In this one I’m chatting with Chris Handley (dr_ether) — a proper RPG writing machine who’s worked on Cubicle 7’s Warhammer RPGs (40K, Age of Sigmar, and Old World), plus things like Iron Kingdoms/Warmachine and more. We get into where his RPG journey started (classic D&D box, Arcane magazine, Star Wars RPGs), and why roleplay games quietly do a ton of heavy lifting for the lore we all obsess over. I love this stuff because it’s the bits the wargame can’t show you: what regular people eat, what they believe, what they’re scared of, and what they’ve never even heard of. The big takeaway is that RPGs are an incredibly efficient way to develop an IP — they “fill the gaps” by answering the questions we all ask when we’re painting minis at 1am. We talk about how settings use unreliable narrators, why “canon” in Warhammer is… wobbly at best, and how games like Inquisitor and Imperial Maledictum drill into the nuts and bolts of the Imperium. We also wander into Warmachine/Iron Kingdoms and how that setting handles real change (characters actually die, the world moves on), plus why dice systems and mechanics genuinely matter to how a story feels at the table.