Warhammer’s outgoing White Dwarf editor speaks on his six years at the helm
On Tuesday, long-serving White Dwarf editor Lyle Lowery announced via LinkedIn that, due to a corporate restructure at Games Workshop, he had been made redundant. Lowery won’t be replaced, since the firm’s plans for White Dwarf don’t involve a managing editor – but having interviewed him about his six and a half years editing the only official Warhammer magazine, it’s also possible that he’s simply irreplaceable.
Lowery joined Games Workshop early in 2019, with his editorial byline first printed in the June 2019 edition of White Dwarf. When his last volume goes to print (516 in September this year), his tenure as editor will have spanned three editions of Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar and 75 issues of White Dwarf.
Lowery got into miniature wargames while still in grade school in the early nineties. “Second edition Warhammer 40k was where I got my start”, he recalls, “I bought that box set that had the Space Marines and the Orks in it, and the rest is history”. When I ask about his inspirations, he remembers the late great Paul Sawyer as his favorite White Dwarf editor, “Almost by default because he had such a long run, which coincided with when I was discovering White Dwarf and Games Workshop and Warhammer”.
Sawyer was editor for Lowery’s favorite ever issue of the magazine, White Dwarf 300 – the US version specifically, since at the time the UK and US editions were different. “It had an article – I think it was called Movie Marines – with alternate rules for fielding Space Marines that powered them up to the level that they would appear in Black Library fiction, so a 10-man squad plus a Rhino could take on basically an entire 2,000 point army”.
Growing up in a small town, it wasn’t until Lowery got to College that he found a community of like-minded nerds to play with. “I discovered Warmachine and I fell in love with it”, he says, “It became my primary game for a long time”. Through friends he made playing Warmachine, Lowery “lucked into” a job with its publisher, Privateer Press, first as the firm’s marketing manager, and then as the editor in chief of No Quarter magazine – narrowly avoiding a career in law.
When the chance to edit White Dwarf came up in 2019, Lowery says “I absolutely snatched it, there’s no higher you can go when you’re a miniatures game magazine creator than White Dwarf”.
Lowery brought in several recurring features to the magazine. He wanted both Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar to have “point of view characters to tell stories through”. For 40k this was the Tome Keepers, a custom Space Marine chapter. Articles for the Tome Keepers not only gave them custom lore, color scheme, heraldry, and rules, “we showed all of our processes and our thought processes that went into creating a Marine chapter to leave readers a blueprint to create their own”.
Though they were intended as a worked example for fans to create their own chapters, Lowery says “I get contacted all the time by people who say that the Tome Keepers are their favorite Chapter, that they’ve got their own Tome Keepers army that they’re doing really neat things with”. “That’s really personally gratifying”, he adds, “I mean, who doesn’t dream about making a Space Marine chapter, right?”
For Age of Sigmar, Lowery resurrected a legend – Grombrindal, the eponymous White Dwarf. This hoary dwarf has been the mascot of the magazine for decades, and a character in Warhammer Fantasy battle – but with the destruction of the Old World in 2015, that character was extremely dead. The White Dwarf team worked with the AoS studio to bring him back into the Mortal Realms.
“Basically the Duardin god Grungni reforged Grombrindal literally out of legend, forged of his own stories and of the stories of the Duardin, to be a uniting hero”. Two Black Library novellas about Grombrindal were serialised in White Dwarf, and with White Dwarf 500, a new model completed his resurrection.
Flashpoints were another Lowery innovation, “a series of serialized campaign material and supporting background and hobby content and whatnot that played out sort of in real time” alongside the major releases coming out of the Warhammer studio. These took advantage of the periodic format of White Dwarf magazine to “episodically reveal story beats month by month”, something that just isn’t possible in a book.
Lowery recalls the Herald of Misery Flashpoint as a real highlight, a series of articles that stood alongside the Arks of Omen campaign and Boarding Actions rules that came at the end of Warhammer 40k ninth edition. “We followed one particular Arc of Omen called the Herald of Misery and told the story of that vessel and how it wove into the larger story… while giving readers I think 36 more boarding action missions to play, new sub-factions you could play and the hobby content that went along with that, culminating in an amazing battle report at the end”.
This kind of content called for close cooperation with other teams. “White Dwarf was embedded in the rules publication studio”, Lowery says, “so I got to sit in the same room as the 40k studio, the Age of Sigmar studio, and we’re meeting every month, sometimes more, to talk about what would be the next great thing to do in White Dwarf for that game”. There was plenty of buy-in for Herald of Misery, since everyone in the studio “Loved the Boarding Action stuff so much and the Arcs of Omen story so much that they were more than happy to make more of it”.
Being integrated into a larger team did have its downsides, as Lowery didn’t have completely free say over the kind of content that White Dwarf contained. “Sometimes I wanted to present a certain kind of content that maybe the studios disagreed with for one reason or another, whether they think that kind of content would be better off in a book that they publish, or they want play to be presented in a slightly different way: more competitive or more casual or whatever the case may be”.
And despite how monolithic Games Workshop appears from the outside, Lowery states that the White Dwarf team was a very small part of it, with finite resources. “I would love to have done more hobby content, painting guides, kit bashing stuff, model galleries, that kind of stuff. But when it came to painting, a lot of it was our small team of writers and graphic designers and editors doing the painting ourselves because we didn’t have a person whose job it was to paint for us”.
Lowery’s personal highlights from his tenure editing White Dwarf were actually a pair of side projects which very few people ever got to see. “I got to lead not one but two Make a Wish projects”. Wargamer has actually interviewed the young man who was the recipient of one such wish, Samuel Badcock, who worked with Lowery and the White Dwarf team to create a mini codex for his Necron Dynasty. “We had another kid whose wish was to be White Dwarf editor, which is such a nice thing to hear as the White Dwarf editor!”
“Both of those were just incredibly rewarding projects to work on”, Lowery says. “It was a group of people who did some work outside of their normal job duties because they were all eager to help me grant this wish”, he recalls, saying that the team overdelivered compared to what was actually asked of them, turning in custom artwork and even a video teaser just for the wish recipient.
Lowery has spent a long time at the heart of one of the most venerable pillars of tabletop games publishing. And in a world overflowing with great wargaming content online (*cough* did we mention our informative guides to all the Warhammer 40k factions?) “Tabletop in general and Warhammer in specific are both very analogue hobbies that are in some ways deliberately disconnected” from the internet, he says. A physical magazine provides “a way to connect to a community, but do it not through a screen, do it through something that is just as at home in your game room, on a beach or on a porch or on a bus or a train”.
And while online content might provide you quantity, a monthly magazine has to strive for quality. “The internet is largely an uncurated experience”, Lowery says. “White Dwarf does a really great job of distilling all of that and creating a through line that guides your experience in a way that’s much more digestible – in some ways it curates the best of what you can find on the internet”.
As for what comes next, Lowery has already signed up for some freelance projects – though he’s not at liberty to reveal them yet. “I’ve also got a couple of ideas for products I’d love to bring to market – publication type stuff”, he adds. And of course he’s going to be doing a lot of gaming.
“I have a campaign planned for next year with some of my friends from America, they’re all coming to England for ‘Lyle Con’ where we’re going to spend a week playing Legions Imperialis and Adeptus Titanicus”. “I’m building and painting Shatterpoint and Crisis Protocol stuff right now” he adds – the man has taste – “And I’ve recently acquired a frame of epic scale Napoleonics figures – that shows my age!”
If you’ve got a fond memory of a particular episode of White Dwarf from Lowery’s tenure, come and share it with us in the official Wargamer Discord community!
