<![CDATA[Fen Orc

<![CDATA[Fen Orc - Home]]>Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:10:02 +0000Weebly<![CDATA[Lovely Hedgerow Review]]>Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:36:02 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/lovely-hedgerow-reviewI don't check out my own reviews all that often (honest), but I did have a look yesterday and found this glowing praise for The Hedgerow Hack and its big brother Through The Hedgerow.

J. is referring to two of my old blogs, Through The Hedgerow We Go introduced the game and A World Without (Too Much) Violence discussed the design philosophy.

Anyway, J. continues:

This is high praise indeed, J.. What's more, it prompts me to get a move on with the next stage of the Hedgerow project: the novel.

Watch this space ...

]]><![CDATA[Bushido meets Call of Cthulhu]]>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:35:52 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/bushido-meets-call-of-cthulhuWell, that's my pitch. And it's a good one.

Cover art is 'Female Human Samurai' by Sly Tiger Art Studio artist S. Farebrother
You can find the rules on drivethrurpg or Amazon

A few months ago I brought out the classic RPG Bushido and started running trial games. Bushido is one of those RPGs I owned in my callow youth, but never got to play. It gathered dust on the shelf, taunting me from afar. 2025 was the year to settle my account with FGU's famously impenetrable game.

It's a classic, but my Maths brain is now mush

I wrote about my experience with Bushido on a previous blog. Long story short, there's been a reversal. Back when I was 15, me and my nerd friends weren't at all daunted by Mathematics; it was the cultural strangeness of Bushido that frightened us off. I couldn't think of any stories to GM in such a setting; the one published scenario (Valley of the Mists) was impenetrable. My players baulked at roleplaying inexplicable characters like Yakuza gangsters and Gakusho priests. This would have been 1982. My mum had watched the TV series of Shōgun with Richard Chamberlain - and that was as far as anyone's awareness of feudal Japan went, at least in my postcode.

Now, we're forty years later. There's been a new TV series of Shōgun with Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai. I'm pretty au fait with all things Oriental, as are my gaming buddies. No one would bat an eye at roleplaying a Yakuza or a Ninja or a Ronin warrior. It's the Mathematics that frightens us.

Bushido is a bit of a bookkeeping burden. Combat is fine: it's just D&D with extra steps. The magic system is OK (although uninspiring). The system for studying skills or building gimmicks is delightful. But the numbers overwhelm. Creating a character involves numbers trickling down from core stats to derivative skills and abilities in a way that makes me marvel how people did this in the days before Excel spreadsheets. Once your character starts gaining experience and honour, studying, and training, it all gets a bit out of hand. But in a very slow, ponderous way, since Bushido doesn't want you to get anywhere too quickly.

All of which is to say, I ended up writing my own Bushido rules using the D&D-derived 'Hack' system I love so much. Here it is: the Yōkai Hack.

I started the project under the working title 'The Bushido Hack and my intention was pretty simple: adapt the D&D-inflected Black Hack rules to cover Feudal Japanese combat conventions and Japanese-themed magic, then develop some granular rules for training and research to capture that distinctive aspect of Bushido. I thought it would be a throwaway sort of product between more serious ventures.

But it turned into another consuming obsession.

It also took on its own tone and direction. Perhaps it was the cover illustration I sourced from Sly Tiger Art Studio - did you look carefully? The lady Samurai looks terrified, surrounded by shadows, strange mist roiling around her, her hand on her katana seems to tremble. It looks like the cover of a horror story.

This is what brought the Yōkai to the fore and gave the game its new name.

What's a Yōkai ? And why do we care ?

'Yōkai' are magical critters in Japanese folklore - the word covers phenomenon as varied as poltergeists and cursed objects through to faeries, ghosts, and demons.

Yōkai is a word that doesn't feature in Bushido, which prefers the dull term 'Supernatural Beings' instead (Bushido is written in a wargaming rules style that is positively allergic to romance).

Bushido seems to be distinctly ambivalent about the supernatural. Yes, there's magic, cast by Gakusho priests and Shugenja sorcerers, but it's all small scale stuff, nothing that transforms the feudal setting or disrupts the historical plausibility. The Supernatural Beings are low key entities. Bushido seems to want you to play a game revolving around politics, feuds, military action, and crises of duty, with a few monsters and spells thrown in to make the transition from D&D a bit less jarring.

Tengu Samurai by Jacob E. Blackmon - the sort of antagonists that Bushido seemed to downplay

I didn't want that. I wanted PCs to be courtiers and entertainers and fortune-tellers and exorcists, people with lots of social skills but very little to offer in a combat situation, who could still negotiate an adventure.

That's why the Yōkai loom larger in my game. I wanted a more apocalyptic setting, where the political turmoil of the pre-Edo world is mirrored by an invasion of supernatural monsters - the Yōkai - who can impersonate people and spread corrupting Pollution by their very presence.

Immediately, the game takes on a detective theme. In many scenarios, the insidious spread of Pollution is the problem. There are gateways to the Yomi World that must be sealed. There are cursed items that must be cleansed. There are supernatural intruders who must be exposed and driven out, dispelled, destroyed, or exorcised. You can't do all of that with swords and ninja flash-bombs.

Of course, you can, in you prefer, play the Yōkai Hack with a Bushido-sensibility: downplay the supernatural, focus on court intrigue, duels, and skirmishes. The game allows you to do that. But I've written it to be more like Call of Cthulhu in feudal Japan, with the Pollution replacing Sanity.

What's In The Book

At 240 pages, The Yōkai Hack is by FAR the biggest of my Hack-RPG books.

Why so big? The Skills and Spells take up space, but it's not just that. There's a much more expansive treatment of combat, taking the light and frothy Hack-rules about as far as they can go in the direction of granular, tactical decision making without abandoning the Old School sensibility entirely. Then there's the consideration of the setting, culture, religion, technology, all of which needs exploring. Finally, I wanted lots of tables to generate encounters, NPCs, and whole stories randomly.

Character Classes

Much will be familiar to anyone who knows Bushido or Oriental Adventures (the 1e AD&D expansion). Of course you can be a Bushi warrior, a Yakuza rogue, a Shinobe assassin, or a Sohei warrior monk. The Taoshi martial artists have a made-up name but inhabit a recognisable archetype. Majutsushi are elementalist sorcerers.

Other character classes required me to be more creative. Geinōsha are entertainers, which includes classic geisha but also poets, actors, clowns, and artists. Onmyōji are magic-users focused on prophecy and omens. Reishō are diplomats and negotiators, anything from a slick courtier to a gangster extorter, they excel at making deals.

Seishinban are entirely made-up for this setting: spirit-wardens and exorcists whose focus is squarely on exposing the Yōkai and cleansing Polluted people and places.

Vengeful Geisha by Bradley K McDevitt

These character classes have ways of dealing with many problems that don't involve swordplay. Geinōsha can extract favours from someone who sees them perform (whether that performance be a song or poem, the creation of beautiful calligraphy, or an exquisite tea ceremony). Reishō can lie irresistibly. Even Yakuza can design their body tattoos to give themselves a bespoke set of abilities.

Tests & Usage Dice

Like standard Hack-RPGs, most tests are done by trying to rollunder your Stat (STR, DEX, CON, WIS, INT, CHA, the old gang) on a d20. Level differentials give you a bonus or a penalty, making it difficult to succeed against high-Level NPCs or high-HD monsters.

The real innovation of the Black Hack was the Usage Die. This is a die representing a resource of some sort (arrows, energy, magical power). When you roll it, it shrinks to a smaller die if the highest two numbers come up. The original Black Hack had the die shrinking if you rolled 1-2, but there are various good reasons to make the shrink happen when the highest two numbers come up.

My various Hack-RPGs really lean into this mechanic, since Paul Baldowski’s The Cthulhu Hack opened my eyes to just how far you could take it. In Yōkai Hack, Honour is a Usage Die. When you put your Honour on the line (to demand respect or a favour), you roll it to see if it shrinks; likewise, dishonourable behaviour forces you to roll it too. Instead of keeping track of money, you roll your Wealth Usage Die, which might shrink after the purchase. Ki, that mysterious Inner Power, can be tracked as a Usage Die too.

Pollution is a bit different, because it's a Usage Die gets BIGGER instead of shrinking. Each increase in size triggers an episode of derangement, bring your corrupted personality to the fore. When it balloons past D20 size, your Utter Calamity befalls, a tragic doom overtakes your character, from which there is no coming back. I encourage players to choose (or roll) their Utter Calamity right at the start of play, so they can bring a bit of foreshadowing into their roleplaying.

Training & Study

One of the signature tropes of Bushido and the wider 'feudal Japan' setting is the focus on skills and training. It can't just be about going up Levels and getting more powers. Players in this sort of game want and deserve more agency than that. But squaring the circle of skill-progression and level-progression is something that has bedevilled D&D for a long time.

Here's what I came up with.

You pick a skill or magical spell or Stat increase that you are working on. The GM gives you a Usage Die for your training. You roll this Study Die between adventures and at certain points during a scenario, such as during a 'training montage' or a moment of insight. Once the Study Die has shrunk away to nothing, congratulations: you have learned your skill or spell.

Then you choose your next skill/spell/Stat and get a Study Die for that, but the catch is, it's always starts off a size bigger than the last one. This means each skill or spell becomes more laborious to acquire.

Going up a Level is great, because it resets your Study Die to a smaller size.

This simple system is festooned with variations. Some characters get more 'study periods' between adventures and others get more 'study points' during adventures. Some skills are difficult, automatically increasing the size of your Study Die when you set out to acquire them. Having great teachers or teaching scrolls lets you roll extra times.

Every time your Study Die shrinks, Duty comes calling. Each character has a Duty towards some person or group and they have tasks for you that are certainly inconvenient, sometimes dangerous, occasionally lucrative. Each character builds their own 'Duty Table' from elements taken from their Character Class and Social Superior. Neat!

Create Your Own Poetry!

I include the normal milestone-based Levelling system for a Hack-RPG, but also an optional system based on discovering the meaning of your own personal poem!

In the appendix, there's a bunch of tables of words culled from Japanese haiku. You can roll your own 3 word line as a 1st level character.

The pale butterfly lingers

Or how about:

Grief softly dances

You level up once you can explain the meaning of your poem to the GM and how it relates to something meaningful to your character that happened in the scenario. Then, at 2nd level, you get a 4-word poem, such as:

The chrysanthemum dreams of the ancient garden

Longer lines might take more scenarios to interpret, but eventually you will have a multi-line poem describing your PC's adventures in a beautifully cryptic way.

Cultural Considerations

I know you cannot win with this, but I'll do my best.

Look, I'm not Japanese. I'm not a scholar of Japanese. I've not even been to Japan. I'm conscious of the critiques of 'West-splaining' and 'Orientalising' Japanese culture and history. But hear me out!

I'm not trying to write a game about Japanese history or society, just one set in a fantasy world that draws on archetypal themes in Japanese media and mythology. To that end, I don't identify the setting as Japan: it's just 'the Archipelago.' There are no real-world states, cities, or rulers mentioned.

Buddhism isn't mentioned, but there are monasteries devoted to the Lotus Path and its Sages. I steer clear of Shintō, but include the Torii Path of shrines and spirits. I agonised for a while over Kami, those gods and demi-gods of nature. They are real objects of veneration in real religious practice. But I figure the term has also crossed over into general usage in the fantasy genre, like 'angel' or 'faerie' or 'djinn.' I came up with new names for the Kami of the Archipelago to avoid appropriating Amaterasu or other real-world divinities.

GMs and players who bring the game to the table can make their own peace with these issues. I suspect most people are going to call Buddhism 'Buddhism' and the Heavenly Mountain 'Fuji' and call the Archipelago 'Japan' or (as Bushido does) 'Nippon.'

One area that occasioned me reflection was the 'outcaste' group that spawns the ninja subculture. Bushido terms this caste 'Eta' - a term I learn means 'filth' but perhaps derives from animal feeding - whereas the modern term is 'Burakumin.' Their status is still a political concern in Japan. There is a Buraku Liberation League. This isn't material to be carelessly handled.

Nevertheless, players of Japanese-themed fantasy RPGs want their ninjas - and rightly so - and ninjas need to come from some sort of outcaste community. My solution is just to name the outcaste subculture 'Tsumi,' a name hinting at sin or misfortune and describing a caste that does work that is ritually Polluting (butchery, tanning, handling corpses).

Ninja Throwing Star from JE Stock Art

Where Does Yōkai Hack Go Next?

There's already an introductory scenario available: The Bride With Two Faces. It's free to download from drivethrurpg and sold at-cost on Amazon.

The Bride With Two Faces takes its plot from Beneath An Opal Moon.

I needed a quick scenario to playtest The Yōkai Hack and was reminded on Beneath An Opal Moon, which is a great little scenario in just a dozen pages, created by Mongoose Publishing for their Samurai of Legend RPG.

SAMURAI OF LEGEND

Samurai of Legend is an Open Content RPG that explores an early period in Feudal Japan with admirable focus: the rise of the Samurai class that the weaponised Buddhism that came to define them. It uses a version of the Runequest/Basic Roleplaying system, which suits Samurai pretty well. Beneath An Open Moon is likewise Open Content, and invites readers "to reproduce this text and build upon it with your own scenarios and mechanics," adding: "You can even print and sell such work, if that is your desire (and we would wish you the very best of luck if you choose to do this!)."

I rewrote most of the text and added more political layers to the plot, as well as encounter tables, stat blocks, and suggested magic items for dealing with the demonic Yōkai that are the root of the problem.

I think that, even if you prefer Samurai of Legend to The Yōkai Hack, you will still appreciate the expansion of this scenario.

I'm putting together a setting book, for a coastal city, its Daimyo and clan politics, and the local Yōkai nemesis, and a few plot threads that tie them all together.

If you enjoy The Yōkai Hack then I'll enjoy your feedback.

]]><![CDATA[Bird Bandits in Amber: White Dwarf #6 (1978) reviewed]]>Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:38:44 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/bird-bandits-in-amber-white-dwarf-6-1978-reviewedThere was a heat wave in the Spring of 1978, but the summer ahead would turn cold and very wet. Boney M had the pop charts in a vice-like grip with Rivers Of Babylon - that is, until the soundtrack from Grease dislodged it. On TV, we thrilled to the appearance of The Incredible Hulk, with its distinctive sad piano theme. The best and worst of times, then. Let's see how White Dwarf reflects the time in which it celebrated its first birthday.

White Dwarf #6 is the end of the 'archaic' phase of White Dwarf. After this issue, the covers will be full colour the price tag 60p, and it will no longer look or read like a glossy fanzine. This is a good point to take stock of the first year of White Dwarf, a magazine in some ways still advocating assumptions and gaming styles that seem very out of date to me now, but in other ways looking ahead to its 'golden age' of innovation and popularity.

The 'Bird Bandits' issue: Chris Beaumont returns to illustrate the front cover

The Cover: It's a bird-eat-bird world

Chris Beaumont did the bloodthirsty art for White Dwarf #1, and he brings a similar edge of macabre violence here. Bird-people in balloons that look like birds swoop down on a caravan in a narrow ravine, where helmeted guards perish defending the treasure being carried by big flightless birds.

It's a welcome break from conventional fantasy tropes and there are familiar Beaumont tropes here: an unusual perspective, a sense of depth and lots of figures in motion, a scene caught in the middle of action that began some time before and will continue some time after the moment captured on the page. I'm not quite sure of the Boss Bird Bandit in the foreground (who is he supposed to be looking at? is he even a bird?) but it's a scene I'd love to include in a wilderness D&D adventure: a great scene to start a scenario with, beginning in medias res.

The caravan you've been hired to protect winds its way between the crags. The tamed Axebeaks plod on under the burden of their wares. Suddenly, the guard in front of you falls dead, a plumed arrow in his neck. Other arrows thud into the ground. You look up. You're being attacked by bird, by birds in winged balloons!

These two-colour covers represent a period of White Dwarf long before I started subscribing, indeed from before I even discovered D&D. That's why I think of them as relic from the magazine's archaic period, when everything was strange and glamorous and didn't make complete sense. Chris Beaumont won't return to future covers either, alas.

Editorial: Happy Birthday White Dwarf

Editor Ian Livingstone celebrates a year of White Dwarf - the magazine being bi-monthly; it didn't go monthly until August 1982.

Livingstone announces the dreaded price increase. It was probably inevitable: the UK inflation rate in 1977 had been over 15%, in 1978 it had dropped to 8.3% and that was a six year low!!!! It puts our current troubles into perspective.

White Dwarf had a reputation for being extremely, err, parsimonious in the way it reimbursed contributors: in many cases, just a free copy of the magazine. You get the impression that, while White Dwarf was growing in subscription and Games Workshop was moving to bigger, grander premises, profits (such as they were) were being ploughed back into the project. The magazine still represented itself as a fan product, soliciting contributions from a fan community largely out of good will, or the 'bragging rights' from seeing your work in print.

Games Workshop opening day at 1 Dalling Road, Hammersmith, London, in April 1978

The opening of the Hammersmith shop was a big event. Over 100 people queued outside. It symbolised Games Workshop shifting from being a mail order business to a proper retailer. Of course, the company opened many high street stores over the following decades, but this original one was demolished in 2015, so don't go looking for it.

Steve Jackson (left) with Ian Livingstone, and the shop's interior

It's quite delightful to see Ian Livingstone boasting about White Dwarf's new production values: right justified text, very slick! Another step in the magazine's evolution towards a professional publication that will end up on the stands at W.H. Smith.

Combat and Armour Class

Oh no, another essay setting out to 'fix' D&D, with a predictable focus on its silly but eminently accessible combat system.

But wait, do not turn that page just yet, because there's more going on here than you think!

Firstly, the author is Roger Musson, who will go onto to be a prolific contributor to White Dwarf (and later Imagine). Musson was at this time a student at Edinburgh University and a member of its Grand Edinburgh Adventuring Society. He had struck up a correspondence with Don Turnbull and the two became friendly. Musson's big claim to fame comes later, in his pioneering article for White Dwarf #15 , How To Lose Hit Points And Survive (1979).

Musson is a creative and a stylish writer. His prose has flourishes and allusions that go beyond the solid journalism of Don Turnbull and Lew Pulsipher, but without the undergraduate Python-isms you find in Ian Livingstone's reports.

Here, Musson offers a far-reaching 'fix' to D&D combat that is truly elegant - contrast it with the byzantine house rules expounded by Andy Holt in the Loremaster of Avallon in issues #1-4. One of the things that makes it so elegant is that Musson has a clear idea of the style of D&D combat he wants his house rules to emulate.

What he wants to emulate is swashbuckling combat. He points out that the famous fantasy heroes (Tarzan, Aragorn, Conan) rarely wear armour. He asks, "When did you last see Sinbad clanking around like the tin man in Wizard of Oz?" Clearly, anyone fighting without armour in D&D will be "very swiftly torn to shreds" but Sinbad gets away with it because "he lunges, parries, jumps out of the ways, swings from chandeliers, etc."

I suspect Roger Musson is thinking of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), but Sinbad & The Eye Of The Tiger (1977) has a similar commitment to sword-fighting in silk blouses.

Musson proposes a radical overhaul of D&D combat, such that no PC has more than 10hp, regardless of level. Musson is talking about Original D&D here; indeed, judging from his later writings, he never seems to adopt AD&D. If you were to adapt his ideas to 1st ed. AD&D, you might increase this cap to 15hp. The point is, a character who is actually hit by a sword or a spear will suffer a nasty wound and most people can't take more than 2 or 3 such wounds. A 10hp wallop from an ogre will paste anyone it connects with.

In place of huge amounts of Hit Points, swashbuckling PCs enjoy generous Armour Class. Musson distinguishes between Combat Armour Class (CAC) used in melee and Prone Armour Class (PAC) used when surprised or subjected to un-parry-able attacks like missiles. Musson offers every adventuring character a CAC of [20 minus Dexterity] or their armour-derived score, whichever is better. You deduct your level from CAC too.

For example, a fighter with 15 Dexterity is AC 5 even if wearing no armour at all; armour only makes a difference if he picks up some plate mail (AC 3). If the fighter is 2nd level, base CAC is 3, so even plate mail becomes optional. Remember, this is Original D&D with its descending AC scale and no ordinary adjustments to AC based on Dexterity.

This allows high-Dexterity warriors to foreswear armour, but still wade through mobs of opponents. Because Musson is using the OD&D rules with no 'automatic hits' on a 20, weak monsters will find themselves unable to hit high level PCs without resorting to traps, ambushes, or missiles (which target PAC) and Musson is fine with this.

In OD&D, goblins, orcs, et al. need 17+ to hit AC 2, so a 6th level character with 15 Dexterity becomes untouchable to these critters. Magic bonuses to AC make a PC untouchable much earlier!

Musson recognises that his system needs to reconsider what 'zero hit points' means, since PCs have so few hit points. He suggests two 'saving throws' where you try to roll equal to or less than Constitution then Strength on 3d6. Fail the Constitution roll and you die; if you pass, but fail the Strength roll then you are unconscious; pass both and you can drag yourself away from danger.

You may or may not like what Roger Musson proposes - Gary Gygax hated it and will write in next issue to set Musson straight about how D&D combat should be, triggering a big letters page debate (and clearly wounding Roger's feelings).

Regardless of the side you take, what strikes me is Roger Musson's radical conception of what a roleplaying game ought to be like. The previous issues have given Lew Pulsipher a platform to expound his 'skill campaign' idea of D&D as a game in which players try to maximise advantage in a consistent setting with (in theory) predictable consequences. He contrasts this with "living out diced fantasies" in games where the DM makes things up as they go along or (in the case of Chivalry & Sorcery) the rigorous settings dictate how you have to react.

Musson has a different conception, which seems to be the 'cinematic campaign' where characters enact dramatic narratives, somewhat insulated from the risk of dying in a way that would 'spoil the story.' It's not full-blown storytelling: it's still a dungeon adventure with wandering monsters and other hazards. Nonetheless, characters have a sort of 'plot armour' that frees them to behave in romantic or heroic ways, rather than always seeking an 'edge' in a hostile environment.

Musson's innovations point towards a more immersive sort of roleplaying experience, whereas Lew Pulsipher is firmly of the opinion that "people who participate in role-playing games ... are unlikely to want to play a character as anything but their 20th century selves" (White Dwarf #5).

There's going to be push-back against Musson's radicalism, but a surge of support from the readership, suggesting the younger generation of RPGers coming up through school and university were developing a different sensibility from the previous generation who discovered the game in 1974 or '75, often through wargaming or postal Diplomacy networks.

The Fiend Factory

The debut of one of White Dwarf's most popular features. It will run until 1986 and many of its contributions will appear in TSR(UK)'s Fiend Folio (1981).

This first instalment is introduced by Don Turnbull, who spends some time elucidating what he is looking for in new monsters. He wants monsters to be "killable" but acknowledges that there is a role for "effectively immortal" monsters who have "a specific purpose other than slaughtering player characters." They must be "deployable" and Turnbull believes there is a particular need for monsters that can be found on the upper (easier) dungeon levels - doubtless this is prompted by his analysis of Chaosium's All The World's Monsters last issue. Finally, he wants monsters that are imaginative, surprising, or humorous.

He will get one such contribution on the next page, which will provoke controversy year later.

Turnbull also offers a brief commentary after each monster, explaining why he likes it or how it might be deployed.

Seven new monsters are presented, all in the new Holmes Basic D&D format, with a standardised stat block followed by a paragraph of description; Don Turnbull continues to add his Monstermark to rate each monster's lethality. With one exception, they are drawn by Polly Wilson, with her characteristic PW monogram and names presented in an ornamental typeface.

Trevor Graver's Needleman is a fake-out zombie: it can't be turned by clerics since it's not technically undead. 3+4 HD makes it rather spicy; the d4 damage isn't huge, but it's the d6 attacks every round that cause the problem. Fortunately, it takes double damage from magic. It would reappear in the Fiend Folio.

Polly Wilson's Needleman with bespoke lettering (left) actually looks creepier than the Fiend Folio Needleman (right, I think the artist is Russ Nicholson)

Ian Livingston offers four creatures. One of them, the Throat Leech, would also enter the Fiend Folio; another, the Fiend, is illustrated by Alan Hunter and is the same image that appeared on the back cover of issue #4.

He also becomes the 'icon' of the Fiend Factory

Two interesting creatures come from Roger Musson and both made it into the Fiend Folio, The Disenchanter is a magical camel whose prehensile snout sucks the enchantment out of magic items. It's like the infamous rust monster, but it drains your magic swords and armour rather than your mundane gear. Its existence attests a style of play where DMs could be outrageously generous with magical treasures, then plot means of taking them away later. Don Turnbull admits to deploying the Disenchanter in his Greenlands dungeon against "an annoyed and aggrieved party"

The Nilbog is a humorous monster, created by Musson's friend Nick Best. It looks just like a goblin; indeed, its name is 'goblin' backwards. The Nilbog starts with 1hp but it GAINS hit points when struck. The only way to kill it is to cast curing spells on it or force-feed it healing potions, since is loses hit points in situations where other people would gain them. Nilbogism is suggested to be a disease that might affect other monsters too - or be linked to a sort of time warp that reverses everyone's behaviour, Bizarro-style.

Musson seems somewhat embarrassed by the Nilbog, and distanced himself from its inclusion in the Fiend Folio, saying: "It was the work of Nick Best, not me, and ... I was not really happy about the Nilbog ever seeing the light of day, since (a) it was Nick’s creation, and (b) obviously a joke. But I mentioned it in passing to Don [Turnbull] and he was keen on it" (cited in Analog Game Studies, 10/10/21).

Nilbogism took on a life of its own, making its way into Forgotten Realms and thence to 5th edition D&D. Not everyone was thrilled. For critics, it typified the juvenile content in the Fiend Folio and represented a throwback to an earlier, less sophisticated style of D&D: the 'funhouse dungeon.' It's interesting that it only appeared in White Dwarf in the first instance, because it tickled Don Turnbull's sense of humour; as such, it reflects the longstanding influence of Turnbull's DMing style and his Greenlands dungeon on the development of the RPG hobby.

At last: an errata assigns authorship to the monsters included in the last two issues. News From Bree started off as a 'scandal sheet' for the Tolkien Society, edited by Hartley Patterson (of Midgard fame), but turned into a UK RPG fanzine in 1975 and ran until 1988.

Archive Miniatures

John Norris returns with another overview of a miniature figures line, this one the US company Archive.

These US imports are an odd size (nearer 30mm than the standard 25mm), so they "tend to tower over the equivalent offerings from other manufacturers." Norris also notes the off-putting price (but doesn't say what it is) and the soft metal which tends to produce a less crisp finish.

He likes the style, though, singling out the dungeon packhorse, which ties in with the letters in earlier issues about the lack of dungeon-delving figures out there. Though delighted to see some of the more obscure D&D monsters, he's not impressed with the Roper. He deplores the "bugbear depicted with the silly Hallowe'en pumpkin head shown in Greyhawk" but finds a lot of praise for the Lord of the Rings figures, especially the "distinctly Renaissance look" for the Gondorians and the characterful figure of Radagast.

Radagast 'the brown druid' (left), cavalier-style Boromir/Gondorian Prince (centre), Roper (right)

Norris doesn't seem to know the background to this company, but it's worth exploring. Archive was California sculptor Neville Stocken and his wife Barbara, who were approached by Greg Stafford's Chaosium (based in nearby Oakland) to make the official product line for his Glorantha setting, starting with the monsters and heroes of the White Bear & Red Moon game. To let Stocken sell licensed miniatures immediately, some of his sculpts were adopted into the Glorantha setting - thus, the pumpkinhead bugbear became Runequest's infamous Jack O'Bear.

The pumpkin-headed Bugbear on the back of Greyhawk (1975), the Archive Pumkinhead/Jack O'Bear, the Jack O'Bear on the cover of Griffin Mountain (1981)

On the back of this success, Archive created licensed miniatures for D&D and Lord of the Rings and even Star Wars. Maybe success went to their head, because they tried to create their own RPG and support it with their own miniatures. Yes, back in White Dwarf #4, there was a full page advert for Archive, inviting readers to "blast off into space" with a line of SF miniatures called Star Rovers.

Another adopted Gloranthan, the octupus-headed Walktapus, appears as an alien.

Star Rovers was going to be written by David A. Hargrave, a quixotic figure in the West Coast gaming scene who created the RPG setting of Arduin and published the utterly unlicensed D&D-derivative game books that drove Gary Gygax wild. Hargrave dropped out, but his gonzo style was evident in the Star Rovers RPG when it was released, to very little acclaim, in 1981. Archive Miniatures did not survive the game by long, but like most of these lines, their sculpts were picked up and continued by other companies later.

A Place In The Wilderness

Lew Pulsipher has been reading The Dragon Masters, a 1963 novella by Jack Vance (another author with a big influence on D&D). The story is set on the arid and rocky planet Aerlith, where humans have bred alien lizards (the 'dragons') as beasts of burden, mounts, and warriors. A spaceship arrives: the pilots are intelligent lizards, the ancestors of the 'dragons,' and they have bred humans to be brutish soldiers, scouts, and even mounts.

Inspired by the setting, Lew converts it to D&D. He presents the 'dragons' in the Greyhawk format: a table (showing each type, Hit Dice, AC, attacks, move) and a separate text description. He also gives stats for the mutated humans that serve the aliens, and rules for the alien heat beam weapon. Oddly, he neglects stats for the giant-sized 'Jugger' that strides above the 5HD 'Fiends,' despite the monster dominating the fantastic illustration by Polly Wilson.

Polly Wilson's monster art defines this era of White Dwarf for me, as later would the illustrations of Russ Nicholson.

The article is referred to as a "scenario" but it's not what would later be termed a scenario. It's really just a set of ideas for an encounter, or perhaps a prompt for a mini-campaign. I wonder if anyone used it as such? There's not really enough detail here, if you haven't read Vance's book (but you should: it's only 130 pages and it cracks along). I suspect quite a few readers placed these 'dragons' in big funhouse dungeons as variety-encounters. For others, it might have inspired ideas for campaign settings that diverged from European medieval norms. including the possibility of D&D in a pre-industrial setting, prefiguring the whole debate about firearms in D&D.

Open Box

Open Box seems to be getting a bit confused. One game gets the number rating and good/bad points summarised, but the rest simply don't. In issue #8 the whole system will break down, then simple one-score ratings will resume in issue #9 and forever thereafter.

The Little Soldier had some products reviewed last issue (their compendiums of monsters and demons) and this issue Lew Pulsipher gives their Knights Of The Round Table a leisurely unpacking. Here's a game which seems to be typical of the era, unsure whether it's a set of miniature rules for squad battles, or a clash-of-nations board game like Diplomacy, or a roleplaying game, or a blend of all of the above (like Midgard, described in White Dwarf #2). It speaks to the fluid state of the hobby that a product like this could hover between genres and a reviewer as astute as Pulsipher would not remark on the oddity of it.

Elric comes down firmly in the board game camp. It's from Chaosium, exploiting their new licence to create games based on the apocalyptic fantasy stories of Michael Moorcock. Gary Porter reviews it positively (7/10), but deplores the luck factor. The game is played through a series of scenarios which build up interlocking rules - a bit like Starship Troopers, reviewed in issue #1. What I find odd is that later reviewers found lots to criticise in this game: in 1979, John Freeman complained that "the rules to Elric are a mess — full of grammatical and typographical atrocities, misspellings, nonwords, and confusing nonsentences." But Gary Porter doesn't seem to have noticed or cared.

Chaosium would republish the game in 1982 as Elric: Battle At The End Of Time, then Avalon Hill would pick it up two years after that. More interesting for me is the Stormbringer RPG that Steve Perrin and Ken St Andre would create for Chaosium in 1981, but all in good time.

Don Turnbull reviews more D&D supplements from Judges Guild, as he did in White Dwarf #3. This time his attention is on JG's celebrated fantasy setting, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy by Bob Bledsaw and Bill Owen. Now Wilderlands is probably worth a blog in its own right, because it exemplifies a style of D&D that was normative for lots of gaming groups in the mid-'70s but looks pretty strange in hindsight.

If you are a fantasy RPG fan, and someone asks you about a fantasy RPG setting, you will have in mind a big map of a continent, for sure, and a detailed history of the kingdoms and races in that continent, perhaps a calendar, some articles about climate, maybe a guide to the rulers and powerful figures, a list of the languages spoken in different areas, perhaps some illustrative fiction.

That's not what Wilderlands gives you. You get the maps of course: five giant maps for the DM and a smaller set for the players to fill in. Yes, 'fill in' because this is what we now call a hex-crawl. Essentially, Wilderlands is a massive outdoors dungeon. You start at one end of the continent and head out, like you're on the Oregon Trail or exploring with Mason and Dixon, mapping their way across Philadelphia. You move from one hex to the next, with each hex being five miles across. The set gives the DM all sorts of tables for populating the hexes and rules for foraging and finding lairs and searching caves or ruins- and there are settlements (briefly described in terms of their ruler and the alignment of the inhabitants), so there are tables for recruiting hirelings and purchasing services.

If you like this sort of thing (and it has been adopted by the 'OSR' movement in recent years as a back-to-basic approach to D&D), then a narrative will emerge out of random encounters and interactions along the way. As the campaign takes shape, an imaginative DM will 'fill in the blanks' - no two DMs running a Wilderlands campaign will end up with the same setting. This stands in complete contrast to World of Greyhawk (1980) or Forgotten Realms (1987).

The Wilderlands provides the wider context for the City State, reviewed in White Dwarf #3

Don Turnbull reviews a couple of other products. Dungeon Decor and Endless Dungeon are foldable cardboard sheets that can be cut out to make dungeon corridors with walls, to place your miniatures in. Turnbull prefers Decor, but finds them both flawed, but they clearly inspired someone at Games Workshop.

In 1979, GW brought out the Dungeon Floorplans, which were absolutely essential to my high school D&D campaign!

Traveller

Don Turnbull reviews the new SF RPG from Games Designers Workshop, written by Marc Miller. The game had actually been around for almost a year - it premiered at Origins Game Fair in 1977 - but it seems to have penetrated the UK market slowly. It doesn't appear on Games Workshop's mail order list until White Dwarf #4 (December/January 1978).

Don Turnbull is, in many ways, the ideal reviewer for Traveller: he's a mathematician and an experienced D&D referee, plus he knows his science fiction reasonably well. He also knows a bit about the market and spends a chunk of this review explaining saturation points: board games have (he believes) saturated the market, but RPGs have not, so there is still a reasonable expectation that people are buying new RPGs to play them, rather than put them on their shelves and look at them. The question is, will anyone actually play Traveller? Don Turnbull suspects not. He is utterly wrong.

Let's just introduce you to Traveller as it looked in 1977 - or 1978, by the time it reached British hobby stores. Traveller looks like a classic RPG: it comes in a small box, with three rules booklets, just like D&D did in 1974. However, Traveller has much better quality control than D&D: everything from the glossy covers, the layout and design, the clear rules exposition, it's all to a slick professional standard, right down to the iconic blurb on the cover: "This is Free Trader Beowulf ... calling anyone ... Mayday, Mayday ... we are under attack ..."

Traveller's cool, minimalist aesthetic made it look like it really had come from the future.

The irony is that D&D was leaving behind the small box format, in favour of AD&D's big hardback books. Just when the competition surpasses it, D&D manages to shapeshift.

Traveller is famous for allowing you to die during character creation. You take your new PC through a series of tables in their careers path, but there's always a risk each year they will die on duty, with some careers (like the Scouts) being particularly perilous. Unlike D&D, which invites you to start as an untried neophyte, Traveller invites you to play someone who has already had an interesting career, amassed wealth, and built up a range of skills.

Don Turnbull writes appreciatively of the starship rules. Like a good Maths teacher, Mr Turnbull is of the opinion that "the calculations are pretty basic and should worry only the innumerate (who shouldn't be playing the game anyway)."

He recognises that "those who don't want to play Traveller but who do enjoy starship combat actions in miniature" will cannibalise these rules and "put them to good use." In fact, people will put the Traveller ules to many uses that Don Turnbull does not foresee

Don is less appreciative of the random planet rules. Perhaps he was unfortunate in the first planet he rolled up, which looks a bit incoherent. However, Traveller players will find this procedure very addictive - rolling up planets and mapping out subsectors in hex grids with the game's distinctive symbology is something Traveller fans will do for fun, quite apart from actually using them in a RPG campaign.

Similarly, he is disappointed with the skeletal rules for rolling up alien creatures and populating planetary encounter tables - complaining that surely players expect lists of 'monsters' to fight - but Traveller fans will turn creating these things into a pastime in its own right.

Don Turnbull can't fault Traveller as a RPG rules set - nobody could, it was state of the art. But he remains unconvinced. He suspects Referees will find the business of mapping and populating a vast area of space prior to the campaign beginning too daunting.: "the Traveller referee must do a good deal more preparation than the D&D dungeonmaster, who can get by initially by creating two or three 'levels.'"

He doesn't foresee that Traveller referees will find mapping out and populating space to be fun in itself. In any event, a single subsector (the equivalent of a dungeon level, to pursue the analogy) is all a referee needs to start with.

He also thinks the "scope" will overwhelm referees. He thinks the game will "be welcomed avidly and bought" but will nonetheless "never achieve 'status.'" He anticipates that its "appeal and usefulness" will prove "transient."

Don is to be pardoned for not reading the runes aright. Traveller is a game that abandoned the dungeon template - it has more similarity to the Wilderlands campaign created by Judges Guild than Don Turnbull's Greenlands dungeon. It lends itself very well to hex-crawling through space: arrive at a system, seek out a cargo, find a patron with a mission, move to the next system, sell the cargo for varying profitability, and deal with random encounters along the way. The story can be emergent, but the jump'n'trade trope is an amusing game in its own right. Lots of people enjoyed playing Traveller as a solo RPG, taking a crew of characters on a ship, and rolling up each planet as they arrived on it.

Furthermore, Judges Guild was waiting in the wings. Their D&D sales would start to wane as TSR professionalised its products and released its celebrated Modules for AD&D. In 1979, JG struck a deal to create licensed Traveller supplements, with settings like the Ley Sector and adventure-planets like Tancred. GDW wouldn't be slow either, and developed their Spinward Marches setting with some classic adventures, like Twilight's Peak (1980).

Of course, Games Workshop would take science fiction adventure gaming in a completely different direction, with their grimdark setting for Warhammer 40K. But that is still in the far, far future.

Kalgar

Not everyone is loving the new comic strip, as you will see in the Letter's Page. However, for my money, this moves things along at a pleasing speed. After being all moody, Kalgar (who looks like Burt Reynolds) goes with the mysterious girl to protect her grandfather from bandits. The bandits are already there, burning the house down.

David Lloyd does a fine job with the action sequence: the burning house, a volley of arrows, the girl races ahead, a burning arrow streaks past her, Kalgar races after her, battle is joined. It's full of motion and, though the action is broken up and seen from different perspectives, the story surges ahead while preserving the adrenal chaos of engagement. Very good.

It's not very much though, a single page every two months. At this time, you could read Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence's The Trigan Empire in Vulcan and Look & Learn - they were weekly magazines and the strip was two pages long (and in colour). Kalgar will feature a bit more sex and violence than the Trigan Empire (trust me) but the story isn't any more complicated. It just doesn't feel like an effective format.

Treasure Chest

Duncan Campbell offers three magic items, which are very much 'of their time.' The Millenium [sic] Blade is a sword that summons ten naked berserkers to fight for you - or just explodes if you are Chaotic. The nice touch is the doggerel inscription that can be read by a Lawful magic-user. The Staff of Demons similarly summons (rather disappointingly) gargoyles, who might attack the wielder if the staff isn't handled properly.

The Crystal Fount covers the character who touches the water with a painful red rash. Once it clears up, the victim's prime requisite goes up by +2. Nice! What's the catch? Hard to tell. Campbell seems to think the other PCs might attack their comrade "as he approaches them with cries for help." Perhaps Campbell's campaign established a curse or disease that motivated players to kill people sporting red rashes. Out of context, none of this makes much sense.

Martin Easterbrook is a regular reviewer in Open Box. Here he tries his hand at 'fixing' D&D with a hit location system for combat, based on targeting parts of the body and inflicting nasty side effects if you surpass the minimum score on your 'to hit' roll by a large amount (+10 will behead someone). It's all fine and I imagine people adopted it for a while; it's certainly simpler and more understandable than Andy Holt's efforts a couple of issues back. I can't imagine many players were happy to see their PC beheaded, just because a monster surpassed the necessary 'to hit' score by +10. And therein lies the problem of trying to relate D&D Hit Points to realistic wounds or injuries. Earlier in this issue, Roger Musson is on the right track with his more radical reconsideration of what Hit Points and Armour Class mean.

Most interesting for me is Brian Asbury's continuation of the 'Asbury System' (the grandiloquence is ironic) for awarding XP in D&D. Last issue, Asbury offered a sharp and intuitive way of relating XP awards to damage inflicted, albeit one that imposed a lot more book-keeping on players. One problem with it was that it disadvantaged magic-users, who rarely get the chance to inflict damage on monsters.

Asbury suggests awarding XP for the successful casting of a spell: 100 XP for a 1st level magic-user casting a 1st level spell, and extrapolate from there. It has to be successful, so if that bugbear makes its save against your Charm Person, you get nothing. An unremarked side-effect of this is to encourage casters to select utility spells that always work (you can sense Lew Pulsipher nodding with enthusiasm).

The asterisks mean that casters of that level can't usual cast this sort of spell, so the award is for casting spells from scrolls.

Asbury offers alternative tables for clerics, who don't get spells until 2nd level in Original and Holmes Basic D&D, and for other spell-casting classes whose spell lists only go to 7th level (which seems a bit unnecessary as the awards don't differ from magic-users in any meaningful way).

Once again, I like it. It's simple, it has the right sort of side-effects on play, do you know what I think I might adopt this for my school-based campaign. But wait a moment: now that PCS are getting larger XP awards for combat and for casting spells, won't they advance through the levels faster? Is that a problem? Brian Asbury will be back next issue with more ideas on XP awarded for gaining treasure.

Letters

The Letters Page always used to be tucked away at the back of the magazine, but it's migrated forwards to page 15. Perhaps this is because an actual letters page debate is brewing (and will continue to do so over the next few issues).

David Coleman writes in to complain about the brain-melting qualities of Don Turnbull's Monstermark system from issues #1-3. I hope he doesn't read Don's views on innumerate people in that Traveller review!

Roger Musson, who has made quite a splash this issue, writes to condemn David Lloyd's Kalgar as a waste of a whole page: "if I want to look at silly pictures of people with balloons coming out of their mouths, I shall waste my money on a comic book."

This might seem like an odd thing for a RPG-fan to say. Don't those nerds love comics? I suspect Roger Musson of being an English Literature undergraduate at this time, so a certain cultural chauvinism might be at work, but it's also worth remembering that the 'graphic novels' that will dignify comic books are about a decade away: Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns arrives in 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1987.

Ironically, Musson signs off by insisting readers don't want to see comic strips in the pages of White Dwarf or for that matter (drum roll) "miniatures catalogues."

On the other hand, John Robinson from Lincoln loves Kalgar. He's going to be disappointed too.

The real fun is to be had from Lew Pulsipher's inevitable retort to Bill Seligman's letter last issue. Seligman had written from America to advocate for not letting players make their own dice rolls. A couple of his reasons were practical. If the DM makes all the dice rolls then players cannot cheat and it's much easier to induct novices into the game because you don't have to burden them with rules.

Lew demolishes these concerns. He argues persuasively that the Maths in D&D isn't burdensome and neither are the rules. He gives examples from his own experience of players actively wanting to roll dice and gives an account of the drama of rolling dice and the excitement of inflicting big damage scores on monsters. As for cheating, he thinks Seligman "must play with a very peculiar bunch of D&Ders," adding that "if a player is going to cheat, why does he bother to play?"

Personally, I think there's a deeper issue here than Lew acknowledges. Most RPGers (and wargamers) don't cheat, but the minority who do cheat seem to feel compelled to do so, and their cheating can prove very divisive. How exactly one deals with the problem I don't know, but it looks like Bill has run into it and solved things with a protocol whereby the DM rolls all dice; Lew has never encountered this problem and can't see what the fuss is about.

Neither does Lew grasp Bill Seligman's main thrust about immersion, but that's hardly surprising if you read his review of Chivalry & Sorcery last issue. For Lew Pulsipher, there is no deeper immersion in character and situation than getting excited about the outcome of a dice roll. Bill Seligman seems to be aiming for something deeper than that, a sort of surrender to the imagined reality being narrated by the DM and the other players.

Be that as it may, the issue must go unexplored for a while longer. In order to debate this, the RPG community will need to define some terms and agree on expectations and, to be fair, Lew Pulsipher's contributions to White Dwarf will prove instrumental in doing this.

Adverts and the Back Page

The News column trumpets the arrival of the AD&D Monster Manual and Games Workshop's deal to produce a softback UK edition "to keep the price down." The Player's Handbook and Referee's Guide [sic] are anticipated in the summer: we know that the PHB did indeed arrive in June and was first seen by most fans at US GenCon in August - but the Dungeon Master's Guide would be another year in the making.

The Help! column is growing. Most of the groups and lonely hearts are in and around London, but I notice wargamers meeting at the Carlisle Sports Complex, Gareth Petty trying to get a club together in Swansea, Mike Jarvis in Nottingham, James Rae in Glasgow, Andrew Beasley in Grimsby, and Paul Vane all the way out in St Austell. I wonder if these people formed their gaming groups and persevered in the hobby.

Glasgow-based Wargames Publications Scotland Ltd have been taking out ads for the past 4 issues for their Warriors of the Lost Continent. Now they add a Magic Miscellany & Arabesque line: eunuchs, djinns, flying carpets. Yes, it's orientalism, I've read my Edward Said, but it speaks to a widening of horizons within the hobby (as indeed does Chris Beaumont's cover).

Games Workshop take out a full page ad for themselves, drawing attention to the new shop with a nice little map, emphasising science fiction as well as fantasy, and exciting people with opening day offers: D&D boxed set for 50p (though this looks like Holmes not the Original) and a free 'I'm A Wargamer' badge.

The back page is the last time art will appear here: it's colour ads from now on. The picture is by Alan Hunter and it's superb: a horseman arrives in a forest clearing flanked by twisted trees, to confront a horde of ghosts or spirits with blazing eyes, that are either waving merrily or crawling towards him with spectral menace.

In Retrospect

And so we bid farewell to the archaic era of White Dwarf: two-colour covers, back cover art, Original D&D as the norm, conflicts over whether RPGs belong in wargaming and who should roll the dice, a delightful ambiguity in genre and tone, the work of mighty patriarchs like Don Turnbull and Lew Pulsipher in establishing the Sort Of Thing D&D Is Meant To Be - even though their settlement will be overturned as the hobby embraces narrativism. With the arrival of Roger Musson, we see the first of the 'new generation' of RPG fans. Further down the road, White Dwarf will welcome writers like Phil Masters and Marcus Rowland and artists like Russ Nicholson and Iain McCaig.

"I had to let it happen," Eva Peron sings from her balcony, "I had to change. Couldn't spend all my life down at heel." Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice will bring Evita to the West End in the summer of 1978. Eva's words apply pretty well to White Dwarf at this juncture. The good news is that there are many years still ahead in which White Dwarf can say to its young readership: "The truth is, I never left you."

]]><![CDATA[Un-dressed By Moonlight: White Dwarf #5 (1978) reviewed]]>Wed, 20 Aug 2025 11:03:52 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/un-dressed-by-moonlight-white-dwarf-5-1978-reviewedAh, the spring of 1978. Blizzards continued to pound the UK, but at least we had The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy on the radio to cheer us up. Plus, women were happening. Anna Ford appeared reading the news on TV, Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher surged ahead of Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan in the polls, Kate Bush burst into the pop charts with Wuthering Heights, and Polly Wilson illustrated the cover of White Dwarf. What a time it was!

The 'Undressed By Moonlight' issue: Polly Wilson's naked witch frolics with her hideous rat-dog familiars

The Cover: Breasts!

Or one of them, anyway. But it's not objectification, because the artist is a woman. Polly Wilson joined the White Dwarf roster in issue #2 - you can often spot her distinctive PW monogram. On this month's cover we see her signature 'stippling' effect: creating the appearance of shade and texture through patterns of dots.

Wilson had previously illustrated the UK (4th) edition of Tunnels & Trolls (1977) - beautiful!

Nudity in European media often produced shocked reactions from Americans, but Britain's best-selling daily newspaper, The Sun, had been displaying bare breasts on 'Page 3' since 1970. Female nudity was a bit of a Seventies thing.

And, joking aside, Wilson's naked witch isn't objectification at all. There's joy in her expression and body language, reaching for the moon, snakes in her hair, while her critters disport themselves strategically about her thighs. I call her a 'witch' but perhaps she is a Minoan goddess, maybe Ariadne from Greek myth.

It's a bold cover, but not a style that White Dwarf will repeat: there will be a lot more barbarian chicks in chainmail bikinis, or slave girls draped over muscular barbarians, throughout the '70s and '80s. However, we will see more of Polly Wilson's illustrations in the magazine's Fiend Factory column, often with ornately decorated names for the monsters. A lot of her illustrations ended up in the AD&D Fiend Folio (1981)

The Spinescale appeared in issue #2: look closely for the PW monogram, bottom right

Editorial: a world without lawyers ...

Can you imagine a world without lawyers ?

Ian Livingstone's editorial gets round to addressing something that has been brewing in the hobby industry for a few months. You see, back in 1977, TSR (the company behind D&D) had received a cease-and-desist order from Tolkien Enterprises over their board game The Battle Of The Five Armies (based on the climax of The Hobbit).

Gary Gygax later recalled the legal proceedings as follows:

The action also demanded we remove balrog, dragon, dwarf, elf, ent, goblin, hobbit, orc, and warg from the D&D game. Although only balrog and warg were unique names we agreed to hobbit as well, kept the rest, of course. The boardgame was dumped, and thus the suit was settled out of court at that. -- quoted in Cheers, Gary (2011)

This legal action meant the withdrawal of Five Armies from publication, and explains the disappearance of 'hobbits' and their replacement with 'halflings' in the new Basic D&D rules (and subsequent AD&D).

The action was brought by Tolkien Enterprises, not the Tolkien Estate. J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1971 and his Estate still controls the sale of his books, but Tolkien had sold the film and merchandising rights to Universal Artists in 1969. By 1977 the rights were owned by filmmaker Saul Zaentz, producer of the Oscar-winning One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Zaentz's company had already licensed an animated film of The Hobbit and was about to release Ralph Bakshi's Lord Of The Rings animated film.

1978 was a pretty good year for fantasy fans

Zaentz had a reputation for greed and litigiousness - go ask the band Creedence Clearwater Revival, who lost millions while Zaentz was running their record label. With someone like that merchandising Tolkien, little hobby companies had a target on their backs. The law suit against TSR certainly had a chilling effect on other companies creating Tolkien-themed miniatures, boardgames, or RPG materials.

Livingstone puts it like this: "Holders of copyright tolerate some of the goings-on, but now the SF/F games and figures manufacturers are beginning to be squeezed."

Livingstone's approach to this is decidedly odd. He affects a sort of wide-eyed hippie idealism, saying: "Let's hope that such problems can be resolved so that in future the wargame tables will welcome the presence of Darth Vader with a light sabre, rather than a law suit, in hand."

This idealism won't last: Games Workshop later trademarked 'space marine' in the context of Warhammer 40K, and aggressively defended the trade mark in contexts outside the game. In fact, in 1978, Games Workshop was already in an exclusive licensing deal with TSR for distributing D&D in the UK and had been for several years. If you were a little indie games designer in 1978 and you put out a game closely imitating D&D, GW would have been the ones sending you threatening letters (or ratting you out to TSR)

Livingstone is trying to square a circle. Games Workshop is becoming a rather successful business, but it still delights in a view of itself as a cottage industry . By deploring the nastiness of license and copyright holders, Livingstone positions White Dwarf as the voice of the player community, rather than the business community. He's staying loyal to his roots, the guy who lived in the back of Steve Jackson's van for three months while he was trying to sell that first batch of D&D sets he brought back from GenCon, the guy who produced Owl & Weasel on his typewriter. He's Keeping It Real.

Chivalry & Sorcery

While analysing White Dwarf #4 I wondered to what extent gamers in the mid-'70s were 'fantasy roleplaying' in the sense we use the term today; i.e. trying to inhabit a different persona from your own, someone who doesn't have your personality or values or knowledge but who instead takes for granted an imagined setting that real people find fantastical. I was intrigued by accounts of players and DMs casually blurring distinctions between 'in character' (IC) and 'out of character' (OOC) knowledge.

Lew Pulsipher is an interesting figure in this regard. An American (born in Detroit, 1951), he discovered fantasy gaming through postal Diplomacy and was introduced to D&D at a Detroit games convention in 1975. He came to London in 1976 to research for his Doctorate in military history and got to know Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson there.

Pulsipher's work in White Dwarf sets out his philosophy for D&D, which is that it's a game to be taken seriously, where players ought to exercise skill by making shrewd choices; indeed, D&D is a game "where you try to avoid having to rely on the dice to save you from disaster." Choice, consistency, consequences: these seem to be the 'three Cs' of Pulsipher's view of RPGs.

Lew Pulsipher is, as they say at the start of boxing matches, in the blue corner.

In the red corner, we have Ed Simbalist & Wilf Backhaus's Chivalry & Sorcery (1977), published by Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU). Ed & Wilf developed C&S out of their own D&D campaign and brought the manuscript (at first titled Chevalier) to GenCon in 1977 to show it to Gary Gygax. It was picked up instead by FGU's Scott Bizar who eradicated the last traces of D&D from the rules (which, by the way, are the first to use the term Games Master or GM) and produced them in a bright red book with densely-typed columns.

C&S is not a 'Pulsipherian' game. C&S is a game in which you immerse yourself in the role of a 12th century French knight, or bishop, or peasant, or alchemist. The High Medieval setting dominates the game and it dominates your character. You act like a medieval person. You think like one. Pulsipher explains: "The C&S world is dominated by the ideas of feudalism and chivalry, a world of order." He notes that this extends to ideas that are "offensive to the 20th century mind," meaning the subordination of women and (I suppose) the suppression of religious minorities, and absolute deference to your superiors in a rigid class system.

With setting being taken so seriously, player autonomy has to be limited. Pulsipher is shocked by the rules for morale: "imagine your bemusement when you want to fight on but your character wants to flee - the character wins the argument!" This is the first time in any issue of White Dwarf so far that I've seen a reference to a distinction between what the player wants to do and what their character might do instead.

Pulsipher isn't impressed with this approach, which he thinks makes it "hard to identify with one's character," adding that "personal identification is more important than living out diced fantasies."

Language needs to be teased apart here. When Lew Pulsipher writes about 'identifying with your character' he seems to mean identifying with it as a proxy, as a vehicle by which 'you' (the 1978 version of you, the real you) gets to explore an imagined setting. He explicitly says that "people who participate in role-playing games ... are unlikely to want to play a character as anything but their 20th century selves." This identification is compromised if you can't make your character do what you want it to do. If you can't make those all-important skilful choices, then RPGs devolve into "diced fantasies" and Lew Pulsipher is candid about his contempt for dice games (after all, he's a Diplomacy fan).

Simbalist & Backhaus are also keen on players 'identifying' with their characters, but they aspire to something different: a sense of immersion, a way of leaving behind 1978-you, the real-you, and becoming, temporarily, someone else, someone who lives in 12th century France and inhabits a medieval mindset: essentially, anything but their 20th century selves.

A similar sensibility, albeit applied to D&D, is expressed by Bill Seligman in this issue's Letters Page.

They weren't alone in this sensibility. Back in 1966, a group of Californians gathered for an afternoon pageant, wearing medieval costume, practising swordplay, and speaking and acting 'in character.' They founded the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), which, as it spread, organised itself into 'kingdoms' with feudal ranks, and set up the popular 'Renaissance Fayres' as a way to inhabit an idealised, courtly, and chivalric way of life. The SCA was named by the fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley and its founder was the author Poul Anderson whose 'portal fantasies' (especially Three Hearts & Three Lions) had such an influence on D&D. C&S designer Wilf Backhaus was a 'baron' in the SCA.

Paol Anderson (a.k.a. Sir Bela of Eastmarch, third from left) hosts a tournament for the SCA in 1968

Of course, none of this aligns with Pulsipher's approach to RPGs, so his review of C&S might best be termed 'cautious.' He respects the mechanics for C&S, especially the magic system, and is impressed by the clarity of the rule book. He suspects D&D players will plunder the game for inspirations and house rules.

But he doesn't think it will catch on: "most D&Ders will stick with their game" because "D&D's superior flexibility and diversity will appeal more than C&S's realism." There's just no beating D&D's "versatility, variety, and simplicity."

In a way, Lew Pulsipher turned out to be right. C&S was greatly admired: it went on to win the H.G. Wells award for All Time Best Ancient Medieval Rules at Origins '79. But most RPGers ignored it, or were outright intimidated by it. James Maliszewski sums the feeling up in his Grognardia retrospective:

Many of the older guys I knew, the ones who initiated me into this weird hobby, were really down on C&S, seeing it as unnecessarily complex and too concerned over "realism." So, it was generally best not to admit to having an interest in such a game in their presence -- and I didn't.
-- James Maliszewski (2012)

But in another sense, Lew Pulsipher was wrong. What distinguished C&S wasn't, at the end of the day, its historical realism, but its philosophy of roleplaying, its focus on immersion and on belonging within an intensely realised fantasy setting. Maybe players didn't turn to C&S in huge numbers, but they turned to Runequest's Glorantha and (in 1985) to Pendragon. They turned to the World of Greyhawk, Mystara, and the Forgotten Realms.

In this (I think) more important sense, C&S was the future of roleplaying.

Der Kriegspielers Fantastiques

John Norris reviews 25mm fantasy miniatures from Heritage Models, a US company. This line, the Kriegspielers Fantastiques ('the fantasy wargamers' in a horrific mangling of German and French) are Tolkien characters: Gandalf, the Fellowship, Haradrim and Gondorians, sundry trolls.

Wait, I hear you cry, Tolkien miniatures? But haven't they been lawyered by Saul Zaentz the same way TSR was?

I don't know the full story, but the miniatures were developed by Bruce 'Duke' Seifried. While in the UK on business, 'Duke' visited Prof. Tolkien and pitched the idea of pewter miniatures. Tolkien was intrigued and the two collaborated on sketches. Back in the States, 'Duke' started casting the figures; Tolkien died before he completed the range, but perhaps his collaboration meant that the project fell under the auspices of the Tolkien Estate, rather than Zaentz's Tolkien Enterprises.

Duke Seifried has some other claims to fame: he pioneered selling miniatures in blister packs and came up with the term 'adventure gaming' to distinguish games like D&D from wargaming, in the years before 'role-playing game' caught on. In the '80s, Duke Seifried went to work for TSR and developed their miniatures line, but was sacked in the First Great TSR Lay-Off of '83, perhaps because of his loyalty to embattled TSR President Gary Gygax.

'Duke' Seifried (1935-2018)

I cannot judge the quality of the miniatures from the B&W photographs, but Norris is impressed with most of them, especially the orcs and trolls, and he points out that "no manufacturer, in my opinion, makes really good elves, all of them being too much like humans" but says the Kriegspieler Fantastiques are "probably the best figures for standard elves available."

The prices are steep: "an average of about 30p for a 25mm figure." For comparison, Asgard Miniatures (reviewed in issue #2) was selling dwarves, wizards, and 'fighting bishops' for 12p; 30p bought you a big ogre or troll; in the same issue, Games Workshop was selling orcs and 'Gondor spearmen' for 10p. That was September 1977 and inflation was running at 15.8%, so prices have surely gone up. But not by that much!

Of course, these figures are US imports, with the prestigious Tolkien imprimatur. The US release of Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord Of The Rings at the end of this year (or the summer of '79 in the UK) would surely push up the enthusiasm for 'adventure gaming' in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Monsters Mild & Malign

Don Turnbull edits this column, which will be re-titled next issue as the more-familiar (and less-annoying) Fiend Factory.

The double-page showcases Polly Wilson's illustrations

I concluded after reviewing last issue that Games Workshop had form in failing to credit creatives. Don Turnbull belabours the point that these monsters are not his own creations and he credits them to Paul Jaquays (editor of The Dungeoneer) and Lee Gold (editor of Alarums & Excursions); Jaquays has already written to White Dwarf #3 to complain about lack of accreditation, so maybe some cogs have been turning. Next issue there will be an 'errata' for issues #4 and #5 giving specific credit to the creator of each monster, not just the editor of the fanzine or APA that printed them.

Turnbull continues to use a developed form of the Greyhawk format for D&D monsters, dropping mechanical details like Hit Dice and damage into a text description. Next issue, Fiend Factory will move to the new Holmes Basic D&D (and future AD&D Monster Manual) format of providing a standardised stat block, followed by a paragraph of description.

The monsters themselves are a merry collection that fit into the funhouse/variety dungeons that are so popular at this time. The beholder-variants from The Dungeoneer are an idea that will be developed by other designers. The gremlin, with its 'bad luck' passive defence, is also a concept that designers will return to. The bogy is a nice minor demon concept and the Cyborg is a minor golem; imps also get a treatment (prefiguring their appearance in the Monster Manual and later development into mephits in the Fiend Folio). There are novelty monsters, like the three-headed threep that functions as a fighter, cleric, and magic-user, and the gold-eater, which is a floating dismembered hand that devours gold through its palms (1d8 x 10gp per round): a luxurious version of the rust monster.

Turnbull's ongoing commentary, discussing how these monsters might be deployed and the impact they might have on players, is very welcome; it's a shame it will be dropped in future Fiend Factories. The Monstermark is welcome also: it alerts you to monsters that might be tougher than a cursory glance at their Hit Dice suggests. Yes, I'm actually pleased to see Turnbull persevering with the Monstermark.

D&D Campaigns

More Lew Pulsipher, this time looking at 'Rules Recommendations' for D&D. The context for this is the strange twilight zone between Original D&D and AD&D (due to arrive in the summer). When Pulsipher mentions "the new rules" he means Eric Holmes's Basic D&D rules, which succeed in collating and clarifying much (but not all) of the material previously scattered across half a dozen rulebooks and many more newsletter and fanzine articles. This means there's a lot of work for someone like Pulsipher to do in interpreting how D&D is supposed to work.

For comparison, two spells from D&D Book 1: Men & Magic (1974, left) and the same spells from Holmes Basic D&D (1977, centre and right)

You can see from the excerpts above how cryptic Original D&D was and how much Holmes clarifies how a spell works, such as giving the occasions for throwing off the effect of Charm Person, the duration of Sleep, and the clarification that Sleep allows no saving throw.

Lew settles more ambiguities with his customary logic. You have to know the language of a charmed monster to give it commands; if someone else tells you the commands, you can at best give simple instructions and not during combat. Sleeping characters can be shaken awake in 2 melee rounds: short enough to give PCs a chance to awake their comrades when fighting spell-using enemies, but long enough to allow "the MU to slit sleepers' throats" during a battle.

Lew acknowledges that some DMs rule that hobbits (they aren't 'halflings' yet) and dwarves are also immune to Sleep spells. I'm struck by his suggestion that handling a magic item give an extra saving throw vs Charm Person, as a way of discouraging players from using charmed monsters to investigate possibly-cursed treasures found in dungeons. There's a little snapshot there of the mid-'70s D&D style, where magical treasures are a lottery you can't afford to pass up (because they are often insanely powerful, but not uncommonly deadly or debilitating).

As usual, Lew's focus is on promoting player skill: magic shouldn't be so powerful it does all the work for you, but used wisely it should give a significant advantage. In other words, it's a resource in the wargame that is D&D, not an attempt to immerse you in a mystical or occult sensibility (as, perhaps, in Chivalry & Sorcery).

For me, the shock comes when Lew Pulsipher discusses how many characters a player should have. "According to the rules," he says, "each D&D player receives one character plus a number of followers." He acknowledges that "a few campaigns are played without followers, one character per player" but insists that "the majority of D&D campaigns ... permit a large number of characters ... for each player."

I had no idea about this, when I started playing D&D. Yes, my school buddy Simon let me create my 1st level Elf and gave me a bunch of followers, but he controlled the followers. When I inducted other friends into the game, I took it for granted that they would play single characters; if NPC 'help' was needed to make up the numbers, then as DM I controlled those characters and rolled dice for them.

Pulsipher is describing a different settlement, where each player controls a "'family' of characters," perhaps with one nominated as their 'prime' PC who directs the others, but if the 'prime' PC dies they just take over running one of the others as their 'prime.'

He gives a lot of thought to the various ways in which players try to 'game' this arrangement: getting characters with poor scores killed off, retiring characters early to give themselves a chance to roll replacements that qualify for coveted subclasses, hoarding magic items with a "favoured character," even bringing along high-level 'guardian angels' to chaperone a low-level entourage so they can all take on tough challenges and rocket through the levels.

It explains Pulsipher's insistence that XP awards for monsters killed be divided by character and dungeon level, to stop high-level characters profiting from chaperoning the new ones and to discourage everyone from malingering in the 'easy' dungeon levels.

It also explains his hostility to the four-way alignment system. If a player is running a 'family' of characters, they are all broadly characterised as 'Lawfuls' or 'Chaotics' - this provides the rules of engagement in the dungeon (i.e. whether you can kill or torture prisoners or steal from other PCs). Four-way alignment gives every character a nuanced ethical personality and Pulsipher has argued in issue #3 that this will "reduce alignment differentiation to nil" as everyone will "act about the same, regardless of alignment."

What I think he meant by that was that a 'family' of characters where some are Lawful Good and other Chaotic Good or Lawful Evil will all just do whatever the 'prime' character wants them to do, regardless of their professed alignment - and that you no longer have a cadre of adventurers acting in a unified way, according to shared rules of engagement, so 'anything goes.'

To be fair, Pulsipher is already shifting ground. The "revised rules" (i.e. Holmes) incorporate Gary Gygax's four-way alignment, and Lew is a big believer in playing by the Rules As Written, so he distinguishes here between good and evil characters as well as lawful and chaotic ones. Nonetheless, this innovation has yet to have consequences for many people's playing styles.

The alignment chart from the Basic D&D rules (Eric Holmes, 1977)

The 'family' style of play has big implications. One is that players go into dungeons 'mob-handed.' A group of 3 or 4 players might, between them, control an expedition of a dozen to twenty characters. A lot of those characters will die horribly in the dungeon threshing machine, but the survivors will emerge enriched and empowered, then everyone dices up replacements for the dead guys.

This explains the lethality - and the arbitrary nature of the lethality - of the dungeons we have seen in previous White Dwarf issues. It explains why Pulsipher argues for the 'skill campaign': you can play D&D very carelessly, laughing as you hurl your characters into death traps, because sheer weight of numbers means some of your characters will emerge with gold and treasure and go up levels. Pulsipher prefers a game where, if the players are thoughtful and husband resources wisely, everyone will "get through with no casualties" - a quote from issue #4 where he criticises DMs who are careless with the treasures they place in the dungeon because they assume players will be careless with the lives of their PCs.

Roleplaying means something very different in this context, as does the "identification" with characters that Pulsipher mentions in his review of Chivalry & Sorcery. You 'identify' with a character in the sense that it's your favourite, you want it to go up levels and get more powerful. But it could die at any time and you would be disappointed, but you have plenty of others; they're just less interesting (because, probably, they're less powerful).

When you play a single character, especially one with lots of idiosyncratic details, you identify much more intensely. This is the direction C&S was taking, but nothing Lew Pulsipher has said so far suggests he (or many other D&D players) took much interest in this.

One-player-one-character became normative. I think the published Modules with their rosters of pre-generated PCs might have contributed to this. It's the default assumption when Gary Gygax, in the AD&D DM's Guide, writes about player characters. When I started as a DM in 1979, I took it for granted each player would focus on a single PC.

Nevertheless, the 'mob' of PCs eventually made a return to RPGs. Ars Magica (1987) proposed three PCs per player: a wizard, a powerful consort, and a humble soldier-guard. Nonetheless, you don't play all three at the same time. On an adventure, one person would play as their wizard, the others would be consorts or soldiers, and these roles would rotate from session to session. Blades In The Dark (2017) assumes each player has several characters who belong to the same criminal gang, but you play as different ones for different missions; Band Of Blades (2019) invites you to alternative between playing the leaders of a mercenary legion and the particular officers and soldiers who go out on missions.

Open Box

Two books are reviewed this issue which are unusual 'system agnostic' compendiums of monsters, clearly with D&D in mind, that beat the AD&D Monster Manual to the presses. Their existence (along with Don Turnbull's column in White Dwarf) speaks to the hunger for fresh monsters in every '70s D&D campaign - part of the "variety" Lew Pulsipher thought so essential to dungeons of the era. I can recall spending hours scouring encyclopaedias and books on Norse and Greek mythology, looking for inspirations for D&D monsters. It was as much a Seventies thing as female nudity, perhaps more so.

Lew Pulsipher reviews The Book of Monsters, as well as its companion guides to Demons and Sorcery, but concludes they are "not worth it" for those cost in the UK. Sorcery offers spell misfire tables and actual incantations for players to read out when casting spells (reminding me of Andy Holt's house rules in White Dwarf #2), but Lew astutely points out that the guide misses a trick by not making higher level spells more difficult to speak out loud.

These books were produced by a games store in Maryland called The Little Soldier. They became an imprint of Phoenix Games, who created the original versions of RPGs like Bushido and Aftermath.

Don Turnbull brings his Big Maths Brain to evaluating All The World's Monsters from Chaosium. Feeling that there are too few low-level monsters, he works out a Monstermark for every single one and -... No, ha-ha, no he doesn't go that far. But he tabulates Armour Class and Hit Dice and demonstrates the collection skews towards AC2 monsters with 9+ HD. Classic Don!

The general consensus is that these collections are too broad and indiscriminate; the perceived need is for fewer monsters described in better detail - a conclusion that will surprise those of you reading Don Turnbull's monster column, which so far offers lots of monsters in barely any detail at all, but that will change starting next issue. Don also argues selecting innovative or unusual monsters over dungeon-fodder.

Games company FGU have already featured this issue as the creators of Chivalry & Sorcery. War Of The Ring is their Lord of the Rings themed board game and it comes pre-savaged by Lew Pulsipher, who prefaced his C&S review by calling it a "travesty of a Diplomacy variant and insult to Tolkien." It was singled out by Ian Livingstone in his editorial as likely to suffer legal action from Tolkien Enterprises - and so it came to pass, the game was withdrawn and is now a rarity.

Reviewer Mike Westhead can't bring the hate like Lew Pulsipher can. He recognises it is a Diplomacy variant, but he likes the high quality board, the secret movement of hobbit pieces, and the multiple victory conditions: he calls it "quite intense and great fun" - but only awards it 5/10 so it can't have been that much fun.

Games Day III

Ian Livingstone reports from Games Day III, from 17 December 1977. Over a thousand delegates attended and Livingstone praises the "three brave girls" on the information stand who had to deal with the "hundreds of steaming, chaotic fantasy gamers" queuing outside. I wonder who those 'girls' were?

Games Day was a big success for Games Workshop. The first two had drawn hundreds, but this seems to have attracted at least twice the previous turnout. For comparison purposes, if 1500 gamers attended Games Day III, over in the USA in 1978, GenCon attracted just over 2000, and Origins Game Fair attracted maybe twice that. This tells you a lot about the disproportionate enthusiasm (and market share) of the UK hobby scene.

An indication of the surprisingly high turnout was the oversubscribed D&D tournament, run by Fred Hemmings (of course, he detailed his experience with Competitive D&D in previous issues of White Dwarf) and Hartley Patterson (of Midgard fame). More than 200 people wanted to take part, so the organisers set a D&D quiz with the highest scorers being allowed into the tournament.

Let's test ourselves with some D&D general knowledge from 1977:

Question	A	B	C	D	E
To what level can a Dwarvish bard progress?	2	4	6	8	10
What are the Hit Dice of a Hippogriff?	2+1	2+2	3	3+1	4
The easiest way to destroy Yellow Mold is:	magic	water	fire	brute force	other (specify)
What damage does an Ochre Jelly do?	1-8	1-10	1-12	2-12	2-16
A Minotaur has how many attacks?	1	2	3	4	5
Which need minimum scores to create a Ranger?	intelligence	wisdom	constitution	dexterity	charisma
A Silver Dragon breathes:	acid	fear	cold	fire	lightning
XP needed by an Illusionist to reach 2nd level?	1000	1500	2000	2500	3000
Which is NOT a 6th level Magic User spell?	part water	magic jar	geas	reincarnation	move earth
How many swords with a basic +3 do the rules list?	2	3	4	5	6

Obviously, there's some deeply nerdy recall being tested here, but clearly a LOT of contestants knew a LOT of these answers. It speaks to the obsessive nature of the hobby and its focus on, what was at the time, a pretty narrow (although widely scattered) range of rules materials that the fan could (and did) learn by heart.

Scroll down for (possible) answers.

Food and Water on the Starship Warden

Richard Edwards offers rules for foraging in the SF survivalist world of Metamorphosis Alpha.

There's a rather witty Polly Wilson illustration too

Metamorphosis Alpha was reviewed way back in issue #1 as a SF RPG in which you play the survivors and mutants on a giant space ark, exploring your environment and learning its lost secrets. The game was to be replaced later this very year by Gamma World, so it's a delight to find someone playing it and supporting it with house rules.

And they are good house rules too! There's a Guide To Botany listing 20 different trees, herbs, and fungi to be found on the overgrown starship. Each gets a vivid description and some have unusual effects (poisonous, addictive, healing). There's a theme running through them (poisonous fungi are blue, edible ones are yellow) so the players can proceed by trial and error then generalise their conclusions - Lew Pulsipher would be proud.

There are simple rules for dehydration, based on time passing without water and armour worn, that lend themselves to D&D campaigns if PCs are trapped underground for long periods.

An article like this makes me feel sad that Metamorphosis Alpha didn't find a larger fanbase. It's also the first article devoted to house rules for a RPG that isn't D&D and, in terms of adding to a game rather than trying to fix it, it's the first proper article on house rules to appear in White Dwarf.

Kalgar

A serialised comic story begins. Kalgar is the tale of "a new Sword & Sorcery hero" that, alas, will only run for 4 issues. It looks GREAT. It was written and illustrated by David Lloyd and, if his art seems familiar, it's perhaps because you read V For Vendetta in the pages of Warrior starting in 1982.

Kalgar is a warrior who fought in a civil war that has ravaged the land of Araquetta for 78 years. When the peace treaty is signed, Kalgar, a bit like Richard III, has no delight to pass away the time in a weak piping time of peace. So he takes off, refusing to hand over his weapons, and wanders like a morose ghost, until he is approached by a young woman who needs help that only a soldier can provide.

Pretty compelling prompt for a fantasy adventure; a bit like the trope of the cop who is told to turn in his badge but instead strikes out as a vigilante. I'm hooked!

Treasure Chest

Joseph Nicholas offers three magic treasures. The Rainbow Sword is, I see, inspired by Robert Plant's Celtic adventure episode in Led Zeppelin's movie The Song Remains the Same.

The Song Remains The Same (1976) mixed Led Zeppelin live footage with fantasy sequences like this. Some people loved it. Other people reacted by forming punk bands.

As a magic item, it's a headache, because it has indefinite mass charm powers, and might charm the wielder and the other PCs too. A decent idea for a plot device, but a bit heavy handed.

The Water of Beguilement and the Water of Enchantment are 'lottery items, like the infamous Deck Of Many Things, but without the cool Tarot symbolism. Lew Pulsipher has already inveighed against the presence of items like this in a campaign and I regard his argument as unanswerable.

I really liked Brian Asbury's Barbarian character class last issue, and Brian is back with the Asbury System, another attempt to 'fix' D&D by improving the XP system.

I started reading this with a yawn and a groan, but actually, it's pretty good. The basic idea is for players to keep track of the amount of damage they deal to monsters during play. Damage is converted to XP by being multiplied by a value derived from the monster's HD and the PC's level.

It works like this. If you are a 1st level Cleric and you bash a 2HD zombie for a total of 5 damage, you will earn (5dmg x 7 for a level 2 monster) 35XP. If your friend the 3rd level Paladin steps into to finish the thing off, dealing 5 damage too, he only earns (5dmg x 5 for a level 2 monster) 25XP.

Ah, you say, but what about Ghouls? They have 2HD but they are much worse than zombies because they have paralysing touch. Asbury suggests adding to the monster's effective level for each nasty power they have, with very nasty powers adding 2, 3, or even 4 levels. So the Ghoul would be level 4 (+1 for paralysing touch and +1 for multiple attacks), netting them both 55XP (1st and 3rd level characters get the same x11 multiplier for level 3 monsters).

Asbury points out some benefits of this system. For example, it rewards PCs for fights they didn't win, either because the monster escaped (like a Vampire going gaseous) or the party retreated.

It also rewards PCs proportionately based on their damage output. This is good news for Fighters, but puny Thieves will only score big if they backstab something. But I suppose Thieves' XP requirements are far lower than Fighters.

What about Magic-Users? Sure, a good Sleep spell could knock out a whole bunch of Goblins and the caster gets the XP as if he had personally killed every one of them in battle - but lots of Magic-Users don't know Sleep and, anyway, if we follow Lew Pulsipher's advice, we want to reward casters for taking utility spells like Detect Magic and using it wisely. Brian Asbury will return to this topic next issue.

I come away from this impressed by the elegance of Asbury's system, but also by the willingness of '70s gamers to engage in book-keeping chores. The people I play D&D with today (OK, mostly youngsters, but there are some adults in this category) would shrink from logging every hit point of damage they dealt out and the monster they dealt it to. Maybe D&D Beyond has accustomed everyone to letting computers do the donkey work, or maybe standards of arithmetic and note-taking have plummeted since I Were A Lad, but I can't share Brian Asbury's sanguine confidence that "the amount of work the DM has to do ... is greatly reduced, since the players calculate their own points scored."

Letters & Adverts

There's a long letter from Bill Seligman in the USA, taking issue with Lew Pulsipher's advice to let players make their own dice rolls. Seligman has a quirky way of dramatising his points, but what he is saying is that rolling dice breaks the deep immersion we want from D&D and encourages players to cheat.

I'm not sure what Lew Pulsipher would say about cheating, but we've already discovered that Lew cares not a jot for deep immersion or anything like that. He wants the players to know their dice scores and combat matrices, so they can make those skilful choices that he considers D&D to be Really All About. Anything else is just "living out diced fantasies."

We've got the great divide here, between players (like Lew) who think of D&D as a wargame that is best when played with skill and agency, and those (like Bill) who see D&D as an immersive narrative, and worry that introducing explicit gaming elements breaks the imaginative spell and elicits pathological tendencies from players.

Joseph Nicholas (the Led Zep fan from Open Box) writes in to praise the magazine generally. The Editor pops up with some errata. Apparently, in the last issue, Don Turnbull's workings-out for his Balrog Monstermark had a printing mistake! I suspect anyone who remembers their own Maths teacher will struggle to suppress a smile at the thought of Don spotting the mistake and insisting that White Dwarf print the correct working out.

The News column announces Judges Guild releasing their Wilderlands of High Fantasy campaign setting, SPI's (fully licensed) Middle Earth board games, and (drum roll) the pending UK release of the AD&D Monster Manual and Players Handbook.

There's an advert for the 1978 Time-Lord Trophy. Apparently, a fan base has formed around the abstract board game 4th Dimension, published independently by J.A. Ball and reviewed in White Dwarf #3. Here they are, proposing a 'world championship' at Southampton University. They've got a bi-monthly news sheet and strategy booklets and promote it as "the TIME-WARPING challenge to Chess." I'm starting to see why TSR thought acquiring this game was a good idea. I wish I could track down a copy!

Back Cover

Fangorn is back! The art is by Chris 'Fangorn' Baker, who has given us two previous back covers as well as the front cover for White Dwarf #2.

For my money, this is his best yet. It's the alien warlord from the back cover of issue #1, complete with energy-crackle glaive, but minus the flying horse. He's got the psychedelic wings of the hot fairy from issue #3. It's a pose, but it's full of languid menace, the sense of inscrutable power at rest. Plus, he's getting better at anatomy: the proportions are much more realistic (the foreshortened legs could be a matter of perspective). This guy should be the BBEG in a space-fantasy campaign. More of this sort of thing!

In Retrospect

This is the strongest issue yet. The art and presentation look increasingly professional. Features that, frankly, outstayed their welcome (Competitive D&D, the Loremaster of Avallon, probably the Monstermark though I liked it) have disappeared. There's a sense of White Dwarf engaging with changes in the hobby going on right now (i.e. in early 1978).

Next issue will see the inauguration of Fiend Factory, which will give the readership a chance to contribute to the development of D&D in important ways, and a big review of Traveller, which is going to challenge the domination of the fantasy genre in the UK RPG scene. Games Workshop is changing too: the famous Hammersmith shop is about to open its doors.

Quiz Answers

Or at least, I think these are the answers:

D, D, C, A, A, A-C, C, E, B, A

Bards were introduced in Strategic Review #6; Hippogriffs, Ochre Jelly, & Yellow Mold in D&D Book 2: Monsters & Treasure when all monsters did 1d8 damage; Rangers appeared in Strategic Review #2; Silver Dragons and Minotaurs featured in the Greyhawk supplement; Illusionists appeared in Strategic Review #4; spells appear in D&D Book 1: Men & Magic and geas is 5th level; Greyhawk lists a +3 sword and a +3 sword of cold,

]]><![CDATA[Killing Crows in Cobalt: White Dwarf #4 (1978) reviewed]]>Mon, 18 Aug 2025 09:11:18 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/killing-crows-in-cobalt-white-dwarf-4-1978-reviewedIt's time to dip into 1978, I've said already that this year was to bring great changes to the UK gaming hobby, and to White Dwarf, but that won't be immediately apparent. Just as Paul McCartney's Mull of Kintyre clung stubbornly to the No. 1 spot in the pop charts through December and January, so issue #4 of White Dwarf didn't seem to be a big change from issue #3 before Christmas.

Let's head back to the storm-lashed January of 1978, when the British public faced a choice between Star Wars in the cinema, or Blake's 7 on TV, and get a sense of what White Dwarf #4 looked like to its first readership.

The 'Cobalt Crow' issue: John Blanche's cover art depicts a tattered (or perhaps undead) warrior duelling with a crow-like monster in a forest glade suffused in blue light

The Cover: 'Die, Crow,Die!'

John Blanche makes his White Dwarf debut here, but we will see a lot more of his covers and he is going to be a huge party of Games Workshop in the future, not least for defining the aesthetic of Warhammer Fantasy and the covers of the Fighting Fantasy books. He eventually becomes GW's art director. Later in this issue, we will discover the now-forgotten 'revised D&D' rules set and Blanche's role in illustrating the cover for that.

In the 1990s, Mark Rein-Hagen's RPG Vampire: The Masquerade will popularise the phrase 'Gothic Punk' as an aesthetic. But Blanche's art is the original Gothic-Punk. His distinctive spindly figures, reminiscent of El Greco's elongated forms, mix medievalism with punk-inspired fetish-wear: leather, buckles, chains, attitude.

Blanche's delight in apocalyptic hues and the strangely heretical tone he brought to religious iconography made him perfect for developing the look of Warhammer 40K; El Greco's Dormition of the Virgin (1657) for comparison.

Editorial: Do Better, Britain!

Ian Livingstone's last editorial was somewhat self-congratulatory. White Dwarf was finding an audience. Now he wonders when the rest of the British hobby sector is going to get its act together.

He wonders why it is that "virtually all board games are of American origin," despite the success of the British game Kingmaker and the head start offered by H. G. Wells, who published proto-wargaming rules Little Wars in 1913. He goes on to fret that US miniature designers like Ral Partha and Grenadier are overtaking established UK miniatures companies.

This is a "sad state of affairs" and there is an implied challenge to British hobbyists to be more entrepreneurial and get their own board games, RPGs, and miniature lines into the marketplace.

On the face of it, Livingstone's complaint is an odd one. On the facing page, there is an advert for Warriors of the Lost Continent, a miniatures line and wargaming rules set from Glasgow. This issue is the third time British games company Waddingtons has advertised its SF boardgame 4000AD; OK, that's a rubbish game, but Waddingtons was prestigious and had been selling family board games since 1922, so its move into the SF genre was significant (but ultimately unsuccessful). Previous issues had featured a big review of Asgard Miniatures, based in Nottingham, and the 4th Dimension boardgame, self-published by A. J. Ball, but later acquired by TSR.

At this point, in early 1978, the UK hobby industry seems to be on the up! But of course, the US hobby scene was booming and Britain hadn't yet produced anything that even looked like D&D.

Meanwhile, the Lord of the Rings franchise, which Ian Livingstone holds out as an inspiration to British designers, is being withdrawn: as this issue goes to press, Tolkien Enterprise's cease-and-desist orders are forcing companies to pull their LotR boardgames and rename their hobbits as halflings.

Of course, the irony is that there was a UK company that was poised to do all the things Ian Livingstone criticised Brits for not getting on with: publish a revered fantasy RPG, produce a huge range of F/SF boardgames, create two world-conquering wargaming rules series, and develop a behemoth of a miniatures brand that spawned its own bespoke paints. And pick up that Lord of the Rings licence. That would be Games Workshop.

Alice In Dungeonland

Don Turnbull dominates this issue and launches into an account of the Alice-themed sub-level of his Greenlands Dungeon. In analysing issue #3, I wrote about what seemed to be a distinctive feature of UK D&D: its whimsy, an undergraduate culture of puzzles, puns, and Monty Python. I also discussed the central role of the big 'mega dungeon' in mid-70s D&D. Both are on display here.

Articles like this must have been instructive: if someone like Don Turnbull platys D&D this way, if this is what good dungeon design looks like, well, wouldn't you imitate? However, like the Red Queen and the White, Turnbull is to be set against his antithesis : Lew Pulsipher will continue his D&D Campaigns article, decrying this sort of funhouse, lottery-based D&D.

One thing that leaps out of this dungeon is how deadly it is. Turnbull suggests this is from Level 4 of the Greenlands Dungeon. Look at what the PCs are up against: 6 weretigers, 2 hill giants, a 7HD vampire, 2 couatls, a 10HD spirit naga, 2 manticores, a chimera, a gorgon, and 2 shambling mounds (9HD and 6HD). OK, it isn't strictly necessary to fight every one of them: PCs can hasten through encounters if they don't want to explore and gain treasure. However, there's no retreating to heal and refresh spells.

All these monsters are from Greyhawk levels 5 and 6. In terms of Turnbull's own Monstermark system, they are VI (hill giants, spirit naga), VII (manticores, weretigers), VIII (couatls, chimaeras), IX (vampire), and X and XI (shambling mounds). Level 8-9 sounds a better fit, especially with all the traps that require Remove Curse or Dispel Magic.

The other feature is the lack of what we (today) think of as roleplaying going on here. We are used to a distinction between 'in character' and 'out of character' knowledge, with the assumption that good roleplayers operate on IC but not OOC knowledge. But the whole point of the Alice dungeon level is to appeal to OOC awareness of Through The Looking Glass (1871); indeed, the final chess puzzle can't be solved unless the players not only read Lewis Carroll's book, but recall the precise move Alice made with her pawn.

Remember???

We saw something similar with Fred Hemmings' competitive dungeon last issue, where contemporary pop cultural knowledge was needed to solve riddles.

My point isn't that there's something wrong with the style of D&D essayed by Turnbull and Hemmings; my point is that this style has almost entirely disappeared. Indeed, it was to disappear over the next couple of years.

Dungeonland wasn't an idea that occurred to Turnbull alone. Gary Gygax created a Dungeonland mini-level for his Castle Greyhawk mega dungeon - it was published in 1983 as Module EX1. However, Gygax's Dungeonland expected the players to use OOC knowledge to get the joke, but not to resolve the encounters themselves. In this, it resembled X2: Castle Amber (Tom Moldvay, 1981), which was best appreciated if you got the allusions to Clark Ashton-Smith's Averoigne stories or Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber series, but such knowledge didn't help you solve the scenario's problems.

Now that I think of it, this IC/OOC distinction has been completely absent from discussion in White Dwarf so far. Lew Pulsipher champions the idea of player 'skill' in D&D, but he doesn't mean skill at pretending to be a person from a fantasy world: just skilfully solving tactical problems and puzzles. When presented with something that invites playing a character with a different outlook from your own - the 'four-way alignment system' - he rejects it, in favour of PCs who are partisans in a cosmic struggle between Law and Chaos that might dictate alliances and limit options (e.g. no killing the prisoners if you're Lawful), but which is completely unrelated to nuances of personality.

I'm not saying Don Tunbull's players didn't roleplay in any sense. Surely, someone played a dwarf who loved gold or a magic-user who was absent-minded. Surely they gave their characters quirks. But there seems to be no expectation that players immerse themselves in these roles.

In the 'portal fantasies' of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or Poul Anderson, the hero is someone from our world who ends up in a fantasy world. Maybe, like John Carter on Mars, they find themselves much stronger than they used to be; like Holger Carlsson in Three Hearts & Three Lions, they know how to do things like ride horses that they previously had no experience of. But they are still themselves, they remember the world (our world, the real world) from which they came, and they can deploy their recollections usefully, like Hank Morgan, in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), who uses his understanding of engineering to advance himself in the medieval world.

This approach to fantasy seems to be the template for a lot of roleplaying going on in the mid-'70s, assuming Turnbull and Hemmings are representative. Indeed, it informed the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon a decade later.

D&D Campaigns

Lew Pulsipher is an advocate of a far more serious style of play than what we see in the 'funhouse' scenarios provided by Hemmings and Turnbull - although, to be fair, the 'Dungeonland' sub-level might not be typical of Don Turnbull's Greenlands Dungeon. Pulsipher calls himself a proponent of the 'Skill Campaign' in which players are rewarded for using resources intelligently and taking the imagined reality of the RPG seriously.

Yet more unites them than divides these two. Pulsipher shares with Turnbull the assumption that D&D takes place in multi-storey 'mega dungeons' that have been stocked with (what I take to be) an arbitrary assortment of monsters and treasures.

Pulsipher advises a DM to start with a dungeon by designing "two or three levels at first, connecting them with the usual stairs, chimneys, ladders, descending passageways, and so on," adding that this "will be sufficient for the first few months of the campaign."

Pulsipher argues for a level of realism that was perhaps unusual for DMs at the time. By 'realism' he means: monsters should be able to fit into rooms, they should not be placed next to other monsters that would certainly kill them, there should be "corridors through which inhabitants can reach the outdoors, or at least other levels."

However, much of Lew Pulsipher's article is rooted in conditions of gaming that are, even in early 1978, passing away. He devotes time to discussing the need to collate tables from different rule books and articles that describe attack matrices, saving throws, and spells: thus was Original D&D before AD&D came along. Lew refers to the "revised rules" clearing up spelll-casting, and he must be referring to the new Holmes Basic D&D rules book.

There is also a commitment to variety. Wandering monsters - and perhaps 'placed' monsters too - are rolled on the Greyhawk random monster tables, even at the cost of thematic unity. Like Don Turnbull, Pulsipher is concerned to balance monster power against PCs, and suggests calculating the XP value of the entire PC party and assigning monsters worth 35%-50% of that value as wanderers, or 70% to 110% as placed. Pulsipher suggests determining all wandering monsters ahead of time, but this again seems to be advice rooted in the inconvenience of searching through different books and fanzines to find the monster if you roll it 'on the spot.'

The 'City' and 'Wilderness' are under-developed aspects of Pulsipher's game. The City "often exists in abstract form, since players must buy equipment and live somewhere." It is relegated to what later parlance calls 'downtime.' However, he gives good advice about not having a Magic Shoppe or "magic drink tavern": the City is ordinary life, it is in the dungeon that the marvellous can be encountered.

Crucially, Pulsipher rejects a design he attributes to Gary Gygax, which is that there should be a "theme for each dungeon level," saying he finds this "too limiting." The example he gives is ironic: a dungeon level in which "the various Chaotic humanoid races are at war." This is a characteristic feature of the Modules Gary Gygax publishes later in 1978, specifically the Giants Modules and, in 1979, B2: The Keep On The Borderlands. The Modules are all tightly themed and feature inimical Chaotic monster factions that clever PCs can pit against each other.

Themed - but hardly limited!

Lew's preference for "variety" over theme places his advice on the other side of a huge shift in D&D's play style that will take root over the next few years. The Zenopus Dungeon in the Holmes Basic D&D Set looks like a variety dungeon and in White Dwarf #12 we will find Bill Howard's variety dungeon The Pool of the Standing Stones; these are however on the wrong side of history, and the far-superior Lichway by Albie Fiore in issue #9 is a themed dungeon with inimical factions.

At the end of the article, Lew discusses the problems with designing Wilderness Adventures, because the random encounter tables aren't gradated by lethality: it is "as likely that dragons will be encountered as orcs." There's no sense here that the encounters might be non-combative, that you might sight a dragon flying overhead; no, an encounter means a fight, Fortunately, "three or four magic-users above fifth level are sufficient for most encounters," which begs the question, just how many characters are there in a typical game of mid-'70s D&D?

The answer, in next issue's article, may surprise you.

Hyboria

After the sound and fury in issue #2, it seemed as if White Dwarf had broken with the tabletop wargaming crowd, but there has been some rapprochement, because here is veteran tabletopper Tony Bath, describing his influential Hyboria campaign.

Hyboria is pre-Ice Age Europe and Asia, populated by the fantasy stories of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936)

Bath started wargaming in the 1950s and somehow discovered Robert E. Howard's 'Conan' stories in a decade when they were long out of print and all the rarer in the UK. He used Hyboria as a wargaming setting because it enabled him to pit 'Ancients' (i.e. medieval or Iron Age) armies from different time periods against each other; he recognises the territories of Asgard as "Vikings," Aquilonia as "medieval," and Brythunia and Corinthia as "Greek" and "Roman."

Bath became a gaming buddy with Don Featherstone, the pioneering wargamer, and the two of them set up the War Games Digest and the UK's first wargaming convention in Southampton in 1961; Bath founded the Society of Ancients in 1965. Hyboria players fought their battles at these conventions and conducted their politicking by post, with Bath writing up the results in the Digest and other fanzines as pseudo-historical battle reports.

In this article, Bath describes the process of building a campaign around Hyboria, assigning rulers and generals as playable characters, developing economic rules for funding armies and fortifications. He concedes that his campaign is "not a true fantasy" because "magic plays very little part in its affairs."

As with Hartley Patterson's Before The Flood (in issue #2), this article gives a window into a hobby subculture that fed into the development of fantasy roleplaying. The Conan Marvel comic, scripted by Roy Thomas, had been running since 1970 and, after the 1982 film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Conan became a household name. But the Hyborian setting was, I think, less well-known. A lot of young readers of Bath's article might not have realised he was describing a wargaming campaign, not a roleplaying game, but I bet it inspired a lot of DMs to expand their games out of the dungeon and - despite Lew Pulsipher's warnings - let their players explore the wilderness of Hyboria.

Open Box

Lew Pulsipher gives 9/10 to Nomad Gods, the boardgame from Chaosium (or 'The Chaosium' as it was then). The game is a follow-on from White Bear & Red Moon, which was cited by Ian Livingstone in his combative editorial in issue #2, serving as a game that sceptical wargamers should try before dismissing F/SF gaming.

Nomad Gods is fondly remembered and was intended as the middle part of a trilogy of games, but the third instalment never came. What arrived instead was Runequest, the RPG set in the same Bronze Age world of Glorantha. Lots of RQ players sought out Nomad Gods (and WB&RM) retrospectively, to fill out their understanding of Glorantha's idiosyncratic lore. Runequest was released at the Origins game fair in July, but Lew Pulsipher must have been unaware these boardgames games were trailing a hot new RPG, otherwise he would surely have mentioned it.

Martin Easterbrook is broadly positive about Star Empires, a TSR SF wargame that was a sequel/expansion to designer John Snider's previous Star Probe. This was another game doomed to be the middle part of an incomplete trilogy. It was scheduled for release in 1974, but got bumped down the schedule by the success of D&D. By this point, TSR had decided their future did not lie in stodgy SF boardgames: they never really promoted the game and returned the rights to Snider in 1980.

Martin is less impressed by the skirmish micro-game Melee. His 'meh' response surprises me, since this is another game by (American) Steve Jackson, who wowed everyone with Ogre a few months ago. Melee was followed up by magical duel game Wizard a year later and the two would form the superstructure of a new RPG called The Fantasy Trip. Steve Jackson bailed on that project, but set up his own company, and used the core mechanics of Melee and Wizard in his GURPS RPG system.

Not that Martin Easterbrook could be expected to foresee any of that. But, given the popularity of 'fixing' D&D, especially the D&D combat system, I would have thought a reviewer would have endorsed a cheap microgame with elegant rules a bit more enthusiastically. Never mind. We must instead smile at the description of armour in Melee working "in the same way as Tunnels & Trolls" while, in a year's time, everyone will say it works the same way as Runequest.

Fred Hemmings is a big fan of Dungeon!, which is still in print today. In fact, it had been around in design form since 1972, pre-dating D&D, and in print since 1975, so I'm not sure why it's being reviewed in this issue as a new game. Perhaps it was just new to Games Workshop's imported stock.

The game was designed by David Megarry, who was one of the players in Dave Arneson's proto-D&D Blackmoor campaign. Megarry wanted a way of capturing the experience of Blackmoor in a boardgame. He accompanied Arneson on the fateful 1972 trip to Lake Geneva, to share his boardgame (then titled The Dungeons of Pasha Cada) and Arneson's Blackmoor with Gary Gygax.

Dungeon! suffered the same fate as Star Empires, being bounced down the production schedule as D&D consumed Gygax's time and attention, but unlike Snider's game, once published it complemented D&D beautifully. In fact, I bet there are a lot of players who introduced their school friends, younger siblings, boyfriends, and girlfriends to D&D via Dungeon! I bet they still do.

Monsters Mild And Malign

The title's a bit precious isn't it? Not to worry, it will be replaced in issue #6 with the punchier Fiend Factory.

Don Turnbull presents a selection of monsters, apparently culled from other fanzines and campaigns (but without accreditation, which is turning into a bit of a signature move for early WD). Turnbull embeds the monsters in an essay discussing the good and bad points of designing new monsters, which is a pleasant way of enlivening a list. Collecting new monsters seems to be the abiding passion of D&D referees in this early phase of the game. Naturally, Don adds his Monstermark for each creature.

The monsters are a charming collection of oddballs: none of them boring, but not one that enjoyed longevity beyond this article. What I'm struck by is the format Don Turnbull uses, compared to that employed by Ian Livingstone, who did a creature feature in Treasure Chest back in issue #2.

Turnbull is working from the format of Greyhawk, where the monsters key statistics are lumped together in a big table, then each gets a paragraph later on in the book. This is part of the maddening dispersal of information you find in Original D&D. So Don brings each monster's statistics together with its text in a helpfully unified paragraph.

Hot off the presses comes the Holmes Basic D&D rulebook. introduced in the UK as the D&D Revised Rules (mentioned by Lew Pulsipher earlier). In this rules set, we find each monster being given its familiar 'stat block' bringing key information together in summary, with a bit of text underneath. This would go onto to become the standard format, albeit expanded, in the forthcoming AD&D Monster Manual.

Back in the summer, Ian Livingstone used a stat block just like Holmes Basic D&D for his new monsters. I suspect Livingstone was privy to the text of the new D&D rulebook while commissioning art for the Games Workshop UK edition. That's why the style of his monsters looks ahead to Basic and Advanced D&D, while the style of Turnbull's article looks back to Original D&D.

Don Turnbull's Black Orc (upper left) above the Greyhawk Bugbear married to its text (below left); the Holmes Basic Bugbear with its stat block (centre), and Ian Livingstone's Giant Centipede with its stat block (right)

Treasure Chest

This column brings back Adam Holt as the Loremaster of Avallon, with more of his interminable house rules for making D&D combat more 'realistic.' Perhaps the rules in this column are the ones that should have been included last issue to make the whole thing intelligible, but I'm not going to investigate. Look at (American) Steve Jackson instead. Steve didn't like the D&D combat system either, so he joined the Society for Creative Anachronism and learned to sword-fight. Then he took what he learned to create the Melee microgame (reviewed this issue). Be like Steve - or use Melee for your D&D house rules, if you must.

Much more interesting is Brian Asbury's Barbarian character class. Asbury will be a frequent contributor to White Dwarf over the next couple of years and this new class is a great calling card, especially as its neither a joke nor a shameless dumbing-down of an existing class. It was a popular addition, and made its way into the Best of White Dwarf Articles.

The Best Of... version of the Barbarian is an updated version of the one found in this issue.

I reviewed the 'Asbury Barbarian' and proposed a variant of it for the White Box retroclone, in an earlier blog.

The Asbury Barbarian suffers from the problem of lots of these fan-made D&D classes: too busy, too powerful, unbalanced. For example, the Barbarian has the same XP requirements as a Cleric, but has the combat potential of a Fighter with some of the utilities of a Thief. It ought to have higher XP requirements, up alongside Magic-Users.

The Barbarian can track like a Ranger and climb like a Thief, and has an 'always on' sense danger power. The danger-sense violates one of Lew Pulsipher's sensible principles, that players should exercise skill by choosing to use powers, not have powers that save them from trouble regardless of their choices.

To qualify for the other powers, the Barbarian must meet requisites, like 9+ Intelligence for Sign Language or 13+ Strength/Dexterity for First Attack Ferocity. Ferocity is a power that lets Barbarians 'backstab' (i.e. double damage) with their first attack, but unlike Thieves they don't have to manoeuvre into an advantageous position first.

Overpowered? Definitely, though the idea of having class powers dependent on other requisites beside your prime requisite is intriguing - but an idea not followed up for other classes or subclasses in this era of D&D, alas.

The limitation that's supposed to offset all this is the inability to wear armour. Just shields, folks - but that diminishes as you go up levels (leather at 6th, chain at 11th) and a combination of high Dexterity and magic items like bracers of defence or cloaks of protection, or magical shields with big plusses, could mitigate this too.

I find the Asbury Barbarian more subtle and appealing than the 'official' Barbarian class that appeared in TSR's Unearthed Arcana (1985).

For all its flaws, Asbury's Barbarian feels like the first meaningful fan contribution to D&D as-hobbyists-will-play-it: far more so than Monstermarks, Alice-themed dungeon levels, or complicated new combat systems. This is the start of a tradition in which White Dwarf will excel, shaping how people play RPGs through the 1970s and into the '80s.

Competitive D&D

More sharing from Fred Hemmings of the funhouse/puzzle dungeon Pandora's Box, that he used as a tournament on D&D-Day in 1977.

These four encounters from the deadly 5th level of the dungeon don't really illustrate much about the nature of tournament play, but as with last issue's offering, they illustrate a lot about he style of D&D going on at D&D-Day (and presumably wider in UK hobbydom).

As with Don Turnbull's Alice-themed level, a lot of the encounters require OOC knowledge to appreciate, or even complete. I recognise that a tournament dungeon involves players who a strangers to you and don't know your campaign setting, so referring to (as in this case) the Pharaoh Akhnaten [sic] will be more meaningful that alluding to an ancient emperor from your own lore.

But Fred Hemmings isn't explicit about this: that's not advice he offers. Perhaps he used a historical pharaoh in full awareness of the OOC knowledge he was appealing to, but calculating it was the lesser of two evils. But I get the impression, as with Don Turnbull's dungeon, that this distinction between IC and OOC roleplaying wasn't something anyone explicitly attended to. D&D was just rather fluid about that sort of thing, back then.

Akhenaten was the father of Tutankhamun

We know that some people in the mid-'70s were campaigning in self-contained fantasy worlds that owed nothing to the history and mythology of our world. Empire of the Petal Throne is one such (although Don Turnbull appears to use it solely as a source of new monsters to crib).

But EPT was always a bit niche, a bit inaccessible. In July of 1978, Runequest will sell out at Origins, introducing players to the Glorantha RPG campaign setting.

In 1980, The World of Greyhawk will do the same for D&D and the casual blurring of IC and OOC knowledge will disappear from the hobby.

Letters and Adverts

There's nothing very exciting in the Letters Page, but there is a sense of continuity, of letters replying to previous letters, with is a symptom of a healthy readership base.

Don Turnbull, in full Maths Teacher mode, writes to correct an earlier correspondent's calculations about Monstermarks for Balrogs. Naturally, he shows his workings.

John Norris writes from Newcastle to share with an earlier correspondent all the different miniature companies that offer realistic dungeoneers, dungeon mules, equipment packs, and suggestions for DIY techniques to add 10' poles to your adventurer minis.

The usual adverts recur, but Archive Miniatures takes out a full page ad for their Star Rovers line. That octopus-headed monster will look familiar to Runequest fans, but Runequest doesn't exist yet! I'll solve this mystery when I look at White Dwarf #6.

Tally Ho Games stops advertising Avalon Hill boardgames and tests the water with ritual magic kits: black magic, witchcraft, divination kits. It's a bold strategy. There probably was (and still is) some overlap between occult practitioners and D&D players, however important it was in the 1980s to deny it, but I imagine most players bought this stuff, if they attended to it at all, simply as 'props.'

Games Workshop have their usual full page mail order stock list, but there's a new addition: the Dungeons & Dragons revised edition (incl. poly dice, M&T ass, and Geo 1) for £7.50, or the rules for £2.50.

This must be the "revised rules" of which Lew Pulsipher wrote. But what exactly is it?

It's the famous 'blue book' Holmes Basic D&D rules, printed under licence by Games Workshop. GW wanted to put their own stamp on the product, and commissioned new art to replace some of the weaker pieces (subjective opinion) by TSR artist David C. Sutherland III with artist Chris 'Fangorn' Baker, who has illustrated White Dwarf, including the cover for issue 2. The iconic cover art was also replaced by John Blanche (who did this issue's cover).

Edit: Archzenopus points out that the UK D&D rules were only ever published as a stand alone rulebook, so that must be the £2.50 'rules only' version of D&D, while the £7.50 version must be the US boxed Basic D&D set.

Classic Sutherland cover (left), Blanche cover (mid left), Sutherland art (above right), and Fangorn replacement art (below right).

In what is starting to look like a signature move, Games Workshop deleted the accreditation of the text to Dr Eric Holmes!

(To be clear, I don't think GW had any sort of policy about not crediting authors. I think it's just amateurism. TSR was pretty poor about this too and didn't give D. Daniel Wagner or Gary Switzer credit for the Thief class when it was published in Greyhawk).

The GW 'revised edition' went through two print runs and it is a valuable rarity today. Later in '78, it was replaced by UK editions of the Basic D&D set, with Module B1 included, and the original artwork restored (and Holmes credited).

Back Cover

The back cover has art by Alan Hunter, who did the cover for issue #3. I remarked about that, that Hunter has a very distinctive 'woodcut' style and seems to delight in depicting monsters materialising through portals. Here he seems to be showing us a trio of extra-planar nasties waiting patiently while a portal forms, so that they can step through it and menace the Prime Material Plane.

The gawping critter at the bottom recurs in issue #6's Fiend Factory as the illustration for an Ian Livingstone creation called 'the Fiend'

In Retrospect

Some of the big changes to sweep over the hobby in 1978 get hinted at: Chaosium's Nomad Gods prefigures Glorantha, Asbury's Barbarian sets the style for the expansion of character classes, the 'revised D&D rules' herald the top-to-bottom overhaul of D&D. But otherwise it's business as usual for multi-level funhouse/variety dungeons and very little mention so far in White Dwarf of what later players would consider to be 'roleplaying.'

The arrival of John Blanche as an artist for Games Workshop is significant, in light of his later influence. We also see illustrations by Polly Wilson, whose monster illustrations will feature heavily in Fiend Factory. There's nothing by Fangorn in this issue, though he will return.

It's a transitional issue for White Dwarf, and we will see a few more of them, until the summer's new releases ring in the changes.

]]><![CDATA[Spiders in Green Grottoes: White Dwarf #3 (1977) reviewed]]>Thu, 14 Aug 2025 09:48:11 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/spiders-in-green-grottoes-white-dwarf-3-1977-reviewedI've reviewed White Dwarf #1 (here) and #2 (here), so it makes sense to crack on and review White Dwarf #3, to complete a classic trilogy. Issue 3 arrived through letterboxes on the run-up to Christmas, while the nation swayed, for weeks on end, to Paul McCartney's Mull of Kintyre.

Travel with me back in time, to the winter of 1977, as inflation soars, the Yorkshire Ripper eludes the police, and a nation waits patiently for Star Wars to come to their cinema screens.

The 'Green Grotto' issue: Alan Hunter depicts a warrior and his lady friend startled by a spider, or perhaps the old man turning into a werewolf (or a werewolf turning into an old man)

The Cover: 'Watch out for that Spider!'

Alan Hunter (1923-2012) did some of the interior art last issue and will go on to produce a lot of illustrations for White Dwarf. Along with the late Russ Nicholson, he is one of the WD artists whose work features prominently in TSR's 1981 Fiend Folio.

Hunter has a distinctive style that reminds me of medieval woodcuts. He was a veteran artist by the time he contributed to White Dwarf, having made his name in the 1950s. However, I don't think his cover art here is particularly successful. His best illustrations are posed pieces; he's not so good at conveying dynamic movement or violent action. I suspect he was essaying the fantasy trope of 'Warrior + Maiden Confront Wizard' but it's all too stylised (right down to the squares on the floor). There's another picture of his that I love that appeared in White Dwarf #38 in 1983.

Hunter seems to delight in drawing spectral beings emerging from portals.

Editorial: The Force Awakens

In the first two issues, Ian Livingstone's Editorials addressed divisions within the hobby community, possibly even stoked them, but advocated a distinctive identity for F/SF gamers, and roleplayers in particular.

Something seems to have changed in the last couple of months. Livingstone is upbeat, outward-looking, and inclusive. There has clearly been financial news that puts White Dwarf on a secure footing; he hints it might be US sales adding to the homegrown market. The upshot is that Livingstone doesn't need to court or chide the historical wargaming crowd: the magazine will be fine without them.

(Well, there is perhaps a dig. Livingstone announces he won't become "complacent" or "let the magazine drift into a safe, stereotyped format" - I wonder which prestigious wargaming periodical he was taking aim at there.)

Livingstone addressees his new audience: what should future issues of White Dwarf carry? More SF? Articles by designers? More art? Short fiction? As it turns out, all of these will feature over the next year.

Livingstone signs off with the phrase, "May the Force be with you."

Star Wars wasn't going to appear in the UK until December 27 - like many, I went to see it as a post-Christmas treat. However, it had been out in the USA since the summer, having smashed the box office records there, so it was a well-known movie. I'm not sure why the gap between US and UK distribution was so enormous. Like many kids, I already knew all about Star Wars. The 2000AD Summer Special had trailed the film (with some inaccuracies) and I rushed to collect the giant-sized compilations Marvel's comic adaptations of the film. Then the Alan Dean Foster novelisation.

The HOURS I spent poring over these ...

I don't think I was an unusual 10-year-old in this regard. Certainly, the crowd at Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed (the book shop advertised last issue) knew all about Star Wars.

"May the Force be with you," then, in late '77, wasn't yet the broad cultural touchstone it later became, but it was definitely 'If You Know, You Know.' I suppose, to use a 2025 phrase usually employed in other contexts, it was a Dog Whistle.

Solo Dungeon Mapping

This two page article outlines a technique for generating randomised dungeon maps - with a view to solo dungeon-bashing (map the corridors, enter the rooms, randomly generate monsters and treasure, fight, loot, repeat).

As such, it's a mere curiosity, since the AD&D DM's Guide (1979) would include tables for random dungeon creation that were rather more sophisticated than this. Especially as this method involves first creating over 100 mini-maps (20x20 squares), to shuffle and copy for each section. That's a chore.

The author is credited as Roger Moores. One wonders, is this in fact Roger E. Moore, the prodigious contributor to RPG magazines (including White Dwarf in the future) and later editor of Dragon magazine?

If this is indeed that Roger E. Moore, then Moore would have been a recent graduate at this time in his life, who only discovered D&D in the summer of '77, while stationed as a mental health counsellor at Fort Bragg. This would be one of his first published articles for D&D, perhaps submitted to White Dwarf after his transfer to West Germany.

I love to think of young Moore, stuck in Fort Bragg or Mannheim, obsessed with D&D, making hundreds of mini-maps so he could play D&D by himself.

Of course, if there is an actual Roger Moores out there, who hates seeing his work misattributed to his famous near-namesake, then please clear this up and accept my apology!

The other thing that leaps of the page is the quality of those maps. They aren't Moore's (or Moores's) maps, because the same technique is used in Hemmings' following article on Competitive D&D. They are in the distinctive style that White Dwarf would employ for its celebrated mini-modules, with the rooms and corridors in white, on a grid background. Far more attractive than the floorplans you find in Judges Guild scenarios (except Tegel Manor, of course) or the Zenopus Dungeon in Holmes Basic D&D (out next year); they hold their head up with the Classic Blue Design used in TSR's modules (also out next year).

I'd love to know if they were created by one of the WD artists, or produced on some early mapping software package. These designs contributed to the clean, grown-up aesthetic the White Dwarf came to embody. They introduced me to the notion that dungeon maps could be more than just functional: they could be beautiful.

Competitive D&D

The third part of Fred Hemmings' series, which, I must confess, has taught me very little about how to run a competitive D&D tournament (indeed, this issue's Letter's Page has a complaint related to this), but it tells us a lot about the distinctive Pythonesque gaming subculture that Hemmings inhabits.

This issue, we get a write-up of the first level of the PANDORA'S MAZE dungeon. It's heavy on traps and riddles, but look: there's more of that fantastic mapping technique on display.

The dungeon is a baffling business. It reads as if vital tables or keys are missing. What can be made out is that monsters teleport in and attack for no clear reason, super high-level NPCs with silly names sit around in small rooms being unhelpful, and that many of the riddles refer to pub quiz trivia (quotes from the Bible, jokes about electricity pylons, brands of cigars, Judy Garland songs) rather than fantasy/medieval tropes that the characters (rather than the players) might be expected to understand.

I suppose what we can take away from this is that the literary form of 'dungeon module' was still evolving, and it wasn't yet clear the best way to do it. Recognising what information you need to tell readers, and what is so obvious it goes without saying, is not in fact so obvious it goes without saying. In a year from now, hobbyists will have read the Zenopus Dungeon, In Search of the Unknown, and the first quality mini-modules in the pages of White Dwarf, and the standards of the genre will take clearer shape. We will see the same inconsistency remarked upon in the reviews of Judges Guild dungeons (coming up this issue), so Fred Hemmings is not to be condemned for failing to be ahead of his time.

What this boils down to is, no one can write well in a new genre until they've all been exposed to someone writing very well in it, whereupon, suddenly, everyone seems to know how to do it. It must have been the same on the Elizabethan stage when Marlowe and Shakespeare showed up to demonstrate how it was done.

The Monstermark System

In the previous two issues, Don Turnbull expanded on his technique for representing the lethality of D&D monsters in a single 'Monstermark' score and used it to redraft the D&D Greyhawk random monster tables, to produce something less arbitrary.

Turnbull got a lot of criticism for this system, mostly from people who shy away from hard sums, but he was a Maths teacher before he became a games designer, so I guess old habits die hard.

This article doesn't add any more to the Monstermark calculations (big sighs of relief all round), but it does generate a couple of interesting ideas. One is a set of examples using the Monstermark to calculate XP awards. They seem fair enough, except most D&D retroclones that I use (Labyrinth Lord, Dragonslayer, Blueholme) have already 'fixed' the XP awards - and I never paid any attention to the strange rule, that Turnbull so strongly advocates, that higher level characters only get a fraction of the XP that a monster would be worth for lower level characters.

Much better is the clever table for randomly determining which random monster table to use for your wandering monsters (or to allocate monsters to rooms, if that's your thing). For example, on the 2nd dungeon level, you might get paltry monsters from the level I table (1-3 on a d20), you will probably get respectable opponents from the level II or III tables (4-13 on a d20), but you could run up against level IV monsters (14-17), or level V (18-19) or even level VI (eek, a 20).

(Let me remind you, the Monstermark allocates wraiths, succubi, and 5-headed hydras to level V, and basilisks, mummies, and the dreaded carrion crawler to level VI. No fun running into THEM on dungeon level 2)

This is absolutely a more sensible method than the Rules As Written - why shouldn't horrific denizens of the lower deeps be holidaying in the upper dungeon levels on rare occasions?

What I am struck by is Don Turnbull's assumption that D&D is played by exploring what we today call a 'mega-dungeon': a structure that descends below ground for a dozen levels or more and that the PC adventurers return to again and again.

The early rules of D&D seem to assume such settings and the original designers created them (Gygax's Greyhawk Castle and Arneson's Blackmoor dungeon); there's a lovely side elevation of such a dungeon in the Holmes Basic D&D which was to see print the following year:

Skull Mountain, baby! Hoo-yeah!!!

Don Turnbull refers to his own 'Greenlands Dungeon' that has this 'mega' structure - and he would publish extracts from it in future issues of White Dwarf.

The mega-dungeon was doomed to pass away and 1977 might be seen as its final year in the sun. In 1978, TSR would start printing its 'modules' that re-framed the dungeon adventure into a much smaller location for a much sharper tactical purpose: eliminating the leadership of the coalition of Giants, discovering the fate of Zelligar and Rogahn, looting the tomb of the demi-lich Acerak.

The passing of the mega-dungeon was also hurried along by the sort of scenarios later published in White Dwarf and Dragon: not extracts from a larger dungeon conurbation, but focused encounters in settings that were realised in superior detail. By the 1980s, and certainly by the '90s, hardly anyone was playing D&D by launching repeated delves into the same seemingly-limitless underground labyrinth.

But then, mega-dungeons returned. The Old School Renaissance (OSR) reclaimed this style of play in the 21st century. Michael Curtis's Stonehell (2009) and Greg Gillespie's Barrowmaze (2012) are celebrated examples.

You can find Stonehell on Lulu (quite cheap), but for Barrowmaze try drivethrurpg and spend a bit more

However, modern mega-dungeons aren't like the ones of old. They've got theme and coherence. You don't roll on a Random Monster Table that might throw up literally anything. Their tables offer curated lists, based on the concept behind that part of the dungeon. The '70s-style underground metropolis where just about every type of monster could be encountered, just wandering about: that's gone for good.

Nevertheless, when I next convene my school club and send a group of PCs into one of the new mega-dungeons, I might tweak the Wandering Monster Tables in line with Don Turnbull's suggestions, allowing small chances of drawing terrifying encounters from deeper in the dungeon or (perhaps, mercifully) from the higher levels instead.

Open Box

Don Turnbull is back as a reviewer in Open Box, taking up two pages to assess a range of products from Judges Guild.

Judges Guild launched the previous year, after super-fan Bob Bledsaw travelled to TSR head office in Lake Geneva to pitch ideas and came away with Dave Arneson's blessing to create D&D-related products. At that time, Gary Gygax didn't think D&D fans wanted 'official' dungeons or play aids. How wrong could a boy be? Judges Guild started publishing crib sheets, character sheets, monster lists, and of course a DM's Screen (they called it a 'shield,' Don Turnbull calls it a 'privacy screen,' which shows how fluid terms and concepts were at this time), and of course scenarios.

They sold like hot cakes. Supposedly, the reason TSR turned to publishing adventure modules in 1978 was because they saw how much money Judges Guild was making from selling scenarios.

JG stuff was cheap to publish and they cranked out tons of it; quality control be damned. The aesthetic amounted to daft puns and goofy NPCs, somewhat giving the lie to Lew Pulsipher's assertion (last issue) that the US hobby scene was more serious than in the UK. Nonetheless, what they did supremely well was maps, especially big campaign maps of cities, provinces, whole continents. Moreover, they collated the disparate jumble of D&D rules, tables, spells, monsters, and magic items, and brought them together on handouts. Invaluable resources these, especially in an era before photocopying was widely available.

For a few years in the 1970s, Judges Guild was synonymous with D&D for most hobbyists. But then TSR got their act together with AD&D and started to compete and, anyway, the hobby culture shifted. Goofiness was replaced by serious narrative, high production quality (hardback books, full colour) came to be seen as standard, and it was a standard JG didn't rise to. By the early-80s, JG was headed for irrelevance.

But before that happened, they had four amazing products to deliver, and two of them are reviewed here.

The other two, in case you didn't know, are the scenarios Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower, both by Paul Jaquays who, by wild coincidence, appears on this issue's Letters Page.

Tegel Manor is, as Turnbull describes it, "a huge haunted house on a bleak, wind-swept sea-coast." The map is, everyone agrees, superb. The content is, as we Brits say, a bit 'Marmite.'

Turnbull doesn't seem to notice the elements that make most critics grind their teeth: it's a 'funhouse dungeon' with randomly assigned monsters and a strange frat boy sense of humour, such as the random encounters with members of the eccentric 'Rump' family. On the contrary, he says he played the scenario (though surely not all of it, it's huge) and "found it enjoyable ... a novel change from the more familiar dungeon setting" (even though it has a dungeon underneath) so I guess expectations were different in '77.

Although I'm pretty sure I know what Lew Pulsipher thinks of funhouse dungeons. He'll remind us in his D&D Campaigns article later.

City State of the Invincible Overlord is the jewel in JG's crown, and Turnbull recognises he's in the presence of greatness. The maps of the enormous city and the castle it trades with are awesome and so is the level of detail in which the city map is keyed. What Turnbull finds odd is that the dungeons under and outside the City are not stocked: they are just dungeon maps, for the purchaser to fill as they see fit.

"No DM worth his salt," opines Don Turnbull, "needs someone else to draw dungeons for him, though he would buy fully stocked and populated dungeons in order to gain fresh ideas for his own creation."

This is a little odd coming from someone who has spent three months 'fixing' the D&D random monster tables, precisely to assist with randomly stocking dungeon maps.

What I take away from this is confirmation of my earlier intuition, that the standards for a D&D scenario were still in flux in 1977. No one had yet produced the definitive dungeon and nailed expectations. There were all sorts of dungeons out there: serious, silly, stocked, unstocked, vast, small. Turnbull acknowledges the "massive differences in style between products of different DMs" but it's safe to say that, by this time next year, there will be an authoritative style, and it will have been laid down by Gary Gygax.

The other reviews are of board games. Citadel (FGU) is one of the earliest examples of a game with a modular board, though of course reviewer Mike Westhead doesn't use that term. Fourth Dimension (by British designer J. A. Bell) is what we now term an 'abstract strategy' game with a loosey-goosey SF theme pasted on; Fred Hemmings likes it well enough and it must have sold, because TSR bought it and produced their own edition.

Martin Easterbrook gives the thumbs-down to the Hobbit-inspired Battle of the Five Armies. So too did Tolkien Enterprises, which finally noticed what TSR (and other hobby gamers) were getting up to with Tolkien's property. Before this year ends, a cease-and-desist order will force TSR to bin games like this (and rename their hobbits, ents, and balrogs in the forthcoming AD&D rules).

D&D Campaigns

Lew Pulsipher is back, continuing his essay on the Right Way To Play D&D from issue #1. It's easy to mock Lew's thin-lipped tone, especially from the 'Your-Game-Your-Way' liberalism of the 21st century. However, I can't stress enough how important essays like these became for young gamers like myself, figuring out how to 'do D&D properly' with almost no adult input. I devoured these articles. I could probably have quoted them word for word. And do you know what, they helped me be a good DM to my school friends.

Re-reading them decades later, I'm intrigued by the idea of Lew as a civiliser, no, a missionary: the Apostle to the Brits, come to bring the word of Higher Roleplaying to the benighted savages of these rain-soaked islands, coaxing them away from pantomime, puns, and Monty Python, trying desperately to get them to Take It Seriously.

Thank you Lew Pulsipher: you lifted me out of darkness

Lew launches this article with a piece of resonant advice:

"The referee must think of himself as a friendly computer with discretion. Referee interference in the game must be reduced as much as possible..." because every time the referee interferes in the game from a position of omniscience, "he reduces the element of skill."

These days, this emphasis on player skill and a neutral, almost invisible DM, is associated with the more robust exponents of the OSR movement, the sort of people who hate 'balanced' encounters and think D&D should be about going into a dangerous environment and learning from your (bloody) mistakes.

But I like to view Lew's ideal DM as similar to the Protestant (or at any rate, Anglican) idea of God. This Person creates a world in detail and depth, then steps back from it. The DM/God hides Himself behind the machinery of His creation. Once it's all in motion, He hates to interfere, however much His people pray and implore. After all, it's a good Creation and they're equipped with the skills and resources they need to prosper in it: they just need to apply themselves, cooperate, and show some ingenuity.

Lew's DM/God has "discretion" though, so He can tweak the machinery on special occasions. He won't tell the players that He's doing this, though, because "believability" is paramount. The results of rare DM/divine interventions will look, to the PCs, like things that were going to happen anyway.

There's a lot to be said for Pulsipher's lofty conception of the neutral-but-benign DM, impartially mediating the setting in a way that emphasises the significance of players' choices. It became my DMing style, up until the arrival of 'Storytelling' RPGs in the '90s. Today, I prefer a more collaborative approach with players, but when I'm running D&D-style dungeon crawls at youth clubs, I revert to the "friendly computer with discretion" that Lew Pulsipher sold me on, all those years ago.

A few other points come out of this article. Pulsipher rejects the arrangement whereby a party 'Caller' mediates between the DM and the other players, even though this was how Gary Gygax did it and is still being advocated in Holmes Basic D&D and AD&D (due just a few months after this article). I'm not sure how many groups actually followed this structure anyway, but history was on Lew's side here.

Pulsipher has a lot to say about 'detection' spells and his view is eminently sensible: reward players who choose them and use them, give players enough information for them to make judicious choices, don't give them so much information there are no meaningful choices to make.

It might seem odd that Pulsipher devotes so much space to this. It serves as a reminder that Original D&D had spell and magic item descriptions that were very cryptic. We are used to the caricature of the 'Rules Lawyer' who uses the rulebook to berate the DM, but back in '77 very few people would have possessed all of 'the rulebook,' scattered as it was across a half dozen booklets and supplements, plus fanzines and old copies of Strategic Review. In a way, everyone back then was playing 'house rules.' It's to Lew Pulsipher's credit that, rather than rewrite every single spell in a clearcut way, he provides a set of sane and widely applicable principles to separate good house rules from bad.

Finally, we get Alignment - and of course, this is the good old days when Law opposed Chaos, with drab Neutrals in between.

Pulsipher assumes (as many people did) that the source for all this is "Michael Moorcock's apocalyptic fantasy novels." In Playing At The World, Jon Peterson argues that the ultimate source is Poul Anderson's 'portal fantasies,' especially Three Hearts & Three Lions and The Broken Sword, but also notes its recurrence in fantasies by Lin Carter and Roger Zelazny.

What I find intriguing is that Pulsipher firmly rejects "four-way alignment, allowing such combinations as Lawful/Evil and Chaotic/Good," which had been floated by Gary Gygax the previous year and must have been gaining acceptance.

His reasoning is that this involves a "complete restructuring of the game" and "reduce[s] alignment differentiation to nil," leading to a situation where "virtually anyone can be in any party, and all act about the same regardless of alignment."

This isn't a widely held view today, even among people who stand by the alignment system in D&D. The difference is down to meta-ethics. 21st century gamers view PC alignment as an expression of personality or temperament: Law/Good is dutiful and kind, whereas Law/Evil is honourable but cruel. A party containing a mix of alignments will produce enjoyable dramatic conflict and ethical dilemmas, or at least opportunities for players to roleplay different reactions to the same situation.

There are tons of 'LG Paladin vs the Rogue/Warlock/Bard' memes attesting the popularity of this sort of player-v-player conflict

For Pulsipher, alignment isn't some sort of ethical orientation or personality trait, it's a cosmic war which places PC adventurers in the front line. He seems to imagine parties that are entirely Lawful (or entirely Chaotic, perhaps), maybe with a few Neutrals sprinkled in 'for colour.' Once again, 21st century hyper-liberalism has overtaken the rigid binaries of the '70s Cold War outlook.

Colouring Conan's Thews

What a horrid title! Thankfully, it doesn't become a lasting series. Which is a shame, in a way, because Eddie Jones offers solid advice, going through the different types of paints and brushes. It's probably too technical for a complete beginner. It's the sort of column that a later iteration of White Dwarf would devote itself to, teaching schoolboys how to paint Games Workshop-produced miniatures with Games Workshop-produced paints, in Games Workshop-approved colour schemes.

But those days lie in the far, far future.

Treasure Chest

For a change, there's no joke character class this week, but what does appear is an oddity. It's a version of the Assassin sub-class. Now, the Assassin class appeared in the 1975 Blackmoor supplement, which was made up of odds-and-sods from Dave Arneson's first RPG campaign. John Rothwell submits a variant of this "for use as a player character in smaller adventures" - meaning, as I take it, dungeon-based adventures rather than the wider campaigns in which assassins have a role that goes back to the original Vol. 3 of D&D White Box.

It's hard at first to see what Rothwell is adding here, except a novel gender bar (his assassins must be male) and a prohibition on 'knowingly' using magic weapons, which makes no sense.

Rather than functioning as a thief two levels lower, Rothwell's assassin functions as a hobbit (ahem, halfling) thief for climbing (which hobbits have a penalty at) and hiding/moving silently (which hobbits excel at, but Rothwell adds +10% bonus on top of that). The backstab ability is expanded with a 10% chance of outright killing the victim, going up to 15% at 5th level.

What we have here is the assassin class, ripped out of the urban context that makes it meaningful, and retooled as a dungeon killing machine that excels at sneaking up on monsters and shivving them.

I shouldn't mock. I too re-tooled the assassin for White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game (i.e. Original D&D) and analysed its iterations in Blackmoor, AD&D, and Swords & Wizardry - you can read all about it here.

The rest of the column is taking up with Andy Holt's Loremaster of Avallon, which is his house rules for 'fixing' D&D: this week, the combat system.

I started off (in issue #1) with a lot of goodwill towards Andy's imaginative endeavour to do D&D with 'proper' spell casting and fancy combat manoeuvres, but my patience runs out with this stuff. As with Fred Hemmings' description of a competitive dungeon level, I defy anyone to understand what's going on here. Andy clearly has a clever system involving playing cards, parrying, weapon lengths and speeds, all very technical. He just can't communicate it coherently.

The whole enterprise stands under the judgement of Heaven anyway, because next year The Chaosium will publish Runequest and the whole crowd that wants parrying and hit locations and weapon speeds will migrate to that system and build mighty redoubt, from which they will sneer at anyone who's still rolling versus Armour Class in silly old D&D.

Letters and Adverts

The Letters Page is growing. Lew Pulsipher writes in to correct his review of Lankhmar from issue #2, but I'm left none the wiser. Nigel Galletty writes in to supply Monstermarks for varies orders of Balrog - getting this in just ahead of the Tolkien Enterprises court order, well done! Don Turnbull, ever the Maths Teacher, will write back in a future issue, correcting his student's work. Patrick Martin complains the D&D miniatures rarely depict adventurers, with backpacks and lanterns, et al. The Editor jumps in to plug GW's pals in Nottingham: Asgard Miniatures do an accessory pack of a dozen wineskins/torches for 15p (not cheap, but doubtless they're not big sellers).

The most interesting letter takes WD and Fred Hemmings to task over the session report for the tournament dungeon in Competitive D&D in issue #1. The article made the dungeon sound like a senseless affair of whimsy and unsolvable riddles. Now we learn that Merlin's Garden was taken (without credit) from issue #2 of US fanzine The Dungeoneer, in which it was presented as a puzzle-based dungeon for 2nd level+ PCs to attempt in a leisurely pace, not for 1st level characters to race through in a 1-hour tournament.

Two things about this. One is that there is no apology, or even acknowledgement, from the Editor, which is surprisingly graceless, especially given the conciliatory tone of the letter and Ed's willingness to jump in to plug Asgard Miniatures elsewhere on the page. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: last issue, Ian Livingstone came across as rather thin-skinned about criticism. The other thing is the identity of the letter writer: Paul Jacquays.

Jaquays published The Dungeoneer while an American college student, between 1976-78. It was a fanzine that could be found in UK as well as US hobby shops. The Dungeoneer was distinctive for publishing actual D&D scenarios - as I noted earlier, TSR disdained to produce these until Judges Guild started making money from them. The Fabled Garden of Merlin by Merle Davenport was published in issue #2 (Sep/Oct 1976, so just over a year earlier).

The Dungeoneer #2: the impressive cover art is also by Jaquays

Jaquays would start work for Judges Guild in the following year, and go on to create the company's two most celebrated D&D scenarios: Caverns of Thracia (1979) and Dark Tower (1980). Jaquays was a pioneering dungeon-designer, preferring non-linear scenarios and maps that allowed multiple routes to the climactic encounter. 'Jaquaysing' is a verb in RPG and video game design, meaning to create dynamic multi-solution scenario pathways.

The hobby remembers her as Jennell Jaquays, who passed away in 2024, leaving a huge legacy in gaming design and trans activism. It's ironic - and somewhat saddening - that one of her first appearances in UK media consists in showing warmth and grace after being treated rather carelessly by White Dwarf.

The adverts are creeping up in number - doubtless another reason for Ian Livingstone's sunny editorial mood (not sunny enough to apologise to Jaquays, but hey-ho). Tally Ho Games are still promoting Starship Troopers and Waddingtons keep pushing the dismal 4000AD (give it up, guys). We do see the first advert for Ral Partha miniatures. This company, founded by teenaged sculptor Tom Meier from his Ohio basement, became one of the most well-regarded manufacturers of imaginative fantasy miniatures.

J.A. Ball takes out an ad to promote 4-D (reviewed in this issue) as the solution to your Christmas present problems. Ogre, which was so hot last month, is still being advertised, and there's a promotion for Games Day III in December, which by my calculations means the annual Games Day happened twice in 1977.

There's the first appearance of a News column. There's a first mention of SF RPG Traveller from GDW, which we know will go on to become an absolute classic. Underworld Oracle is billed as a UK fanzine similar to The Dungeoneer (so GW were definitely aware of Jaquays' publication, hmm.....). If we peer into the future, we can see that Oracle will gather a loyal fanbase but only last 7 issues. In film news, Star Wars is anticipated after Christmas, and Richard Donner's Superman in the new year. What a time to be alive!

Back Cover

I've been a bit sniffy about Christopher Barker's art in the first two issues, but his illustration for the back cover is a striking psychedelic fairy. Great stuff!

If you look closely, there's still some problems with proportion (the lower legs), but this is much more adventurous and, OK I'll say it, sexy than his previous works. The ecstatic expression, the iridescent wings, the hair floating upwards, the hands - so much to enjoy looking at here.

In Retrospect

A triumphant third issue, that sees 1977 out with a bang. White Dwarf at this point exudes confidence and a sense of purpose, but not magnanimity, not yet.

There's a great watershed up ahead. Star Wars will profoundly change the position of SF and Fantasy in popular culture - crucially, it will convince investors that there's money in geekiness, and a great surge of sales will follow. White Dwarf at the end of 1978 will only have produced six more issues, but will look and feel different. As will the wider hobby: messy, maddening Original D&D is on the way out, Holmes Basic D&D is coming, then AD&D and Gygax's definitive Modules; but 'roleplaying game' will no longer mean just D&D, because the great competitors Traveller and Runequest are on the way.

I can't wait!

]]><![CDATA[Monster Summoning in Mauve: White Dwarf #2 (1977) reviewed]]>Tue, 12 Aug 2025 11:11:04 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/monster-summoning-in-mauve-white-dwarf-2-1977-reviewedWhite Dwarf #1 (reviewed here) was late to the presses, so the Aug/Sep issue #2 of the UK's first glossy RPG magazine arrived hot on its tails. This issue would have arrived in time for University terms to start and college gaming clubs to convene, so I imagine it was actually the first issue that a lot of casual readers saw.

Not me. I was ten years old, reading 2000AD, and waiting for Star Wars to come out. I acquired issue #2 years later (in 2020), but I knew some of its contents that had been anthologised in Best of White Dwarf in the early '80s.

Let's take a time machine back to 1977, and try to read White Dwarf #2 as its first fans might have read it.

The 'Mauve Monsters issue, complete with ripped barbarian: art by Chris 'Fangorn' Barker - although my copy is a 1st reprint

The Cover: 'I Cast Summon Mauve Monsters!'

Christopher Barker ('Fangorn') did the back cover last issue and suffered in comparison to Chris Beaumont on the issue #1 front cover. This is a better Fangorn piece: a scene that looks like the climax of a D&D game where the surviving fighter confronts the evil magic-user, who casts Monster Summoning, and gets (no doubt, to his chagrin) a couple of kobolds.

The proportions aren't as convincing as Beaumont and, despite the drama, it looks static and posed in comparison to the energetic decapitation last issue. Nonetheless, it shows us a proper dungeon setting and will surely have burned itself into the imagination of many young fans of D&D.

These two-colour front covers persist until issue 6, when they will be replaced by full colour art. To my eyes, they are indicators of the 'pre-historic' phase of White Dwarf (i.e. from before I was aware of D&D) and this simple aesthetic marks the magazine's continuity with the earlier Owl & Weasel newsletter and the broader low-budget fanzine community.

Editorial: The Gloves Come Off!

Issue #1 reflected some debates and conflicts roiling around the nascent roleplaying community in 1977, but Ian Livingstone's Editorial had been a reasonably genial appeal for the wargamers to embrace the influx of Fantasy/Science Fiction fans to the hobby. That issue's Open Box had reviewed two games by companies with impeccable credentials (SPI and Avalon Hill), dipping their toes in F/SF themed games.

I don't know what went down at Games Workshop in the summer of '77 - the long summer of the Silver Jubilee and the Sex Pistols storming the music charts - but Livingstone is in a pugnacious mood this time around.

Livingstone hits back at the contempt from "traditional wargamers, table-toppers in particular" for the "childish nonsense" of F/SF gaming and especially D&D.

This division might have come as news to youngsters attending a university D&D society or local games club. Insofar as most D&D fans knew anything about the hobby's origins, they would have assumed D&D was birthed out of wargaming. Most of them probably floated freely between playing wargames and playing D&D.

This conflict was really going on at a level above casual gaming clubs. It was being fought out in the articles and letters in fanzines and amateur press associations. The 1960s wargaming hobby had firmly resisted the incursion of magic and monsters onto their sand tables. Don Featherstone was the godfather of the UK wargaming hobby in the 1950s and his Wargamer's Newsletter ran all the way up to 1980. Here's a taste of his views:

No one resisted more strongly than I when an opponent introduced into his Ancient wargames the use of wizards whose spells would turn cavalry squadrons into toads or formulated rules governing the introduction of pre-historic animals (Timpo plastic monsters) whose table-top activities made war elephants seem like seaside donkeys
-- Wargamers's Newsletter 92 (1969)

When, in 1971, Gary Gygax published a battle report of his Chainmail game ('Battle of Brown Hills') involving orcs, ogres, and elves, people wrote to complain about "absolute rubbish" like this appearing in a serious periodical like Wargamer's Newsletter.

The most august periodical for 'Ancients' wargaming was (and still is) Slingshot. The letter pages debated the inclusion of fantasy elements throughout 1973, coming down heavily against. In the same year, the UK War Games Research Group published a 3 page fantasy-themed appendix to their rules, "hidden at the back" so that "sane, sensible wargamers can avoid continuous mental shocks while thumbing through these pages."

That was all 4 years previously, but attitudes seem only to have hardened in these rather elevated circles of people strongly committed to their expensive, scholarly, and time-consuming hobby. Dungeons, yes by all means, but Dragons, absolutely not!

Ian Livingstone uses his White Dwarf editorial to settle a few scores. He proposes that wargamers critical of the F/SF end of the hobby are ignorant, stuck in the past, and frightened of the competition. He finishes with a plea for "harmony" but then, in the next breath, asserts that traditional wargames are just F/SF games minus the imagination. Burn!

It's about gate-keeping, really, and Livingstone's Editorial is an assault on those gates.

Most readers would have had no clue about who Livingstone was roasting, but the editorial established an important preconception: that young F/SF gamers are in some sense better than the stuffy old guard with their sand tables and their Napoleonic and Ancients armies.

This was, after all, 1977, the summer when the Sex Pistols had a Number 1 hit with God Save The Queen that was banned by the BBC: another bunch of fussy gate-keepers being swatted aside by a shift in youth culture.

Don't be told what you want, you want
And don't be told what you want to need
There's no future, no future
No future for you
-- The Sex Pistols

No future for the traditional wargamers either, Livingstone seems to be saying, positioning D&D as the punk rebellion to Don Featherstone's fussy formalism. Young readers wouldn't have understood the debate, but they rejoiced in the sense of themselves as insurgents, the underdogs, and the future.

(I suspect teenage D&D players in 1977 were more likely to be listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Pink Floyd than the Sex Pistols, but you can't fight the zeitgeist).

Competitive D&D

This is the second part of Fred Hemmings' series, introducing us to the mysteries of playing D&D competitively in tournaments. The first part took the form of a session report about a topsy-turvy tournament dungeon Hemmings had participated in at Games Day '77 in February. This issue is devoted to a tournament dungeon Hemmings had designed and run at D&D-Day, an event organised by Games Workshop in March of the same year, hosted at Fulham Town Hall, and reported in the press.

Issues of Owl & Weasel earlier in the year promoted Games Day '77 and D&D-Day.

The article covers the scoring system and the list of pre-generated (or "pre-thrown" in 1977-speak) characters. The premise couldn't be more quirky. The PCs are all members of the Underhill family, converging on the Brass Monkey Inn for the reading of the will of the fabulously wealthy and curmudgeonly Ragnarock 'Digger' Underhill. Old Digger invites his heirs to plunder a dungeon he has created - or die trying. The heirs have names like Flash, Zadok, Tonto, and Prudence, each with a personal mission. The naming conventions riff on Monty Python, David Bowie, Tolkien, Norse mythology, Frank Baum's Oz, and '70s pop culture. In other words, exactly what you'd expect a bunch of witty undergraduates would come up with.

It's silly stuff, but a testament to the joie-de-vivre of mid-1970s D&D and, in the UK, to the popularity of Monty Python-inspired undergraduate humour. Later this issue, in a review of Tunnels & Trolls RPG, Lew Pulsipher makes a throwaway comment that "T&T is not really a serious game, though this might not bother British D&D players," then adding (with an audible sniff): "because so few here play D&D in a serious vein."

The implication is that the sort of larky, whacky D&D games that Hemmings describes were in fact quite typical among UK players in the early to mid '70s. More than typical, distinctively British; in contrast to a more earnest American style of play, that Pulsipher had left behind when he moved here.

If this is true (or at any rate, was widely perceived to be true), then White Dwarf's civilising mission can be seen as bringing a serious American style of roleplaying to the anarchic frontier of Britain's gonzo gaming culture. A couple of decades later, the sociologist Anthony Giddens would call this phenomenon reverse colonisation.

Speaking of bringing civilisation to the unruly natives, where is Lew Pulsipher's second instalment of D&D Campaigns, promised last issue?

Asgard Miniatures: review

Lew will be along in a moment. First, Don Turnbull reviews the latest alloy miniatures from Asgard Miniatures. He gives coverage of 15 miniatures (monsters and adventurers) and an ad for the Nottingham company follows.

I can't overstate how important miniatures were for playing D&D back in the '70s. Theatre of the Mind was still a long way off. The teenagers at my youth club today are rather ambivalent about miniatures (often quite happy to use dry wipe boards and coloured pens to show positions of characters in dungeon rooms). Not so, in my youth. Oh no. Access to a shop selling fantasy miniatures was essential.

The central role of miniatures in playing D&D meant that minis doubled up in many roles: goblins would be used for all sorts of humanoids, giant rats for all sorts of animals. If you could source a miniature that actually looked like your character, that was a minor triumph. In this review, Turnbull note the paucity of good Cleric miniatures out there, adding: "there were hardly any figures that could suitably used as Clerics in D&D, and this tended to put many players off from using them as characters."

Think about that: your choice of character class might be influenced more by the availability of a miniature than by considerations like ability scores or imaginative ideas for characterisation. Yet so it was.

Look at the prices: 30p for an ogre or a troll, 12p for an adventurer, a whopping £1 for a (rather shoddy) dragon. In 1977, 12p bought a can of coke (no multipack deals back then) or a packet of crisps and 30p bought a pint of beer. If I look at (for example) Wayland Games miniatures today, an adventurer sets you back £7 and a big mini like an ogre is £20. That's considerably more than a pint and a packet of crisps, showing once again how pricey the hobby is to buy into nowadays.

Asgard co-founder and sculptor Bryan Ansell would, in 1978, set up Citadel Miniatures with funding from Games Workshop. He ended up owning GW until the big buy-out in 1991, so he's a name to watch out for.

The Green Planet Trilogy: reviewed

Promises made, promises broken. We are told that D&D Campaigns doesn't feature this issue due to "lack of space" but will return for issue #3. Instead - and rather strangely - we have something else from the pen of Lew Pulsipher: a review of a trilogy of SF-themed board games called The Green Planet: comprising Mind Wars, War of the Sky Galleons, and Warriors of the Green Planet.

Cheap(-ish) boardgames in a ziplock bag were a feature of the '70s industry - since replaced by print-and-play versions of humungously expensive Kickstarters

Lew's been assigned 3 pages to review a trilogy of games he doesn't like very much, so he starts out setting out his perspective on games generally, which won't surprise anyone who read last issue's D&D Campaigns. Lew likes games to be realistic. He likes them to reward skill. He detests luck.

Richard Jordison's trilogy of SF games fare rather badly under Pulsipher's stern inspection. Only War of the Sky Galleons passes muster, and Pulsipher admits this is because his passion for naval skirmish games outweighs his contempt for the whole concept of floating warships from the age of sail.

What Pulsipher barely comments on - because it's taken for granted in the gaming culture that birthed him - is the conceit of linking these games together, with the lumbering Sky Galleons operating on a vast scale, troops from Warriors of the Green Planet skirmishing more locally, and Mind Wars allowing players to 'cut away' to duels breaking out between the mutant psychics embedded in the armies.

You might associate 'nestling' time frames in this way with Christopher Nolan's film Dunkirk (2017), but, according to Jon Peterson's Playing At The World (see blogs passim), it was a common device for wargamers after the appearance of Diplomacy in gaming circles in the 1960s. Wargamers would play Diplomacy by mail (or a Dip variant, using a map of a different continent or era), and when units clashed, the players would conduct a tabletop battle to determine the winner.

These Diplomacy PBMs could get very complex, with rules for managing economies and researching new military technology. Players would adopt the role of the head of state of their kingdom, and often communicate 'in character' and write immersive battle reports as the imagined combatants experienced them. One of the leading lights of British wargaming was Tony Bath, whose Hyboria campaign (based on the prehistoric world of Conan the Barbarian) had been conducted in a similar way since the 1950s.

Tony Bath: founder of the Society of Ancients, editor of Slingshot, organiser of the first wargaming conventions in his native Southampton

Wait a moment! Hyboria? But didn't the grandees of the wargaming scene detest fantasy and magic alongside their tin soldiers? Why, yes, but Bath's campaign never featured the magic or monsters that recur in Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. He chose Hyboria because its kingdoms are based on different real-world civilisations that would otherwise be centuries apart: if Aquilonia battles Corinthia, you can see how your medieval knights fare against your opponents Greek hoplites.

Gary Gygax played this sort of immersive Diplomacy-wargaming hybrid and Jon Peterson argues it was a vital link in the invention of D&D, represented by the way D&D moves from exploratory time (measured in 10-minute turns as the players map out the dungeon) and tactical time (measured in 10-second rounds when combat occurs).

Before The Flood

All of which is a necessary preamble for the next article, in which Hartley Patterson discusses the Midgard phenomenon.

Patterson describes attending a the 1970 World Science Fiction Society convention in Germany and discovering a game called Apocalypse, that its organisers dubbed 'the Eternal Game.' In Apocalypse, players took on roles in a fantasy setting, mapped and populated by a games master, which they explored, acquiring (and losing) power and influence, and communicating with each other 'in character.' Sounds like D&D, right? Well, yes, except that it was a Play By Mail game, with 'moves' posted to the GM and in-character communications shared in a regular fanzine.

Inspired, Patterson created his own world and fanzine, Midgard, and throughout 1971 recruited 30 players, through the medium of Don Turnbull's Diplomacy community and Albion zine. Not having access to the Apocalypse rules, he created his own, with character classes (a term he came up with) including Hero, Wizard, and Merchant.

Midgard generated intense interest - including spin-offs in America and Australia - but Patterson's game never got off the ground. There were two reasons. One was the PBM structure; even with the proposed 2-week turnaround, character immersion was limited. The second was the quirky decision to make the rules fluid and subject to player ballots in the pages of the Midgard zine. Needless to say, no one could agree on the rules to be used.

Patterson's article has a strange tone: part apologetic, part elegiac. It reads like an obituary, despite his protestations that Midgard lives on in other countries and as a RPG setting.

What would new White Dwarf readers have made of this? And why is it titled 'Before The Flood'?

The title might have come from Livingstone or Jackson, possibly under the misapprehension that Midgard was, like Tony Bath's Hyboria, set in a version of our world, in the pre-Ice Age past.

But Midgard is antediluvian in a more potent sense. It is an Darwinian ancestor of D&D, an evolutionary branch that ultimately led nowhere; it is one of the giant reptiles that lumbered the Earth before the small, quick mammals with their opposable thumbs, now known only through their petrified bones.

As such, this baffling article is (I think, unintended) propaganda. Young readers would come away with two impressions. One (following Livingstone's rancorous Editorial) is that there is an alternative pedigree for fantasy roleplaying, outside of tabletop wargaming. The other is that D&D is the fittest that survived, the winner of the Darwinian lottery. All good creation myths are teleological, and White Dwarf is gesturing towards a creation myth for D&D: just as D&D improved upon - and therefore superseded - earlier attempts like Midgard, so too will the contributors to White Dwarf 'fix' D&D.

In this context, we turn, if not eagerly, then at least with heightened apprehension, to Don Turnbull's Monstermark article ...

Open Box

But first, product reviews. Most of this issue seems to be product reviews: first Green Planet, then Asgard Miniatures, now three pages of Open Box.

One thing to note is the disappearance of the comparison of all games to either Diplomacy or D&D. In fact, the subcategories of Complexity, Skill, Atmosphere, Originality, and Presentation have also been abolished, in favour of a single score out of 10 and a list of good and bad points.

First up, Ogre, which was the board game 'hotness' of the summer of '77. It's a microgame in which one player controls the robot super-tank and the other player controls the more conventional army trying to defeat it, or at least delay it.

Ogre was designed by Steve Jackson (the American one, not the WD co-editor) and Steve Jackson Games (SJG) have re-released it in different forms ever since. It's what we today call an asymmetric game.

Reviewer Martin Easterbrook is charmed and there was obviously a lot of hype around the game at the time. Easterbrook describes gamers carrying copies in their pocket or briefcase, just in case circumstances should suddenly allow for an unexpected duel to take place. Later, in the '90s, Magic: the Gathering was like that too.

TSR's Lankhmar board game gets muted praise, while War of the Star Slayers gets a drubbing, but it does seem to be an early example of what we today call a 4X game. Seeing the Lankhmar game reminds me of how important author Fritz Leiber was to the development of fantasy games. His characters Fafhrd and Gray Mouser were iconic, easily as recognisable as Conan back in the '70s, and his cosmopolitan fantasy setting of Newhon probably informs modern Fantasy RPGs far more than Tolkien, yet he seems to be slipping from popular consciousness. Perhaps because no one has turned Lankhmar's antiheroes into a film or TV series.

Fafhrd is the big barbarian, Gray Mouser is the diminutive thief

We conclude with Lew Pulsipher's review of Tunnels & Trolls (T&T). This is important, as an early review of a RPG that isn't D&D. For some readers, simply learning that there were such RPGs might have been a surprise.

T&T was the second ever RPG, created by Arizona librarian Ken St Andre, out of a mixture of delight at the concept of D&D and disgust with its confusing and clunky rules. St Andre was no wargamer, cared not a jot for miniature figures, and possessed an impish sense of humour. T&T is simple, intuitive, and often goofy. It ought to have been a big hit in Britain then, right?

Not if Lew Pulsipher has any say in the matter. If you read Pulsipher's D&D Campaigns article last issue, you would know Pulsipher as an advocate of a rather high-minded style of D&D, focusing on narrative seriousness, player skill, and sticking to the Rules As Written. He torpedoes T&T so hard it doesn't even get a number score or a list of good points.

Some of Pulsipher's criticisms are valid. T&T is not serious. The spell names have a folksiness to them that (I suspect) has more charm if you're American (but not the T&T version of Charm Person, which is has icky racist connotations).

Other criticisms seem arbitrary, or even unfair. Pulsipher is the only critic who ever lambasted T&T for being too complicated. The absence of definitive monster and treasure lists is a prompt for imagination, not a "heavy burden" as the review claims.

But then, I'm viewing T&T from the other end of a long telescope. Here in 2025, the prospect of creating a monster bestiary and treasure trove for a new fantasy RPG causes no alarm. Back in 1977, all these concepts were quite new. There was a tendency to lean heavily into canonical lists and the creation of brand new monsters was something of an imaginative achievement.

(Mind you, Pulsipher didn't let up. His article in Different Worlds in 1980 slighted T&T as a "silly" RPG and drew a response from Ken St Andre, condemning "Pulsipher's sanctimonious pile of crap." You can read about it in Grognardia's blog.)

Another feature of 21st century RPGs has been the arrival of minimalist games, often within the OSR movement, that rejoice in their bare bones mechanics and the invitation to GMs to make rulings rather than follow rules. I'm thinking of the Black Hack, of course, but also Cthulhu Dark, Cairn, and Lasers & Feelings. T&T was pioneering, but it was hard to see that (or at least, Lew Pulsipher couldn't see it) from the vantage point of 1977.

The Monstermark System

Don Turnbull returns with the second part of his Monstermark project, to calculate the lethality of D&D monsters in a single objective score.

Three observations. First, despite the careful mathematics of average damage output and average damage received, Turnbull's system requires tweaking with a multiplier termed 'M.' This multiplier is rather arbitrary. To his credit, Turnbull acknowledges this, assigning lesser demons a M-value of x3 to reflect their ability to gate in allies, while admitting "opinions will vary" about this.

Next, Turnbull reframes the Greyhawk random monster tables, replacing the old 6 levels (based I believe on Dave Arneson's predilection for stocking Blackmoor dungeons with d6 rolls) with a new 12. Effectively, Turnbull is creating a higher and lower sub-tier for each level of monster. I notice with pleasure the relocation of gelatinous cubes to level III (i.e. lower 2nd level, whereas they were 1st level before), and carrion crawlers to level VI (i.e. upper 3rd level, not 2nd level where they were before). This suggests that, arbitrary though Turnbull's M-multipliers might be, it doesn't matter so long as his intuitions conform to mine!

Most interesting, for me, is the inclusion of monsters from Empire of the Petal Throne (EPT), with the comment that Turnbull suspects his is "not the only dungeon to contain free adaptations of ... EPT monsters."

EPT is a RPG set in the fantasy/science fiction world of Tékumel , created by the American linguist M. A. R. Barker. As a setting, Tékumel has the cultural and linguistic richness of Tolkien's Middle Earth, albeit much more peculiar in its SF elements and appropriation of Amerindian motifs rather than Northern European ones.

Barker's posthumous reputation is in tatters today, after his neo-Nazi affiliations came to light. None of this was known in the '70s, when Barker's Tékumel was viewed as one of the most esoteric and adult settings for fantasy RPGs out there; TSR had published EPT as a stand alone RPG in 1975 in a very attractive box. The game only lasted a couple of years, before Barker reclaimed the rights, so it retained a cultish aesthetic, even within the cultish RPG hobby itself. For many White Dwarf readers, Turnbull's article would be their introduction to the existence of EPT, sending them off down a fantastical rabbit hole.

If you want to know just what sort of influence EPT had on British teenagers exploring the roleplaying hobby of the Seventies, may I direct you to Mark Barrowcliffe's excellent The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons And Growing Up Strange (2014).

Treasure Chest

There are four pages of D&D house rules and new monsters, and a good job too, because otherwise this issue would have been too weighted towards product reviews and rather arcane discussions or cryptic rants.

As with last issue, we have a new magic item and a joke character class. The Needle of Incalculable Power by Justin Cable is a bodkin that produces whatever power its owner expects it to have. If you pick up the needle and say, 'I wonder if this lets you improve leather armour to plate mail with better stitching!' then that's what it does, whereas for someone else it might just be a +1 dagger.

The joke class is the Scientist and the creator is Dave Langford, who will reappear as White Dwarf's esteemed book reviewer, with his distinctive wry humour. The Scientist is just as much a throwaway as last issue's Pervert, but, because Langford wrote it, the jokes are better.

Ian Livingstone contributes 5 D&D monsters, all of which are excellent. The Spinescale is best, an amphibian that will appear in a later White Dwarf mini module, The Lichway, while the Blood Hawk will appear in the Hall of Tizun Thane. The Ning and the Dune Stalker are the sort of creatuires that guard treasures or hunt down adventurers who steal treasures: monster-as-traps, really. What's nice about this selection is it's low- to mid-level focus. These are monsters to menace the sort of D&D characters most people were creating. They nicely illustrate White Dwarf's advocacy for sober, grounded D&D, rather than high-level shenanigans and unkillable gribblies.

Andy Holt returns with his suggestions for 'fixing' D&D. His magic system, which requires the players to learn and recite pseudo-magical incantations rather than just 'I cast Sleep Spell,' is certainly innovative - though, if it had caught on, I it would have provided fuel for the later Satanic Panic over D&D.

Letters and Ads

Three letters congratulate the team on the first issue, as you would expect. A Heinlein fan (there's always one) takes issue with Ian Livingstone's gravity rules for Metamorphosis Alpha - and a Starship Troopers fan (who almost certainly likes Heinlein too) argues about the play balance in Avalon Hill's game. Then, as now, Heinlein fans are the ones who will catch you out when you make a mistake.

The ads are better quality this time round. Only family games manufacturer Waddingtons (pushing its dismal 4000AD game on a crowd who have advanced way past that) offers a simple text box. Other companies have sourced art for their ads - and there's an ad for the new hotness, Ogre, as you'd expect. Games Workshop takes a full page to promote its mail order miniatures stock. You notice that Minifigs is expensive (but they are American imports), but other UK manufacturers undercut Asgard, with 9p or 10p more typical for an adventurer or a goblin than 12p.

The entire back page is an ad taken out by London hobby shop Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed. What a name for a shop! But not just any shop. Dark They Were And Golden Eyed billed itself "the biggest and best science fiction, fantasy, and comic book store in the world" and was a focal point for the UK counter-culture; Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore shopped for comics there, Bryan Talbot and Brian Bolland did their artwork (paid in comics) before moving on to 2000AD.

The wonderful name is, of course, the title of a Ray Bradbury short story, one of his delirious Martian chronicles of transformation and cultural continuity.

In retrospect

An odd second issue, to be sure, but that's what they say about difficult second albums too. Livingstone's Editorial sets a rancorous tone and there's a sense of mysterious undercurrents in the gaming hobby: the demise of Midgard, the criticism of Tunnels & Trolls, the big ad for the deeply weird Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, a store whose very name both demands and inspires an education in SF subculture.

New readers must have had the sense they were joining a conversation, or perhaps an argument, half-way through, with many names and terms being thrown around yet not unpacked. This can be dizzying but, perhaps especially for young adults, deeply appealing. More so than its predecessor, White Dwarf #2 holds a hint and a promise. The hint is of a hidden world of ideas and debates, with sides to take, and the surface barely scratched. The promise is that things will be made clear to you in time, but you have to keep reading to find out.

Let us press on, and see the year 1977 out with issue #3.

]]><![CDATA[Perils In Yellow: White Dwarf #1 (1977) Reviewed]]>Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:12:06 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/perils-in-yellow-white-dwarf-1-1977-reviewedReviewing Jon Peterson's Playing At The World (Vol.1 and Vol. 2) has enthused me for RPG history - in particular, interrogating my own incomplete memories by reading the early issues of White Dwarf magazine.

Full disclosure: I didn't discover D&D until the Autumn of 1978, when I went to visit an old school friend in the far off metropolis of Welwyn Garden City. He had been introduced to D&D at a local youth club (along with the 2-Tone record label and a fascination with The Specials). This means that the first copies of White Dwarf represent, for me, a sort of pre-history of gaming, a period while D&D was quietly taking hold of the nation's youth, but I was still wrapped up in Marvel Comics.

I didn't take out my own White Dwarf subscription until 1980, so these early issues were known to me only through the heady content that appeared in Best of White Dwarf Articles/Scenarios - and, by the way, the content in both of these is fantastic, especially Scenarios, and they're still available on eBay at affordable prices.

It was during the UK Lockdown that I decided to track down the gaps in my WD collection and get them nicely stored in magazine binders. That's how I ended up with my own copy of Issue 1, from June/July 1977.

The 'Yellow Peril' issue, complete with decapitation: art by Chris Beaumont - although my copy says 50p ($1.50) so this must be a picture of a reprint.

The Owl & the Weasel

Let's step back in time. White Dwarf was birthed out of the newsletter Owl & Weasel, produced by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson to support their Games Workshop. Back in 1975, Games Workshop was literally that: a little business hand crafting wooden boards for traditional games. Owl & Weasel supposedly took its name from the qualities needed in a good gamer: "wise like an owl and crafty like a weasel," according to Jackson. (Although I always assumed Livingstone was the Owl and Jackson the Weasel).

Owl & Weasel was shared with subscribers to Don Turnbull's Diplomacy PBM zine Albion; one subscriber was Brian Blume, who sent Livingstone and Jackson a copy of Dungeons & Dragons in return. The pair were blown away and devoted whole issues of Owl & Weasel to promoting D&D and signed a deal with TSR to market the game in Europe. Significantly, they travelled to Wisconsin USA in 1976 to attend GenCon VI in Lake Geneva. There, they picked up exclusive rights to distribute D&D - probably because their bedroom-based mail order business was the only British company in attendance.

O&W #6 (July 1975) was given over to promoting D&D

At GenCon, they probably saw the first issue of Dragon magazine, the glossy replacement for TSR's company newsletter Strategic Review. They decided a similar magazine would replace Owl & Weasel, with Livingstone as editor. White Dwarf was cleverly named, connoting both a mythological creature and a type of star: the distinction between fantasy and science fiction was still evolving at this time and the readership might be attracted to either or both genres.

White Dwarf effectively replaced the 26th issue of Owl & Weasel and continued Games Workshop's promotion of the UK D&D Society and the annual Games Day. Games Day '77 was covered by the Sunday Times and I remember my mother showing me the article. I was fascinated by the idea of Dungeons & Dragons (from the article's muddled account, which made it sound like a board game) and set about trying (and failing) to create my own version of it. Then, a year later, I was introduced to the real thing.

But this is where our story begins ...

The Yellow Peril cover

Yeah, that cover. A pair of dwarves confront a wizard, knock over his brazier, and chop his head off. His expression speaks of profound disappointment. His sinewy familiar escapes. Two ghostly pterodactyls look on, and one dwarf shakes a spear at them. Presumably the wizard had been trying to summon the winged creatures, but now, ritual interrupted, they are fading away. Or that's my reading.

It's a very fine piece of fantasy art, with great perspective and a sense of action caught in snapshot. It feels like the climactic encounter of a classic D&D game, albeit with a Dwarf-only party (or are the Dwarves the only survivors?). Chris Beaumont has produced something far superior to the sort of art that appeared in the Original D&D rulebooks, although it strongly anticipates Donald Trampier's contributions to the future Monster Manual.

It's also very bloodthirsty - and this, along with female nudity, turns our to be a motif in F/SF gaming that White Dwarf honours for the next couple of years. It was, for adolescent males, a great time to be alive.

Editorial

Up in the top corner is the white dwarf icon that is used so effectively throughout the magazine. Is that also by Beaumont? It has the same look as the dwarves on the cover. The pose is fantastic: strength in repose: beautifully proportioned - quite unlike Sutherland's gangrel creature in the later Monster Manual, but certainly foreshadowing Trampier's Dwarves in the Magic Mouth illustration in the AD&D Player's Handbook.

Ian Livingstone's editorial strikes a bullish tone, asserting the significance of fantasy roleplaying (or 'role-playing') games as a new aspect of the hobby and the right of Fantasy & Science Fiction to have a place at the wargaming table.

Owl & Weasel had already nailed its colours to the D&D mast, but the need to defend F/SF strikes us as odd in 2025. It hearkens back to the early-'70s when fantasy/SF fans were seen as ghastly parvenus in wargaming circles; the grandees of the hobby vigorously repudiated having wizards on a table alongside Mycenaean hoplites or (shudder) a space marine. The joke was to be on them, and Games Workshop would put both wizards and space marines on the table, driving pure Napoleonics and Ancients style wargaming into relative obscurity.

Metamorphosis Alpha

Ian Livingstone leads with a 2-and-a-bit page account of Metamorphosis Alpha, which was very nearly the first ever SF RPG (beaten to the punch by an obscure Ken St Andre game called Starfaring, basically Tunnels & Trolls in space).

James Ward's Metamorphosis Alpha uses D&D-adjacent rules that were more successfully recycled the following year as Gamma World. In many ways. Alpha has the more intriguing premise: the PCS are descendants of the crew and passengers of a giant space ark, mutated and reduced to barbarism by a radiation storm, and no longer understanding the advanced technology and robots they encounter as they explore.

Following on from the editorial, you can see why Livingstone places this first: it's a celebration of science fiction gaming, of RPGs, of the fast-moving state of the hobby.

Livingstone expands on Alpha's premise, but frets about the requirement to map every level of the gigantic Starship Warden, which reminds us how far away we were in '76 from 'theatre of the mind' or story-first RPGs. But more of this to come, when Lew Pulsipher addresses D&D Campaigns.

What stops this being a simple product review is Livingstone's digression into what he takes to be Ward's literary sources: Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky, Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop, and Harry Harrison's Captive Universe. Then some house rules for adventures on regions of the ship with different gravities.

The article has full page art, again by Chris Beaumont, depicting a battle with a two-headed mutant (doubtless inspired by Brian Aldiss's Jim-Joe) and carnivorous grass. It's got Beaumont's characteristic sense of proportion and dramatic perspective: a fast-moving combat encounter, captured in time.

What's odd about the article is its ambiguous purpose. Is it a product review (no price is given), or literary analysis, or a rules analysis? What it is, is a classic piece of fanzine writing, celebrating the latest Cool Thing. Later, White Dwarf well develop a distinctive house style, driven by Livingstone and Jackson's growing authority within the hobby, and breathless essays like this will fade from the increasingly professional pages.

The Monstermark

The indefatigable Don Turnbull presents a very dense essay, outlining a novel system for ranking D&D monsters. This is a system he had been developing in Owl & Weasel, but now it gets a fuller treatment here and over the next four issues. It also appears in The Best of White Dwarf Articles (1980).

Now this thing here: this is a time capsule. If you want to get a flavour of what early D&D was like and what it did to the minds of the people who played it, read Turnbull's 'Monstermark.'

The problem is simple. D&D's Greyhawk supplement had grouped monsters by levels to allow random allocation to dungeons, but the allocation was pretty arbitrary. Greyhawk's monster levels are below (left). Gelatinous Cubes are at the tough end of Level 1, but Carrion Crawlers are very dangerous indeed for Level 2; meanwhile, an Ochre Jelly isn't much of a threat on Level 3, not compared to Harpies or Wights.

Turnbull's solution is so old school it makes my teeth ache, but in a good way, like eating lemon sorbet. He calculates an Attack value for every monster type, based on the average amount of damage an average-HP version of that monster will deal out before an average 1st level fighter dealing average sword damage finally kills it. Then he applies a multiplier for special abilities (x1.5 for regeneration, x2 for poison, x2.5 for level drain). The resulting number is the Monstermark. An orc is 2.2 but a gelatinous cube is 36 (see!!!); an ochre jelly is 31.5 but a carrion crawler is a whopping 120 (see? I told you!!!).

Turnbull suggests using his Monstermark as an alternative to the arbitrary XP awards for defeating monsters in early D&D; another article later in the issue addresses this same problem, in an equally maths-heavy way. I must confess, reading this made me itch to start working out Monstermarks for all sorts of other critters from later modules and later iterations of D&D. Admit it, you always suspected Demogorgon would beat Orcus in a fight: now you can compare their Monstermarks!

The old school psyche is distinctive. Faced with these oddities, no one seems to say 'Hey, play the game your way' or try to justify Greyhawk's shonky tables with tenuous in-universe logic. No, none of that nonsense: monsters are made out of maths and, if the system was carelessly thrown together, maths will rationalise it. We will meet variations of this old school attitude in Lew Pulsipher's article and the Treasure Chest house rules later this issue.

Open Box: product reviews

In his essay collection 31 Songs (2011), Nick Hornby communicates a very specific sort of nostalgia for music-lovers:

"In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternative versions and unreleased material. If you can hear Dylan and The Beatles being unmistakably themselves at their peak – but unmistakably themselves in a way we haven’t heard a thousand, a million times before – then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their spirit, and it’s as close as we’ll ever get, those of us born in the wrong time, to knowing what it must have been like to have those great records burst out of the radio at you when you weren’t expecting them, or anything like them."

This describes very well the pleasure I get from reading old games reviews: that "thrilling flash of their spirit" from the first time anyone ever opened up Call Of Cthulhu or read the AD&D Monster Manual.

This first Open Box reviews two board games: Sorcerer by SPI and Starship Troopers by Avalon Hill. The contrast is interesting. Avalon Hill was the Old Man of board gaming, far and away dominating market share, and the giant that newcomer TSR/D&D wanted to topple. Avalon Hill published its own magazine The General and organised the Origins games fairs, run in competition with GenCon, and broadly served a conservative wargaming fanbase that remained sceptical of F/SF and RPGs: the very body that Ian Livingstone addresses in his editorial. Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) was a young upstart, challenging Avalon Hill in a similar field of complex war-themed boardgames, often WWII-set, and striving for innovation in design. It published its own magazine, Strategy & Tactics.

The General vs Strategy & Tactics: the formal titles contrast sharply with White Dwarf. It's interesting that the two games reviewed are Fantasy and SF respectively, atypical of both companies' output, but underscoring Livingstone's editorial line about F/SF deserving a place at the table. The products were well-judged inclusions, dignifying White Dwarf by including games from 'proper' companies.

Sorcerer sounds gimmicky, with its colour-themed magic, but Starship Troopers was a game I played, although years later. It was good fun, with a cracking cover (despite what the reviewer says) in AH's 'bookcase' format. The modular rule book, teaching the game through increasingly complex scenarios that sequentially fold in more detailed rules, is now utterly conventional in boardgames.

The cover gives me warm fuzzies but I don't miss cardboard chits

By the way, Open Box introduces its rating system with examples from two games readers are expected to know: Diplomacy and D&D.

You might find it odd that Diplomacy would be a cultural touchstone in 1977 (why not Risk?) but this hearkens back to Owl & Weasel, which piggy-backed on the PBM Diplomacy fandom. Diplomacy would disappear from White Dwarf going forward, but it's good to acknowledge how important it was in developing the emergence of D&D - an idea explored by Jon Peterson in Playing At The World.

Competitive D&D

Fred Hemmings describes his experiences of playing competitive D&D. The article ends up telling you very little about running competitive D&D; instead, it's a session write-up and as such it's a fascinating insight into a style of play that would probably be considered deranged today, but was pretty normative in '77.

The party has to enter a dungeon, get as deep into it as possible, liberate some magical heirlooms of Merlin, and get out. The dungeon has a whimsical 'Wonderland' quality, with riddles written in the languages of Shedu or Lamassu (obscure monsters from the D&D Greyhawk supplement), magical traps that petrify people or make them mute, invisible cowardly Mummies, and doors that open when gems are pressed the right way but strike you dead if pressed the wrong way. It's wild ride where nothing makes much sense, everything is a puzzle, and a single misjudgement kills your character.

There's also no roleplaying going on, in the sense we use the term today. OK, sure, most tournament dungeons do not reward expressing your character's personality, nor provide many opportunities for so doing, but it's significant that Hemmings doesn't mention what the PCs even are until near the end (where a fighter, thief, and magic-user are among the survivors), never mind their names.

(The provenance of this particular dungeon adventure will be revealed in White Dwarf #3 and excite some criticism; more of that in a future blog.)

The puzzle/trap theme is reinforced by No Way Out?, a column by David Wells that offers three puzzles/riddles that could be incorporated into D&D games. The column didn't last long, perhaps reflecting the steep decline of this style of RPG already underway in the summer of '77.

D&D Campaigns

Another serialised article that made its way into Best of WD Articles, this one by Lewis 'Lew' Pulsipher, an American games designer who had moved to England and was to exert a deep influence over White Dwarf and the British gaming hobby.

D&D Campaigns serves as an antidote to the style of play we saw going on in Competitive D&D. Pulsipher makes a hard distinction between "those who want to play the game as a game" and 'escapists' who enjoy the game as "a passive receptor, with little control over what happens." In the escapist camp, Pulsipher lumps together people playing 'Lottery D&D' where things happen by chance, with little allowance for skilful play, and "people who prefer to be told a story by the referee."

There are elements here that prefigure Ron Edwards's GNS Theory of roleplaying: Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism; except that Pulsipher seems to conflate Gamism/Simulationism and deplores Narrativism as an inferior mode of play.

To be clear, Edwards insists that, in Narrativism, " the players are often considered co-authors," but Pulsipher insists on the essential passivity of games where the DM will "make up more than half of what happens, what is encountered, and so on, as the game progresses, rather than doing it beforehand" - a development, he claims, which has its origin "in California."

Pulsipher is advocating a "skill game" in which players "earn the rewards and penalties" and this comes about when the referee has created an objective fictional setting beforehand, down to maps and room keys, which has "internal self-consistency" so that the player characters can "act as rational, though brave, people." He compares playing in an escapist/Narrativist game as similar to the experience of getting "drunk and/or stoned."

You might detect in Pulsipher's views a foreshadowing of the 21st century OSR (Old School Renaissance) commitment to impartial refereeing and players making skilful choices in a consistent setting. You might also suspect that he's not being entirely fair to the experimental styles of play coming out of West Coast gaming fandom; in any event, the Dragonlance modules of the mid-'80s would be a powerful restatement of Narrativism in D&D.

But in the context of Summer 1977, Pulsipher's article was incredibly influential, even authoritative. White Dwarf became a flagship for the style of play Pulsipher advocates, supported by many other such articles and demonstrated in the magazine's revered 'mini-modules.' The whimsical 'Wonderland' dungeon that Fred Hemmings described would fade from its pages - and become deeply unfashionable. It was to be Pulsipher In Excelsis.

As a young D&D referee, I pored over Pulsipher's articles, like the words of an Old Testament prophet. I was figuring out how to run a D&D game on my own, without the support of an adult club with experienced DMs; Pulsipher's voice came to me, even in 1980, as the authoritative guide to How D&D Should Be Played, even though I was was in no position to judge the arguments he was settling in such a prescriptive fashion.

The Warlord

Steve Jackson pens an article introducing readers to a game they can't buy. Warlord was created in 1974 by university lecturer Mike Hayes and sold on short print runs. Jackson, however, adores it as a nuclear-charged extension to his Diplomacy hobby. He spends two pages rhapsodising about the game's distinctive mechanics, which we would nowadays characterise as 'push-your-luck.'

Like Diplomacy, Warlord allows players to expand their control over a board-map of ravaged Europe, acquiring more reinforcements as they seize desirable territory. Combat involves trying to guess how many of the attacker's available chits have been committed to the fight (maximum six, indicated by the face of a die concealed under a cup); guess wrong and you lose a defending chit and the attacker loses the number of chits they committed; guess right and you lose nothing but the attacker is utterly wiped out.

Successful attackers gain nuclear missiles, one stage per chit they destroy, and these missiles become tottering steeples, eventually to be fired, annihilating conglomerations of enemy pieces (and possibly detonating other missiles in exciting chain-reactions).

Jackson never wavered in his commitment to Warlord. In 1980, Games Workshop purchased the game and published their own slick'n'streamlined version as Apocalypse: The Game of Nuclear Devastation.

I rushed to buy Apocalypse in 1980, knowing nothing of Warlord. It's still on my shelf.

Apocalypse shares with its predecessor a punk-rock commitment to bad taste (this was the middle of the Cold War, you will recall - although Arab/Israeli Wars is perhaps more extreme game content today!) and a game duration that lasts for hours. Jackson describes being introduced to Warlord with a 4½ hour game. For Diplomacy fans, that's no big deal, but board gamers today baulk at committing that sort of time to such an unsophisticated game. Twilight Imperium, this is not.

Treasure Chest: readers' contributions

Treasure Chest became a long running feature, offering magic items, spells, traps, monsters (soon to become a separate column), and house rules.

Steven Littlechild's Helm of Vision is the sort of object that would feature in Hemmings's whimsical dungeon but I don't think Pulsipher would be keen. It's an incredibly useful item for Lawful PCs, somewhat useful for Neutral PCs, but a cursed item for Chaotic PCs. You put it on, you take your chances.

The Law/Chaos split had not yet been refined to include Good/Evil. Actually, that's not quite true. Gary Gygax had floated the idea of the Law/Chaos vs Good/Evil axes in 1976, but in an article in Strategic Review that would not have been known to many D&D fans in the UK. The four-way alignment split would appear in the 'Holmes' D&D Basic Set, which came out (in America) at almost exactly the same time as this issue of White Dwarf (it doesn't appear on Games Workshop's UK stock list until White Dwarf #4 in January 1978).

Andrew D Holt inaugurates the long tradition of supplying house rules to 'fix' the mess that is D&D. The focus is on increasing 'realism' and the importance of 'player skill' (one senses Lew Pulsipher nodding along). They are quirky suggestions: using playing cards for manoeuvres in combat and getting players to read out the astrologically-inspired command words for spells, with backfires if they get them wrong in any particular. Neither suggestion seems to have borne fruit in the wider hobby: the future of rules hacks lay in the Don Turnbull maths-hammer approach, but, after all these years, I'm quite intrigued by both - I might play-test them with my youth RPG club!

In a manner more approved by Turnbull - indeed, credited to him - Alan Youde suggests adapting the Metamorphosis Alpha poison rules for D&D, so that poison deals damage rather than instant death, as determined by the Constitution ability. I don't think Lew Pulsipher would have condemned this departure from 'Lottery D&D' despite his preference for sticking to 'rules-as-written.'

Oh, yeah. And the Pervert character class. At 9th level, you get to be a 'Rapist.' It was the 1970s ...

Adverts

If, as Nick Hornby puts it, you're looking for "a small but thrilling flash of [the] spirit" of 1976 gaming fandom, you find it in the adverts. Not that White Dwarf #1 has that many, of course: only those supporters it carried over from Owl & Weasel.

Barry Minot is advertising his miniatures (in both the UK and North America, very enterprising) along with what looks like a set of skirmish rules called Thane Tostig. Chris Harvey has a mail order business in Walsall and offers the Ogre microgame (to be reviewed next issue) for £1.85. Ken St Andre's semi-parodic Monsters! Monsters! RPG is being sold by Games Centre in London. Games Centre has a bunch of ads scattered through the magazine: Stellar Conquest, Godsfire, and Ythri are SF board games, the latter based on Poul Anderson's People of the Wind. Tally Ho Games looks like a traditional North London hobby shop that specialises in Avalon Hill games; the latest release is Arab/Israeli Wars (1956-73) which makes you realise (a) nothing changes, and (b) such a product would never be released today.

The British Fantasy Society and the D&D Society take out ads: the former is still going strong today.

Games Workshop enjoys a back page advert for its current stock. You notice they undercut the competition: Arab/Israeli Wars will be selling for £7.95, whereas Tally Ho Games charges £8.95.

Let's play a game. D&D (original white box) is selling for £6.75 and White Dwarf for 50p. White Dwarf today (2025) costs £5.99 (a twelve-fold increase) so you'd expect a complete D&D set to cost £80. Ahem, try £120.

Is a 12-fold increase right? A pint of beer in 1977 was 38p: the average pint is £5.17 today; that's a 14-fold increase. If D&D had gone up with the price of beer it would cost £95. Not £120.

I know, I know: D&D in 1977 was three flimsy B&W booklets in a box; today it's three big glossy full-colour hardback books in a slipcase. D&D was always considered expensive 'for what you got' but the buy-in cost for the game is higher now, relatively speaking. And 1977 was the year of UK inflation hitting 15.8% (worth pondering, given our own recent inflation-driven crises): not the best time for Livingstone and Jackson to be putting out their new magazine and persuading people to spend their diminishing wealth on expensive imported games. Yet people did: the hobby took off, White Dwarf became a national institution, and Games Workshop a global industry.

I'll trace the journey White Dwarf embarked on in future blogs. Until then, here's the back cover art by Christopher 'Fangorn' Baker and the promise of continuing the series of Monstermark, Competitive D&D, and D&D Campaigns ... but one of these promises will be broken.

A striking alien/demon, astride a nightmare steed, wearing flippers, with lots of Kirby-crackle around the spear. Not as dynamic or well-proportioned as Beaumont's front cover, but we will see a better Fangorn illustration on next issue's front cover.

]]><![CDATA[Sorry Mr Gygax, D&D Would Have Happened Anyway]]>Thu, 07 Aug 2025 11:55:39 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/sorry-mr-gygax-dd-would-have-happened-anywayA provocative title for a blog, but the unstated conclusion of Jon Peterson's Playing At The World Vol. 2: Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games (2025, MIT Press).

It's big. It's weighty. It's not cheap. It's the meisterwerk of scholarship into the origins of tabletop roleplaying.

I reviewed Vol.1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons pretty much exactly a year ago (and you can read that review here). Vol. 2 arrived this Spring with twice the page count and a price tag to match (i.e. still cheap as chips compared to buying a new boardgame).

It's a more challenging read, not just because of its length, but because it's not really written to be read sequentially, in a start-on-page-1-and-just-keep-going sort of way - although that's what I did, despite Peterson's repeated appeals to readers to skip bits that don't appeal to them.

In this, it contrasts with Vol. 1, which was a guided tour, year by year, of how D&D arose out of Midwestern wargaming and Diplomacy groups, cross-pollinated with more avant-garde West Coast early adopters, and how that led to fierce debates about who owned this new recreational form and how it was to be defined. That book almost demanded to be read sequentially. Jump in to Chapter 16 (GenCon 1974 and its Aftermath) and you'll be asking, 'What does IFW stand for? Where is Avalon Hill? Who or what is Lowrys Guidon?' Back you must go to earlier chapters to find out.

A timeline of D&D's inception, taken from Peterson's The Game Wizards (2021)

The Medieval Fantasy Genre

Vol. 2 comes at things more theoretically. There are three roughly-equal parts to the book. The first covers the Medieval Fantasy Genre: where did this emerge from? how did it distinguish itself from science fiction? what texts were the biggest influences? where specifically do D&D tropes like underground dungeons, pointy-eared elves, character classes, and alignment come from? As a literature graduate, this is the section that I found easy reading and inspirational: lots of novels to add to my bucket list!

For people who like arguing with strangers online, Peterson addresses both sides of the contention that D&D plagiarises - or repudiates - Tolkien.

It amazed me how many bedrock D&D tropes you think must be medieval in fact date from Poul Anderson's 1961 'portal fantasy' Three Hearts And Three Lions.

The Rules of the Game

The second section, and the largest, covers the Rules of the Game. Peterson is thinking of things like Hit Points, saving throws, levels of experience and experience points, ability scores. Before he can delve into that he first takes us on a deep dive into the origins of wargaming in Prussian Kriegsspel games and the manufacture of toy soldiers. These chapters are particularly dense and, although Peterson essays to keep bringing everything back to D&D, there are longueurs. But then again, I'm no wargamer, so perhaps this section was always going to sag for me.

I was intrigued by the early techniques for generating probability spreads just using six-sided dice, back before the advent of polyhedral dice in the 1960s and '70s. Interesting too was the division between simulationists who wished to use wargames as a way of training military officers, and gamers proprement-dit, who used wargames to stimulate the imagination or as a prompt for creativity. I was fascinated to read of a convalescent Robert Louis Stevenson using toy soldiers to fight battles and writing the results up as war journalism reporting from fictional conflicts - imaginative immersion that is a clear step towards RPGs.

Dice like these used to be really difficult to get hold of!

Playing Roles

The final, and shortest, section covers the concept of Playing Roles. Peterson gives the childhood game of 'Let's Pretend' the obligatory nod, then dives into an analysis of some real childhood pretend-worlds that persisted into adulthood, notably those of the Bronte siblings and C.S. Lewis and his brother. This leads to a discussion of the world of 'Coventry' created by Paul Stanbery and imagined to exist on a gigantic space ark in the far future. Coventry attained performative reality in the 1960s as members of Los Angeles SF fandom adopted roles within it and attended events, in character and costume.

From here we progress into the Society for Creative Anachronism pioneering Renaissance Fayres and 'shared world' experiences like Tony Bath's Conan-inspired Hyboria campaign and the Play By Mail game Midgard, all of which merged wargaming, diplomacy, and immersion in a fictive role within an imagined setting. Perhaps because of my current work in Psychology, I found this the most intellectually gripping section of the book.

One of my (very few) criticisms of Vol.1 was that Peterson prefers granular close analysis to placing events within the context of broader cultural change. Here he redresses that, looking at the impact of the atom bomb and the Cold War on the ethics and ostensible purpose of wargaming. the influence of globalisation and European travel on previously isolated wargaming subcultures, and the disillusionment with modernity that underlies much wargaming and RPGs after the Second World War - a trend that Peterson links to the popularity of 'Portal Fantasies' in literature, in which an ordinary person can live an extraordinary life when they inadvertently enter a fantastic new world. Peterson explores the tensions between imagining yourself operating in a fantastic world, and imagining yourself as native to a fantastic world, and wishing to have that experience in a recurring form, rather than just while reading a book or watching a movie.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (yes, the Tarzan guy) popularised 'Portal Fantasies' with stories of John Carter, an ordinary schmo on Earth, but on Barsoom (Mars) he battles monsters and romances half-naked princesses.

Who Invented RPGs?

Instead of debating angels dancing on pins, 21st century fandom still convulses over whether the credit for D&D should go to Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson. Peterson's argument might be summarised as 'Both, but really Neither.'

The picture that emerges from Peterson's marshalling of sources and statements is of immersive, character-driven, campaign-style roleplaying developing on a number of fronts at the end of the 1960s and through the early 1970s. Out on the West Coast, they were dressing up as knights-of-olde or attending diplomatic banquets as rules of Coventry. Over in the UK, Tony Bath was getting wargamers to imagine themselves as rulers and generals of Robert E Howard's fantasy world of Hyboria. Out of Germany came a Play By Mail Game called Armageddon, which was repurposed in Britain as Midgard, then launched (rather more effectively) in the USA as Midgard II and its spin-offs. Even ordinary board gamers and Diplomacy players were naming their favourite miniatures or board game tokens, treating them as real people, and skewing the game away from playing-to-win towards 'What Would My Character Do?'

On this telling, popular culture was hungry for a fantasy roleplaying product, but no one had yet put the component parts together in a way that could launch into the mainstream. Miniature wargaming and Creative Anachronism required research, craftsmanship, and expense. Pay By Mail games were slow. 'Shared Worlds' like Coventry were too open ended, prone to schism, and lacked focus.

You would have expected D&D to emerge from a Play By Mail game like this, rather than from Gygax and Arneson's playing around with miniature figurines.

What Gygax and Arneson delivered was the essential experience of fantasy roleplaying, adapted to the tabletop, and imagined in a setting (the 'dungeon') that allowed for moment-by-moment immersion and characterisation.

But if they hadn't done it, who would? Maybe Hartley Patterson or Will Haven (of Midgard), or Lewis Pulsipher or Hal Broome who developed the concept, or Tom Drake (of Midgard II), or Scott Rich (of Midgard Ltd), or someone else from the SfCA. All these people were striving towards the same end, chasing the same elusive experience, trying to find away to instantiate fantasy worlds in real-life exchanges.

This doesn't make D&D inevitable, like Thanos: but reveals it to be a cultural product whose time had very much arrived.

Should It Be On Your Shelf?

As a work of scholarship into the history of RPGs, Peterson is unsurpassed and this book will be a resource for decades.

As a work of popular history, it's a bit harder to assess. There will certainly be something in it for everyone, whether to delve into the literary sources that inspired Clerics or how 19th century mathematicians developed percentile outcomes from d6 rolls, or how the RAND Corporation used Diplomacy to wargame nuclear brinksmanship in the 1950s: it's in there and more.

But it's a lot of book to buy just to access one part of it - and with an academic price tag too. It's a well deserved price tag, because there's a lifetime of scholarship here, but face it, you could buy an entire RPG in hardback in a fancy slipcase for that money.

Here are two alternatives, if you are on a budget:

The Elusive Shift (2022) is also by Peterson, with the subtitle 'How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity.' It focuses on the concept and practice of roleplaying, its antecedents, and the ways D&D built on and then developed this sort of creative immersion - or rather, perhaps, the way it didn't, but the fan culture around D&D did so, far more enthusiastically than the game's creators.

Peterson's other book is The Game Wizards (2021), subtitled 'The Epic Battle For Dungeons & Dragons.' It traces the conception and marketing of D&D, from 1974-1985, culminating in Gary Gygax being ousted from his company TSR and losing control over D&D. (If that's too much of a cliffhanger for you, Benn Riggs's Slaying The Dragon follows the tribulations of D&D and TSR through the 1990s).

Both of these books are products of the same scholarship that created Playing At The World: essentially, they offer Peterson a platform to piece together events and draw historical conclusions from data that goes beyond his remit in writing his straightforward-yet-labyrinthine history of RPGs.

I recommend them all. I just wish Peterson would stop trying to make 'Role-Playing' with a hyphen happen. It's not going to happen.

]]><![CDATA[Links in the Damnation Chain]]>Tue, 05 Aug 2025 18:12:55 GMThttp://www.fenorc.co.uk/home/links-in-the-damnation-chainMy Latest Obsession (Part 2)

The last blog described how I was reintroduced to the 1990s horror RPG Kult, leading to obsessions with expanding the Taroticum scenario into a complete campaign - which in turn inspired me to create a new horror RPG to use with it: The Occult Hack. After that, I wanted to produce a new scenario to introduce the game - and ended up resurrecting The Damnation Chain from 1994.

The Damnation Chain was a scenario for Kult 1ed that I wrote for Valkyrie, a UK hobby magazine from the 1990s. It was published in issues 1 and 2, in September and October 1994. The illustrations were by Wayne 'Chig' Chisnall.

Valkyrie was sold through retailers - you could buy it in W H Smiths! - between 1994 and 1998. It took up the mantle of being the UK's independent RPG/gaming magazine, after Adventurer, G.M., and its competitor Arcane, all passed away.

Nowadays, magazines full of RPG-related reviews, scenarios, and house rules, have been utterly superseded by the Internet, for better or worse. But back in the 1990s there was still a market - and a cultural yearning! - for this among rpgers. Getting your scenario published in a magazine like Valkyrie was a Big Deal for me in my mid-Twenties. I still get a thrill of excitement looking at it.

The Damnation Chain (1994)

I'm a bit puzzled about how I came to write it.

I must have submitted the scenario to Valkyrie's predecessor-magazine, Role Player Independent (RPI, also edited by the redoubtable Dave Renton). Some of Chig's illustrations bear the date '1993'. Since the English-language version of Kult was published by Metropolis Games in 1992, I must have been an early adopter.

It's easy to understand why. Kult 1ed can't compete with the new Divinity Lost rules for sumptuous art and high quality production, but it makes a little go a long way, with its pages spattered in blood-red designs, its murky two-colour art by Nils Gullikson, and that cover art by Peter Andrew Jones.

I mean, who wouldn't pick this up and start browsing?

What's harder to understand is how. In the '90s I was living in Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland. Now if there is a bright star in the constellation of UK roleplaying games, Berwick-upon-Tweed is the point furthest from it. I can only imagine I came across Kult while visiting a hobby shop in Edinburgh.

I wasn't running Kult games. The only roleplaying I was doing in 1993 was Vampire: the Masquerade - along with everyone else in the Western Hemisphere. I wasn't even a big fan of horror literature or movies. I hadn't read any Clive Barker. I saw Hellraiser II on late night TV (but not the original Hellraiser, so you can imagine how confusing that would have been). Why did I set myself the task of writing a Kult scenario?

I can only suppose it was the imaginative power of Kult itself, of its bleak and nihilistic themes, of its horrifying vignettes, and perhaps the melancholy face of actor Doug Bradley, who invested Pinhead with such haunting depth.

The Original Scenario

The Damnation Chain is a homage to Hellraiser, no doubt about that. In place of the Lament Configuration puzzle box, there's a candle that opens a portal to the dimension of sado-masochistic demons. Various NPCs acquire the candle and are murdered by the demons, their souls being tortured in Purgatory in psychologically-specific ways (which is not really a feature of Hellraiser or Kult, but perhaps was inspired by Mage: The Ascension, which came out in 1993 and utterly blew my mind).

The conceit - and it's a sharp one, though I say it myself - is that the demons come for the owners of the candle in order, so there's a chain of victims. When one of the PCs acquires the candle, they become the latest link in the chain. As previous owners start horribly dying, the PC realises they will be next, and searches for a way to break the curse.

Is it true you can never break the Chain?

There's an impressive complexity to the chain : the poseur occultist who cheats on her drug-dealer boyfriend to get the candle from his dealer, who got it from a biker gang, who stole it from a Satanist, who was trying to use it to get out of his deal with a Death Angel, but was dragged to Hell instead. The Satanist's deranged boyfriend is still out there, warping time and space (as you do, in Kult) to deliver nightmarish warnings. Ultimately, the PCs accompany the boyfriend into Purgatory to get his lover back - a Dante-esque journey through the private hells of all the NPCs who have died so far and a grim twist when the lovers are reunited at the end.

Re-reading it thirty years later, I like it. Although it's very much Kult-does-Hellraiser (right down to the sexual betrayals and obsessions driving NPCs to their doom), it leans heavily into Kult-specific tropes, like the ways Shock can make the Illusions collapse or warp your body or distort time and space.

What I can't have realised at the time - but appreciate now - is that it conforms to the structure of official Kult scenarios too. On the downside, this means it's very linear: the PCs move from clue to clue, then go on a unidirectional journey through Hell to a preordained climax. However, it shares with Kult-designers Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén's Taroticum, the conviction that PCs are not supposed to fight the overpowered monsters of the rulebook, so much as witness them and live to tell the tail.

The original Taroticum: as Linear as Mycenaean Greek, but one hell of a wild ride! I had no idea of its existence back in 1994.

Themes Reconsidered

There are themes in the scenario that I perhaps thought of as daring in 1994, but which have aged strangely.

The central gay relationship between Kyle McAllister and Ellis Wood was unusual representation at the time. Even White Wolf products (the acme of cool, for '90s RPGers) were strongly heteronormative. Remember, in the UK, same-sex marriages were unimaginably far off and Section 28 still had a chilling effect on LGB representation in the media.

On the other hand, Kyle & Ellis conform to the tired trope of the tragic/doomed gay relationship - sometimes known as 'Out of the Closet, Into the Fire.'

The Worst Muse is Jay Edidin's parody account, offering horrible tips for budding writers

It's ironic that, for all Kult subverts Judeo-Christian cosmology, the style of horror it represents is sexually conservative. Hell, most horror is sexually conservative.

In the same vein, '90s Me was proud of including so many female characters in the NPC roster and giving them such important roles. That's not nothing. Play through a Call of Cthulhu scenario of that vintage and your Investigators will interrogate dudes and find the ladies in dumpsters. However, in hindsight, my female NPCs simply devolve to two archetypes: Grieving Mother (Harriet Shaw) and Amoral Slut (Melanie Prior, Bethany Yeoman), which is Freud's Madonna-Whore complex, still going strong.

You see, you're never as grown-up as you think you are.

Another subversive inclusion was the Christian fundamentalist sect 'The Last Witnesses' as awkward allies of the PCs. The 'Satanic Panic' was still a big concern in the '90s UK gaming scene. This was odd, because fundamentalist moral entrepreneurs had largely moved on to new panics, and even odder because this panic barely touched British roleplayers. In this, as in so many aspects of late 20th century culture, everyone was desperate to be American, but didn't realise it.

In Kult, many of the tenets of organised religion are true, just not in the way worshippers suppose, while religions themselves are aligned with the Lictors, Archons, and Death Angels that oppress or torment humanity. By making Gavin McKnight and his sect into NPC allies (complete with their homophobic attitudes and daft conspiracy theories), I can see '90s Me striving for irony and a bit of nuance. Never a bad thing.

Were I to write the scenario today, I'd probably make the religious sect Muslim rather than Christian. I think I would gender-flip Melanie and Vernon: he's the occult poseur doomed to die, she's the drug-dealer girlfriend with hostility issues. I think I'd leave Kyle and Ellis unchanged. It might be a trope, but it works.

The Damnation Chain (2025)

Once The Occult Hack went to digital press, I decided to adapt The Damnation Chain as an introductory scenario: free-to-download, or at-cost if you want a print-on-demand physical copy.

For the interior illustrations, I really wanted to re-use the original art from Valkyrie Magazine, so I reached out to Wayne Chisnall, now a very successful artist, sculptor, and scriptwriter. Wayne was incredibly gracious and not only gave permission, but sent me some scans of the originals.

A selection of Wayne's art, some in collaboration with Sharon Massey.

Wayne Chisnall Instagram

Wayne Chisnall Blog

Other than Stat Blocks and a few rules links, I didn't want to make alterations to the text out of respect for '90s Me. What I did do was break the scenario into 3 Acts, then include a GM's Toolkit with each Act, expanding on the original scenario.

Act I is Melanie's Party, where the PCs acquire the cursed candle - or Dark Taper. The original scenario advised the GM to 'wing it' but here was an opportunity to provide a NPC Roster of quirky guests and the shenanigans that ensue when they mix. I also added a roster of occult artwork and antiques at the apartment, some of it actually supernatural.

In Kult, your problems escalate when you go into Shock: you can project your fears, warp your body, or tear down the Illusions. The Occult Hack doesn't do this, but it does have a Horror Cascade, a series of events that occur as the Horror Usage Die exhausts. One of the problems PCs in the Occult Hack face is the presence of the Fanum, a sort of occult security force working for God and cracking down on people who threaten the Asylum's reality. At Melanie's Party, you have a Fanum spy on the lookout for occultists - and an egotistical and indiscreet occultist who will get himself into trouble.

Act II is the investigation, the period while the bodies pile up and the PCs discover the corpses and research into the Dark Taper. The original scenario assumed the PCs moved from clue to clue in an orderly manner and left the eventual arrival of the demons up to the GM. This time round, the Horror Cascade governs the demonic timetable and there's a timeline of events, as well as some advice on what to do if the PCs go off-script, as they inevitably will.

Act III is the Hell Walk, which requires little alteration, although Penitarchs in the Occult Hack aren't quite as formidable as Nepharites in Kult, so PCs are expected to use some physical force in places. What I have added is much more detail into the history of the Dark Taper and its creator, and a guiding intelligence behind the Hell-realm that the Taper links to. There are suggestions for different ways to end the scenario, allowing PCs to deviate from the linear path, and even setting the demons against one another - possibly involving a chagrined Lucifer in the messy business, if you like to escalate things all the way.

That's it! The Damnation Game is back from the pages of Valkyrie, reunited with its original art after 30 years, and repurposed for a new generation of horror RPGs. Leave a review, or drop me a message, and let me know what you think.

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