If you grew up on Black Library novels or the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, this hire is going to mean something. Marc Gascoigne, the man who helped launch Games Workshop's fiction imprint and the science-fiction publisher Angry Robot, has come out of semi-retirement to join indie wargame phenomenon Trench Crusade as its first Head of Special Ops. Set in an alternate First World War where Hell has cracked open and the Church wages literal crusade against demonic legions in no-man's-land, Trench Crusade is the grimdark skirmish game that's quietly become the talk of every UK wargame table since the free rules dropped.
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See how it worksHis brief, broadly speaking, is to build out the world. That means in-house and licensed products spun off from the core skirmish game, with novels, RPGs and crossovers all on the table given his back catalogue. "I was just considering retiring and finishing some personal projects," Gascoigne said in the announcement, "but the summons to join the crusade proved too strong."
It's a hire with serious provenance. Back in the 1980s Gascoigne developed and edited classics like Blood Bowl and Dark Future for Games Workshop, co-wrote the original Judge Dredd RPG and worked on the first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. In 1997 he helped found Black Library and ran it as publisher for a decade, then jumped to HarperCollins to set up Angry Robot, which won the World Fantasy Special Award in 2011.
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Find events near youTrench Crusade itself has been one of the indie wargame stories of the past two years. Designer Tuomas Pirinen (lead on Mordheim during his Games Workshop years) released the free 1.0 rules in November 2025, with the upcoming Carcass Front starter box (two warbands, a 96-page campaign book and twin narrative campaigns) landing in late July via Archon Studio. With Gascoigne onboard, the question now is what shape the broader Trench Crusade universe takes.
Sources: Tabletop Sentinel | Trench Crusade | Wikipedia
