Lustria In Flames

A very long time ago, in my younger salad days (1991) I was an aspiring illustrator trying to make a career of scribbling little pictures for books and such, all the while paying bills (barely) with some low-grade retail jobs. Nowadays they’d be called “minimum wage” but back then there was no minimum wage, so they were poverty pay at best. It was a struggle, but…err…I’m getting off topic.

My interest in gaming of all types, and at that time an obsession with Games Workshop’s roleplaying game Warhammer Fantasy collided with this aspiring “career” and I threw some doodles together and sent them off (in a stamped addressed envelope like a cave man) to Carl Sargent, the “head honcho” (as he signed his letters off to me) at Flame Publications. Flame Publications was a subsidiary of Games Workshop Ltd. from 1990 to 1992, that was set up to publish the books for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. They lost the license to Hogshead Publishing.

Anyway, Mr Sargent and the art director Tony Ackland seemed to like my little pictures and we corresponded for a while on commissioning me to produce some work for the up-coming Lustrian Supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. As he said, my art would “constitute roughly 50% of the internal images, maybe 15-20 pieces”.

I remember being jolly excited by the prospect, and eagerly awaited the arrival of the source material they were sending me, along with design and style guidelines (which seemed to boil down to “do that, but with more spikes”).

A few dozen pages of typed text arrived, and I set about my commission with the abandon of a goblin fanatic! But within a few days, I got a phonecall (landline obviously) from Mr Sargent who sounded very gloomy.  Apparently, Games Workshop had pulled the plug on the project, so it was all over.

Ah well, when one door closes, etc.

So he said I could keep the stuff they’d sent as they were hoping to restart the project and would let me know if anything came of it.  Clearly it didn’t and the much-anticipated Lustrian Supplement never made it to print.

For 31 years I’ve had this old manuscript tucked in among my extensive Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay book collection. I understand its quite a rare thing, so I figured that I’d finally get round to digitising these old parchments. 

For those of you interested in the history of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying it may offer some interesting insight into the early stage of development of what could have led to playing games in the steamy jungles of far Lustria.

Enjoy!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Addendum.

Its also worth taking a look at the Awesome Lies blog, where I talked about this a while back (thanks Gideon!)

And some exceptional further work recostructing the possible structures of the supplement, had it made it to pring.