Modiphius Entertainment

Brought to you by BedroomBattlefields.com, this is the Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast.

Can you imagine working at a rave until the early hours of the morning and then spending the rest of the day playing miniatures games? On this episode of the Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast, I'm joined by Modiphius founder Chris Birch, who used to do just that.

Chris has gone from casting his own metal miniatures at home as a kid to running a company with around 70 people, and right now he's busy bringing XCOM to the tabletop.

We get into all of that, plus the realities of building a games company.

It's like quite a good, you know, chill, come down to it.

and I bet you know correct me if I'm wrong but throughout university and that your experiences of all these games was there ever a hint that this could be a career for me or did you always just see it as sort of play time?

So me and Stuart we always used to dream like one day we'll have a games company and we'll you know all the desks will look like Blake 7 and you know have all those little flashing lights on them and we'll have like you know electric doors and we kind of i think we kind of daydreamed of one day we could do all that you know but never never thought much of it of course and you know i was in i was in music businesses never that wasn't going to change and um but we kept writing game ideas we wrote a game called blaster array that was a little bit Savage Worlds, but with miniatures, and it was an RPG, and it was our own world, and it was set in a artificial star system called Modiphius, spelled with an F, which became the name of the company, funnily enough.

So when I came up with the name, I was like, well, also, you want to find a good .com address, and when you make up a name, it's easy.

It's interesting because...

And there's an interesting thing with Modiphius, from my own perspective this is, obviously, that Coho Cthulhu and Dreams of Machines, two quite big things that they're pushing.

I mean, Coho Cthulhu gets pushed quite a lot from the tactical skirmish game side as well.

But I didn't...

So it's an interesting dynamic.

I kind of wonder how well they're doing.

Is it just that they are concentrating on other stuff and it'll come out in due course? Or has the Dreams and Machines experiment not done as well as Chris Birch at Modiphius had hoped.

I think it hadn't sold as well as he'd originally hoped when it first came out.

But Forgotten Ruin is a role-playing game.

There's also a minis game put out by Modiphius.

for this that uses the five parsecs from home rule set or the five leagues in the borderland.

He used that basic rule set for Forgotten Ruin for the miniatures game.

Hey everybody, Jim Johnson.

I am the project manager and line editor for the Star Trek Adventures RPG and the Fallout solo, actually the Fallout RPG in general over at Modiphius Entertainment.

Also project managed Captain's Log with Michael and some other stuff that you'll see coming up in the coming months.

And also co-author on the forthcoming Star Trek Timelines book by DK Books, which Michael and I worked on along with Kelly Fitzpatrick and Derek Tyler Attico.

Yeah, literally, it's like a multi-million enterprise, right? Yeah.

I literally don't think that would cover Paizo, literally, and then maybe Modiphius as well.

I think it's like four people, right? It's like Freely, Modiphius, Paizo, and Wizards, yeah.

Yeah.

And then there are small business federations and groups, but a lot of these places are...

You can find my stuff at scriblenanny.com.

I am, uh, the current project manager of the Star Trek Adventures RPG and the Fallout 2D20 RPG over at Modiphius Entertainment.

Uh, also, uh, as Michael mentioned, co-author on the forthcoming Star Trek Timelines, which I can't wait.

It's been...

Yeah.

I think Modiphius does a really bad job of making rule books.

Their rule ga- their rule sets might be good.

[laughs]