Bird Bandits in Amber: White Dwarf #6 (1978) reviewed

There 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of the first year of White Dwarf, a magazine in some ways still advocating assumptions and gaming styles that seem very out of date to me now, but in other ways looking ahead to its 'golden age' of innovation and popularity.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."