Killing Crows in Cobalt: White Dwarf #4 (1978) reviewed

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 Dungeonland

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

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

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

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

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

Remember???

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D&D Campaigns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Themed - but hardly limited!

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

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

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

Hyboria

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monsters Mild And Malign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treasure Chest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competitive D&D

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

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

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

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

Akhenaten was the father of Tutankhamun

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

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

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

Letters and Adverts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back Cover

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

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

In Retrospect

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

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

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