Perils In Yellow: White Dwarf #1 (1977) Reviewed

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 Weasel

Let'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 cover

Yeah, 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 Alpha

Ian 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 Monstermark

The 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 reviews

In 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&D

Fred 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 Campaigns

Another 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 Warlord

Steve 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' contributions

Treasure 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 ...

Adverts

If, 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.