Monster Summoning in Mauve: White Dwarf #2 (1977) reviewed

White Dwarf #1 (reviewed here) was late to the presses, so the Aug/Sep issue #2 of the UK's first glossy RPG magazine arrived hot on its tails. This issue would have arrived in time for University terms to start and college gaming clubs to convene, so I imagine it was actually the first issue that a lot of casual readers saw.

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

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

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

The Cover: 'I Cast Summon Mauve Monsters!'

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

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

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

Editorial: The Gloves Come Off!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competitive D&D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asgard Miniatures: review

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Green Planet Trilogy: reviewed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before The Flood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Monstermark System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treasure Chest

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

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

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

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

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

Letters and Ads

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

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

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

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

---

In retrospect

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

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

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