Interview with Nate Taylor, Creative Director for Dwarven Forge

*Audio interview, edited for clarity and length*

Two weeks ago, Gaming Trend sat down with Nate Taylor, the creative director for Dwarven Forge, who have been producing high quality, hand painted terrain for Dungeons & Dragons, wargames, and all sorts of tabletop needs since 1996. We've learned all about where Dwarven Forge came from, the level of creativity that exists in their studio, and the standard of excellence that keeps them going today.

GT: Where did Dwarven Forge come from? And what do you credit to the longevity of a premium terrain company?

NT: That's a good question! Dwarven Forge started from the idea of wanting to make D&D more fun, and specifically wanting to physically quantify the world, like there were already miniatures, right? Amazing miniatures getting made, Ral Partha and Grenadier and all these folks making these really cool miniatures.

But there wasn't a lot to put them on, right?

So there's the desire to create that world, quantify that world and an excuse to play with toys. There's something freeing about giving yourself permission to play. You need a few things to tell you, hey, it's OK to play, you know, get rid of your suit and your business head and your adulting and all this stuff and just say, wait a second...we're just gonna be in this fantasy for a little bit. Immersing yourself into a physical dungeon flips that switch immediately you're like, oh wait, we're in a crazy dungeon land! You can switch into game mode and go live your best fantasy life.

GT:  I remember the first time I saw Dwarven Forge pieces, I was at a con, and there was someone playing a meat grinder game with a bunch of Dwarven Forge, and it made me feel so much more immersed.

NT: That's one of the cool things about role-playing. It unites all walks of life, right? Anybody from the guy in the corporate suit to the young girl who's 12 years old to whatever like, you know, anybody can play anybody's welcome at the table. Like...it really is amazing, the walks of life of people you discover who are into RPGs and DND. It's getting more and more popular, right? You're discovering more and more people everywhere.

I think the longevity of Dwarven Forge is twofold.

Playing with toys is fun, right? Any of us that grew up playing with Legos, or even just blocks and whatever, there's something very satisfying, very immediate, very tangible, about being able to build stuff and giving people the tools to build, I feel like open-ended building systems are always gonna do well. Look at the popularity of Minecraft, there's just a bunch of blocks that you do anything. It's still cooking, I don't know how, 15 years later or whatever it is, it's still going. So I think when you can provide people tools that are open-ended they can make their own fun.

People are injecting their own creativity into these things. It's more than just what you're what you're making. The stories that they're creating in D&D and role-playing in general tends to have a lot of good emotional baggage where you're really invested in this game.

The moments that you're having at the table are bigger and more exciting than most of the other things often in life, so there's a lot of emotional weight to it. So then the things that you're building to help quantify the stories then have emotional weight.

There's a lot of emotional attachment to what we make because of what the game is bringing or what it means to a lot of people, myself included.  I think the the fact that we strive incredibly hard to create the coolest pieces we can.

It's a miniature piece of art, right? Like we're trying to obsess over each millimeter of each piece, and I think that infuses a thing whenever you create something, be it a movie or a book or a piece of terrain, a painting or whatever, you can feel when the creator is injecting passion right when they care about what they do. There's a joy in that creation.

The pieces are beautiful and you can tell they're crafted with love and whatnot. So I think somehow the combination of those two and then luck of course. In anything good like just like D&D, we roll a couple 20s along the way and managed to ride that to victory.

The moments that you're having at the table are bigger and more exciting than most of the other things often in life. So there's a lot of emotional weight to it. - Nate Taylor

GT: Do we still have faith that Dwarven Forge is going to keep going in a world where people can print fancy terrain with 3d printers?

NT: I certainly don't have the clear definitive answer in this. There's a lot of turmoil right now. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot. Yeah, it's probably one of the most unstable times I can remember. There's a lot of uncertainty, so it's impossible to give any sort of clear answer. But I think that what we do is make tools for role-playing and role-playing tends to be the thing people go to when times are tough, right? That's your chance just to forget about all the tariffs and all the nonsense and all the whatever and like kind of just for four hours, go slay some Dragons.

I think the analogue experience is something a lot of people are gravitating to as they're rejecting screens and screen time and digital interaction like having a physical reason to get together.  I think it's still there and because what we create is a great facilitator for that, right? It's a really good excuse to get your friends like, hey, I built a four foot dungeon, you wanna come over?

We managed to make it all the way through COVID without laying anybody off.

We've got a very hard working, very dedicated team and most importantly, we have some unbelievably loyal and die hard backers, right? Our supporters tend to not take little nibbles of Dwarvennite, they are gorging on Dwarvennite like people cannot get enough of it, right? But once you have the tools to start building your thing, you just want to keep building and building. So I think as long as we continue to make high quality products, make stuff that people enjoy using to create stories, I think we'll be able to survive whatever the heck's going on.

GT: You know, in a town full of fishermen, you don't want to be another person selling fish. You want to sell the fishing rod, right?

NT:  There's more and more people selling fishing rods now with the rise of 3D printing, right? It's now essentially affordable to have your own 3D printer. I mean there's a lot of hidden costs and there's time, you know fundamentally more people are printing stuff at home from miniatures to terrain to whatever crazy prototypes or whatever. It's an amazing tool and as a result there's more and more people that are creating digital files because you don't have to deal with shipping or warehousing or anything like, you know, digital files are amazing, so there's more people creating terrain digitally and printing it at home, which is awesome, right?

It's just like the more people that are playing with toys, the better. And if that's what gets you into the game like awesome, the world is better. The more people that are creating things, the better it is. And I think one of the things that'll help us stay relevant is that nobody's delivering quite what we're delivering, right? We cast in our super secret high quality PVC material called Dwarvenite. This stuff doesn't shatter like resin or chip or whatever. It's super indestructible and we're selling it hand painted. We figured out our painters are so good at coming up with paint schemes that are repeatable so that we can produce huge batches of these and get those results.

That's one of the challenges. Like, you can make (3d print) the coolest things. You print out this crazy old tower. You still have to paint it. And then if it falls off your table, you're in a lot of trouble.

We have those advantages and then our artistry, I think in our modular design that helps keeps us going. But you know it's amazing seeing other people creating really cool, clever stuff and innovating whatever helps drive us to keep going and see what else we can do and keep trying to push the envelope.

I think that what we do is make tools for role-playing and role-playing tends to be the thing people go to when times are tough, right? - Nate Taylor

GT:  Dwarven Forge now has some sci-fi terrain, and so it makes me wonder, are y'all going to start pushing into other areas like modern?

NT: So sci-fi came from mid August of 2020. We ran our Wildlands campaign in the middle of COVID, which was crazy. We're a year and a half in for prepping and we're about to launch and then COVID hit. So we delayed a little bit and kind of got that sense that we're just going to launch this anyways and it was pretty scary because we didn't know what was going to happen, you know everybody was working from home and we're here in New York.

We really wanted to hit 4 million because it would be our biggest one yet and it was just sort of an emotional victory and whatever. So we did a live stream for the tail end of the campaign and as we approached the end, we had like 10 minutes left in the campaign and we were, I don't know, 200K short or something. We had 3.8 million.

So we started making crazy offers on this campaign. I'm like "if we hit 4 million, we're gonna give stuff away". I have this painted prototype! And, you know, I was like, I'll sculpt this thing for zero and people are just like throwing money at us. It was like an auction. One of our painters is a lifelong Warhammer player and really has been dying for sci-fi terrain. He's like, how about we do sci-fi? But I'm like, yeah, we'll do sci-fi if we hit 4 million and sure enough with like seconds left to go, we hit 4 million. So then we were locked into having to do a sci-fi campaign, which is awesome. It was really a nice way to end.

It is really fun, getting to sort of cleanse the palate and think about the approach because it was a whole new set. We actually could get rid of all of our assumptions like we have a lot of set geometry about how the thicknesses of floors and walls and tolerances and just sort of general like a lot of parameters that we have to work within and we got to throw all of that out and start like, OK, if we're starting from scratch, what if suddenly everything was in in perfect half inch increments. So no matter how you stack the pieces so you can use the bottom as a top, flip it upside down, it becomes a roof. I think it's the most creative set in terms of how you can implement and use the pieces modularly. So we we definitely would like to explore some more stuff outside of fantasy.

The reality is our design process is very slow, right? It takes us at least a year to do anything. It's a very slow burn. So I don't know if we do something that's non fantasy, it won't be for at least like three years cause we're about to launch a Cities Campaign which I'm super excited about our Tudor villages and then next spring we're launching Perilous Frontiers, which is going to be sand and snow, arctic and desert wasteland. So it's Hoth and Tatooine. So the earliest we'd do something else, non fantasy would be 2027 or 2028.

GT: What's the craziest, largest, wildest creation that you've ever seen, either at a convention or posted or wherever?

Adepticon. Some of the boards, the display boards that people make are ridiculous like there's some floating 3 foot high things and disco balls and rainbow lights and it just the greatest, I guess. Honestly Adepticon I think is my favorite convention because the vast majority of the people there are committed at another level because they've made an army or a display board.

You're coming there with something that you've created and some people are already excited to show that off and then everybody else is showing off. And it's sort of vibrating...It's this feedback loop where everybody is like, oh, look at the new toys! You're seeing the other stuff that other people did, and everyone's trying to out do themselves. And it just sort of brings that that energy level up.

It's about the commitment...it's about doing the things like creating, spending the time to create the thing. It doesn't matter if it wins an award or whatever, it's just you stop and go "Wow, someone did this". There's things that people have made that are just so cool and so creative and so ridiculous.

GT: Are you going to get into making weird, really weird things? Like, Trench Crusade weird?

NT: In order to cast in Dwarvenite we have to make these big steel molds which are super expensive in the process. The process is expensive so we tend to want to make pieces that are relatively universal and are usable in multiples. It's giving more building possibilities, so that's like, you know, 90% of our pieces kind of fall into that category, but we always get to give, we always have to give ourselves like you don't want to just make a hundred plain rocks, right?

If we're doing a new biome, 50% of it or 75% of it is relatively generic. It's like this can be used for a beach or for a desert, or for Tatooine, or for this blasted nuclear waste or whatever. Then you gotta have some character. Like, what do we have that we can add some character but also hopefully some open-endedness, right? Like it's just some weird pit of goo like that could be nuclear waste, it could be a toxic pool in the wasteland. It could be a baby Sarlacc!

We'd always like to do a couple of things that are like this wildly specific, like, really weird pieces. That are a chance for chance for the sculptors to do something really fun and kind of show off.

So when we were doing Hellscape we did a Lemure Pool. We melted down a bunch of devils into a two by two floor tile and it's like the creepiest.

GT: What got you into Dwarven Forge?

NT: It was a weird little bit of luck. I grew up playing D&D where I got the red box in 1983 and was playing D&D nonstop and then LARPing for another decade and a half and I got really into building foam craft swords and various weapons and then into armor making so I could build full kits of armor. Crafting is always the thing I was doing. I was super into gaming, and then career wise, I went down the film path. I found myself trying to make make movies, had a hard time making money, making movies.

I can make money doing commercials, so I was doing commercial post production, which was really fun because it was a great way to learn the art of visual storytelling. You get to work with the greatest artists and its fast, right? 30 second commercial you do in three weeks and it's done and out.

And I saw Dwarven Forge launched a Kickstarter and I was like, wait a second. It's Dwarven Forge from Dragon magazine! The resin sets were very expensive like this, and this was like a cheaper material, Dwarvennite, a whole new thing, it was awesome.

We're located in Brooklyn, NY, and I'm like, wait a second, I'm in New York , we're neighbors! So I sent a nice e-mail that said you make unbelievable products, and I think your videos are garbage, I could do better.

I was looking at it through the lens of a professional commercial filmmaker. And I said, you know what, why don't I do it for free? Why don't I just show you what I think the possibilities are. I shot a thing and it was just like get in here! And then I just continued, realizing that I had all these weird skill sets that fit with exactly what Dwarven Forge is doing, I could make mock ups of the stuff sculpting some foam so we can figure out what the geometry is, relatively quickly before you spend 2 weeks sculpting it in real life. I know how to modularize, I played with Legos as a kid. I had all these weird skill sets that fit into all these gaps there and just went all in 11/10 years ago.

GT: Last question: what's your dream project?

NT: I've been sort of mulling over playing Age of Sigmar, I want to do some battlefield specific modules. I wanna have a couple of big chunky boys you can just put on the table and then obviously it's modular and customizable and whatever, but one of the things is a war-torn battlefield, a rich tapestry to sort of dig into there.  Like we tend to do ruins last, and then we run out of time or pieces or whatever, so they always keep getting cut. So the running joke is that we just cut ruins for everything. At some point we're just gonna do all ruins because we keep not doing them!

GT: Nate, thank you for the time and the knowledge! We appreciate you and we can't wait to see what you and Dwarven Forge do next!

Dwarven Forge is currently collecting backers for their latest set and 14th Crowdfunded campaign, Tudor Village, which will be a fully modular City terrain featuring new pieces, new set configurations, and discounted bundles. Be sure to give them a follow or back the project on Gamefound, and stick with Gaming Trend for all things hobby news!