I was Heroquest-adjacent in the previous years; in that I was aware of it but never had Heroquest. I did own and play Advanced Heroquest though, and there was a nice continuation from there in look if a slightly more light-hearted approach.
ReV: What role did you play in the creation of Warhammer Quest? We know that you contributed so much to the game regarding the expansions and such. You're also credited in the Roleplay Book providing 'additional material'. How much were you involved in the creation of the main game and what exactly were your contributions to it?
GT: As a group the Assistant Games Developers spent about 2 months solidly playtesting the basic rules (alongside our other duties) with Andy and then working our way through a full campaign testing the Roleplay book. As part of that we were suggesting rules, coming up with treasure items, events and so forth, basically contributing to the development of the full game.
By the end of the playtest, it was more a matter of slapping down an objective room and seeing how many Blood Thirsters the party could handle! Okay, maybe not quite that abstract, but there was certainly a lot of combats testing all those D66 tables. D3 Bull centaurs or D3+1? How many Dragon Ogres can a level 10 Barbarian deathblow? It was a lot of fun. We then started subbing in some of the expansion characters like the Imperial noble, and so on as work began on them overlapped with delivering the final game.
I can’t recall any specific sections of the book that I wrote, but perhaps there were some short colour pieces or quotes from me.
ReV: During the development phase of the game, were you in contact with other designers of dungeon crawler games such as Jervis Johnson (Advanced Heroquest) or Stephen Baker (Heroquest)? Others?
GT: This is all took place in the Games Workshop design studio where Jervis also worked. I don’t know for certain but I’m fairly sure Andy would’ve spoked to Jervis at least – their desks were about no more than meters away from each other… That would’ve been in the design of the core game though. Jerv was busy with his own stuff and wasn’t involved in the playtesting a bit later development. I don’t know if Andy was in contact with Stephen Baker, I expect he knew him from the Heroquest days.
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ReV: Warhammer Quest is very famous. Even today it enjoys almost a cult status and is often cited as the best dungeon game in history, with many modern games patterning its format. Being there from the conception and throughout the entire history of Warhammer Quest, could you sense at the time that this game would leave such a mark in the history of dungeon games?
GT: That’s very generous, though I would say Heroquest (and later Space Crusade) is probably responsible for more people coming to gaming in the early 90s than almost anything else. That WQ has gone on to have new editions, and licensed video games, is testament to the fundamental appeal of the dungeon crawl adventure game in general.
To be perfectly honest, at the time Warhammer Quest was quite expensive to produce and, like Man O’ War before it, the amount of card content made translations prohibitively costly, which somewhat reduced the reach via GW. Resources were tight and as was seen later with White Dwarf and then Fanatic releasing the unused material, we had extra adventurer packs and a quest pack that never got manufactured (the miniatures were nit made, but we did get art at least!). With all the secondary games, there was a viable hobby and community, and a perfectly reasonable business, but in the great metric of sales it was simply more effective to put those resources into Warhammer and 40K. What’s good now is that these games are separated out from the ‘core games’ with their own design teams, so that no longer applies. Andy half-joked for a while that we should just license WQ from GW and run it ourselves for a £1 million a year business…
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ReV: The current rarity and expense of Warhammer Quest (1995) keeps a lot of people from acquiring and playing this game, but it also seems to help maintain its cult status. Do you think a reprint of Warhammer Quest would be a good or bad thing for the game?
GT: I think the world has moved on. There are many dungeon crawl boardgames, and even GW has updated Warhammer Quest with newer, slicker versions. And as I mentioned, there’s a LOT of cards in the WQ range and that has got more and more expensive to produce. Though perhaps not quite several hundred pounds, a reprint would not be cheap at retail price.
The thing is, at its heart there’s not a lot that’s particularly special about Warhammer Quest. The mechanics could certainly be improved in light of far more modern games. The adventurer miniatures are nice (very dynamic for the time), but the monsters are certainly monopose mid-90s quality. The floorplans are still amazing though! The real hook comes from the whole package, both a really straightforward but fun boardgame, or a deeper dungeon bash roleplaying game.
The recent re-release of Heroquest is quite telling though. Rather than being released into mainstream stores with a TV commercial like the original that would bring in a new generation of gamers, it was crowdfunded nostalgia-bait for middle aged folks like us who would drop $200+ to be teenagers again. It’s hard not to see a Warhammer Quest relaunch being treated the same way, or at least seen in the same light.
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End of interview
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in this thread.
