There are many people in our hobby, and the most mysterious are those authors that write our codices. In fact many people often "love" or even "hate" them. There is no such position in our hobby that draws out more emotion than these mysterious individuals.
What a lot of our hobby sometimes forget, is that these are people too, that could easily be somewhere else doing something they are very qualified to do. Their love for this hobby and Game are tremendous, enough that when they found the opportunity to work at one of their passions, they took it. Robbin Cruddace is one of those authors.
Space Marines, Chaos Daemons, Imperial Guard and many more are credited his way. So lets take a look at Robbin Cruddace from an interview for Phsyics World, the November Issue. This is only part of the interview with Robin, but some of the most related to our hobby.
The Interview.
How did you get your current job?
I’d been interested in games ever since I was 10 years old. It has always been my hobby, just as it is for many scientists. When I was finishing my doctorate I was applying for jobs left, right and centre – jobs with my industrial sponsors, science-related jobs, analysis jobs, technical recruiting jobs – all sorts of different places. As part of casting my net as wide as possible, I thought “Oh, I’ll check the website of my favourite hobby, Games Workshop.” They were advertising a job as a games developer, and that sounded like the kind of job that every 10-year-old would want, so I thought “Why not?” The interview process took over six months from beginning to end and there were all sorts of written tests and assessment days. At the beginning
I never thought I would be offered the job. I was applying because it seemed like a bit of fun, and if I got to travel up to the company’s Nottingham headquarters and have a little poke-around, well, that would be good fun as well. I got through to the next round and the next and the next – they must have been whittling it down from quite a few applicants – and eventually they offered me the job. I was very lucky in that I also had a couple of other offers, but I felt this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that, with my physics background and training, if it didn’t pan out I would still be well placed to look for another. Now I’ve been here for over six years, so it seems to be going strong.
What’s actually involved in your job?
Games Workshop is a business based on people collecting armies of miniatures, playing games with them and painting them. My job is to write the rule books and art books that support the toy soldiers that the company makes – books filled with background text, gaming mechanics and details about what certain models can and can’t do. It’s a matter of contextualizing and transferring what the sculptors who make the miniatures have done and writing that into a game in a way that reflects a unified story. I’ve worked on all aspects of what Games Workshop does, including Space Marines, which is our flagship range. The thing I enjoy most is seeing the books I’ve created on the shelves. Talking to people who’ve paid their hard-earned money to buy them is both humbling and exciting.
How has your background in physics helped?
My job is about coming up with ideas, whether for a set of rules or mechanics or some sort of game system based on rules and probabilities. Once you have the idea, you have to present it to people and test it. We play our games to test them as we go along, and it’s similar to an experiment – you notice what worked, what didn’t, what you can learn from it and how it compared to what you thought would happen. It’s an iterative process, and then at the end of it, I have to sit behind a keyboard and write the book, which feels very similar to the process of writing my doctoral thesis. The writing is also very technical, and it helps to have had some formal training in how to write like that.