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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of the first year of White Dwarf, a magazine in some ways still advocating assumptions and gaming styles that seem very out of date to me now, but in other ways looking ahead to its 'golden age' of innovation and popularity.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 worldChris 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 DwarfEditor 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 ClassOh 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 FactoryThe 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 MiniaturesJohn 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 WildernessLew 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 BoxOpen 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! TravellerDon 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. KalgarNot 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 ChestDuncan 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. LettersThe 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 PageThe 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 RetrospectAnd 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." 
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Ah, 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 & SorceryWhile 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. 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 FantastiquesJohn 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 & MalignDon 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 CampaignsMore 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 BoxTwo 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 IIIIan 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:
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 WardenRichard 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. KalgarA 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 ChestJoseph 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 & AdvertsThere'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 CoverFangorn 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 RetrospectThis 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 AnswersOr 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,
It'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 DungeonlandDon 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 CampaignsLew 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. HyboriaAfter 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 BoxLew 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 MalignThe 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 ChestThis 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&DMore 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 AdvertsThere'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 CoverThe 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 RetrospectSome 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.
White 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  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 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&DThis 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: reviewLew 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: reviewedPromises 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 FloodAll 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 BoxBut 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 SystemDon 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 ChestThere 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 AdsThree 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 retrospectAn 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.
My 2025 resolution is to play a bunch of those RPGs of my youth that shamefully gather dust on my shelves. It has delivered a great Pendragon campaign and thoroughly enjoyable Bushido games. Now it’s time to tackle something difficult. Something dark. Let’s play Kult.  Yes, Kult. A game so shocking they banned it in Sweden. Well, no they didn’t, but there was certainly a moral panic about it in the Nineties, similar to the US ‘Satanic Panic’ about D&D in the ‘80s. With its graphic themes of death and madness and anti-religious imagery, Kult was an incongruous product in Swedish toy shops (where RPGs were sold, Scandinavia lacking specialist hobby shops at that time). It was cited in a 1997 motion in the Swedish Parliament, which sought to cut public funding for youth groups involved in RPGs, referencing the Bjuv murder, where two teens allegedly influenced by Kult killed a friend. Critics linked Kult to further tragedies, including a teenage suicide and a missing persons case, and the book De Övergivnas Armé warned that RPGs like Kult preyed on neglected children. Kult became a symbol of anxiety about youth, violence, and occult subcultures. The Ominous AllureEd Grabianowski describes Kult as ‘the most controversial RPG ever made’ in his 2013 Gizmodo review. " 'It's banned in Sweden,' is pretty much the best possible sales pitch you can make to a couple of 14-year-old boys,” he says, reminiscing about shopping for the game in his youth. “Kult was never a big success in North America, it still holds that strange frisson of ominous allure." As it did for me, when it blew my mind back in my Twenties. It was a game that seemed too problematic to play. I stuck to World of Darkness roleplaying, with its safety rails of consent and high-mindedness. Kult was created by Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen in 1991 and first published in Sweden and France by Target Games. It was later translated into English and released in 1993–1994 by Metropolis Ltd - a company created by Terry Amthor of Iron Crown Enterprises with the sole aim of making Kult more widely loved. Unfortunately, the game’s sheer unremitting bleakness and its unsettling treatment of themes like rape and child sexual abuse kept mainstream gamers at bay. But it developed a … ahem… kult following, despite its high ‘ick’ quotient and somewhat boilerplate rules.  The gory and blasphemous 1st edition and the ... errr ... different aesthetic for the 2nd edition, which was in fact (and to everyone's relief) just as gory and blasphemous. More recently, there’s been a deluxe crowdfunded reinterpretation titled Kult: Divinity Lost, but that’s not what I’m talking about. No, I’m going back to the 1st edition, the one with the tortured angel on the front and blood-spattered imagery all over the pages. The version that caused all the trouble.  Beautiful, right? But - and maybe this is just me - ever so slightly less gory and blasphemous than it could have been? Kult is a modern-day cosmic horror RPG, with a particular focus on gritty urban settings and psychologically-troubled anti-heroes. Like Call of Cthulhu, it positions PCs as people who stumble into the horror of a wider supernatural reality populated by lunatic cults, alien gods, and portals to other dimensions. But rather than homaging Lovecraft, Kult takes its aesthetic from antinomian Christian heresies, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood.  Hellraiser (1997), based on Barker's stories and a big influence on Kult What's The Verdict?Derek Guder has a great review of Kult on RPGNet and I can’t improve on his summary of the deep lore in Kult, so I’ll reprint it here: "The reality behind the game is that God is out to get you. Not test you to see if you are worthy or punish you for the sins you committed in a life you can’t remember, just simply out to get you. You personally. He (the Demiurge) created the world as we know it (the Illusion) to serve as a prison for humanity, supposedly afraid of the divine nature within each of us. Trapping mankind for all eternity as they continue to chug through a constant cycle of life, death, suffering in Hell until they don’t remember anything anymore and finally reincarnation. Hell isn’t a punishment for the sinful, it’s a metaphysical dishwasher set to burn the memories of your life right out of you." In Call of Cthulhu, sanity is a resource that you lose as you penetrate the secret truths of the Mythos, especially when you encounter monsters or cast spells. In Kult, you have Mental Balance, which is zero for an ordinary person, but can swing into high or low (negative) scores. Both types of extreme Mental Balance are ‘crazy’ by ordinary standards, but Kult encourages you to lean into the crazy: as your Mental Balance veers to the extreme, you get more powerful, not less, eventually transcending humanity and awakening to your true divinity. The Light and Dark Roads (of high or low Mental Balance) both involve turning yourself into something that is, by ordinary standards, deeply abnormal, possibly monstrous. Such a game demands maturity from players and GMs and considerable trust. The setting puts PCs through the mill and, if handled badly, the game itself can become sadistic or crass, with themes of torture, abuse, and sexual degradation played for kicks, or else instrumentally, as a crass way of minimaxing. On the other hand, if done right, the game’s weird aesthetic invites some profound roleplaying, tackling head on the big themes of religion, mental illness, free will, and existentialism. Its demented Judeo-Christian lore is also more frightening – because it is more personal – than the aimless octopoid menaces of Lovecraftian horror. How Does It Work?In the 1st edition, you have 8 Abilities similar to the ‘Big Six’ of D&D, but adding Comeliness and Perception, and substituting Education and Ego for Intelligence and Wisdom. You can roll them on 2d20 or assign 100 points between them. You also have 150 points to distribute between Skills, each on a 20-point scale – although ‘Basic Skills’ start at 3 rather than 1 and it costs extra points to raise a Skill higher than its governing Ability. For example, if a knowledge skill is governed by EDU, then it costs extra points to raise that knowledge higher than your score in Education. As with most '80s games (and despite its commitment to lore and richly-conceived characters, Kult is an '80s game at heart), there are far too many skills. Compare and contrast Vampire: the Masquerade (also a product of 1991) which condensed skills to sets of broad aptitudes. Kult would have benefited from a similar radicalism. The main mechanic is a d20 roll, looking to roll equal to or less than your Skill or Ability: 1s are crits (1s or 2s if your score is 15+) and 20s are fumbles (19 or 20 if your score is 4 or less). How much you roll under what you needed to is your ‘Effect’ that determines degree of success – except in combat where you determine ‘Effect’ by rolling on a table for that weapon type and applying modifiers based on Damage Bonus and Armour. It’s simple enough. The main thing about your new PC, however, is not her Skills but her Advantages and Disadvantages, perhaps especially the Disadvantages. You can choose as many of these as you like and tot up their point values. If the Disadvantages have a higher total, your Mental Balance is negative, but you get extra Skill Points; if Advantages add up to more, you are blessed with a positive Mental Balance but fewer Skill Points. Anyone with a negative Mental Balance has to choose a Dark Secret, so character creation involves producing, not wide-eyed ingenues, but scarred and possibly corrupted veterans, already knee-deep in personal horror, and that’s all before the awful Razides come a-calling. In a nutshell, high Mental Balance characters will be a bit less competent, but more psychologically resilient. Low Mental Balance characters will have lots more abilities, but struggle under the burden of more flaws and react worse to horror (if you fail your EGO throw against something awful, one of your Disadvantages takes over). Kult gives a bunch of colourful ‘Archetypes’ to guide you in the game's style: they seem to draw heavily on '80s action movies. Like many ‘80s and ‘90s games that supposedly eschew violence in favour of tone and storytelling, we are treated to a huge arsenal of guns, detailed rules for poisons and explosions, and complicated mechanics for kick-ass martial arts. Let’s be clear: none of these things will do you any good  Let’s look at the stat block for a Razide, the game’s signature demonic adversary: imagine an alien xenomorph converted into one of Hellraiser’s Cenobites, with a lot of steampunk prosthesis bolted on for good measure. They have an Initiative Bonus of +19, you (a human) might have +3 or +4 if you have one at all – so they will go first in combat. They have melee skills of 40, so they crit on a 1-5 and cannot miss, except on a double-20 (and even then they won’t fumble). With a +11 damage bonus, they deal fatal wounds on a d20 result of 12+. Oh, and they get 5 attacks per round. For scale, understand that you probably get 1, maybe 2 or 3 actions at most. Even if you somehow manage to land a good blow, it takes 3 fatal wounds to kill one. Nobody’s kung fu is that strong. Heck, nobody's assault rifle is that strong. You have to wonder why the designers even bothered statting these entities, but I suppose there are spells to summon and bind such monsters: perhaps powerful PCs might make them fight each other ? Is There A Problem With The Kult-i-verse?All of this points to the fundamental problem with Kult, which becomes very clear in the published scenarios: the players are, by necessity, passive - they just can't accomplish much in the face of such perils - so scenarios have to be linear and railroading. Think of Call of Cthulhu’s famous ‘onion skin’ approach to scenario construction. For most of the scenario, the PCs are researching. Perhaps they do a bit of interrogating or breaking-and-entering, maybe they rough-house with some goons. This is all well within the parameters of PC skills. At the end of the scenario, you meet Deep Ones or Mi-Go or Star Vampires or Shoggoths. These things can kill you out of hand, but by then you’ve gotten hold of an Elder Sign or a Spell, or just enough dynamite to seal that well shaft forever. If the PCs have failed their research, they will go up against the Big Bad armed with only their stats and guns. Puny humans will die. But serves them right: there was always another way. Kult is much less coy than Call of Cthulhu. Its horrors don’t wait offstage for their third act cue. The beasties of Kult aren’t sealed away or waiting for the stars to be right. They are here among us, or just on the other side of the Illusion, and they’re not going to wait until the third act to start causing trouble. Moreover, there are no Elder Signs to wave in their faces. If PCs are to use Spells, they need to choose these Advantages and Skills at character creation and starting PCs will never be able to cast the demanding Binding Spells. Kult’s solution seems to be to introduce PCs to powerful NPCs who can keep them safe then railroad them through a linear plot that introduces them to the horrors of the Kult-i-verse: not much player agency going on, because of course if the players make choices then there’s every chance they will make suboptimal ones and that will kill their characters. Let's Talk TaroticumTime to look at the scenario I'm going to be running: The Taroticum (1994). The adventure comes direct from the pens of Kult designers Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén. They have described Taroticum as their favourite Kult adventure, believing it best embodies the game’s core spirit of metaphysical horror and personal awakening, so it’s a valuable insight into how the designers themselves think the game should be played.  Taroticum has also been adapted for the new Kult: Divinity Lost, but, other than re-naming the main villain, I believe the new shares many of the features of the original (above) The story begins in 1894, as a sinister conjurer in London summons the Goddess of the Forgotten, keeper of the Taroticum—a deck of cards representing the hidden forces governing reality. When the ritual goes awry, the Taroticum fuses with London’s spiritual fabric, subtly reshaping lives and places across the city. A century later, in 1994, the player characters uncover their spiritual link to those past events—and undertake a desperate mission to bring into existence the only being who might shatter the occult framework that now binds their destinies. Great stuff. Unfortunately, the scenario (or rather, mini-campaign) was widely decried for railroading PCs to a shameless degree. The excellent Reflections & Refereeing blog sums up the critical consensus: "There’s a couple of bits where players might choose to prioritise one set of tasks above another, but ultimately the adventure expects the players to accomplish all the tasks it sets them in the way it anticipates them to do it, and it gives almost no consideration to what happens if the players decide to take a different route. To a large extent it’s an exercise in witnessing weird metaphysical happenings which you may or may not understand, and to invoke a cliche that is sorely deserved at this point it would work much better as a movie or a novel than as an interactive entertainment. " Yeah, I can't disagree. The Taroticum does read like a movie treatment or the outline for a (brilliant!) graphic novel. The blog continues: "It’s also really badly designed even if you want a hyper-linear railroad. The adventure kicks off with a prelude section taking place in 1894, where the players get to play their past incarnations who turn out to have been complicit in kicking off the action of the adventure. However, to successfully bring this portion of the adventure to a close the PCs have to undertake a very specific series of tasks which they could quite conceivably fail to think of, or actually botch; this is demanded by the metaphysical axioms the adventure works on. Consequently, as written it is decidedly possible for the campaign to be utterly derailed before the players even get to play their main PCs." -- Arthur Here's where I think this criticism is overstated. The PCs in the Prelude are pregenerated characters and the behaviours attributed to them in the scenario are pretty plausible. Even if you have players who are particularly dense or who subscribe to the “it’s-what-my-character-would-do” school of RPG perversity, the significant NPCs can bring about the Prelude’s denouement and, for the rest of the scenario, the PCs can be assumed to be the reincarnation of those characters. Some dramatic unity is lost, but nothing is derailed. Over on the r/Kult Reddit, there’s a great thread on ‘Taroticum Reshuffled’ which tries to redress the linear plotting. "... the Taroticum is a complete mcguffin with no actual bearing on the plot, I hate this. As written it could be literally anything, a magic wand, talisman or a tea set, it being a deck of cards never comes into play as it can seemingly do whatever the user wants it to do if they know how to manipulate it in the correct way, so let's change that ...” -- Responsible-Catch903  Kult: Divinity Lost has produced an actual Tarotica deck, only described back in 1994. Eerie! Redditor Responsible-Catch903 suggests adapting the scenario so that the PCs are tracking down the Taroticum cards across London, gaining powers and fulfilling destinies by so doing. That’s a pretty ambitious re-write, effectively treating The Taroticum as a setting guide. He goes on to break the story down rather brilliantly to illustrate his ideas. I find The Taroticum a puzzling product in other ways. Each of the Taroticum’s 7 chapters ends with stat blocks of the main NPCs, but, as we’ve seen, the supernatural antagonists are so powerful that stat blocks read like a cruel joke, or perhaps a type of modernist poem on existential dread. Moreover, none of Kult's rule mechanics is referred to anywhere. There are no suggestions for when you should make EGO rolls, or for the Terror modifiers when you do. The PCs will experience physical and spiritual transformations, but none of this is interpreted in terms of Mental Balance. The PCs might be minor sorcerers themselves, but no consideration is given to what might happen if they try to use spells to resolve situations. Given that this is the Kult’s actual designers composing this, one can only assume that, despite the rulebook’s plethora of rules for guns, bombs, and spells, Jonsson and Petersén far prefer theatre of the mind and don’t really intend for all those rules to be used anyway. Now, run as theatre of the mind, Taroticum could be a vivid exercise in storytelling. Nonetheless, I’m looking to introduce my players to Kult as a set of rules as well as a storytelling setting, and I want to provide a ‘sandbox’ experience where the players have genuine choices about where to go and what to do in the wider metaphysical world of Kult.  The Kult 1e rulebook gives quite a few locations and NPCs in London, and these sourcebooks offer more. I want PCs to have the option of visiting Metropolis, recruiting Dream Princes, descending into Ktonor, and encountering the other London-based allies and antagonists described in 1st ed. Kult and its supplements, like the Lorelai, the Gelochelis, and Dr Lazarus.
To that end, I’m writing an expansive ‘Taroticum Unbound’ modular guide to the scenario. More on that in the next blog, after I’ve playtested. Stay tuned! I blame Shogun. If you watched the slick Rachel Kondo/Justin Marks adaptation of the lumbering James Clavell's potboiler about Renaissance-era Japan, you too will be gripped with the romance of Nippon: honour versus duty, forbidden love, betrayal, tea ceremonies, ritual suicide, all that stuff.  Oh, and quality memes. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a forever-GM inspired by a new film or TV series must be in want of a RPG experience to pursue it further. Which brings us to Bushido.  Chef's kiss! Ah, Bushido. Like Leo Woodall's Roxster in the latest Bridget Jones film, I was too young to appreciate you when you came into my life back in 1982. I was a callow youth of 15 and you, you were ... err ... well, you were three years old, and that sort of age gap doesn't work. But now, in my fifties, I think I'm ready to commit.  Tell Me About Bushido When You Were Young, GrandadBushido is a TTRPG from 1979, when it was published by Robert Charette and Paul Hume through Tyr Games, later to be picked up by Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU), in a beloved boxed set. Mike Polling's review in White Dwarf, which was then my Bible for RPG wisdom, awarded it 10/10, saying "maybe the best game I have ever seen." That was why I went out and bought a copy. A copy that gathered dust for decades.  The beloved 1981 boxed set, with two rulebooks (players guide and GM's guide, as is only proper), campaign map, character sheet, tables and charts - lots of tables and charts ... You see, Bushido was very much ahead of the curve, as few reviews in 1979-1982 could appreciate. It was a pretty early entry into the RPG scene, especially as a non-derivative product in a quasi-historic setting. D&D co-creator Dave Arneson had been planning to shame his rival Gary Gygax with a feudal Japan RPG called 'Samurai' but Bushido got in there first. Not that Arneson would have finished 'Samurai' even if the genre had been entirely ignored by other designers. Nor were the game rules easy to pick up. A review in Dragon (not, perhaps, the kindliest critic of indie rivals like FGU) stated that the "rule books ... make advanced nuclear theory texts seem like light reading by comparison." That's too harsh, but the rules are not only unfamiliar but make too much use of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and are scattered around the densely-paragraphed books. All of which is to say that, if you were an adolescent RPG fan in the early '80s, Bushido was a deeply unfamiliar sort of game, both in mechanics and setting. Sure, feudal Japan had touched popular consciousness in Britain and America. Clavell's Shogun novel came out in 1975 and the popular TV adaptation with Richard Chamberlain in 1980, so we all sort-of knew about samurai and ninjas and seppuku.  But there was no Internet search engine to fill in the gaps and not a lot of books in your local library. Bushido does a creditable job of laying out the world of Nippon in the 'Warring States' (or Sengoku) period of the 15th-16th century, deducting Portuguese Catholics and gunpowder, and adding in magic and mythical monsters. But it's a huge step away from the accessible world of medieval fantasy, dungeons, and the Keep on the Borderlands. I often see Bushido referred to as 'Japanese Pendragon' which perhaps reflects the fans' love for both games, but it doesn't strike me as quite right. Bushido isn't trying to tell a dynastic saga that will enable players to perceive a cultural sweep, from Sengoku to Edo, and take part in the great events of the era. Its focus is low-key and personal: your particular samurai or monk or yakuza, perhaps his feudal superiors and clan (though these details are a bit sketchy) and what he can accomplish over a few years of adventuring. A better comparison is with another late-70s RPG with a rigorously historical setting and dense rules. Bushido is the 'Japanese Chivalry & Sorcery.' C&S was a D&D-clone with a heavy focus on medieval France, Catholic religiosity, and heraldry, that evolved into a complex game in its own right. It was published in 1977, also by FGU, and designed by Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus. The two went to GenCon'77 to present their game to Gary Gygax, but ended up pitching it to FGU founder Scott Bizar (supposedly because they took a dislike to Gygax once they met him in person, which by all accounts was not an uncommon experience). Early editions of C&S were certainly complicated; some called it 'unplayable.' Yes, Bushido has dense rules. Not unplayable though. Combat is more technical than D&D, but still boils down to a d20 roll to hit and a damage roll to reduce your enemy's Hit Points. No, the complexity is in the variety of skills and the algorithms that link them to your stats and derived stats (there are a lot of derived stats) - and how all of these lock into a rigorous system for training and study. Years later, I picked up Ars Magica and it reminded me of Bushido.  Besides the similar approach to 'mythic history' (a historically accurate setting, except that wizards and supernatural beings really exist), both games offer a sort of never-ending character generation system, where you deploy your downtime to study and train and only go off on adventures when the resources to study and train run short. On the back of every Bushido character sheet is a calendar, so you can tick off the weeks you spend training and the ones you are forced to spend travelling or adventuring instead. Book-keeping is important in Bushido. In fact, book-keeping is the beating heart of Bushido. All of which is to say that Bushido went quite over my head as a young 15-year-old. Character generation was a fraught business of flipping between half a dozen sections in the first rulebook: newfangled personal calculators were essential, given the maths involved, and every tweak to a stat altered dozens of derived stats in unpredictable ways. You have to be pretty committed to bring a game like that to the table and once you have, well, I just didn't know what to do with it. There's an intro scenario where you slaughter bandits at a tea house (at least, that's what I recall happening) and I had no sense of where to take things from there. And so the dust settled. Flash Forward Forty Years ...Here I am in 2024, contemplating the Bushido rules. I'm not planning anything time-consuming, nothing ambitious. Just a low-key mini campaign, maybe one or two PCs, something easy, no stress. So of course I spend a month fiddling around with a spreadsheet to help create characters. Who am I kidding. I'm still fiddling around with that spreadsheet, six months later. You see, I had to learn how to do Excel formulae first, so it took a while. 
Here's where I'm up to so far. Bushido has elements of both random character creation and point-allocation, but it's a maddening synthesis. Yes, you allocate 60 points between your six stats - Strength (STR), Deftness (DFT), Health (HLH), Speed (SPD), Will (WIL), and Wits (WIT), remember I said about TLAs? - so a 'Classic NPC' has 10 in each, but players will want to tweak. That's easy enough, right?  Your choice of character class imposes a bunch of modifiers to your choice, such as Bushi (warriors) getting +10 to Strength and Deftness, +15 to Health, +5 to Speed, but -5 to Wits. There's also a ton of derived stats, which are usually based on your Stat Saving Throw, which is a 1-20 value that is actually used in game play, calculated from 1/3 of your raw stat. These saving throws are then added or averaged or manipulated in various ways to produce more characteristics - and your raw stats are added or multiplied to produce your skill scores - and those are then divided by 5 to create 1-20 skill-based saving throws. Long story short, even a small change to one of your raw stats has a 'trickle down' effect, altering all sorts of saving throws, derived stats, skills, and skill-based saving throws. Seriously: how did we do this back before spreadsheets?  And then there's the stuff you can't control. A percentile dice roll determines your caste and your rank within that caste. From this derive various starting skills, equipment, money, and whether you are eligible for classes like Ninja. You might roll a high-ranking samurai with a horse, cool armour, a finely-crafted heirloom sword, and lots of sophisticated skills. Or you might be a low-ranking heimin (peasant) with a stick and an aptitude for popular dance. Did I mention you level-up? Yes, there is a reason to go adventuring rather than just train perpetually. Levelling up grants you more Hit Points/Magic Power Points, and generous bonuses across all your class-related skills, plus boosts to complex derived stats like 'Zanshin' which enables you bto take multiple actions. The granularity of all this is very satisfying. Once you get familiar with the rules, you start to see how training in THIS leads to gaining points in THAT which leads to trickle-down benefits in something else entirely. It's a finely-tuned machine indeed. Or a tutorial in Reaganomics. It was the early-'80s, after all.  Now here's the thing: not only do the random and non-random aspects of character creation influence each other in interesting ways, but they also dictate the sort of story you can tell. A scenario for a bunch of aristocratic samurai will be different from one for a mob of yakuza gangsters, or Shinto priests, or peasant martial artists. Some of these combinations are deeply implausible: any D&D party can feature a paladin, a cleric, a thief, and a monk, but it's hard to propose a good reason for a samurai to team up with yakuza and a mob of peasants. Or at least, I find it hard. One option is to ditch the dice-rolling and simply choose your caste. Fair enough. The whole 'roll your background' trope comes from a bygone era of RPG praxis. We don't need to do that any more. We can just sit down, knuckle our foreheads, and compose compelling Bushido characters out of thin air. Except, of course, we can't all do that, especially if we're not particularly au fait with Shogun and feudal Japanese adventure fiction. Everyone defaults to being a Ninja or a high-ranking Samurai. The other option is pre-generated characters: the trusty GM rolls up characters and presents them to the players, maybe inviting them to tweak a few stats and watch the numbers trickle down the spreadsheet. Bushido, One Shrine At A TimeMy friend Karl rolled up his character to launch the mini-campaign. Nakatame Atagi is a low-ranking peasant bushi (warrior), equipped with ashigaru armour, some mediocre weaponry, and a big tetsubo cudgel. He selected iaijutsu as a skill so he can perform lightning fast sword draws in duels. In many ways, Atagi illustrates the problem in Bushido: a character of such lowly provenance will struggle to interact with the political end of the game, with court, with samurai culture. In Pendragon, everyone is a knight, but in Bushido, the likelihood is you will be someone like Atagi: basically, henchman material. You might say: sure, why not? Why not run a 'thug' level Bushido campaign, far away from the haiku-swapping pretensions of the samurai. After all, I ran a One Ring campaign where the PCs were hobbits and the action revolved around Bree and its satellite villages, and an encounter with a solitary goblin was a big deal. You could run Pendragon where everyone is a peasant and no one ventures more than a day's journey from their village: the scenarios are all about missing pigs, contested land enclosures, the local druid versus the local priest, the tyranny of the knightly landlord, lusting after the miller's pretty daughter.
But maybe I misjudge the limitations on the life of a medieval peasant? Hang on, I was moved to do this by watching Shogun, remember? So haiku-swapping is de rigueur. Also: elite culture throughout history is quite easy to approximate (or stereotype) in a RPG because we're familiar with it; working class culture is always underrepresented in the historical record. Pseudo-medieval peasants are mysterious enough, but pseudo-medieval Japanese peasants? That's asking a lot. My campaign solution goes like this. Nakatame Atagi has been plucked from obscurity by the eccentric Compassionate Master Jigen of the Heavenly Retreat temple. Atagi must accompany a hapless young priest named Koji on a pilgrimage round five ancient shrines. They take with them many prayers to be recited, documents of safe passage, and a truculent ass named Fuku. The visit-five-shrines structure lets me devote a scenario to five different aspects of life in Nippon: so, Ninjas will feature, and Yakuza gangs, also noble Samurai, war, the supernatural world too. The pilgrimage conceit gives Atagi the opportunity to access elite society as Koji's bodyguard - and Koji's blunderings will occasion conflicts and problems to solve. Between adventures, there is downtime at each shrine, so opportunities for training with elite tutors. The whole thing borrows from 'Journey to the West' (or 'Monkey' if you watched British TV in 1979).  OK, Monkey was set in China - and Journey To The West is a Chinese classic - but it was a Japanese show and it makes a great RPG template. Along the way, Atagi will pick up oddball fellow-travellers. After the first scenario, the manic-depressive ronin Kurotatsu has joined the group. This will enable me to fold in new players as we go. Even with this campaign concept, there's still not enough haiku-swapping for my taste! So I came up with this 'bookend' structure. Each scenario kicks off with a scene between the pivotal NPCs, with the player getting to represent one of them. In the opening scenario, this was a meeting between the Daimyo Hoshikawa Tadanori and his courtier Takemura Haruto who is instructed to make a gift of the courtesan Lady Akane, a woman renowned for her political genius. Later, when Akane is kidnapped and Takemura is disgraced, the wandering pilgrims enter the plot at ground level. Similarly, a coda scene lets us roleplay the Daimyo's reconciliation with the villainous lord Ishida Akihiro, setting in motion events that will shape the future scenarios. I like this bookending structure. It feels very appropriate for a game like Bushido, partly because it lets the players view the plot from different social altitudes, but also because it allows an opportunity for freeplay-style roleplaying. Bushido has wonderfully granular mechanics, but like a lot of games of its era (that's the '70s and '80s, not Sengoku), it has assumptions baked into it that the PCs will spend most of their time sneaking and stabbing. There are no mechanics for social interaction beyond skills like Tea Ceremony or Poetry Composition. Rather than bolt on more rules, it feels more natural to wave them away, and engage in a bit of improv during the prologue and epilogue. That's Bushido: another 'lost game' from my youth reclaimed. Now excuse me: I have to get back to work on that spreadsheet ...
Hot on the heels of The Vampyre Hack (see blogs passim, such as here) comes its unholy spawn, a rather dense supplement covering mortals and almost-mortals that serve, traffic with, and hunt down the undead.  The dynamic cover is ‘All Hope Is Lost’ © Gary Dupuis. The book is available as PDF from drivethrurpg or physical copies from Amazon. Like most sprawling endeavours, this book started as a modest project to provide some rules for human Witch-hunters, either as more developed antagonists or as Player Characters battling against NPC vampyres. But then I added in more detailed rules on the Familiars that serve vampyres ... and then I thought I ought to cover the half-vampyric Dhampirs who are born with vampyre blood in them ... well, I got carried away. I'll take this promotional blog as a chance to indulge in a bit more critical nostalgia about Vampire: the Masquerade in the 1990s, the directions it took, and the various ways I've stuck with or departed from that template. Ghouls Just Wanna Have FunGhouls were there in 1991, in the original V:tM rules set. They are humans given a sort of provisional immortality and a bit of a strength boost by feeding on vampire blood. If the immortality and the strength isn't enough of a motivation, they're usually victims of the Blood Bond, making them devoted slaves of the vampire that feeds them. You can use the background dots in Retainers to represent these guards and flunkies, a convention which established an anonymity about them which endured right through the product line. Subsequent expansions developed the vampire Clans massively, but never really got to grips with Ghouls, who surely outnumber actual vampires by orders of magnitude and were pretty essential for their functioning and safety. Ghouls: Fatal Addiction came along in 1997 to set things straight. The book was part of the Year of the Ally series, focusing on the sidekicks in all the World of Darkness games at that time. Its cover and interior art drew heavily on BDSM themes, making it feel like a release from the company's Black Dog imprint, specialising in mature themes.  It's been replaced by similar supplements for later editions, but the original is still on driverthru in all its kinky glory. Ghouls:FA leans pretty hard into the idea of Ghoul-dom as soul-crushing addiction and debasing submission. The supplement actually has a lot of neat rules for Ghoul characters of different sorts, including settling lots of questions about the nuts and bolts of feeding on vampire blood and the effects of withdrawal. The only catch is that the theme of sexual fetish running through the art and a lot of the fluff fiction rather distracts from its purpose. What was needed was a book looking at Ghouls across the vampire world and the uses different Clans find for them. Instead, there's a rather relentless focus on sexual and kinky motivations, to the point of making you wonder whether the authors are venting some personal issues.  Guy Davis' art is GREAT, but if your PC's Ghoul is a snooty cordon bleu chef or a garrulous taxi driver named Frank, you might wonder what all the leather and rubber is for. Making the Revenant Relevant & ResonantWhile the poor old Ghouls were being debased, another concept was emerging from the margins of the World of Darkness. A rather controversial supplement called Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand (1994) introduced the idea of Revenants, which are humans born to Ghoul parents and granted long life and supernatural powers by the vampire blood in their veins. Yes, 'Revenants' is a bit of a stupid word for this sort of creature, since they haven't died and come back to life again. It's an odd misstep for White Wolf, who were normally so inspired in their naming conventions. But then, DSofBH is full of missteps and Revenants are among the few concepts introduced in that book to be adopted widely. DSotBH introduced three Revenant families bred by the Tzimisce vampires to serve the Black Hand: Enrathi child-snatchers, Marijava spies, and Rafastio witches. Ghouls:FA introduced a few more that serve the wider Sabbat: monster-wrangling Bratoviches, mortal-manipulating Grimaldis, scholarly Obertus, and party animal Zantosas. Other splatbooks, especially for Tzimisce, added many more - and the Tremere get their own Revenants, the wizardly Ducheski. There's no doubt that Revenants are a significant addition to the World of Darkness setting, shifting it away from 'real world with vampires in it' into a dystopia infested with half-human collaborators practising abduction, murder, and exploitation on a grand scale. Your mileage probably varies with this sort of thing. It's part of the mid-'90s 'Vampions' phase of the game where everything got lurid and nihilistic and the 1st edition's rather gentle and melancholic moral tone was binned. The designers seemed a bit ambivalent about Revenants. Perhaps aware of how their presence in a game could destabilise the power politics of the World of Darkness, they took pains to point out how most Revenant families survived only in remote parts of the world (this was the '90s: Eastern Europe or Central Asia might as well have been Oz) or worked solely for the Tzimisce, with their parochial Balkan obsessions. Vampire Hunting: what a difference a decade makesIn 1992 there was a delightful supplement for 1st edition V:tM called The Hunters Hunted which took the idea of mortal vampire hunters and turned them into player character options.
Covers are so revealing, don't you think? Janet Aulisio's cover art for the 1992 original is full of atmosphere, as a geeky squad of amateur hunters peer by flashlight into a cellar, clutching their tomes of lore, stakes and a mallet. What's down there? Dare they descend? Will they ever come out again? By contrast the 2013 edition shows a bunch of dudes straight up staking a vampire on the floor. Something subtle has been lost along the way ... Hunters Hunted is maligned as a flimsy document that lacks ambition. It sets out motives for vampire hunting, gives some equipment and a few templates, and describes some organisations that hunt vampires, like the governmental NSA and CDC and the occultist Arcanum. It introduced the idea of 'Numina' or minor magical gifts, including the power of True Faith hinted at in the original rulebook and paths of 'Thaumaturgy' for mortals that were later re-branded as Hedge Magic. The main thing the book offers is a ton of theme and sensibility. Predating the cosmic scope of the later World of Darkness, it describes a setting in which vampires are the main - or possibly the only - supernatural threat and Hunters go after them armed with chutzpah and solid brass balls and not much else. Contrast 1999's release, with Hunters getting their own standalone game Hunter: the Reckoning. By the end of the '90s, the night has become a crowded place and Power Creep is well under way. Vampires are by now assisted by Ghouls in gimp suits and veritable armies of Revenants, not to mention all those Level 6+ Disciplines. New-look Hunters are called 'the Imbued' and they are honest-to-goodness superheroes with magic powers. Yup, that's where the game line ended up. So, what went wrong?In a sense, nothing went wrong. Vampire: the Masquerade was incredibly successful. It went from a little indie project to a world straddling publishing phenomenon, with spin off TV shows, card games, and video games. It beefed up, put on some muscle, lost its shyness, gained some swagger. The original themes of moral struggle and redemption got sidelined, in favour of horror, epic sweep, and Nietzschean bombast. It was following the fans in all of this. People got the game they wanted, which wasn't quite the same as they game they were originally pitched. The 1st edition rules had a story serialised in the illustrations, in which a a family man turned into a vampire by a seductive lover at a 'Midnight Michelangelo' exhibit finds the resolve to confront his creator and win back his humanity. Later editions abandoned this sort of sentimentality, in favour of torture-porn dominatrices and inhuman spiritual paths. Each to their own, but the later iterations of Vampire struck me as coarser than its first expression, for all that the setting became crowded, louder, more violent, and more dazzlingly diverse. There's a metaphor there, for postmodernism, or growing up, or something. Expanding the Vampyre HackThis book took a lot of writing. The Vampyre Hack adopted the framework of Matthew Skail's excellent Blood Hack and adapted it to thinly-disguised pastiches of the 'Classic 7' vampire clans from V:tM. It pretty much wrote itself. Bride of the Vampyre Hack was a bit more innovative, playing fast and loose with the independent and Sabbat Clans introduced in later V:tM supplements. More novelties required more thought, but the templates were still there to lean on.
Both are on drivethru (click images for links) and as a bundle, while there's a complete physical edition called Tomb of the Vampyre Hack on Amazon. Spawn of the Vampyre Hack goes a lot further from the source material. First off all, there's a bunch of rules for mortals. Mortals can only get to 5th Level, they have to choose between increasing their Usage Dice or getting useful Talents, they suffer Hunger and Exhaustion and more formidable Out of Action (OofA) penalties. They're flimsy. Familiars Let's start with Familiars (aka Ghouls). In V:tM, any vampire can turn a human into a Ghoul. In Vampyre Hack, you need a Greater Blood Gift to do this or a Rank 2 Goetic Spell. Starting characters could recruit a single Familiar via a Lesser Blood Gift - and the lordly Sangrali can create Familiars for free as their class ability - but Familiars are generally rarer and a bit more precious as a commodity. They are an investment. You're also restricted to managing no more than one Familiar per level you have (twice that for Sangrali) which makes it important to choose them carefully. There will still be vampyres out there whose Familiars are sex toys, but the rules make you choose between such self-indulgence and more practical concerns. Of course, any vampyre can bind mortals to him using the Sanguine Fetter (i.e. blood bond) but Fettered mortals don't become Familiars: they still age, they don't get super powers, it's just not as useful. Out of your general pool (or Paddock) of Familiars, one is your adjutant, known as your Grimalkin. This Familiar is a cut above the rest: you've imbued her with your essence, she goes up in levels with you and acquires more powerful Blood Gifts. Grimalkins get the player character treatment. A Talent available to some Familiars is Unfettered, which weakens the Sanguine Fetter, allowing PC Grimalkins a measure of independence. It also explains the existence of Gallowglasses, who are Rogue Familiars struggling to preserve themselves by working for payment in vampyre blood. Alchemical Talents enable them to avoid the Sanguine Fetter by making blood donations last longer or even removing the enslaving effects. Familiars at 1st and 2nd Level can hold their own against a vampyre of the same level, but even with the extra powers that kick in at 3rd-5th Level, vampyres start to pull away. Unfamiliars Then there are the other Familiars that don't have it so easy. Blajini are the malformed creatures that higher level Zoltan vampyres create with their flesh-warping. They struggle to pass for human, but at least they aren't usually Fettered. Strega vampyres can't create Familiars with their blood and few of them know Goetic magic, but they summon ghosts and place them into corpses and their Zombies serve many of the same functions. Of course, the ghost has its own memories, attachments, and agenda, and the rules encourage Zombies to pursue a side hustle of dealing with the issues they died without fixing. Chorazin vampyres use Goetia to create Golems and Flesh Golems make tank-y alternatives to Familiars. Once again, the brain sourced for the Golem preserves fragmentary memories and desires from when it was alive, which PC Golems can fulfil when their masters aren't watching. Un-persons are the soulless victims of the Unlife that higher level Rakasha vampyres manipulate. It's not much fun playing one of these, but how about playing all of them? The Bhuta is the collective intelligence of the Un-persons serving a vampyre and it switches its consciousness between bodies in order to pursue its Weird - an alien agenda that the vampyre had better not find out about. Unfamiliars are an exotic option for experienced roleplayers, especially as they are hiding not just from humanity, but concealing their independence and intentions from their own vampyre masters. Dhampirs Dhampirs are what Revenants should have been called (though, to be fair, the World of Darkness applies the term to a different type of creature). Since Familiars and Unfamiliars can't beget life, something very odd has to happen for one of them to conceive a child who will be born with vampyre blood. I set about concocting reasons why this might happen. For example, the Ajakavas have their foetal soul replaced by a ghost thanks to necromancer and are born 'possessed' while the Grosvenors are descended from werewolves whose vitality overcomes the poisonous vampyre blood in their parent's body; Czernobogi are made fertile by a cthonic ritual in a sacred grotto while Harpagons have literally made a deal with a devil; the all-female Nafarroa have used their witchcraft to remain fruitful while the alchemist Darzis use potions. The Fae-touched Duvaliers, werecat Nunda, and leprous Jahangirs have similar backstories. Dhampirs are split between the Vassal Lineages who work directly for vampyres and the Mercenary Lineages who manage a degree of independence, selling their services without committing themselves. What I'm trying to do here is build the idea of Dhampirs existing independently (albeit very contingently) from vampyres. Part way between humans and the undead, they're a 'third force' in the setting, albeit a weak and disunited one. They function as powerful enforcers for the vampyric 'hegemon', but also potential allies PCs can go to that won't automatically turn the in to the Elders. They're not liminal figures like V:tM's Revenants, but they're independent and unreliable, and as likely to be the targets of vampyric plots as the instruments employed by them.. Witch-hunters Here are the Hunters that this supplement was supposed to be all about in the first place. There's a bunch of mortal character classes, like Clergy, Psychics, Shamans, Techies, and Special Agents that cover the broad templates from Hunters Hunted. The Fanatics and Paragons are a bit more like the 'Imbued' from Hunter: the Reckoning, since they are mortals whose life-changing traumas or supernatural benefactors confer powerful abilities. The Security Usage Die from Vampyre Hack is reinterpreted for hunting vampyres. You have to force the vampyre to roll Security by fulfilling investigative challenges until it shrinks and fully exhausts: then you've got him at your mercy. Yes, it'a a pretty clumsy system, but most of the time Players will roleplay their way to the showdown before the Die gets exhausted, which means a trap or ambush is in store. What has Spawn of the Vampyre Hack got goin' on?The Vampyre Hack is my part-apologetic, part-wistful, part-resentful love letter to Vampire: the Masquerade. Partly, it's a fun project to reinterpret the clunky handfuls-of-dice 'Storyteller System' into a simpler, more intuitive D&D-style game. Partly, it's a way to go back to vampire RPGs without the wider setting that V:tM acquired in the '90s, much of which I took issue with. It's a chance to approach the clans, lore, and institutions, like ghouls and revenants, afresh, saying to myself 'How would you rather this had developed?' Partly, it's an original creation, saying, 'Isn't this a novel and intriguing way of doing vampire tribes and their various undead and semi-undead apparatchiks?' TL:DR, Spawn of the Vampyre Hack concludes this project for the moment. I've got a scenario in mind and a solo rules set in development, but the old vampire itch has been scratched. If you play Vampyre Hack, with or without its Spawn, let me know how it goes! Next on the list, The Full Moon Hack, for werewolves and their ilk.
 Before I talk about the Warpstar! RPG by Greg Saunders, I want to take a long route around. I'm a Star Wars kid. I was 10 when Star Wars premiered in the UK and went to see it on my 11th birthday. I was blown away. Obviously, I had to own the action miniatures, a cardboard Death Star, the board game, the comics and a collection of those strange cards you bought with bubblegum (which I detested).
 I'd been groomed for Star Wars by the UK comic 2000AD which had appeared earlier in 1977 and thrilled me with dinosaur hunting time-travellers, Dan Dare and, of course, Judge Dredd. The 2000AD Summer Special had heralded the arrival of Star Wars with a centre splash page that conveyed no idea of who the hero was or who the baddies were (Jawas, perhaps?) but the mysterious images pierced my soul with their distinctive blend of space romance.  The 1977 2000AD Summer Special: the caption for Han Solo and Chewbacca reads 'Luke Skywalker takes a break with one of his friends.' After that, I loved Sci Fi. I'd loved Science Fiction before, of course. I adored Doctor Who and the Tomorrow People on TV and was an avid fan of Space 1999: the distinctive Eagle spaceships from that show were a treasure childhood toy along with an Interceptor from the earlier Gerry Anderson show, U.F.O..
Doctor Who acquired a, err, charming new companion in 1977, but Tomorrow People had the haunting and enigmatic opening sequence and a stranger and more provocative concept.
Best. Toys. Ever. My first ever memory of watching TV is the episode of Star Trek where Kirk fights Spock with weird weapons in an arena: I was, I think, 3 or 4.  Are you hearing the music in your head? But Star Wars involved a sort of commitment to glorious starscapes, roiling planetary surfaces, lasers in the darkness and gleaming battle armour. The odd thing is that, within a year of watching Star Wars for the first time, I was playing D&D. Roleplaying quickly dovetailed back into science fiction, with the Gamma World RPG and Traveller in its iconic black box.
Age cannot wither her: there will probably never be a RPG set this ... beautiful Yet science fiction roleplaying just never captured my imagination. Gamma World was a lark with its gun-wielding mutant bunnies, but it just wasn't serious the way D&D could be. What about Traveller? Well, I certainly tried it. Who couldn't love the sleek modernism of the three-book box set, the cool black-and-red iconography, the tantalising mayday from Free Trader Beowulf ... Traveller: Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future was clearly a serious game set in a serious universe. I spent merry hours rolling up planets and populating my own sector maps.  Yes, and not just sector maps, but rolling up animals and random encounter tables for those planets, then rolling up all sorts of retired Marines and cashiered Naval Officers ...  Notoriously, the process of rolling up a Traveller character could result in dying during background history. Traveller invites you to create a 40- or 50-something PC who has already had a proper career in the military or in politics but then decides, in a ludicrous mid-life crisis, to go gallivanting round the universe getting into hare-brained scrapes with a bunch of strangers. As a roleplaying proposition, I found it a bit of a stretch back in my teens. Now that I'm the same age as those characters, it's no clearer to me what Traveller PCs think they're up to. So, I rarely played Traveller and when I did, the results were underwhelming. Traveller just never seemed to catch fire. There wasn't, for me, a story that was dying to be told and needing Traveller as its idiom. There was just a lot of aimless wandering in space ... heists ... bounties ... patrons in space bars ... the cost of repairing ships ... Twilight's Peak (1980) was a striking scenario but I just couldn't sell it to my players because, well, I wasn't sold on it myself despite Andy Slack's glowing review in White Dwarf #24 ('This is how Traveller should be. Buy it.'). Back to the dungeon I went and never really looked back at SF RPGs. (My) Problems with SF RoleplayingPart of it was just maturity. Traveller isn't as easy for teenagers to switch on to as D&D. In a fantasy RPG there are standard tropes: you arrive in a village, you go to the inn, some ageing peasant tells you of strange goings on at the ruined keep and the disappearance of the miller's daughter, off you go to clean the site out of kobolds and rescue the maiden. OK, you could substitute 'planet' for village and 'spaceport bar' for tavern and, I suppose, a 'disused orbital space station' and a 'missing corporate CEO' (female, if you insist). But immediately , questions intrude. What sort of planet? What sort of spaceport? What exactly is this orbital facility? Which corporation? Why isn't anyone else dealing with this? You might say that answering those questions is precisely what makes for designing a good adventure - and you'd be right. But my problems were closer to home. D&D offered easy access because everyone knows what a medieval village, tavern and ruined keep would be like - but everything needs thinking about in a SF RPG and nothing can be assumed. Or so it seemed to me at the time. In any event, Traveller seemed to set a high entry bar in terms of conceptualising and preparing the scenario, while not offering particularly clear hooks. You see, Traveller was basically the Nineteen Seventies In Space - and a rather banal, suburban take on the Seventies at that. Traveller didn't have laser swords, space wizards, godlike AIs or matter transport beams, let alone smart drugs, cyber-enhancement or netrunning. There was a sort of austerity to Traveller: computers were big box-y things, laser pistols were inferior to conventional slug-throwers in most contexts, the PCs were middle aged, psionics were rare, aliens scarce. When Traveller's official setting introduced the Aslan lion-people and Vargr dog-people, they were hardly compelling. Gentle reader, you might be tearing your hair out. Why didn't I just add those things in if I wanted them so badly? Of course, I could have. But I think I was as enthralled to Traveller's severe aesthetic as I was repelled by it. The game seemed to demand to be taken on its own high-minded terms. It would seem ... somehow, I know not how ... clumsy to foist lightsabres, transmat beams and cybermen onto Traveller. It would have been indelicate. Jejeune. I was too much a roleplaying snob to let myself have fun. Hey, Idiot: why not play Star Wars? A friend has reminded me that West End Games did a fantastic Star Wars RPG back in the '80s. I remember playing it, now that my memory is jogged. I owned the d20 Star Wars and Star Trek RPGs way back when as well. But ... I don't know. I've never really cared for tie-in games. I'm not bothered about the Dune, Blade Runner or Firefly RPGs either. Maybe it's my snobbery again, but I wanted a RPG that enabled me to create something like Star Wars or Firefly - without roleplaying in the official universe of those franchises. For whatever weird reason, I've been looking for a SF RPG that would make me want to create my own science fiction, not inhabit someone else's. OSR To The Rescue !My rehabilitation in SF RPG was a long time coming. I contrived to miss out on the genuinely up-to-date SF RPGs of the 1980s (Cyberpunk, SLA Industries) or the loony SF mash-ups of the '90s (Rifts, TORG). I somehow managed to avoid Star Frontiers, which offered actual D&D in space and would surely have disabused me of the hurtful notion that SF roleplaying had to be particularly clever or sophisticated.
'The Playable One' seemed like a direct dig at maths-heavy Traveller. There's a lovely retrospective of Star Frontiers but by 1980 I'd been scared off by Traveller and stuck to my fantasy furrow. I never really looked at SF RPGs again until quite recently, when the OSR trend for adapting original D&D led me first to White Box, then White Box spin-offs like Eldritch Tales (last post) then to James M Spahn's White Star.
White Star comes as a perfectly-serviceable basic rules and an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Galaxy Edition (which you might as well go for if you're getting the PDF since the digital versions cost the same). White Star is a beautifully-presented adaptation of White Box style D&D into a SF idiom. It is also completely shameless about porting in Star Knights with their laser swords, alien brutes, computer-hacking cyphers, cyborg, superheroes, mechas and a host of other stereotypes to create a broad palette you can pick and choose from. I really wish I'd found something like this in my '80s teens. If White Star has a problem, it's perhaps that it's too broad. With every science fiction and science fantasy trope on offer, it risks losing the idiosyncracy that intrigued me in Traveller: the offer to roleplay in a highly distinctive universe. With White Star, the problem isn't all the stuff you have to add in; it's the stuff you have to take out. Interlude: Lady Blackbird and Scum & VillainyDuring the first Lockdown there was an opportunity to roleplay with friends via Zoom and we tried out Lady Blackbird by Jon Harper: it's a free mini-RPG and you can find it here. We also played another of Harper's games, the excellent Blades In The Dark. Blades has a sister product called Scum & Villainy and I sourced a copy of that in my newfound enthusiasm for space romance.
Lady Blackbird is a 15-page RPG with a set of pre-generated characters who start off as prisoners on board the imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow. The rag-tag group have to escape and get back to their ship, the Owl. The group includes a space princess fleeing an arranged marriage, her bodyguard, a romantic space captain and his quirky crew. The universe is the 'Wild Blue' (shattered worlds around a dimming star), with breathable space, space squids, space goblins, space magic. It plays out like a Saturday morning matinee. It's steampunk Star Wars. It's great. Blades in the Dark is a bigger project, but Scum & Villainy grounds its wide-open RPG system in a manageable small corner of space called the Procyon Sector: four out-of-the-way solar systems linked by interstellar gates but somewhat cut off from the vast galactic empire. Here's a setting with space mystics, alien AIs, sci-fi religions, glamorous guilds of space-thieves, very much space fantasy. So, Star Wars again (as the title alludes). John Harper has certainly won me back to SF RPGs, but of a distinctive genre: space romance. His trick is to set the action in a very localised part of a very particular sort of SF universe: one with a lot of the accoutrements of fantasy roleplaying. The catch is, you really need 5 players to run Lady Blackbird (and it's a one-shot); Scum & Villainy is designed for campaign play, but it's quite demanding. Warpstar To The Rescue (and about time too!)Recently I came across Greg Saunders' fantasy RPG Warlock! (reviewed here) and was impressed by its artfully minimalist rules and striking tone. I quickly discovered that Warlock! has a sister product: SF RPG Warpstar! (see what they did there? both games begin with war-! and end with -!). Could this be the game that properly lures me back to SF?
Warpstar! is very much Warlock! re-skinned for SF. You have just two stats (Stamina and Luck) and a set of 32 skills you add to a d20 roll, trying to hit 20+ or just beat your opponent. These skills start at 4, 5 or 6 but five of them are career-specific and you have 10 extra points to split between them, to a maximum of 10 or 12. Some are generic skills (spot, Stealth), some familiar from the fantasy game (Short Blade, sleight of Hand) and some are new to the SF setting (Astronav, Ship's Gunner, Zero-G, etc). One, Warp Focus, lets you do 'magic.' The 24 careers cover the spectrum of SF tropes. Some are professions (Bounty Hunter, Diplomat and I suppose Pirate and Gambler) but others are more like archetypes (Street Kid, Rebel) and one, Warp-Touched, is a space wizard. As well as boosted skills, each career comes with a couple of tables to roll (or choose) your background and quirky details of your motivations, past escapades, enemies made and reputation earned. As with Warlock!, there is a ton of imagination in these tables, which accomplish more world-building than an entire chapter of setting, and a slightly seedy tone that Greg Saunders delights in. Characters can use experience to switch careers, broadening their repertoires, and gain access to Advanced Careers if they want to push their skills into the teens. In a variation on the Warlock! template, everybody starts with a randomly-rolled Talent, to give PCs a little more heroic oompf than the down-at-heel misfits of Warlock! ever enjoyed. Combat is a standard skill test, but hand-to-hand combat involves an opposed roll, trying to roll higher than your opponent. The risk of launching an attack but coming away as the one who takes the damage should make players cautious about resorting to violence. Once Stamina hits zero, you roll for lasting Criticals, the worst of which kill you outright. With PCs boasting Stamina scores in the teens or low 20s and weapons doing damage ranging from a d6 (knives, etc) to 2d6+4 (pulse guns), you can afford to get hit once. but after that you consider retreating, which carries no penalty. The intention is that combat usually goes to first blood, then NPCs (and wise PCs) back off and try a different approach. Stamina is regained rapidly - you get half of it back after a brief rest, all of it after a long rest. Magic enters the game because of the Warp Space that ships use to cross interstellar distances. This isn't the clean and clinical hyperspace of Star Wars; no, it's the chaos-realm of Warhammer 40K and anyone exposed to it risks being mutated, but one such mutation is the acquisition of spell-like powers called Glyphs. As with Warlock!, spells/glyphs are physical things that an aspiring magus has to hunt down, bargain for or steal from other practitioners. The main addition to the game is the addition of space ships and ship combat. It's assumed each PC group gets their own space ship and you can roll or choose from a set of 6, each with a distinctive design and aesthetic: from the elegant D'Aubigny Envoy Cruiser to the tough, fast but unfashionable Kilos Star Hauler. Spaceship combat is handled just like personal combat. Ships have Stamina (called Structure), armour, built-in weapons that deal damage in a similar range to (but great scale than) personal weapons. It's a clean, intuitive system that once again encourages brief skirmishes then running away once someone takes damage. The setting is a vast Galactic Empire known as the Chorus. This is ruled by fractious noble houses who, in a clear nod to Dune, achieve an almost-immortality through using the space-drug Cadence, the source of which is known only to the supreme Autarch. Other factions include the military Hegemony, the unscrupulous Merchant Combine and the arcane Warp Consortium whose possession of weird technology makes them, in effect, a guild of sorcerers. A bestiary includes some oddball aliens, some of which (the Fruiting Dead and Borg-alike Nodes) imply cosmic horror, but many of which seem to delight in upsetting expectations, such as the troll-like Jondo who are actually placid and philosophical or the hideous dog-monster Borrs who are actually deeply cultured. Warp Entities allow for the inclusion of space dragons, space vampires and space demon-gods, according to taste. So, is it any good? Yes. Warpstar! is quick, clean and intuitive - as you'd expect from an adaptation of an already-solid game like Warlock!. The setting is highly serviceable while being vague enough to customise. The character careers offer lots of hints for your first few scenarios. Nobody dies in character generation. Some features are 'baked in' to the rules. There's space-magic, for example. You could prise it out, I suppose, or recast it as psionics if you are allergic to fantasy in your SF (although references to Warp mutations run all through the rules and setting). The combat system, as noted, does tend to impose a cautious, scaredy-bully style of play, where antagonists shoot or stab each other once, then down their weapons and negotiate. The skill system means that PCs tend to succeed between a third to half the time, which is a bit low for a truly swashbuckling game, a bit high for gritty techno-realism. But I like these baked-in features. They give the game some character that seemed to be missing in White Star, for example. I could see myself using Warpstar! to scratch the itch for SF one-shots - or to adapt Traveller scenarios (such as used to feature in White Dwarf of old) into a slightly more space operatic idiom. I've also acquired the Omoron sourcebook, which is a Warpstar! detailed setting: a peculiar star cluster that's a bit like the Procyon Sector in Scum & Villainy. It features a couple of scenarios, but I'll not mention them until I've run them on my gaming group.  Omoron (and several other sourcebooks for Warpstar!) is available from drivethrurpg The only criticism I can make of Warpstar! is the price. The rules are available as PDF and hardback. The PDF is £9 which isn't exactly cheap, but you're getting a solid game and a lot of setting ideas for your money. The hardback is a stonking £33. Why so expensive? Well, it's because this is the premium colour price point. Is there a lot of colour in the rules? No, barely any - but Greg Saunders explains "the premium colour option has been chosen for the print version as it represents a much better quality of paper with an improved look and feel." I bit the bullet and invested in a physical edition because I find it hard to use PDF rules sets in play; I can attest that the paper is very good quality, the book looks clean and clear and, well, very SF, so that's a big tick for Artistic Standards. But it has to be said the book really doesn't need this treatment, especially as the art style throughout aims for the same scuzzy 1980s-fanzine vibe that informed Warlock! I mean, it looks great, but it would marry very nicely with coarser paper and lower resolution. You can't help wishing there was a nice cheap non-premium edition, or even better a non-premium softback. If you could buy a physical copy of Warpstar! for, say, £10-15, I'd cheerfully treat my group to 'players copies' to build commitment and speed up character creation. Warpstar! hits my sweet spot. It delivers space romance (which I think is my preferred genre, rather than Hard SF) with a simple but distinctive rules set. It's got theme and imagination running through it. It posits player characters who are quirky and distinctive, but of less-than-heroic stature. It will hit the gaming table a few times over the next few months. I'll review the Omoron campaign book when it does.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, For great poems about (possibly) haunted houses, there's Poe and Walter De La Mare's The Listeners, but Poe describes the situation where the ghost is trying to get in - which is the theme of the second scenario for The Ghost Hack. UPON A MIDNIGHT DREARY underwent a playtest last week and here's the session report. Of course, massive SPOILERS ahead.  Evocative cover art by Bob Greyvenstein. Interior art (used below) is copyright Steve Miller (2015). Click image to link to drivethrurpg. The scenario played out over two sessions, with a shifting cast of PCs:
After the events of HELL HATH NO FURY, the PCs are all second level and Joshua Pflint has a wightblade sword (for a while longer anyway). Mortal Coils The story begins (as they usually do) with the PC ghosts checking on their Mortal Coils. Lexi is furious to find a new manager at her beloved bar, The Crash Lounge, has installed a massive TV screen to play noisy sports to customers. She uses Ghostly Caress to change the password on the satellite box, locking it down. Oscar visits his wife, who has moved the children to a new home in an old signalman's house beside an abandoned railway line. There's a crisis when his son Dale goes missing. Oscar finds the boy in the railway cutting, playing safely and watched over by another ghost. This ghost is an old signalman and introduces himself as Edwyn Sullivan - or 'Sully'. He manifests in order to return Dale to his mother and asks in return that Oscar helps him. Sully haunts the old Trevalyan House, but a team of Ghost Hunters has moved into it, using salt to lock Sully out and trap his ghostly wife inside. Oscar agrees to find a way into the House and rescue the ghost trapped inside. In fact, 'Sully' is really evil Dr Reinhardt, a dead serial killer, using Apparition to take another form. The bit about the Ghost Hunters and his wife is true. He hasn't mentioned the cellar full of ghostly victims he and his wife have been torturing for half a century, now all dangerous Wights. Who ya gonna call? Oscar assembles fellow-ghosts Gregg and Lexi to visit the Trevalyan House. They can see it's been recently renovated but then abandoned. A crazy old lady sticks up posters warning people to STAY AWAY - EVIL LIVES HERE! A mysterious blonde girl takes photographs of the building until the old lady chases her away. The PC ghosts decide to enter. The two mortals are important NPCs. The crazy old lady is Kathleen Dawson who escaped from the Trevalyan House 50 years ago when she was just a young woman, bringing the Reinhardts' murder spree to an end. The younger woman is Michelle 'Misty' Quint, a wannabe serial-killer under the spell of Dr Reinhardt's evil ghost. The players debate for a while and decide it would be best to ignore these blatant plot-hooks. The building has been warded with salt, making it hard to pass through the walls. Gregg enters the back pantry and finds one of the Ghost Hunters there, making lunch for the team. When Oscar joins him, they accidentally set of the EMF Meter the hunter is carrying. The young man lashes out with a wrought iron baton. These hunters are well-equipped to deal with ghosts! Oscar retreats out of the house but Gregg stays at a safe distance and observes. The hunter, Lloyd, is joined by an older man in an iron wheelchair. He is Fyodor Herzog and he has trapped a ghost in the kitchen, inside a circle of salt. Gregg notes with dismay that the trapped ghost is a feral Wight that bashes the kitchen table about in impotent rage. Herzog appears to be trying to interview the creature, as if he can actually hear it. More Wights are trapped in the cellar, including one who is a witch-like woman who seems to possess more rationality and wickedness than the others. The salt wards are salt crystals stuck to adhesive tape that the Hunters have slapped down across doorways and windows, making entire rooms impenetrable to ghosts. As starting characters, the PCs have relatively un-rotted souls (in game terms, their Grave Die is only a d6) so they can push through walls and doorways with effort - they have to make a CON test at a penalty. This creates a lot of anxiety as some PCs succeed and others fail, splitting up the group, while those who get inside worry about being able to get back out again. Lexi enters the study instead and finds the team leader, Greta, working on salt-based grenades. Staying clear of Greta's EMF Meter, Lexi reads Greta's notes on the house, learning about 18th century murders who laired here and a more recent spree of murders in the '70s.  Greta, leader of the Ghost Hunters P.A. arrives and investigates the team's van. He discovers that the team is from The Ghost Society and has been recruited by the house's new owner, Jerome Maxwell-Goode, to investigate the strange goings-on in his new property. The Ghost Hunters are a complex bunch with dynamic interpersonal relationships. Lloyd's boyfriend Harvey is down in the cellar, being driven mad by the Wights. Herzog is having a nervous breakdown. A love triangle is leading to a violent resolution between Bernard, Lee and Anushika. A random encounter table mixes these developments up so that no two scenarios unfold in quite the same way. Trouble on the Tracks Lexi and Oscar decide to find and possess someone with the authority to enter the House. Lexi possesses a woman police officer, Chayan Kaur, and Oscar rides along unseen. Kaur is visiting a house where a child as gone missing and Oscar realises it is his own family. Dale has disappeared again and this time has not returned. Lexi guides PC Kaur and her partner PC Gill down the old railway track, to an abandoned siding where there is a big shed full of iron chains and an abandoned wagon. They realise that there are people locked inside the wagon, but the iron in the frame makes it impenetrable to ghosts. One prisoner is a ghost and he identifies himself as the real Edwyn Sullivan - the 'Sully' who introduced himself to Oscar was an imposter. The imposter reveals himself soon after as a vicious ghost with scalpel fingers who possesses PC Gill and attacks the PCs, along with his human accomplice, the blonde girl who swings an iron chain. Lexi knocks the evil ghost out of Gill by pushing him into the iron chains in the shed. She abandons Chayan's body to attack the ghost in person, but is outmatched. The ghost carves her up so badly she turns into a Wight herself and slips into Hades. Consumed by hatred, she visits her Mortal Coil and demonises the place, chasing out terrified staff and customers. Seeing what happened too Lexi, Oscar flees. The only good outcome is the PC Gill phones in a report to his superiors, so police will come to open up the wagon. Reinhardt's deadliness took the players by surprise. Lexi was unlocky to exhaust her Grave Die when she reached 0 HP but those are the breaks. Her Mortal Coil ended up shrinking by one dice step and she reformed amidst the wreckage she had caused, on 2 HP, feeling very traumatised. The survivor's story Gregg and P.A. have followed the crazy poster lady back to her cat-infested bungalow. They realise she's Kathleen Dawson and is obsessed with the Trevalyan House because she's the sole survivor of a string of murders there in the '60s and '70s by husband-and-wife serial killers Fitz and Beverley Reinhardt. As well as postering the house, she's pestering its new owner, Jerome Maxwell-Goode, but he is away on a cruise. The mysterious blonde woman arrives at the door and threatens Kathleen, telling her that Dr Reinhardt misses her and wants to see her again. She chases Kathleen into the kitchen where the old lady suffers a heart attack. Gregg manifests in his Charnel Form of a burning corpse and chases the young woman out of the house. Using ghostly caress, they contrive to get Kathleen her heart medication. Reinhardt was planning for Misty to kill Kathleen so he could chain her ghost up in chthonic fetters and take her to his wife Beverley as a gift. Now he's properly angry with the PCs for interfering.  Dr Reinhardt Meeting together, the PCs conclude that the evil ghost who has engineered everything is Dr Reinhardt, the serial killer, and his wife must be the powerful Wight trapped in the cellar, which puts the Ghost Hunters in danger. They suspect the blonde woman is a murderess that Dr Reinhardt is mentoring to carry own his murderous legacy. They resolve to warn the Hunters and are joined by the Poltergeist Joshua Pflint. Return to Trevalyan House Back at the House, events have moved on. The Ghost Hunters have lost one of their number, Harvey, who disappeared investigating the cellar. The team's mechanic, Bernard, is working on drones to fly downstairs and investigate. Greta has nearly finished her salt bombs. Herzog has had a breakdown after psychic abuse from the Wights in the cellar. Tensions are brewing between Bernard and his girlfriend Anushika over team-mate Lee's attraction to her, which is clearly reciprocated.  Beverley Reinhardt (in pre-Wight days) Oscar enters the kitchen and manifests to warn Bernard about the ghosts in the cellar. However, the team has no intention of leaving while team-mate Harvey is still missing. Greta (followed by Gregg) goes to try to shake Herzog out of his funk and Bernard (followed by Joshua) runs upstairs to find Lee and Anushika embracing. That produces a fight which sees Bernard badly beaten. Meanwhile, Lloyd, who is Harvey's lover, is lured into the cellar by Beverley Reinhardt, imitating Harvey's voice using manifest and apparition. Once down there, he is possessed by her and calls for help. Greta descends and the two of them drag Harvey up the steps, with the possessed Lloyd contriving to drop Harvey on the top step, breaking the salt ward there. Gregg decides to reveal himself to old Herzog, warning him about the Wights in the cellar. He advises Herzog to get to safety behind salt wards, ideally upstairs. However, he is too late to avert catastrophe.  Herzog, the psychic The events in the house have triggered "the Crisis" - this is when the Ghost Hunters enter the cellar and unwittingly release the Wights. Catastrophe The rest of the team convenes in the kitchen to examine Harvey's body. Beverley Reinhardt steps out of Lloyd and summons her Wights up the stairs. Joshua uses his Poltergeist powers to snatch one of Greta's salt grenades and throw it into the cellar staircase, driving the Wights back. He attacks Beverley with his wightblade sword, but to no effect. Beverley demonises the room, shattering windows and flinging knives about, then blowing up the boiler. The humans are killed or traumatised in the carnage. Greta escapes but her salt grenades detonate, stunning her. Joshua resolves to hold the room against a small army of Wights. Spying on the outside, Oscar sees a taxi pull up. Out step the ghostly Dr Reinhardt and his mortal apprentice, Misty. The blonde girl starts to break upon the front door to the house with a crowbar.  Misty, serial-killer apprentice Joshua escapes, dragging the unconscious Anushika out of the house and leaving the other hunters for dead. Greta drags Herzog to the front door, only for it to be opened by Misty, the young serial killer. She smashes Herzog's skull with an iron bar. Gregg tries to intervene by manifesting again in his burning-corpse form but Beverley appears and is far too strong, throwing him through the walls, gravely injured. Oscar contrives to get Greta to safety, by keening positive emotions into her and guiding her out through the study. At this point, the players realise they are overwhelmed. Four Wights would be a challenge on any day, but added in super-Wight Beverley, evil Doctor Reinhardt and Misty with her iron chain and the PC Ghosts realise they have to escape.. The Wights escape the house. They are the tortured spirits of the Reinhardts' old victims and now they desire only to find their own Mortal Coils and visit terrible sufferings on them. Dr Reinhardt is taken aback to see his wife is now a Wight. Beverley is furious to see he has been grooming a mortal protege. In a jealous rage, she attacks Misty and, gripped by a noble impulse, Reinhardt attacks his monstrous wife. They are lost to sight as the house burns down. Post Credit Scenes The PC Ghosts realise that the four Wight victims of the Reinhardts will race back to their Mortal Coils to visit unspeakable horrors on them. AS they are partly responsible for releasing them, the PCs stand to increase their own Grave Dice if they allow this to happen. So we have a follow-on scebnario: finding the Wights' Mortal Coils before the Wights do. In their favour, 50 years have passed since the Wights died in the cellar so the monsters will be a bit confused about where things are now. A closing scene has frail Kathleen Dawson recovering in hospital. She tells a kind nurse she is feeling much better and hopes to go home soon. This is greeted by cruel laughter from the patient in the next bed. The patient is Misty, recovering from her injuries in the Trevalyan House. She turns her burned face towards the terrified Kathleen and keeps laughing. Reflections The scenario unfolded beautifully. The PCs failed in the primary mission (defeating the Wights and Dr Reinhardt) but they did save a couple of Ghost Hunters from the House at the end. HELL HATH NO FURY had a linear plot that unfolded in a string of encounters in a more-or-less fixed order. Successful players were well-equipped for the final showdown. This scenario has a different structure. The House is a location with a cast of NPCs and monsters inside and a random encounter table dictating their interactions. The players can interact with this setting in any way they like. This makes UPON A MIDNIGHT DREARY far more open-ended. Exploring the Trevalyan House was delightfully tense, because of the difficulty with crossing the salt-wards separating each room. PCs were often in danger of finding themselves trapped in a room, unable to press on or retreat. Later, they found ways to disrupt some of the wards, making movement easier. But of course, easy movement for the PC ghosts also means easy movement for the horrid Wights. The players engaged with several plot strands (the wagon in the old railway siding, Kathleen Dawson, the history of the House, the team of Ghost Hunters) but never really pursued any of them. As a result, when the Crisis blew up, it caught the players on the back foot. Gregg (played by Karl) was only just revealing himself the the psychic Herzog. If that had happened earlier, things could have unfolded differently, with the Ghost Hunters as well-armed allies helping the PCs take on the Wights. As it turned out, the players found the least-optimal outcome and also the most alarming one, with the Wights rampaging through the House, the salt wards failing, the humans dying horribly... bad times. But also, good times. The players have a clear follow-on scenario to protect mortals from the spirits of as tragedy half a century ago now released and bearing down on unsuspecting families, former lovers, homes and grandchildren. Then there's Beverley Reinhardt, already established as a great villainess, and the merrily deranged Misty, the apprentice serial-killer, now operating without her beloved Dr Reinhardt guiding her murderous steps. The playtest threw up some valuable rules tweaks too, mostly to make the ghostly 'Crafts' more consistent in how they work. The 2.1 rules set on drivethrurpg incorporates these changes.
We're playing a campaign using White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game, which makes a virtue out of simplicity. We like to impose a critical hit (maximum damage!) on a 20, so there needs to be a critical failure on a 1. Currently we go with the old drop-your-weapon standby. There's nothing wrong with drop-your-weapon (DYW). It's simple. You can spend a round picking it up again (foregoing your attack) or someone else can pick it up for you (foregoing their action) or you can just draw another weapon and bash on with that. I note with a sinking heart that White Box uses the ghastly one minute melee round (p31) that Gary Gygax introduced for AD&D. Why?!?!? I wrote about this back when I was reviewing Forge: Out of Chaos. In a one minute melee round you have plenty of opportunity to pick up a dropped weapon yourself. Needless to say, my White Box melee rounds are a brisk 10 seconds. The problem with DYW is that it gets a bit boring. Players never get tired of dealing maximum damage but they do get fed up of dropping their weapons, especially the Dark Elf War Smith whose warhammer seems to be made out of banana skins. DYW also gets comedic, which is fine on some occasions but not the vibe you want in more dramatic showdowns. I need to resist the urge to create a complicated Critical Fail table, partly because this is White Box here and partly because whatever I create for PC fumbles will have to apply to monsters too and, as a Referee, I don't want extra book-keeping. Option 1: Fumbles Are Stressful  I already use the Trauma & Insanity system, adapted from Goblinpunch. I find it pretty easy to track and it doesn't alter the structure of the game too much, but it helps spotlight scary moments and indicates to players when danger is looming. So far only two characters (both belonging to the same player!) have contracted any permanent derangements, but a few people have had awkward breakdowns. A simple mechanic is: if you roll a natural 1 in combat, gain a Trauma point. Of course, you then have to make a Breakdown Test by rolling over your current Trauma on a d20 (Wisdom modifiers apply) and if you fail that you freak out in the manner of your choosing for 1d6 rounds or else 'suck it up' and waive the penalty at the cost of taking on a derangement. This means combat fumbles don't always produce a bad side-effect, but they contribute to your overall stress and, when they do explode in your face, you could be quite severely discomfitted. The beauty of this is elegance: it relates to a mechanic I already use and my players understand and it's a mechanic which periodically causes PCs to freeze or flee or freak out. Of course, it doesn't apply to monsters - instead, a Natural-1 could cause them to make a Morale Check. There are some monsters (Berserkers, Undead) who simply don't fail Morale Checks, so a Natural-1 is just an ordinary fail for them. Is that a problem? Option 2: Fumbles Are Feints  Another view is that a fumble in combat represents, not your clumsiness, but your opponent's craftiness. They feinted or somehow drew you into a reckless attack that exposed yourself. A simple mechanic is: the enemy you are attacking gets a free attack. In other versions of D&D, this could be quite punishing, but remember two things:
The beauty of this is that it speeds fights up by adding in extra attacks now and again. Given the damage output that PCs have, it probably plays in favour of PCs. It rewards high-HP, high-AC characters who can endure multiple attacks. Most importantly, it's REALLY SIMPLE. You roll a 1 and your opponent hits you: simples. Option 3: A Critical Miss Table  It's a classic solution: 
This was my first solution, but on reflection it's the least attractive. It's another damn table to roll on. The results won't always make sense in the narrative. It can be unintentionally comedic at the wrong times. But it does introduce uncertainty and drama to combat. One option is to decide which to use on a case-by-case basis, announcing it at the start of any given fight. Being swarmed by Giant Rats or an army of rotting Skeletons is stressful, so Option 1 fits best: your fumbles means the rats are in your hair, the skeletons' bony fingers are at your throat. A duel or matched melee against humanoid opponents fits Option 2 better: you are both trying to break through each other's guard. A party attack on a big enemy fits Option 3 better: if you are all fighting a Dragon or a Giant, it keeps swatting you away and deafening you with its roars.  |
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I'm a teacher and a writer and I love board games and RPGs. I got into D&D back in the '70s with Eric Holmes' 'Blue Book' set and I've started writing my own OSR-inspired games - as well as fantasy and supernatural fiction.. Stuff I'm GMingStuff I'm ReadingGames I'm LovingStuff I Wrote
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