A New Print Magazine For Fans Of Classic RPGs
James Hoare talks about his latest project, Secret Passages
Print journalism is dead. Well, that’s what a million think pieces over the last couple decades have said anyway. But it seems like as far as tabletop gaming magazines are concerned, death is just another obstacle to overcome. Joining the wonderful Wyrd Science and Senet, there’s a new magazine sitting down at the table and rolling the dice.
Secret Passages is a new UK-based 64-page quarterly zine for fans of classic RPGs and “Oldhammer”. The first issue is crowdfunding now with glossy stories on the nostalgia of Advanced Heroquest, the secret service raid on Steve Jackson Games in 1990, the horniness of the first Warhammer novel, and more. Rascal spoke to the magazine’s editor James Hoare over email about why he would do such a thing in 2024.
(This interview has been slightly edited and condensed.)
Thomas Manuel: So what's the origin story of Secret Passages?
James Hoare: I've been a journalist and editor for almost 20 years and my formative experiences as a roleplayer were the mechanics that underpinned much of what I did – the GURPS for life. It taught me empathy, curiosity, and storytelling, and – when I became a film and TV journalist – it turned out that roleplaying was a pretty good substitute for film theory.
My journey into roleplaying followed the traditional British formula, starting with Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and Games Workshop, so when the Oldhammer movement started to bubble up like a corpse in a swamp I found myself pouring over the Corehammer and Realm of Chaos 80s blogs in my lunchbreak. I was working for a consumer magazine publisher and the desire to create the equivalent of RetroGamer or Classic Rock for tabletop games grew. I tried a couple of times to get something moving but I was unable to get any interest.
Over Covid I started playing a super intense long-running game of Vampire: the Masquerade second edition/Revised (I was playing Revised, everyone else was playing second edition) that then turned into Changeling: the Dreaming and now Shadowrun second edition. I had my mum send up my boxes of old games from my childhood bedroom, I ebayed ferociously to fill in the gaps, and my day would increasingly consist of long, rambling voice notes to my friends as I tried to unpick the authorial intent behind obscure bits of ill-fitting lore and clunky mechanics. For my day job, I edited a science fiction website and increasingly found myself writing longform articles on games like Dune: Adventures in the Imperium and Mothership that I could justify to an audience of Stargate SG-1 fans. It reawakened a little of that personal mission from almost a decade ago. I briefly toyed with doing a podcast (as if there weren't already enough of those), but in a moment of cold realization, it struck me: what do I know about podcasting? Nothing. It was vanity over rationality. What I do know is how to commission great articles, work with writers to fashion distinct angles, and gracefully edit already glowing copy into dizzying new heights.
So Secret Passages was born with an ambition to continue that dialogue about old games that began in those voice notes, to situate weird and wonderful 80s and 90s releases in their proper time and place, and wherever possible, to aim for depth rather than breadth.
