THE FLAME OF THE OLD WORLD FLICKERS

We talk to Cubicle 7’s founder, Dominic McDowall, about taking our most loved stories to the tabletop and keeping the embers of the Old World alight

Words by Christopher John Eggett

“We worked out the other day that I’ve got something like 400 credits,” chuckles Dominic McDowall when we ask him to introduce himself to our microphone at a busy Dragonmeet 2021. He is the founder of Cubicle 7 Games, a now Irelandbased roleplaying game publisher best known for The Doctor Who roleplaying game and holding the banners for roleplaying in the worlds of Game Workshop’s Warhammer series.

And on that front, the company, and Dominic’s own writing in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fourth Edition, is one of the few places where the ‘old world’ still exists on our tabletops. Games Workshop, or rather Archaon –a Lord of Chaos – literally smashed the fabric of reality and tore the world into the pocket-dimensions we now observe in Warhammer Age of Sigmar. While there’s much to love about this newest age for the mortal realms, there’s something extremely charming about the classic, slightly silly, fantasy of Warhammer Fantasy. And Cubicle 7’s Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is currently the only non-digital way you can dip into this strange world.

We asked McDowall to take us on a tour of how Cubicle 7 ended up here, which begins, as many strange things do, with a trip to the doctor.

THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW

McDowall started in an editor’s role – commissioning work and directing the course of the game books they published. He cheerfully laments that he’s not designed the layout for a book since 2011.

Cubicle 7 is now a fairly large company, “sometimes I have to pinch myself and ask ‘how did this happen?’,” he says, the company now sits at around 28 employees. Cubicle 7 was incorporated on 22 December 2006, on the cusp the new year, a birthday a few days away at the time of the interview.

It wasn’t a simple leap into the Old World however. Instead McDowall took time convincing himself that his contributions were worthwhile on the page, as well as shaping them.

“I’m a fairly traditional gamer, big on the elaborate details of fantasy, but not big on confidence,” says McDowall, “it took me a little time to realise that the games had been successful – and accepting that I had played a significant role in that – and thinking ‘hang on, I’m okay at doing this,’.”

Adventures in Middle-earth –a Fifth Edition setting – was the game that the designer felt was ‘his game’, relatively late in the history of Cubicle 7, although he’s quick to point out that every game is a huge joint effort. It’s very clear that he has as much affection for the people he works with as he does for the games that he makes.