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I don't check out my own reviews all that often (honest), but I did have a look yesterday and found this glowing praise for The Hedgerow Hack and its big brother Through The Hedgerow.   J. is referring to two of my old blogs, Through The Hedgerow We Go introduced the game and A World Without (Too Much) Violence discussed the design philosophy. Anyway, J. continues:  This is high praise indeed, J.. What's more, it prompts me to get a move on with the next stage of the Hedgerow project: the novel.
Watch this space ...
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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of the first year of White Dwarf, a magazine in some ways still advocating assumptions and gaming styles that seem very out of date to me now, but in other ways looking ahead to its 'golden age' of innovation and popularity.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."  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.
Reviewing Jon Peterson's Playing At The World (Vol.1 and Vol. 2) has enthused me for RPG history - in particular, interrogating my own incomplete memories by reading the early issues of White Dwarf magazine. Full disclosure: I didn't discover D&D until the Autumn of 1978, when I went to visit an old school friend in the far off metropolis of Welwyn Garden City. He had been introduced to D&D at a local youth club (along with the 2-Tone record label and a fascination with The Specials). This means that the first copies of White Dwarf represent, for me, a sort of pre-history of gaming, a period while D&D was quietly taking hold of the nation's youth, but I was still wrapped up in Marvel Comics. I didn't take out my own White Dwarf subscription until 1980, so these early issues were known to me only through the heady content that appeared in Best of White Dwarf Articles/Scenarios - and, by the way, the content in both of these is fantastic, especially Scenarios, and they're still available on eBay at affordable prices. It was during the UK Lockdown that I decided to track down the gaps in my WD collection and get them nicely stored in magazine binders. That's how I ended up with my own copy of Issue 1, from June/July 1977.  The 'Yellow Peril' issue, complete with decapitation: art by Chris Beaumont - although my copy says 50p ($1.50) so this must be a picture of a reprint. The Owl & the WeaselLet's step back in time. White Dwarf was birthed out of the newsletter Owl & Weasel, produced by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson to support their Games Workshop. Back in 1975, Games Workshop was literally that: a little business hand crafting wooden boards for traditional games. Owl & Weasel supposedly took its name from the qualities needed in a good gamer: "wise like an owl and crafty like a weasel," according to Jackson. (Although I always assumed Livingstone was the Owl and Jackson the Weasel). Owl & Weasel was shared with subscribers to Don Turnbull's Diplomacy PBM zine Albion; one subscriber was Brian Blume, who sent Livingstone and Jackson a copy of Dungeons & Dragons in return. The pair were blown away and devoted whole issues of Owl & Weasel to promoting D&D and signed a deal with TSR to market the game in Europe. Significantly, they travelled to Wisconsin USA in 1976 to attend GenCon VI in Lake Geneva. There, they picked up exclusive rights to distribute D&D - probably because their bedroom-based mail order business was the only British company in attendance.  O&W #6 (July 1975) was given over to promoting D&D At GenCon, they probably saw the first issue of Dragon magazine, the glossy replacement for TSR's company newsletter Strategic Review. They decided a similar magazine would replace Owl & Weasel, with Livingstone as editor. White Dwarf was cleverly named, connoting both a mythological creature and a type of star: the distinction between fantasy and science fiction was still evolving at this time and the readership might be attracted to either or both genres. White Dwarf effectively replaced the 26th issue of Owl & Weasel and continued Games Workshop's promotion of the UK D&D Society and the annual Games Day. Games Day '77 was covered by the Sunday Times and I remember my mother showing me the article. I was fascinated by the idea of Dungeons & Dragons (from the article's muddled account, which made it sound like a board game) and set about trying (and failing) to create my own version of it. Then, a year later, I was introduced to the real thing. But this is where our story begins ... The Yellow Peril coverYeah, that cover. A pair of dwarves confront a wizard, knock over his brazier, and chop his head off. His expression speaks of profound disappointment. His sinewy familiar escapes. Two ghostly pterodactyls look on, and one dwarf shakes a spear at them. Presumably the wizard had been trying to summon the winged creatures, but now, ritual interrupted, they are fading away. Or that's my reading. It's a very fine piece of fantasy art, with great perspective and a sense of action caught in snapshot. It feels like the climactic encounter of a classic D&D game, albeit with a Dwarf-only party (or are the Dwarves the only survivors?). Chris Beaumont has produced something far superior to the sort of art that appeared in the Original D&D rulebooks, although it strongly anticipates Donald Trampier's contributions to the future Monster Manual. It's also very bloodthirsty - and this, along with female nudity, turns our to be a motif in F/SF gaming that White Dwarf honours for the next couple of years. It was, for adolescent males, a great time to be alive. Editorial Up in the top corner is the white dwarf icon that is used so effectively throughout the magazine. Is that also by Beaumont? It has the same look as the dwarves on the cover. The pose is fantastic: strength in repose: beautifully proportioned - quite unlike Sutherland's gangrel creature in the later Monster Manual, but certainly foreshadowing Trampier's Dwarves in the Magic Mouth illustration in the AD&D Player's Handbook.  Ian Livingstone's editorial strikes a bullish tone, asserting the significance of fantasy roleplaying (or 'role-playing') games as a new aspect of the hobby and the right of Fantasy & Science Fiction to have a place at the wargaming table. Owl & Weasel had already nailed its colours to the D&D mast, but the need to defend F/SF strikes us as odd in 2025. It hearkens back to the early-'70s when fantasy/SF fans were seen as ghastly parvenus in wargaming circles; the grandees of the hobby vigorously repudiated having wizards on a table alongside Mycenaean hoplites or (shudder) a space marine. The joke was to be on them, and Games Workshop would put both wizards and space marines on the table, driving pure Napoleonics and Ancients style wargaming into relative obscurity. Metamorphosis AlphaIan Livingstone leads with a 2-and-a-bit page account of Metamorphosis Alpha, which was very nearly the first ever SF RPG (beaten to the punch by an obscure Ken St Andre game called Starfaring, basically Tunnels & Trolls in space). James Ward's Metamorphosis Alpha uses D&D-adjacent rules that were more successfully recycled the following year as Gamma World. In many ways. Alpha has the more intriguing premise: the PCS are descendants of the crew and passengers of a giant space ark, mutated and reduced to barbarism by a radiation storm, and no longer understanding the advanced technology and robots they encounter as they explore. Following on from the editorial, you can see why Livingstone places this first: it's a celebration of science fiction gaming, of RPGs, of the fast-moving state of the hobby. Livingstone expands on Alpha's premise, but frets about the requirement to map every level of the gigantic Starship Warden, which reminds us how far away we were in '76 from 'theatre of the mind' or story-first RPGs. But more of this to come, when Lew Pulsipher addresses D&D Campaigns. What stops this being a simple product review is Livingstone's digression into what he takes to be Ward's literary sources: Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky, Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop, and Harry Harrison's Captive Universe. Then some house rules for adventures on regions of the ship with different gravities.  The article has full page art, again by Chris Beaumont, depicting a battle with a two-headed mutant (doubtless inspired by Brian Aldiss's Jim-Joe) and carnivorous grass. It's got Beaumont's characteristic sense of proportion and dramatic perspective: a fast-moving combat encounter, captured in time. What's odd about the article is its ambiguous purpose. Is it a product review (no price is given), or literary analysis, or a rules analysis? What it is, is a classic piece of fanzine writing, celebrating the latest Cool Thing. Later, White Dwarf well develop a distinctive house style, driven by Livingstone and Jackson's growing authority within the hobby, and breathless essays like this will fade from the increasingly professional pages. The MonstermarkThe indefatigable Don Turnbull presents a very dense essay, outlining a novel system for ranking D&D monsters. This is a system he had been developing in Owl & Weasel, but now it gets a fuller treatment here and over the next four issues. It also appears in The Best of White Dwarf Articles (1980).  Now this thing here: this is a time capsule. If you want to get a flavour of what early D&D was like and what it did to the minds of the people who played it, read Turnbull's 'Monstermark.' The problem is simple. D&D's Greyhawk supplement had grouped monsters by levels to allow random allocation to dungeons, but the allocation was pretty arbitrary. Greyhawk's monster levels are below (left). Gelatinous Cubes are at the tough end of Level 1, but Carrion Crawlers are very dangerous indeed for Level 2; meanwhile, an Ochre Jelly isn't much of a threat on Level 3, not compared to Harpies or Wights.  Turnbull's solution is so old school it makes my teeth ache, but in a good way, like eating lemon sorbet. He calculates an Attack value for every monster type, based on the average amount of damage an average-HP version of that monster will deal out before an average 1st level fighter dealing average sword damage finally kills it. Then he applies a multiplier for special abilities (x1.5 for regeneration, x2 for poison, x2.5 for level drain). The resulting number is the Monstermark. An orc is 2.2 but a gelatinous cube is 36 (see!!!); an ochre jelly is 31.5 but a carrion crawler is a whopping 120 (see? I told you!!!). Turnbull suggests using his Monstermark as an alternative to the arbitrary XP awards for defeating monsters in early D&D; another article later in the issue addresses this same problem, in an equally maths-heavy way. I must confess, reading this made me itch to start working out Monstermarks for all sorts of other critters from later modules and later iterations of D&D. Admit it, you always suspected Demogorgon would beat Orcus in a fight: now you can compare their Monstermarks! The old school psyche is distinctive. Faced with these oddities, no one seems to say 'Hey, play the game your way' or try to justify Greyhawk's shonky tables with tenuous in-universe logic. No, none of that nonsense: monsters are made out of maths and, if the system was carelessly thrown together, maths will rationalise it. We will meet variations of this old school attitude in Lew Pulsipher's article and the Treasure Chest house rules later this issue. Open Box: product reviewsIn his essay collection 31 Songs (2011), Nick Hornby communicates a very specific sort of nostalgia for music-lovers: "In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternative versions and unreleased material. If you can hear Dylan and The Beatles being unmistakably themselves at their peak – but unmistakably themselves in a way we haven’t heard a thousand, a million times before – then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their spirit, and it’s as close as we’ll ever get, those of us born in the wrong time, to knowing what it must have been like to have those great records burst out of the radio at you when you weren’t expecting them, or anything like them." This describes very well the pleasure I get from reading old games reviews: that "thrilling flash of their spirit" from the first time anyone ever opened up Call Of Cthulhu or read the AD&D Monster Manual.  This first Open Box reviews two board games: Sorcerer by SPI and Starship Troopers by Avalon Hill. The contrast is interesting. Avalon Hill was the Old Man of board gaming, far and away dominating market share, and the giant that newcomer TSR/D&D wanted to topple. Avalon Hill published its own magazine The General and organised the Origins games fairs, run in competition with GenCon, and broadly served a conservative wargaming fanbase that remained sceptical of F/SF and RPGs: the very body that Ian Livingstone addresses in his editorial. Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) was a young upstart, challenging Avalon Hill in a similar field of complex war-themed boardgames, often WWII-set, and striving for innovation in design. It published its own magazine, Strategy & Tactics. The General vs Strategy & Tactics: the formal titles contrast sharply with White Dwarf. It's interesting that the two games reviewed are Fantasy and SF respectively, atypical of both companies' output, but underscoring Livingstone's editorial line about F/SF deserving a place at the table. The products were well-judged inclusions, dignifying White Dwarf by including games from 'proper' companies. Sorcerer sounds gimmicky, with its colour-themed magic, but Starship Troopers was a game I played, although years later. It was good fun, with a cracking cover (despite what the reviewer says) in AH's 'bookcase' format. The modular rule book, teaching the game through increasingly complex scenarios that sequentially fold in more detailed rules, is now utterly conventional in boardgames.
The cover gives me warm fuzzies but I don't miss cardboard chits By the way, Open Box introduces its rating system with examples from two games readers are expected to know: Diplomacy and D&D.  You might find it odd that Diplomacy would be a cultural touchstone in 1977 (why not Risk?) but this hearkens back to Owl & Weasel, which piggy-backed on the PBM Diplomacy fandom. Diplomacy would disappear from White Dwarf going forward, but it's good to acknowledge how important it was in developing the emergence of D&D - an idea explored by Jon Peterson in Playing At The World. Competitive D&DFred Hemmings describes his experiences of playing competitive D&D. The article ends up telling you very little about running competitive D&D; instead, it's a session write-up and as such it's a fascinating insight into a style of play that would probably be considered deranged today, but was pretty normative in '77.  The party has to enter a dungeon, get as deep into it as possible, liberate some magical heirlooms of Merlin, and get out. The dungeon has a whimsical 'Wonderland' quality, with riddles written in the languages of Shedu or Lamassu (obscure monsters from the D&D Greyhawk supplement), magical traps that petrify people or make them mute, invisible cowardly Mummies, and doors that open when gems are pressed the right way but strike you dead if pressed the wrong way. It's wild ride where nothing makes much sense, everything is a puzzle, and a single misjudgement kills your character. There's also no roleplaying going on, in the sense we use the term today. OK, sure, most tournament dungeons do not reward expressing your character's personality, nor provide many opportunities for so doing, but it's significant that Hemmings doesn't mention what the PCs even are until near the end (where a fighter, thief, and magic-user are among the survivors), never mind their names. (The provenance of this particular dungeon adventure will be revealed in White Dwarf #3 and excite some criticism; more of that in a future blog.) The puzzle/trap theme is reinforced by No Way Out?, a column by David Wells that offers three puzzles/riddles that could be incorporated into D&D games. The column didn't last long, perhaps reflecting the steep decline of this style of RPG already underway in the summer of '77. D&D CampaignsAnother serialised article that made its way into Best of WD Articles, this one by Lewis 'Lew' Pulsipher, an American games designer who had moved to England and was to exert a deep influence over White Dwarf and the British gaming hobby.  D&D Campaigns serves as an antidote to the style of play we saw going on in Competitive D&D. Pulsipher makes a hard distinction between "those who want to play the game as a game" and 'escapists' who enjoy the game as "a passive receptor, with little control over what happens." In the escapist camp, Pulsipher lumps together people playing 'Lottery D&D' where things happen by chance, with little allowance for skilful play, and "people who prefer to be told a story by the referee." There are elements here that prefigure Ron Edwards's GNS Theory of roleplaying: Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism; except that Pulsipher seems to conflate Gamism/Simulationism and deplores Narrativism as an inferior mode of play. To be clear, Edwards insists that, in Narrativism, " the players are often considered co-authors," but Pulsipher insists on the essential passivity of games where the DM will "make up more than half of what happens, what is encountered, and so on, as the game progresses, rather than doing it beforehand" - a development, he claims, which has its origin "in California." Pulsipher is advocating a "skill game" in which players "earn the rewards and penalties" and this comes about when the referee has created an objective fictional setting beforehand, down to maps and room keys, which has "internal self-consistency" so that the player characters can "act as rational, though brave, people." He compares playing in an escapist/Narrativist game as similar to the experience of getting "drunk and/or stoned." You might detect in Pulsipher's views a foreshadowing of the 21st century OSR (Old School Renaissance) commitment to impartial refereeing and players making skilful choices in a consistent setting. You might also suspect that he's not being entirely fair to the experimental styles of play coming out of West Coast gaming fandom; in any event, the Dragonlance modules of the mid-'80s would be a powerful restatement of Narrativism in D&D. But in the context of Summer 1977, Pulsipher's article was incredibly influential, even authoritative. White Dwarf became a flagship for the style of play Pulsipher advocates, supported by many other such articles and demonstrated in the magazine's revered 'mini-modules.' The whimsical 'Wonderland' dungeon that Fred Hemmings described would fade from its pages - and become deeply unfashionable. It was to be Pulsipher In Excelsis. As a young D&D referee, I pored over Pulsipher's articles, like the words of an Old Testament prophet. I was figuring out how to run a D&D game on my own, without the support of an adult club with experienced DMs; Pulsipher's voice came to me, even in 1980, as the authoritative guide to How D&D Should Be Played, even though I was was in no position to judge the arguments he was settling in such a prescriptive fashion. The WarlordSteve Jackson pens an article introducing readers to a game they can't buy. Warlord was created in 1974 by university lecturer Mike Hayes and sold on short print runs. Jackson, however, adores it as a nuclear-charged extension to his Diplomacy hobby. He spends two pages rhapsodising about the game's distinctive mechanics, which we would nowadays characterise as 'push-your-luck.' Like Diplomacy, Warlord allows players to expand their control over a board-map of ravaged Europe, acquiring more reinforcements as they seize desirable territory. Combat involves trying to guess how many of the attacker's available chits have been committed to the fight (maximum six, indicated by the face of a die concealed under a cup); guess wrong and you lose a defending chit and the attacker loses the number of chits they committed; guess right and you lose nothing but the attacker is utterly wiped out. Successful attackers gain nuclear missiles, one stage per chit they destroy, and these missiles become tottering steeples, eventually to be fired, annihilating conglomerations of enemy pieces (and possibly detonating other missiles in exciting chain-reactions). Jackson never wavered in his commitment to Warlord. In 1980, Games Workshop purchased the game and published their own slick'n'streamlined version as Apocalypse: The Game of Nuclear Devastation.  I rushed to buy Apocalypse in 1980, knowing nothing of Warlord. It's still on my shelf. Apocalypse shares with its predecessor a punk-rock commitment to bad taste (this was the middle of the Cold War, you will recall - although Arab/Israeli Wars is perhaps more extreme game content today!) and a game duration that lasts for hours. Jackson describes being introduced to Warlord with a 4½ hour game. For Diplomacy fans, that's no big deal, but board gamers today baulk at committing that sort of time to such an unsophisticated game. Twilight Imperium, this is not. Treasure Chest: readers' contributionsTreasure Chest became a long running feature, offering magic items, spells, traps, monsters (soon to become a separate column), and house rules.  Steven Littlechild's Helm of Vision is the sort of object that would feature in Hemmings's whimsical dungeon but I don't think Pulsipher would be keen. It's an incredibly useful item for Lawful PCs, somewhat useful for Neutral PCs, but a cursed item for Chaotic PCs. You put it on, you take your chances. The Law/Chaos split had not yet been refined to include Good/Evil. Actually, that's not quite true. Gary Gygax had floated the idea of the Law/Chaos vs Good/Evil axes in 1976, but in an article in Strategic Review that would not have been known to many D&D fans in the UK. The four-way alignment split would appear in the 'Holmes' D&D Basic Set, which came out (in America) at almost exactly the same time as this issue of White Dwarf (it doesn't appear on Games Workshop's UK stock list until White Dwarf #4 in January 1978). Andrew D Holt inaugurates the long tradition of supplying house rules to 'fix' the mess that is D&D. The focus is on increasing 'realism' and the importance of 'player skill' (one senses Lew Pulsipher nodding along). They are quirky suggestions: using playing cards for manoeuvres in combat and getting players to read out the astrologically-inspired command words for spells, with backfires if they get them wrong in any particular. Neither suggestion seems to have borne fruit in the wider hobby: the future of rules hacks lay in the Don Turnbull maths-hammer approach, but, after all these years, I'm quite intrigued by both - I might play-test them with my youth RPG club! In a manner more approved by Turnbull - indeed, credited to him - Alan Youde suggests adapting the Metamorphosis Alpha poison rules for D&D, so that poison deals damage rather than instant death, as determined by the Constitution ability. I don't think Lew Pulsipher would have condemned this departure from 'Lottery D&D' despite his preference for sticking to 'rules-as-written.' Oh, yeah. And the Pervert character class. At 9th level, you get to be a 'Rapist.' It was the 1970s ... AdvertsIf, as Nick Hornby puts it, you're looking for "a small but thrilling flash of [the] spirit" of 1976 gaming fandom, you find it in the adverts. Not that White Dwarf #1 has that many, of course: only those supporters it carried over from Owl & Weasel. Barry Minot is advertising his miniatures (in both the UK and North America, very enterprising) along with what looks like a set of skirmish rules called Thane Tostig. Chris Harvey has a mail order business in Walsall and offers the Ogre microgame (to be reviewed next issue) for £1.85. Ken St Andre's semi-parodic Monsters! Monsters! RPG is being sold by Games Centre in London. Games Centre has a bunch of ads scattered through the magazine: Stellar Conquest, Godsfire, and Ythri are SF board games, the latter based on Poul Anderson's People of the Wind. Tally Ho Games looks like a traditional North London hobby shop that specialises in Avalon Hill games; the latest release is Arab/Israeli Wars (1956-73) which makes you realise (a) nothing changes, and (b) such a product would never be released today. The British Fantasy Society and the D&D Society take out ads: the former is still going strong today.  Games Workshop enjoys a back page advert for its current stock. You notice they undercut the competition: Arab/Israeli Wars will be selling for £7.95, whereas Tally Ho Games charges £8.95. Let's play a game. D&D (original white box) is selling for £6.75 and White Dwarf for 50p. White Dwarf today (2025) costs £5.99 (a twelve-fold increase) so you'd expect a complete D&D set to cost £80. Ahem, try £120. Is a 12-fold increase right? A pint of beer in 1977 was 38p: the average pint is £5.17 today; that's a 14-fold increase. If D&D had gone up with the price of beer it would cost £95. Not £120. I know, I know: D&D in 1977 was three flimsy B&W booklets in a box; today it's three big glossy full-colour hardback books in a slipcase. D&D was always considered expensive 'for what you got' but the buy-in cost for the game is higher now, relatively speaking. And 1977 was the year of UK inflation hitting 15.8% (worth pondering, given our own recent inflation-driven crises): not the best time for Livingstone and Jackson to be putting out their new magazine and persuading people to spend their diminishing wealth on expensive imported games. Yet people did: the hobby took off, White Dwarf became a national institution, and Games Workshop a global industry. I'll trace the journey White Dwarf embarked on in future blogs. Until then, here's the back cover art by Christopher 'Fangorn' Baker and the promise of continuing the series of Monstermark, Competitive D&D, and D&D Campaigns ... but one of these promises will be broken.  A striking alien/demon, astride a nightmare steed, wearing flippers, with lots of Kirby-crackle around the spear. Not as dynamic or well-proportioned as Beaumont's front cover, but we will see a better Fangorn illustration on next issue's front cover.
A provocative title for a blog, but the unstated conclusion of Jon Peterson's Playing At The World Vol. 2: Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games (2025, MIT Press).  It's big. It's weighty. It's not cheap. It's the meisterwerk of scholarship into the origins of tabletop roleplaying. I reviewed Vol.1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons pretty much exactly a year ago (and you can read that review here). Vol. 2 arrived this Spring with twice the page count and a price tag to match (i.e. still cheap as chips compared to buying a new boardgame). It's a more challenging read, not just because of its length, but because it's not really written to be read sequentially, in a start-on-page-1-and-just-keep-going sort of way - although that's what I did, despite Peterson's repeated appeals to readers to skip bits that don't appeal to them. In this, it contrasts with Vol. 1, which was a guided tour, year by year, of how D&D arose out of Midwestern wargaming and Diplomacy groups, cross-pollinated with more avant-garde West Coast early adopters, and how that led to fierce debates about who owned this new recreational form and how it was to be defined. That book almost demanded to be read sequentially. Jump in to Chapter 16 (GenCon 1974 and its Aftermath) and you'll be asking, 'What does IFW stand for? Where is Avalon Hill? Who or what is Lowrys Guidon?' Back you must go to earlier chapters to find out.  A timeline of D&D's inception, taken from Peterson's The Game Wizards (2021) The Medieval Fantasy GenreVol. 2 comes at things more theoretically. There are three roughly-equal parts to the book. The first covers the Medieval Fantasy Genre: where did this emerge from? how did it distinguish itself from science fiction? what texts were the biggest influences? where specifically do D&D tropes like underground dungeons, pointy-eared elves, character classes, and alignment come from? As a literature graduate, this is the section that I found easy reading and inspirational: lots of novels to add to my bucket list! For people who like arguing with strangers online, Peterson addresses both sides of the contention that D&D plagiarises - or repudiates - Tolkien.  It amazed me how many bedrock D&D tropes you think must be medieval in fact date from Poul Anderson's 1961 'portal fantasy' Three Hearts And Three Lions. The Rules of the GameThe second section, and the largest, covers the Rules of the Game. Peterson is thinking of things like Hit Points, saving throws, levels of experience and experience points, ability scores. Before he can delve into that he first takes us on a deep dive into the origins of wargaming in Prussian Kriegsspel games and the manufacture of toy soldiers. These chapters are particularly dense and, although Peterson essays to keep bringing everything back to D&D, there are longueurs. But then again, I'm no wargamer, so perhaps this section was always going to sag for me. I was intrigued by the early techniques for generating probability spreads just using six-sided dice, back before the advent of polyhedral dice in the 1960s and '70s. Interesting too was the division between simulationists who wished to use wargames as a way of training military officers, and gamers proprement-dit, who used wargames to stimulate the imagination or as a prompt for creativity. I was fascinated to read of a convalescent Robert Louis Stevenson using toy soldiers to fight battles and writing the results up as war journalism reporting from fictional conflicts - imaginative immersion that is a clear step towards RPGs.  Dice like these used to be really difficult to get hold of! Playing RolesThe final, and shortest, section covers the concept of Playing Roles. Peterson gives the childhood game of 'Let's Pretend' the obligatory nod, then dives into an analysis of some real childhood pretend-worlds that persisted into adulthood, notably those of the Bronte siblings and C.S. Lewis and his brother. This leads to a discussion of the world of 'Coventry' created by Paul Stanbery and imagined to exist on a gigantic space ark in the far future. Coventry attained performative reality in the 1960s as members of Los Angeles SF fandom adopted roles within it and attended events, in character and costume. From here we progress into the Society for Creative Anachronism pioneering Renaissance Fayres and 'shared world' experiences like Tony Bath's Conan-inspired Hyboria campaign and the Play By Mail game Midgard, all of which merged wargaming, diplomacy, and immersion in a fictive role within an imagined setting. Perhaps because of my current work in Psychology, I found this the most intellectually gripping section of the book. One of my (very few) criticisms of Vol.1 was that Peterson prefers granular close analysis to placing events within the context of broader cultural change. Here he redresses that, looking at the impact of the atom bomb and the Cold War on the ethics and ostensible purpose of wargaming. the influence of globalisation and European travel on previously isolated wargaming subcultures, and the disillusionment with modernity that underlies much wargaming and RPGs after the Second World War - a trend that Peterson links to the popularity of 'Portal Fantasies' in literature, in which an ordinary person can live an extraordinary life when they inadvertently enter a fantastic new world. Peterson explores the tensions between imagining yourself operating in a fantastic world, and imagining yourself as native to a fantastic world, and wishing to have that experience in a recurring form, rather than just while reading a book or watching a movie.  Edgar Rice Burroughs (yes, the Tarzan guy) popularised 'Portal Fantasies' with stories of John Carter, an ordinary schmo on Earth, but on Barsoom (Mars) he battles monsters and romances half-naked princesses. Who Invented RPGs?Instead of debating angels dancing on pins, 21st century fandom still convulses over whether the credit for D&D should go to Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson. Peterson's argument might be summarised as 'Both, but really Neither.' The picture that emerges from Peterson's marshalling of sources and statements is of immersive, character-driven, campaign-style roleplaying developing on a number of fronts at the end of the 1960s and through the early 1970s. Out on the West Coast, they were dressing up as knights-of-olde or attending diplomatic banquets as rules of Coventry. Over in the UK, Tony Bath was getting wargamers to imagine themselves as rulers and generals of Robert E Howard's fantasy world of Hyboria. Out of Germany came a Play By Mail Game called Armageddon, which was repurposed in Britain as Midgard, then launched (rather more effectively) in the USA as Midgard II and its spin-offs. Even ordinary board gamers and Diplomacy players were naming their favourite miniatures or board game tokens, treating them as real people, and skewing the game away from playing-to-win towards 'What Would My Character Do?' On this telling, popular culture was hungry for a fantasy roleplaying product, but no one had yet put the component parts together in a way that could launch into the mainstream. Miniature wargaming and Creative Anachronism required research, craftsmanship, and expense. Pay By Mail games were slow. 'Shared Worlds' like Coventry were too open ended, prone to schism, and lacked focus.  You would have expected D&D to emerge from a Play By Mail game like this, rather than from Gygax and Arneson's playing around with miniature figurines. What Gygax and Arneson delivered was the essential experience of fantasy roleplaying, adapted to the tabletop, and imagined in a setting (the 'dungeon') that allowed for moment-by-moment immersion and characterisation. But if they hadn't done it, who would? Maybe Hartley Patterson or Will Haven (of Midgard), or Lewis Pulsipher or Hal Broome who developed the concept, or Tom Drake (of Midgard II), or Scott Rich (of Midgard Ltd), or someone else from the SfCA. All these people were striving towards the same end, chasing the same elusive experience, trying to find away to instantiate fantasy worlds in real-life exchanges. This doesn't make D&D inevitable, like Thanos: but reveals it to be a cultural product whose time had very much arrived.  Should It Be On Your Shelf?As a work of scholarship into the history of RPGs, Peterson is unsurpassed and this book will be a resource for decades. As a work of popular history, it's a bit harder to assess. There will certainly be something in it for everyone, whether to delve into the literary sources that inspired Clerics or how 19th century mathematicians developed percentile outcomes from d6 rolls, or how the RAND Corporation used Diplomacy to wargame nuclear brinksmanship in the 1950s: it's in there and more. But it's a lot of book to buy just to access one part of it - and with an academic price tag too. It's a well deserved price tag, because there's a lifetime of scholarship here, but face it, you could buy an entire RPG in hardback in a fancy slipcase for that money. Here are two alternatives, if you are on a budget:
The Elusive Shift (2022) is also by Peterson, with the subtitle 'How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity.' It focuses on the concept and practice of roleplaying, its antecedents, and the ways D&D built on and then developed this sort of creative immersion - or rather, perhaps, the way it didn't, but the fan culture around D&D did so, far more enthusiastically than the game's creators. Peterson's other book is The Game Wizards (2021), subtitled 'The Epic Battle For Dungeons & Dragons.' It traces the conception and marketing of D&D, from 1974-1985, culminating in Gary Gygax being ousted from his company TSR and losing control over D&D. (If that's too much of a cliffhanger for you, Benn Riggs's Slaying The Dragon follows the tribulations of D&D and TSR through the 1990s). Both of these books are products of the same scholarship that created Playing At The World: essentially, they offer Peterson a platform to piece together events and draw historical conclusions from data that goes beyond his remit in writing his straightforward-yet-labyrinthine history of RPGs.
I recommend them all. I just wish Peterson would stop trying to make 'Role-Playing' with a hyphen happen. It's not going to happen.  The 2nd ed. of Jon Peterson's magisterial overview of the origins of RPGs, from MIT Press or, y'know, Amazon Jon Peterson's weighty Playing At The World came out in 2012 and, at 720 pages, won plaudits from the chin-strokers of the gaming community, but was only ever going to be a niche entry in popular history. Nonetheless, its status grew and it proved itself prescient: the last decade has seen a torrent of books exploring the inspiration for D&D and the rise and fall of TSR and of founder Gary Gygax. Yup, the 1970s is officially 'the historical past' and therefore another country, requiring travel guides. I don't mind: I was only a kid in the '70s. When someone tells me the 1980s is the historical past, well, that's when we riot. For this 2nd edition, Peterson has divided his magnum opus in two. This, Part I, covers the chronology of D&D's appearance, dutifully starting off with H G Wells publishing Little Wars in 1913, leaping ahead to the appearance of the Avalon Hill company manufacturing board-based wargames in the 1950s, then the emergence of a wargaming fandom in the Midwest in the '60s that proved particularly creative and collaborative, with E. Gary Gygax as its mover and shaker. The book goes on to explore the people and groups that 'ran with the ball' once D&D emerged from the correspondence of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Peterson examines the vibrant fandom on the West Coast that produced the fanzine Alarums & Excursions. He discusses the impact of conventions like GenCon and Origins in the mid-Seventies, and the, often heavy-handed, attempts by Gygax's company TSR to control the ownership and direction of D&D against a grassroots movement of fans that was often more radically creative than the game's original designers. Part II, due in 2025, will abandon the chronological approach to delve into three key 'pillars' of RPGs: a more theoretical approach. At 370 pages, Part I is still a hefty tome, but Peterson has a light style and covers ground quickly. He's particularly good at tagging key personalities and publications and keeping them distinct. What would otherwise be a welter of confusing names (Gygax, Charlers Swann Roberts, Lee Gold, Don Featherstone, Donald Lowry, Hilda Hannifen, etc.) and fanzines with names that are either quirky (Corner of the Table, Fire the Arquebusiers, Owl & Weasel), prosaic (Great Plains Games Players Newsletter, Strategic Review), or just a jumble of letters (IFW, APA-L, CITEX), becomes a crisp narrative with a shifting focus that reminds me of the opening sequence to TV's Game Of Thrones. The key players are placed before the reader then orientated in time and space: Peterson prevents things turning into a blur. Academic writing of this clarity is no small achievement. Nonetheless, it's dense stuff, and not the ideal starting point for people who don't yet know their Kasks from their Kayes, their Lakofkas from their Leibers. The sheer granularity of Peterson's analysis is impressive. He's read every amateur rules set, every fanzine, cross-referenced all the letters pages, unscrambled the anagrammatised pseudonyms, tracked gaming road trips across the continent, broken down inventory lists to spot the emergence and abandonment of products, and deconstructed the attendances at conventions. He deduces who met whom at a San Francisco dinner party in December 1974 then played D&D into the small hours of the morning - then he finds their session write-ups in a letter or amateur press association article. Cultural history is an elusive thing, because the world is full of broken Roman pottery, but poetry is winged, and vanishes unless someone writes it down. Thousands of people discovered D&D in the 1970s, but reconstructing how they found it, how they played the game, how they influenced each other: that's the missing pattern. Gygax was a voluminous correspondent and the Los Angeles gaming scene documented almost everything they did, but between Gygax's Lake Geneva and the LA burbs stretches a 'dark continent' from which only stray names and texts emerge: Ken St Andre publishing Tunnels & Trolls in Arizona in 1975 or Richard Berg in Baltimore, coining the term 'role-playing game' that same year. I'm reminded of books on Dark Ages history. You've got a few monks writing in Latin, a few genealogies of Welsh kings, and the historian surmises that the Cynddigilligwdd who died at Amyggyllydd fighting Rhydyddydyd must be the same Cynddigilligwdd mentioned as the brother of Nggiog in the Life of St Gwrgygwgion. Names emerge out of the murk and get anchored to the few secure landmarks in a vast sea of anonymity. The price Peterson pays for this granularity is a loss of, well, the culture in cultural history. Peterson is so busy pinning down names and terms, who met who where and how they influenced them to write what and when, that the experience of playing D&D rarely gets touched upon. There are flickers of ancient passion from the gushing letters, idiosyncratic session logs, and fan fiction that Peterson quotes from time to time. And of course, you can still feel the heat from the letter page debates condemning styles of play - and dragging the Blackmoor supplement over hot coals of criticism. You pick up a sense of Gygax's prickly, preening, passive-aggressive personality. But you're left with little sense of what anyone else was like as a person, what they got out of D&D, what it was like playing those early, groundbreaking games. The reward is lots of insights into the development of ideas in the abstract. Where did 'rolling for initiative' come from? Not D&D - it appeared in the short-lived Warriors of Mars wargame that TSR rushed out for 1974's GenCon VII. Who invented the Thief class? Not Gary Gygax: it was submitted by California fan Gary Switzer in early 1974, but made its way into the 1975 Greyhawk supplement uncreditted. How about 'role-playing games'? As noted above, it was Richard Berg, reviewing the new trend in fantasy games for New York wargames company SPI. Peterson isn't just doling out fascinating titbits. He draws broader conclusions from these things. TSR's appropriation of the Thief class, without giving credit, is made into a touchstone for the way Gygax's company attempted to define 'canon' and rein in the creativity of fans. The term 'role-playing game' becomes a way of exploring, not just what makes D&D different from other wargames, but a distinction between D&D itself and the RPGs that followed, like Tunnels & Trolls, En Garde, and Runequest. With the arrival of this term, D&D becomes simply a role-playing game, which has important consequences for TSR's attempt to discourage competition with threats of copyright infringement. One chapter that, I think, illustrates Peterson's strengths is #10 'Return of the Referee.' He identifies a Twin Cities wargamer David Wesley who, back in the early Sixties, reintroduced to the hobby the idea of a Referee, which had lain dormant since the 19th century. Referees were important when wargames were military instruction tools, because someone had to arbitrate which side would prevail when asymmetric forces employed different tactics against each other. Wesley adopted this playstyle, with its revolutionary principle that 'anything can be attempted' but the Referee decides what worksl. To this he added a concept drawn from a Parker Brothers family board game: the idea of victory points. From this combination came Wesley's pivotal Braunstein wargame in which players took roles of combatants and civilians in a Prussian siege - and one of the Braunstein players was Dave Arneson, who pitched the as-yet-unnamed and unsystematised D&D to Gary Gygax a few years later. There were other ingredients crucial to the creation of D&D: the growing acceptance (amidst resistance) of the fantasy genre in wargaming circles, the idea of gaming moving between a geographic/exploratory mode and a tactical/combat mode (which Peterson sources in fan variants of Diplomacy from the late-'60s), and the emerging and collaborative fan culture that Peterson traces back to Avalon Hill's in-house magazine The General and its 'Seeking Opponents' column. What's missing is an attempt to link these innovations to wider cultural movements of the 1960s and '70s. Some of that will doubtless inform Part II next year. However, in this 2nd Edition, Peterson does address some current year preoccupations of race and gender. He celebrates the important contributions of Lee Gold and Hilda Hannifen from the West Coast fandom. He finds great resonance in Len Lakofka's notorious article from a Diplomacy fanzine in 1976 that argued for female characters having lower Strength scores but instead having a Beauty attribute which could be used to seduce men. TSR foolishly reprinted the article, prompting a community backlash, and Peterson cleverly links this to his theme of who could and should define D&D authoritatively. I found Peterson's deep dive enthralling, but maybe I'm a special case. I discovered D&D in the UK in 1978 and pored over the product lists and reviews from far-away America. I never read Alarums & Excursions but it was a title redolent of wonder for me; likewise Empire of the Petal Throne, Blackmoor, the Egg of Coot, GenCon, and tournament dungeons. Peterson reads, to me, like a Bible concordance, unpacking all the childhood stories from Sunday school. Maybe you'd rather wade into D&D's tumultuous history with something less academic, less impersonal, more dramatically engaging? OK, here are four alternative reads:     Click covers for links Empire of Imagination (subtitled 'Gary Gygax & the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons') by Michael Witwer has a GREAT cover. It's an homage to the Unearthed Arcana D&D expansion, casting Gygax in the wizard role, complete with slack-jawed expression. It tells the tale of Gary 'n' Dave, their falling out, Gary Gygax's excesses, and the loss of his beloved company, in the style of an in-flight magazine: a lot of dramatic cliffhangers and flashbacks, but not much real insight. It's attractive and accessible, even if you know nothing about D&D. Of Dice & Men (subtitled 'The Story of Dungeons & Dragons And The People Who Play It) by David M Ewalt has a GREAT title. It's popular journalism, like Witner's book, but much better written and more insightful. It has a revelatory structure: as well as a history of the game and its key personalities, it's a memoir and road trip, culminating in a personal pilgrimage to Lake Geneva, the birthplace of D&D. It's a book with a lot of heart, even if the history too often takes second place to the vibes. Slaying The Dragon (subtitled 'The Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons') by Ben Riggs has the worst title, far and away. Unlike the previous two, it's a proper piece of historical research, but Riggs's focus is less on the game than on the business side of D&D. Like Peterson, he has the gift of lucidity and the ability to draw out a revealing theme from a mass of confusing detail. Based on interviews with the main actors (but not, alas, the much-maligned Lorraine Williams) and a forensic eye to contract law, he traces the rise and fall of TSR and its flawed business model throughout the '80s and '90s. I heartily recommend this one, especially if you grew up on the D&D settings and novelisations in the '90s. The Elfish Gene (subtitled 'Dungeons & Dragons And Growing Up Strange') by Mark Barrowcliffe has the BEST title. It's an autobiography, so you only get historical details about D&D in passing. What you do get is an unflinching analysis of a teenage obsession with D&D when it first landed in Britain in the late-'70s. Barrowcliffe doesn't spare himself any blushes with his by-turns comedic then tragic dissection of clueless adolescence and the deep (and possibly damaging) addictive quality of D&D for young minds. It's a story of friendships lost and opportunities for growth squandered - but every word of it resonates with me.
Most of us who love old school versions of D&D – or retroclones, as these rewritten versions of early D&D rule sets are termed - end up collecting them, but only using their particular favourite, if they use them at all. I’m a bit unusual, I suspect, floating between White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game, Blueholme, and Labyrinth Lord. But look out, there’s a new retroclone on the block: Greg Gillespie’s Dragonslayer. Dragonslayer has its origins in the OGL Crisis that engulfed the roleplaying hobby – or at least, the OSR end of it – in 2023. You may recall that Wizards, who publish D&D, leaked a plan to revise the ‘Open Gaming Licence’ under which countless indie publishers had been creating D&D-adjacent material for 20 years. Much ink was spilled on what the original OGL did or did not permit and much speculation ensued over what new terms Wizards would impose on indie publishers. Several of the larger publishers took fright and announced plans to release their own Fantasy RPG systems that were carefully (and legally) distinct from D&D, while being fully compatible with their own D&D-adjacent products. A new generation of retroclones was a-borning, to use Stan Lee’s deathless phrase. Early out of the traps is Dr Greg Gillespie, who has become a one-man industry creating highly-regarded megadungeons. I’m a big fan of his Barrowmaze dungeon and have sent parties of adventurers into it under several fantasy rules systems. Given his investment of time, creativity, and profitable Kickstarter campaigns, in the megadungeon business, Dr Gillespie was hardly going to hand over a chunk of his profits to Wizards for the right to publish stuff based on D&D. So here he is with his own bespoke old school RPG, Dragonslayer.  Whisper it: it’s still D&D really! The premise behind these retroclones has not, as far as I know, been tested in any court of law, but it wins universal acclaim in the court of public opinion, and it is this: you cannot copyright rules, only the distinctive imaginative properties those rules govern, and there’s nothing distinctive about concepts like elves, fighters, and fireballs. Therefore, Dragonslayer is really just 1980s-style D&D with certain properties removed or renamed. No mind flayers, ‘Phase Panthers’ instead of Displacer Beasts, and ‘Bigby’ has been renamed ‘Koweewah’ in all those high level ‘Magic Hand’ spells. It's more than that, though. Rewriting D&D from the ground up is a fantastic opportunity to ‘correct’ its original game's skews and stumbles and impress your own ludic philosophy on things. Old School Essentials is admired for the clean and clear way in which it assembles the jumble of rules and tables that comprise the game. OSRIC brings the mad labyrinth of AD&D together in one easily-referenced tome. Blueholme takes Holmes’s Basic D&D and extends it from 3rd to 20th level of play.
Click images to link to these products on drivethrurpg The ludic philosophy is where things get a bit controversial. There are simple enough decisions to make about whether you are ‘cloning’ original ‘white box’ D&D, early Basic D&D (in its three iterations), or Gygax’s AD&D in all its Baroque glory. But some of these decisions get a bit … political. Are we going to persist in referring to Elves as a ‘race’ and capping their advancement as fighters or magic-users? What about sex-based ability caps? Your design decisions on these things are used by unkind critics to infer your viewpoint on everything from trans rights to who should have won the Second World War. As we shall see… Get On With It!To Dragonslayer, then. A single book, running to 300 pages, with striking cover art by industry legend Jeff Easley and interior art that more than lives up to the high standard he sets. It’s a beautifully laid out book, with crisp and slightly retro fonts, and materials curated to fit into single page spreads where appropriate. But then, if you are familiar with Barrowmaze and other Gillespie products, you will expect no less. It’s not cheap but you can see where the money went.  Appetisers: races and classesThe introduction sets out the ‘Six Tenets of Dragonslayer’ which amount to a familiar OSR manifesto: ordinary heroes, rulings not rules, the DM (sorry … Maze Controller!) is absolute sovereign. Roll a character using the ‘Classic Six’ attributes: roll 3d6 seven times and assign as you like. Abilities follow the Basic D&D gradations (13-15 grants a bonus, 16-17 a great bonus, 18 an amazing bonus, likewise penalties for scores below 9). First level characters start with maximum Hit Points. There’s Descending Armour Class and if you’re one of those people who never understood THACO, well, I have some bad news for you later. Now for Races – and it’s old fashioned Races, not lineages or heritages or (shudder) ‘species.’ I’m British, so the R-word doesn’t connote the Satanic tang for me that it seems to have for some Americans. There are half-races here too – Half-Elves and Half-Orcs. Yes, I’m familiar with all the arguments about this. I quite admire the way Blueholme Journeymanne comes out and says: your PC can be any type of creature you like, even Thri-Keen insect people! But part of the 'old school experience' for many players is adapting yourself to the very particular imaginative contours of the game as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So Half-Elves are a thing, but Half-Dwarves are not.  There are some missteps, such as the big, dumb, one-eyed Cyclopsmen. Surely 'Cyclopsfolk' you say? Nope, Cyclopsmen. Deal with it. If you want to start deconstructing the game for sinister sentiments, then you start here, because these creatures are former slaves with limited IQ. They’re an unhappy inclusion (and in terms of the culture wars, a bit of an unforced error) since they have no prototype in early versions of D&D – and Half-Orcs already fulfil the big’n’brutal role. I guess they were part of Greg Gillespie’s homebrew campaign and he included them out of gratitude for the fun they brought to his table. I wonder if this was wise, given the proclivities of some critics to sniff ideological taint in things like this. The races all get randomised starting ages, height/weight tables, ability modifiers, their own base movement rates, and suggested languages for high-Intelligence characters, as well as some roleplaying hints. Darkvision is here, rather than the classic infravision, which may or may not please you. There are quirks. Gnomes have an affinity with being illusionists, so their spells last +3 rounds. It’s a bonus that will rarely make much difference to anything. Elves, meanwhile, enjoy +1 to hit with the longbow. Elves have lost their immemorial perk of being fighter/magic-users who can wear armour and cast spells. Dragonslayer seems to be a bit hostile to the idea of multi-classed characters. The concept gets a brief paragraph on p39, amounting to ‘It’s up to the GM (sorry - 'Maze Controller') whether it’s even allowed, but if it is, you get stuck with the most punitive armour restrictions of the classes you are combining.’ I’m deeply loyal to the idea of Elves in armour casting spells. My first ever D&D character (for Holmes Basic, back in 1978) was an Elf called Tristan with a Sleep spell. It seems to me there are two interesting ways to house-rule Dragonslayer. Maybe let all Elves use longbows, regardless of their character class, rather than the bonus ‘to hit’ which pretty much only benefits Elven fighters. Alternatively, let Elven fighter/magic-users wear armour (maybe limited to chain mail) – and why not let the Gnomish thief/illusionists wear leather armour while you’re at it – instead of these piddly little bonuses. But that’s just my 1sp. The character classes are incredibly well set out and the innovations here are astute. Each class fits on its own splash page, with saving throws, spells, class-abilities, and starting funds, as well as a set of ‘fast packs’ to equip starting characters. Clerics with Wisdom 15 get an extra 1st and 2nd level spell – as do magic-users with Intelligence 15+. Magic-user starting spells are rolled from an offence, defence, and a utility, with Read Magic and Detect Magic as standard. Clerics can trade in any spell they’ve learned to cast Cure Light Wounds and magic-users/illusionists can do the same to cast Read/Detect Magic. Druids don’t get this very sensible bonus – but they do start with 2 spell slots at first level, so I suppose they’re OK. Fighters get a ‘cleave’ power that gets them extra attacks whenever they kill an enemy in combat – an innovation that certainly adds momentum to combat. Thief powers strike me as enhanced: Move Silently 33% and Hide in Shadows 25%, compared to 23%/13% in Labyrinth Lord, and a ‘why-even-bother-trying?’ 15%/10% in AD&D back in the day. One alteration set me thinking. Dragonslayer’s clerics turn undead on a d20 (like AD&D) but can only attempt turning three times in a day. Pick your battles, right? I can see the rationale for this. Lots of scenarios won’t feature undead at all, or just occasional instances (wandering monsters, a dungeon room that’s a crypt), so often this restriction won’t matter. But if you’re running an undead-themed dungeon – like, er, Barrowmaze – then clerical turning becomes the boring default for every encounter. This forces PC clerics to weigh up whether undead can be dealt with by violence and use turning only after careful deliberation.  Turn, Undead, Turn by CaptainNinja on DeviantArt There are two unexpected classes. Monks appear, but radically redesigned. These are not the Kung Fu martial artists of AD&D; no, they are very much medieval-style mendicants, more Friar Tuck than Grasshopper. One of these Monks is not like the other one! They even start off knowing ‘Ancient Common’ (which, I guess, means Latin). They don’t wear armour but their AC improves every level. They get combat feats with a quarter staff. They can chant. At higher levels, they get clerical spells and turning undead but also do Comprehend Languages at will. They feel a bit one-note to me, but at least they’re coherent. Barbarians are back, but these are the ‘Asbury Barbarians’ (referring to Brian Asbury’s prototype for the class published in White Dwarf long ago and discussed here). They are limited to light armour, fly into berserk rages, and get a few thief abilities, but they scorn magic. It’s a classic build and this seems to be a coherent iteration of it. The Main Course: spells, monsters, magic items - and a few rulesI won’t dwell on the spell lists. They seem to be the AD&D-via-Labyrinth Lord canon, with some renaming to throw the lawyers off the scent. The descriptions are even more concise than Labyrinth Lord, but I wish there were page references for them – or an index!!! – and this complaint recurs with the monsters and magic items. The monster bestiary is extensive. Dragons get good treatment (complete with a multi-headed ‘Mother of Dragons’ – ahem) and the coverage of Demons’n’Devils is refreshingly candid. I guess you can’t copyright Mephistopheles, but I’m surprised to find ‘vrock’ appearing as the lowest order of demonkind – these infernal naming conventions have been imported wholesale from the AD&D Monster Manual rather than reinterpreted. Presumably Dr Gillespie took good advice on that – or perhaps he figures that family-friendly Wizards aren’t going to get involved in a legal spat over legal ownership of demons!!!  Oh, and the picture of a Hobgoblin on p170 is a delightful homage to David Sutherland’s iconic ‘samurai’ style for them. The magic items list is particularly good – unsurprising, since Gillespie shows himself to be a prolific inventor of magical gewgaws in Barrowmaze. Intelligent swords get a careful treatment, Dhurinium (mithril) armour is linked to the imagined setting in exciting ways, and there are lovely tables for randomly generating hordes – again, no surprise if you’ve seen Barrowmaze. What does come as a surprise is just how short the main rules section is: a couple of pages covers combat, dungeon exploration, and saving throws. This is testimony to how well-designed earlier sections were, drawing together the key information into the treatises on character classes and abilities, so it doesn’t need to be repeated here. You need a 20 to hit AC 0, and you get modifiers to make that easier as you go up in levels, rather than having complicated tables for each and every class. Strangely, the same minimalist approach is not adopted for saving throws. Missed opportunity there, I think. One effect of this is to de-power monsters, who also hit AC 0 on a 20 and follow the same bonuses as fighters, which means +1 to hit at 3HD and with every HD thereafter. This means 2HD monsters are no better than starting characters, which is bad news if you’re a Gnoll.  The Dessert: good adviceThe last 30 pages offer some fantastic resources, such as advice on dungeon design, wilderness campaigns, excellent random tables to map and stock dungeons, and a cute time tracker with rest breaks and wandering monster checks included. So, Should You Buy It?Recommending Dragonslayer is complicated – it depends on what you’re looking for. If you collect OSR retroclones, then you’ll want to add this handsome book to your collection. If you are intending to play a retroclone RPG and you wonder if Dragonslayer might be the best purchase, then there are things to consider. Dragonslayer is quirky. It’s full of departures, great and small, from the pristine D&D rule set of yore. I’m not just referring to the regrettable Cyclopspersons or the way the game hybridises elements of Basic D&D with the classes and spells of AD&D. There are all sorts of ways in which Dragonslayer differs from the game that people were playing in 1978. Thieves actually have a decent chance of doing something useful at 1st level, for instance. But if you want to dust off some classic modules, like say, B2: The Keep on the Borderlands or G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, then perhaps you want that authentic early D&D experience without the innovations. May I direct you instead to Blueholme for B2 or OSRIC for G1. Or Advanced Labyrinth Lord if you want the hybrid rules without the novelties.   It's only fair to add that you can pick up these earlier retroclones (with their royalty-free art and functional layouts) far cheaper. If you’re not looking for the authenticity, but you are shopping for an OSR rules set with a contemporary flourish, then Dragonslayer is a strong contender. However, there will be a post-OGL revised edition of Labyrinth Lord later this year, which author Dan Proctor promises will also break with the D&D mould in exciting ways; it looks rather beautiful and also has a cyclops PC race, if that’s a weird deal-breaker for you.  Hexed Press previews Labyrinth Lord 2e The third consideration is whether you use Greg Gillespie’s excellent megadungeons. If you are playing Barrowmaze, for example, then Dragonslayer fits it like a glove. Indeed, several features of Dragonslayer seem to have emerged specifically in response to the design decisions in those dungeons (like the reconsideration of clerical turning). If you want to get into those big, daunting, exciting dungeoneering projects, then Dragonslayer is a no-brainer. Get on board. For me, the charm of Dragonslayer is its 'lived in' feel. Despite the speed with which it was brought to press, it doesn't feel rushed. You very much sense that this is the consummation of Greg Gillespie's own D&D campaign, with house rules and good practice developed over many years. Everything feels lovingly crafted and bedded in through recurring use. Despite being a new game, it feels like an old one, and that's praise that goes to the heart of what makes a retroclone appealing.
I finally got to play Dragon Warriors. You're thinking, "Wasn't that a Nintendo console game?" Well, yes, it was, but I'm talking about the British RPG from the 1980s.
The original '80s Dragon Warriors RPG in cool paperback format Dragon Warriors was created by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson in 1985, slipping in just at the end of the 'Old School' era of roleplaying games. DW bucked a number of trends. For one thing, it was a simple rules system, only marginally more fiddly than the BECMI Dungeons & Dragons rules that offered a stripped down alternative to AD&D and are so beloved of OSR purists today. This, at a time when RPG design was tending towards complexity, with systems like Rolemaster and Harnmaster offering (to my mind, excessive) realism through a plethora of tables. DW's other distinguishing feature was its format: published by Corgi books in the classic 178mm x 110mm trade paperback size. This meant the game was delivered to you in a modular sequence. The first book, Dragon Warriors, introduced core rules with Knights and Barbarians as PCs. If you wanted magic, you needed Way of Wizardry for Sorcerers and Mystics. The Elven Crystals provided linked scenarios, Out of the Shadows added Assassin PCs, The Power of Darkness added Elementalists and The Lands of Legend developed the campaign setting (a world called Legend) and Warlock PCs. The books retailed at £1.75 back then, which was cheap compared to other games normally priced at £10-12 . But then again, other '80s RPGs tended to come in a box, with a starter scenario or screen, and to acquire all of DW you would need to spend £9.50, so perhaps it wasn't such a saving. On the other hand a young gamer could acquire Dragon Warriors gradually, in pocket money sized instalments, rather than needing to wait until Christmas or a birthday for the substantial gift of a £10 game. (If you want to translate into today's money, multiply mid-'80s prices by three.) The paperback format probably made sense to Corgi, because the Fighting Fantasy game books were still printing money for Puffin Books and Corgi adopted a similar look with Dragon Warriors, hoping for some crossover purchases. It was not to be. Dragon Warriors won warm praise from critics and gathered a devoted fan base, but it never secured a place at the top gaming table. There were many reasons. It was quirky British at a time when American culture dazzled. It was conventional fantasy at a time when interest was rising in SF, horror and book/film tie-ins. It was simple when complexity was fashionable. Changes in print technology would soon make RPG rule books into glossy hardback artefacts resembling coffee table talking points and DW's paperback format came to look childish and naff by comparison (but is beloved by collectors now for that very reason).
Dragon Warriors and the '90s competition. 'Game over, man!' I never played DW when it first appeared. I was starting university and moved past Fighting Fantasy and pocket money sized instalments didn't appeal the way it would have done a couple of years earlier. But I noticed it, especially the adverts that promoted DW's authentic medieval and faerie themes. I remember being particularly drawn to an advert for the game that promised a RPG setting in which Elves were not cosy woodland party-goers, but alien entities who have no souls! DW was rescued from oblivion by Mongoose back in 2009, who brought the six paperbacks together as a single volume. When that lapsed, DW was rescued again by Serpent King Games and their edition, as well as many more supplements and scenarios, can be bought at drivethrurpg.  How Does It Play? (but don't bore me ...)I'll try not to! You create your character by rolling the familiar 3d6 for Strength, Reflexes, Intelligence, Psychic Talent and Looks. As is traditional for old school RPGs, 'Looks' has no mechanical value in the game and serves as a dump stat for all right minded people. The important stats are Attack, Defence, Magic Attack and Defence, Stealth, Perception and Evasion. These are dictated by your character class and (slightly) modified by extreme score in Strength, Reflexes, etc. (but not Looks, obviously.) Hit Points are rolled with a modifier based on your class, with Barbarians getting the most Hit Points, as is only right and proper. The basic mechanism is to roll a d20 and score under your stat. If it's a conflict, you deduct your opponent's Defence or Magical Defence from your stat. If it's a ranged attack, instead of deducting Defense you get a penalty based on their range, size and speed. A 1 always hits. That's it. Well, not quite. Weapons do a fixed amount of damage, like 4 for a dagger or 6 for a morning star. This is modified for very high/low Strength (but not Looks!). You then roll to bypass armour. Each weapon has its own Armour Bypass Die (a d4 for a dagger, a d6 for a morning star) and you have to roll it and match or exceed the armour rating (4 for full mail, 5 for plate armour) otherwise you do no damage at all. On top of that, a shield gives a simple 1 in 6 change of negating all the damage. This means you end up imitating D&D by rolling a d20 'to hit' then a weapon die, but the weapon die is really a second 'to hit' roll versus armour. Fixed damage takes some of the unfairness out of dicey mechanics, but it does make combat somewhat predictable. Heavily armoured PCs have a definite edge over monsters. The combat feels a bit clunky and unresponsive to dramatic improvisation, but it captures the brutal tone of medieval melee and it gives armour the right sort of value. There are Spell Lists and some of the spells are quite distinctive. Magic using characters can cast any spell (no Spell Books, which is disappointing) but have to spend Magic Points (MP), which recharge once a day. Mystics are a bit different; instead of MP they have a push-your-luck mechanic which can result in losing all magical power for the rest of the day. There are a few fiddly details. Some rolls are made with 2d10 instead of a d20, which additional penalises low scores and further rewards having high scores. I can't quite see the point of this. In a nutshell: It's a fairly boilerplate RPG rules set with a heavy focus on fighting, no social mechanics to speak of and a fairly gritty feel to it. Character classes are prescriptive but are nicely locked into the medieval setting. You get to choose skills at higher levels, but otherwise characters of the same class are as undifferentiated as D&D - perhaps more so, because draping yourself in goofy magic items is less of a thing for DW. What's the Setting Like? (please be brief)DW's biggest draw is its world and the tone created by that setting. The world is called Legend.
Legend has more than a passing resemblance to 13th century Europe, with Ellesland (NW corner) having a kingdom called Albion - where (with the patriotic perspective we expect) the campaign is assumed to start. From there, PCs can explore such exotic and threatening places as Chaubrette (France), Algandy (Spain), the New Selentine (i.e. Holy Roman) Empire and on south and east to caliphates, sultanates and emirates and Mungoda, which is plainly Africa. I'm sure Edward Said would have turned in his grave, if he wasn't alive and well at the time, having published Orientalism just a few years earlier, denouncing this sort of other-ing and fetishizing of African and Middle Eastern culture.  Once we've had the mandatory cringe at all this eurocentric bias and cultural appropriation, let's put this in a RPG perspective. Dragon Warriors was in good company. Gary Gygax ran his original D&D campaign in a fantasy world that was a map of North America with the names changed. Expert D&D, published just a couple of years before DW, introduced the Known World setting, later named Mystara; this spawned a set of gazetteers in the late 1980s, most of which explicitly modelled fantasy realms on historical civilisations - for example, Ken Rolston's The Emirates of Ylaruam (1987) bundles the Islamic Middle East into a single fantasy realm. At around about the same time, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was developing the Old World setting, which pastiched Michael Moorcock, H P Lovecraft and Renaissance Europe into a distinctive fantasy world. (And of course, 1996 George R R Martin published Game of Thrones.) It's to DW's credit that it treats Legend as more than a gauzy historical backdrop, but rather expects players to lean in to its culture and cultural conflicts. Knights are expected to live by the feudal code and Barbarians and Elementalists are explicitly the warriors and mages of the northern and eastern expanses. The scenarios go out of their way to illustrate medieval norms and assumptions about class, nationhood, honour and the supernatural. Faerie is another feature of this setting and DW strives to evoke a numinous and threatening feel for the Fae: beautiful but alien, feared, fickle, otherworldly, uncanny. Very different from the humdrum Elves of D&D and Warhammer, but not unlike the Others/White Walkers of Game of Thrones. My friend Simon Barns reminds me of other '80s games that explored a fantasy/historical setting. Chivalry & Sorcery rather beat you over the head with its historical verisimilitude and DW is a light-footed, free-spirited nymph by comparison. Pendragon excels at this sort of roleplaying, but only in the Arthurian theme and with the convention that you all play Knights. So, Are You Going to Play It?No, I don't think so. There's an introductory scenario in the revised rulebook called The Darkness Before Dawn which I ran with a group of friends. It's a fine scenario, illustrating feudal duties, community tensions and faerie malevolence. Everybody enjoyed themselves. But the session illustrated both the strengths and shortcomings of Dragon Warriors as a rules set. Character creation is quick but rather unsatisfying. Put simply, you are your character class. The background tables prompt you to deviate only slightly from the medieval stereotype (our PC Knight was the son of an ink maker and must have been knighted as a mercenary). Combat is similarly clunky - not laborious or longwinded or fiddly, just lacking in drama. The magic system is solid and might have seemed very fresh and rational compared to the lottery that is D&D, but again lacks colourful moments. Judged as a OSR product, DW feels as if its moment has passed. A good comparison might be that other 'fantasy heartbreaker' that I love: Forge Out of Chaos (see blogs passim). Forge and DW offer a similar departure from old school D&D without questioning its core assumptions. They both retain the 3d6 characteristics and the roll-a-d20-to-hit combat system. But Forge has more interesting quirks, like weapons notching, time out to repair armour, harmful side effects from spells and a distinction between damage done to armour and damage done to its wearer. The crucial problem with DW is that the stuff that makes it so distinctive - the twilit, Celtic-themed Faerie vibe - isn't part of the rule set at all. The PCs aren't faerie themed - they don't have mystical geisa binding them to tragic dooms, they can't go into warp spasms, they don't have Fae heritage or the second sight, you can't roll to be the seventh son of a seventh son. The magic system is sturdy but generic: there are no faerie themed spells, you can't tap ley lines, open portals at standing stones, commune with river goddesses or learn someone's True Name. All of which adds up to this proposition: I explore the world of Legend and DW's excellent scenarios without having to use the Dragon Warriors rules set, because the rules set is no necessary part of what makes the setting and the scenarios so good. If I wanted to emphasis gritty combat and white-knuckle survivalism, I'd use Forge: Out of Chaos; if I wanted to retain the simplicity and the sense of being ordinary mooks in a big bad world, I'd go with Warlock!. If I just wanted to tell wild fairy tales in a romantic medieval setting, I'd use Blueholme or another D&D retroclone.
Warlock! and Blueholme are available at drivethrurpg (click the images) but Forge can only be found in (vintage) physical editions at the moment - albeit inexpensive ones Sounds Like You're Being a Bit Harsh ...Maybe I am. I can certainly see why people who discovered Dragon Warriors in the '80s stayed loyal - and I can see why DW might be an exciting discovery for someone delving into RPG products of decades past. It's probably the best of the 'lost' RPGs of that era and, if it were categorised as one of Ron Edwards' 'fantasy heartbreakers' then it is an exceptional one. I'm judging DW from my own perspective, of course. If I run a fantasy RPG, it will always be in a historical setting or one inspired by a historical era. Faerie is a big influence on my imagination and I represent Faerie in my games very much as Dave Morris & Oliver Johnson advocate in Dragon Warriors. I prefer low-key fantasy RPGs where wounds, trauma, supplies and the like all matter. And because of this, I'm disappointed to find Dragon Warriors isn't offering me anything except exhortations to roleplay in the way I already do, in a world very like one I would create myself, and a rules set that has no distinctive advantages over other OSR or fantasy heartbreaker games I already own,. In other words, by the time I finally got round to reading Dragon Warriors, it was too late. The moment has passed. The passion isn't going to ignite. We're in the friendzone, DW and I. But you, Dear Reader, maybe you're different. Maybe you've never done a fantasy RPG in a historically inspired setting. Maybe this Faerie theme thing is new to you. Maybe you're wanting to try one of these 'old school' RPGs and don't know which of the many out there to begin with.
I reckon, if two out of the three above apply to you, then Dragon Warriors will blow your mind. I think it would have blown mine if I'd discovered it back when I was 18: with her moody Celtic beauty and quirky medieval style, Dragon Warriors is the one that got away. SPOILERS AHEAD: Fen Orc and Swamp Goblin dissect the classic 1982 AD&D module 'Against the Cult of the Reptile God.' My good friend Swamp Goblin and I have decided to put out a series of video reviews focusing on the RPG products that inspired us. Here's our first; my video production skills are pretty basic, but they're only going to get better. AD&D module N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God came out in 1982. It was written by Douglas Niles, a former English teacher who bashed this out in 4 weeks: it was his first assignment as a designer for TSR. Niles went on to design other RPGs, like Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks and Top Secret: SI, had a big hand in creating Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms and authored a ton of novels. Reptile God is fondly remembered - and deservedly so - and a particular delight is the way it subverts the expectations of 'Golden Age' or Gygaxian D&D. In the early template, the village acts as a base for the PCs to raid a nearby dungeon. This gets its definitive outing in 1979's T1: The Village of Hommlet. Sure, there are dramas in Hommlet: you can go around gathering clues, you can recruit NPCs to your party, there are a pair of evil dudes who will spy on you for the nearby Temple of Elemental Evil, there are sectarian tensions between Druidists and Cuthbertites. But Hommlet is fundamentally static and benign and it's up to the PCs to make things happen there - or not, as they choose.   You can see the influence of Hommlet on Niles' design of Orlane. There are rectangular houses on neat patches connected by public roads and screened by attractive trees. It looks like no medieval town ever; rather, it's a sort of idealised American frontier settlement, somewhere north of Walton Mountain and south of Avonlea, not far from St Petersburg, Missouri.  This sort of American idyll, passed off as pseudo-medieval Europe, is very common in fantasy RPGs. You can see it in Greg Stafford's Apple Lane (1978, one of the first RuneQuest scenarios) and I do a deep dive on Mark Kibbe's World of Juravia over here. I mention in the video that an interest in what lies beneath the surface of small town American life has a long pedigree in American literature. I forgot to mention the link cited by Stephen King himself: Grace Metalious' 1956 novel Peyton Place which explores lust, incest and murder in a sleepy New England town. It's the close resemblance of Homlett and Orlane to idealised American communities - rather than actual medieval ones - which drives home the themes of corruption and secret conspiracy so effectively.  Niles builds on Gygax's wholesome template in several ways. For a start, he's a better writer and each location is introduced with snappy read-aloud captions that establish more than the size and shape of the property.  Attentive players will pick up on tell-tale details of chaos and neglect that indicate (often, but not always) the influence of the Reptile Cult. Niles takes the implied drama of Hommlet and makes his setting fully dynamic. Over a period of days, the Cult will abduct and brainwash the free-willed villagers, in a particular order. This is a community that changes while the PCs are here and if they do nothing at all they will still notice events going on. Niles is sometimes credited with introducing a more investigative, less combat-orientated approach to D&D. Sandy Peterson's Call of Cthulhu RPG came out the previous year (1981) and it's hard not to see the thematic links here - although Niles would have had his work cut out to read and digest Call of Cthulhu and then bash out this Cthulhu-esque module in the time available, so it is perhaps a coincidence. Another possible coincidence is that 1981 saw the release of the first British AD&D module, U1: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, by Dave J. Browne with Don Turnbull. Saltmarsh surely beats Reptile God to the punch when it comes to delivering an investigative AD&D adventure. I'm not sure whether Niles would have been aware of the material being created by TSR (UK) and - again - the time frame doesn't leave much scope for a direct influence. But in any event, Niles' Orlane differs from Saltmarsh in fundamental ways. For a start, Saltmarsh isn't mapped or detailed: it gets a pretty lightweight description:  Interesting: the World of Greyhawk location puts Saltmarsh south of Orlane, in the neighbouring Kingdom of Keoland. OK, it's a few hundred miles away, but the same general region. Moreover, the whole point of Module U1 is [SPOILERS] that, despite all appearances, there isn't actually anything supernatural going on - whereas in Orlane, despite the superficial prosperity, there is an occult menace at work. U1: Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is not an adventure I've ever loved. It feels anticlimactic to me, far too invested in atmosphere and not enough drama and, despite all the investigation and clue-finding, it ends up with a massive fight that can easily overwhelm a low-level PC party (the NPC magic-user has a Sleep spell, ferchrissakes). The secret is not particularly sinister - or even particularly secretive. One thing you cannot accuse Saltmarsh of, though, is being too American. It's all fog, brine, fishy smells and a general sense of murkiness. The later scenarios in the U-series bring in reptile-people (Lizard Men, Sahuagin) and their cults, but there's a complex and realistic political situation unfolding: they're not just 'monsters.' Meanwhile, N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God picked up critical plaudits, but never spawned a sequel. The N-series turned out to be N-for-Novice: a string of modules supposedly designed for starting characters, not a series developing the region of Orlane, the Rushmoors and the fallout from the destruction of the Cult. The next N-module came along in 1984 and Carl Smith's N2: The Forest Oracle is (not entirely unfairly) pilloried as the worst TSR module ever. In particular, it's condemned for its sloppy and ineffective writing - which only throws Douglas Niles' strengths as a designer into sharper relief. In the video review, Swamp Goblin and I discuss different ways that N1 could develop after the destruction of the Cult. Maybe Module alt-N2: Revenge of the Goddess Merikka, is something I'll have to write myself ... In the meantime, our next deep dive review will be the oh-so-problematic Module X1: The Isle of Dread.    |
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Fen Orc
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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