Jeff Tidball Talks About Horus Heresy

Here’s something I missed a couple of weeks ago: Horus Heresy designer Jeff Tidball writing about the dream of designing and developing a “mountains-of-plastic-figures” game for Fantasy Flight. An excerpt:

The challenge in adapting any story (be it a comic, novel, film, or whatever) into a game (be it a board game, card game, or roleplaying game) is that there’s a fundamental difference between what a story is and what a game is: In a story, the author tells you what happens. In a game, you decide.

After giving it some thought, I set this goal for myself: At the end of the day, I wanted it to be possible for just about everything that happens in the canonical Horus Heresy story to be able to happen in the game. But at the same time, I wanted lots of other things to be possible, too. As much as Warhammer 40,000 fans love the canonical narrative, I don’t think they want to just re-enact those same events blow by blow and die-roll by die-roll. They want to try out different decisions. They want to play “What if?”

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