On May 24, author Gideon (no surname given) at the brilliantly named ‘Awesome Lies’ blog announced that they had signed a deal with academic publisher MIT Press to publish ‘The Forging of Worlds’, “a rigorous history of the creation of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Warhammer 40,000“. Gideon says it “draws on more than fifteen years of research, including access to rare and unpublished documents, interviews with many of those involved in the games’ creation, and careful review of financial and other corporate records”.
No date is given for when the book will be available, and the blogpost notes that although “the project is far advanced… there remains work to do”.
In 2017, Awesome Lies published a series of blog posts giving an early history of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which formed the kernel of this project. You won’t find them on the site now though, as Gideon took them down in February 2026. At that time, Gideon said this was because the project had ballooned in scope, and now followed the “history of Warhammer up to the change in ownership and management at GW in 1991-1992”. They added that “over the last year I have written more new material for the project than in the entire prior history of Awesome Lies”.
This is an extremely welcome book – there is no comprehensive and academically rigorous history of the development of Warhammer. Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s ‘Dice Men’ is a personal memoir of the earliest days of Games Workshop, mostly prior to Bryan Ansell joining the company and the emergence of Warhammer. ‘Talking Miniatures’, edited by John Stallard and Robin Dews, is a series of original interviews with ex Warhammer studio staff from the ’80s and ’90s – an excellent and very human source of information, but not structured into a formal history. ‘Blanche, the Rise of Grimdark’, is a biography of just one man.
My own book, ‘Grimdark’ – trapped in pre-publication limbo at the very small Strange Attractor press – is in the main a collection of essays analysing the main themes expressed by the Warhammer 40k factions and how they reflect real life in and around the fandom. It opens with a one-chapter potted history of Warhammer 40k, and oh how I wish that a rigorous history book had been available as a reference resource before I started writing.
MIT Press previously published the truly astonishing Playing At The World by Jon Peterson, an exhaustive history of the emergence of D&D and the concept of roleplaying games out of miniature wargaming. I have my fingers crossed that The Forging of Worlds can match it.
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Source: Wargamer
