Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop

[Lord_Ikka]

Not BL specifically, but related to it in the fact that it is a novel about the very beginning of GW. Basically it's Ian Livingstone's story of how he and Steve Jackson (and John Peake) started GW in the 70s, covering their involvement in the company until 1991 when they were bought out.

 

Goonhammer did a really good review, I'm wondering if anyone else here has read it and has an opinion? Personally, I'll probably read it but I'm more interested in what happened in the company in the years after the Kirby buyout, up to the launch of AoS and the kind of "rebirth" of GW being involved in the community (the resurgence of stuff like Warhammer Community and GW-sponsored tournaments after the killing off of the old warhammer site forum and events). That is a book that I would like to read.

[JustinDHill]

That's an excellent review from Goonhammer... I was one of the unbound subscribers - and it was lovely to go back and relive some of my early gaming experiences through this book. (I was brought into the hobby through D&D and my first White Dwarf was #32, so there was quite a bit from before my time, but a lot also that overlapped.)

 

It was a very interesting read. Everyone gets a cameo role - with little insert texts from Rick Priestly et al. My sense going through it, though, was that it was a little thin - packing in images to fill in for text. As a reader experience it felt more like a hardback magazine than a book.

 

I guess it raises a lot more questions that it answers, and that it would be great to tell this story journalistically - getting everyone's, sometimes contradictory experiences, recollections and motivation. Sure that's not going to happen, I mean the hobby is not that big, and in the meantime this is a great stand in. But it would be fascinating to continue the story of GW beyond the mid-80s, when the hobby, Warhammer and 40K really took off....