Spiders in Green Grottoes: White Dwarf #3 (1977) reviewed

I've reviewed White Dwarf #1 (here) and #2 (here), so it makes sense to crack on and review White Dwarf #3, to complete a classic trilogy. Issue 3 arrived through letterboxes on the run-up to Christmas, while the nation swayed, for weeks on end, to Paul McCartney's Mull of Kintyre.

Travel with me back in time, to the winter of 1977, as inflation soars, the Yorkshire Ripper eludes the police, and a nation waits patiently for Star Wars to come to their cinema screens.

The 'Green Grotto' issue: Alan Hunter depicts a warrior and his lady friend startled by a spider, or perhaps the old man turning into a werewolf (or a werewolf turning into an old man)

The Cover: 'Watch out for that Spider!'

Alan Hunter (1923-2012) did some of the interior art last issue and will go on to produce a lot of illustrations for White Dwarf. Along with the late Russ Nicholson, he is one of the WD artists whose work features prominently in TSR's 1981 Fiend Folio.

Hunter has a distinctive style that reminds me of medieval woodcuts. He was a veteran artist by the time he contributed to White Dwarf, having made his name in the 1950s. However, I don't think his cover art here is particularly successful. His best illustrations are posed pieces; he's not so good at conveying dynamic movement or violent action. I suspect he was essaying the fantasy trope of 'Warrior + Maiden Confront Wizard' but it's all too stylised (right down to the squares on the floor). There's another picture of his that I love that appeared in White Dwarf #38 in 1983.

Hunter seems to delight in drawing spectral beings emerging from portals.

Editorial: The Force Awakens

In the first two issues, Ian Livingstone's Editorials addressed divisions within the hobby community, possibly even stoked them, but advocated a distinctive identity for F/SF gamers, and roleplayers in particular.

Something seems to have changed in the last couple of months. Livingstone is upbeat, outward-looking, and inclusive. There has clearly been financial news that puts White Dwarf on a secure footing; he hints it might be US sales adding to the homegrown market. The upshot is that Livingstone doesn't need to court or chide the historical wargaming crowd: the magazine will be fine without them.

(Well, there is perhaps a dig. Livingstone announces he won't become "complacent" or "let the magazine drift into a safe, stereotyped format" - I wonder which prestigious wargaming periodical he was taking aim at there.)

Livingstone addressees his new audience: what should future issues of White Dwarf carry? More SF? Articles by designers? More art? Short fiction? As it turns out, all of these will feature over the next year.

Livingstone signs off with the phrase, "May the Force be with you."

Star Wars wasn't going to appear in the UK until December 27 - like many, I went to see it as a post-Christmas treat. However, it had been out in the USA since the summer, having smashed the box office records there, so it was a well-known movie. I'm not sure why the gap between US and UK distribution was so enormous. Like many kids, I already knew all about Star Wars. The 2000AD Summer Special had trailed the film (with some  inaccuracies) and I rushed to collect the giant-sized compilations Marvel's comic adaptations of the film. Then the Alan Dean Foster novelisation.

The HOURS I spent poring over these ...

I don't think I was an unusual 10-year-old in this regard. Certainly, the crowd at Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed (the book shop advertised last issue) knew all about Star Wars.

"May the Force be with you," then, in late '77, wasn't yet the broad cultural touchstone it later became, but it was definitely 'If You Know, You Know.'  I suppose, to use a 2025 phrase usually employed in other contexts, it was a Dog Whistle.

Solo Dungeon Mapping

This two page article outlines a technique for generating randomised dungeon maps - with a view to solo dungeon-bashing (map the corridors, enter the rooms, randomly generate monsters and treasure, fight, loot, repeat).

As such, it's a mere curiosity, since the AD&D DM's Guide (1979) would include tables for random dungeon creation that were rather more sophisticated than this. Especially as this method involves first creating over 100 mini-maps  (20x20 squares), to shuffle and copy for each section. That's a chore.

The author is credited as Roger Moores. One wonders, is this in fact Roger E. Moore, the prodigious contributor to RPG magazines (including White Dwarf in the future) and later editor of Dragon magazine? 

If this is indeed that Roger E. Moore, then Moore would have been a recent graduate at this time in his life, who only discovered D&D in the summer of '77, while stationed as a mental health counsellor at Fort Bragg. This would be one of his first published articles for D&D, perhaps submitted to White Dwarf after his transfer to West Germany.

I love to think of young Moore, stuck in Fort Bragg or Mannheim, obsessed with D&D, making hundreds of mini-maps so he could play D&D by himself.

Of course, if there is an actual Roger Moores out there, who hates seeing his work misattributed to his famous near-namesake, then please clear this up and accept my apology!

The other thing that leaps of the page is the quality of those maps. They aren't Moore's (or Moores's) maps, because the same technique is used in Hemmings' following article on Competitive D&D. They are in the distinctive style that White Dwarf would employ for its celebrated mini-modules, with the rooms and corridors in white, on a grid background. Far more attractive than the floorplans you find in Judges Guild scenarios (except Tegel Manor, of course) or the Zenopus Dungeon in Holmes Basic D&D (out next year); they hold their head up with the Classic Blue Design used in TSR's modules (also out next year).

I'd love to know if they were created by one of the WD artists, or produced on some early mapping software package. These designs contributed to the clean, grown-up aesthetic the White Dwarf came to embody. They introduced me to the notion that dungeon maps could be more than just functional: they could be beautiful.

Competitive D&D

The third part of Fred Hemmings' series, which, I must confess, has taught me very little about how to run a competitive D&D tournament (indeed, this issue's Letter's Page has a complaint related to this), but it tells us a lot about the distinctive Pythonesque gaming subculture that Hemmings inhabits.

This issue, we get a write-up of the first level of the PANDORA'S MAZE dungeon. It's heavy on traps and riddles, but look: there's more of that fantastic mapping technique on display.

The dungeon is a baffling business. It reads as if vital tables or keys are missing. What can be made out is that monsters teleport in and attack for no clear reason, super high-level NPCs with silly names sit around in small rooms being unhelpful, and that many of the riddles refer to pub quiz trivia (quotes from the Bible, jokes about electricity pylons, brands of cigars, Judy Garland songs) rather than fantasy/medieval tropes that the characters (rather than the players) might be expected to understand.

I suppose what we can take away from this is that the literary form of 'dungeon module' was still evolving, and it wasn't yet clear the best way to do it. Recognising what information you need to tell readers, and what is so obvious it goes without saying, is not in fact so obvious it goes without saying. In a year from now, hobbyists will have read the Zenopus Dungeon, In Search of the Unknown, and the first quality mini-modules in the pages of White Dwarf, and the standards of the genre will take clearer shape. We will see the same inconsistency remarked upon in the reviews of Judges Guild dungeons (coming up this issue), so Fred Hemmings is not to be condemned for failing to be ahead of his time.

What this boils down to is, no one can write well in a new genre until they've all been exposed to someone writing very well in it, whereupon, suddenly, everyone seems to know how to do it. It must have been the same on the Elizabethan stage when Marlowe and Shakespeare showed up to demonstrate how it was done.

The Monstermark System

In the previous two issues, Don Turnbull expanded on his technique for representing the lethality of D&D monsters in a single 'Monstermark' score and used it to redraft the D&D Greyhawk random monster tables, to produce something less arbitrary.

Turnbull got a lot of criticism for this system, mostly from people who shy away from hard sums, but he was a Maths teacher before he became a games designer, so I guess old habits die hard.

This article doesn't add any more to the Monstermark calculations (big sighs of relief all round), but it does generate a couple of interesting ideas. One is a set of examples using the Monstermark to calculate XP awards. They seem fair enough, except most D&D retroclones that I use (Labyrinth Lord, Dragonslayer, Blueholme) have already 'fixed' the XP awards - and I never paid any attention to the strange rule, that Turnbull so strongly advocates, that higher level characters only get a fraction of the XP that a monster would be worth for lower level characters.

Much better is the clever table for randomly determining which random monster table to use for your wandering monsters (or to allocate monsters to rooms, if that's your thing). For example, on the 2nd dungeon level, you might get paltry monsters from the level I table (1-3 on a d20), you will probably get respectable opponents from the level II or III tables (4-13 on a d20), but you could run up against level IV monsters (14-17), or level V (18-19) or even level VI (eek, a 20). 

(Let me remind you, the Monstermark allocates wraiths, succubi, and 5-headed hydras to level V, and basilisks, mummies, and the dreaded carrion crawler to level VI. No fun running into THEM on dungeon level 2)

This is absolutely a more sensible method than the Rules As Written - why shouldn't horrific denizens of the lower deeps be holidaying in the upper dungeon levels on rare occasions?

What I am struck by is Don Turnbull's assumption that D&D is played by exploring what we today call a 'mega-dungeon': a structure that descends below ground for a dozen levels or more and that the PC adventurers return to again and again.

The early rules of D&D seem to assume such settings and the original designers created them (Gygax's Greyhawk Castle and Arneson's Blackmoor dungeon); there's a lovely side elevation of such a dungeon in the Holmes Basic D&D which was to see print the following year:

Skull Mountain, baby! Hoo-yeah!!!

Don Turnbull refers to his own 'Greenlands Dungeon' that has this 'mega' structure - and he would publish extracts from it in future issues of White Dwarf.

The mega-dungeon was doomed to pass away and 1977 might be seen as its final year in the sun. In 1978, TSR would start printing its 'modules' that re-framed the dungeon adventure into a much smaller location for a much sharper tactical purpose: eliminating the leadership of the coalition of Giants, discovering the fate of Zelligar and Rogahn, looting the tomb of the demi-lich Acerak.

The passing of the mega-dungeon was also hurried along by the sort of scenarios later published in White Dwarf and Dragon: not extracts from a larger dungeon conurbation, but focused encounters in settings that were realised in superior detail. By the 1980s, and certainly by the '90s, hardly anyone was playing D&D by launching repeated delves into the same seemingly-limitless underground labyrinth.

But then, mega-dungeons returned. The Old School Renaissance (OSR) reclaimed this style of play in the 21st century. Michael Curtis's Stonehell (2009) and Greg Gillespie's Barrowmaze (2012) are celebrated examples.

You can find Stonehell on Lulu (quite cheap), but for Barrowmaze try drivethrurpg and spend a bit more

However, modern mega-dungeons aren't like the ones of old. They've got theme and coherence. You don't roll on a Random Monster Table that might throw up literally anything. Their tables offer curated lists, based on the concept behind that part of the dungeon. The '70s-style underground metropolis where just about every type of monster could be encountered, just wandering about: that's gone for good.

Nevertheless, when I next convene my school club and send a group of PCs into one of the new mega-dungeons, I might tweak the Wandering Monster Tables in line with Don Turnbull's suggestions, allowing small chances of drawing terrifying encounters from deeper in the dungeon or (perhaps, mercifully) from the higher levels instead.

Open Box

Don Turnbull is back as a reviewer in Open Box, taking up two pages to assess a range of products from Judges Guild.

Judges Guild launched the previous year, after super-fan Bob Bledsaw travelled to TSR head office in Lake Geneva to pitch ideas and came away with Dave Arneson's blessing to create D&D-related products. At that time, Gary Gygax didn't think D&D fans wanted 'official' dungeons or play aids. How wrong could a boy be? Judges Guild started publishing crib sheets, character sheets, monster lists, and of course a DM's Screen (they called it a 'shield,' Don Turnbull calls it a 'privacy screen,' which shows how fluid terms and concepts were at this time), and of course scenarios.

They sold like hot cakes. Supposedly, the reason TSR turned to publishing adventure modules in 1978 was because they saw how much money Judges Guild was making from selling scenarios.

JG stuff was cheap to publish and they cranked out tons of it; quality control be damned. The aesthetic amounted to daft puns and goofy NPCs, somewhat giving the lie to Lew Pulsipher's assertion (last issue) that the US hobby scene was more serious than in the UK. Nonetheless, what they did supremely well was maps, especially big campaign maps of cities, provinces, whole continents. Moreover, they collated the disparate jumble of D&D rules, tables, spells, monsters, and magic items, and brought them together on handouts. Invaluable resources these, especially in an era before photocopying was widely available.

For a few years in the 1970s, Judges Guild was synonymous with D&D for most hobbyists. But then TSR got their act together with AD&D and started to compete and, anyway, the hobby culture shifted. Goofiness was replaced by serious narrative, high production quality (hardback books, full colour) came to be seen as standard, and it was a standard JG didn't rise to. By the early-80s, JG was headed for irrelevance.

But before that happened, they had four amazing products to deliver, and two of them are reviewed here.

The other two, in case you didn't know, are the scenarios Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower, both by Paul Jaquays who, by wild coincidence, appears on this issue's Letters Page.

Tegel Manor is, as Turnbull describes it, "a huge haunted house on a bleak, wind-swept sea-coast." The map is, everyone agrees, superb. The content is, as we Brits say, a bit 'Marmite.' 

Turnbull doesn't seem to notice the elements that make most critics grind their teeth: it's a 'funhouse dungeon' with randomly assigned monsters and a strange frat boy sense of humour, such as the random encounters with members of the eccentric 'Rump' family. On the contrary, he says he played the scenario (though surely not all of it, it's huge) and "found it enjoyable ... a novel change from the more familiar dungeon setting" (even though it has a dungeon underneath) so I guess expectations were different in '77.

Although I'm pretty sure I know what Lew Pulsipher thinks of funhouse dungeons. He'll remind us in his D&D Campaigns article later.

City State of the Invincible Overlord is the jewel in JG's crown, and Turnbull recognises he's in the presence of greatness. The maps of the enormous city and the castle it trades with are awesome and so is the level of detail in which the city map is keyed. What Turnbull finds odd is that the dungeons under and outside the City are not stocked: they are just dungeon maps, for the purchaser to fill as they see fit.

"No DM worth his salt," opines Don Turnbull, "needs someone else to draw dungeons for him, though he would buy fully stocked and populated dungeons in order to gain fresh ideas for his own creation."

This is a little odd coming from someone who has spent three months 'fixing' the D&D random monster tables, precisely to assist with randomly stocking dungeon maps. 

What I take away from this is confirmation of my earlier intuition, that the standards for a D&D scenario were still in flux in 1977. No one had yet produced the definitive dungeon and nailed expectations. There were all sorts of dungeons out there: serious, silly, stocked, unstocked, vast, small. Turnbull acknowledges the "massive differences in style between products of different DMs" but it's safe to say that, by this time next year, there will be an authoritative style, and it will have been laid down by Gary Gygax.

The other reviews are of board games. Citadel (FGU) is one of the earliest examples of a game with a modular board, though of course reviewer Mike Westhead doesn't use that term. Fourth Dimension (by British designer J. A. Bell) is what we now term an 'abstract strategy' game with a loosey-goosey SF theme pasted on; Fred Hemmings likes it well enough and it must have sold, because TSR bought it and produced their own edition.

Martin Easterbrook gives the thumbs-down to the Hobbit-inspired Battle of the Five Armies. So too did Tolkien Enterprises, which finally noticed what TSR (and other hobby gamers) were getting up to with Tolkien's property. Before this year ends, a cease-and-desist order will force TSR to bin games like this (and rename their hobbits, ents, and balrogs in the forthcoming AD&D rules).

D&D Campaigns

Lew Pulsipher is back, continuing his essay on the Right Way To Play D&D from issue #1. It's easy to mock Lew's thin-lipped tone, especially from the 'Your-Game-Your-Way' liberalism of the 21st century. However, I can't stress enough how important essays like these became for young gamers like myself, figuring out how to 'do D&D properly' with almost no adult input. I devoured these articles. I could probably have quoted them word for word. And do you know what, they helped me be a good DM to my school friends.

Re-reading them decades later, I'm intrigued by the idea of Lew as a civiliser, no, a missionary: the Apostle to the Brits, come to bring the word of Higher Roleplaying to the benighted savages of these rain-soaked islands, coaxing them away from pantomime, puns, and Monty Python, trying desperately to get them to Take It Seriously.

Thank you Lew Pulsipher: you lifted me out of darkness

Lew launches this article with a piece of resonant advice:

"The referee must think of himself as a friendly computer with discretion. Referee interference in the game must be reduced as much as possible..." because every time the referee interferes in the game from a position of omniscience, "he reduces the element of skill."

These days, this emphasis on player skill and a neutral, almost invisible DM, is associated with the more robust exponents of the OSR movement, the sort of people who hate 'balanced' encounters and think D&D should be about going into a dangerous environment and learning from your (bloody) mistakes.

But I like to view Lew's ideal DM as similar to the Protestant (or at any rate, Anglican) idea of God. This Person creates a world in detail and depth, then steps back from it. The DM/God hides Himself behind the machinery of His creation. Once it's all in motion, He hates to interfere, however much His people pray and implore. After all, it's a good Creation and they're equipped with the skills and resources they need to prosper in it: they just need to apply themselves, cooperate, and show some ingenuity.

Lew's DM/God has "discretion" though, so He can tweak the machinery on special occasions. He won't tell the players that He's doing this, though, because "believability" is paramount. The results of rare DM/divine interventions will look, to the PCs, like things that were going to happen anyway.

There's a lot to be said for Pulsipher's lofty conception of the neutral-but-benign DM, impartially mediating the setting in a way that emphasises the significance of players' choices. It became my DMing style, up until the arrival of 'Storytelling' RPGs in the '90s. Today, I prefer a more collaborative approach with players, but when I'm running D&D-style dungeon crawls at youth clubs, I revert to the "friendly computer with discretion" that Lew Pulsipher sold me on, all those years ago.

A few other points come out of this article. Pulsipher rejects the arrangement whereby a party 'Caller' mediates between the DM and the other players, even though this was how Gary Gygax did it and is still being advocated in Holmes Basic D&D and AD&D (due just a few months after this article). I'm not sure how many groups actually followed this structure anyway, but history was on Lew's side here.

Pulsipher has a lot to say about 'detection' spells and his view is eminently sensible: reward players who choose them and use them, give players enough information for them to make judicious choices, don't give them so much information there are no meaningful choices to make.

It might seem odd that Pulsipher devotes so much space to this. It serves as a reminder that Original D&D had spell and magic item descriptions that were very cryptic. We are used to the caricature of the 'Rules Lawyer' who uses the rulebook to berate the DM, but back in '77 very few people would have possessed all of 'the rulebook,' scattered as it was across a half dozen booklets and supplements, plus fanzines and old copies of Strategic Review. In a way, everyone back then was playing 'house rules.' It's to Lew Pulsipher's credit that, rather than rewrite every single spell in a clearcut way, he provides a set of sane and widely applicable principles to separate good house rules from bad.

Finally, we get Alignment - and of course, this is the good old days when Law opposed Chaos, with drab Neutrals in between.

Pulsipher assumes (as many people did) that the source for all this is "Michael Moorcock's apocalyptic fantasy novels." In Playing At The World, Jon Peterson argues that the ultimate source is Poul Anderson's 'portal fantasies,' especially Three Hearts & Three Lions and The Broken Sword, but also notes its recurrence in fantasies by Lin Carter and Roger Zelazny. 

What I find intriguing is that Pulsipher firmly rejects "four-way alignment, allowing such combinations as Lawful/Evil and Chaotic/Good," which had been floated by Gary Gygax the previous year and must have been gaining acceptance.

His reasoning is that this involves a "complete restructuring of the game" and "reduce[s] alignment differentiation to nil," leading to a situation where "virtually anyone can be in any party, and all act about the same regardless of alignment." 

This isn't a widely held view today, even among people who stand by the alignment system in D&D. The difference is down to meta-ethics. 21st century gamers view PC alignment as an expression of personality or temperament: Law/Good is dutiful and kind, whereas Law/Evil is honourable but cruel. A party containing a mix of alignments will produce enjoyable dramatic conflict and ethical dilemmas, or at least opportunities for players to roleplay different reactions to the same situation.

There are tons of 'LG Paladin vs the Rogue/Warlock/Bard' memes attesting the popularity of this sort of player-v-player conflict

For Pulsipher, alignment isn't some sort of ethical orientation or personality trait, it's a cosmic war which places PC adventurers in the front line. He seems to imagine parties that are entirely Lawful (or entirely Chaotic, perhaps), maybe with a few Neutrals sprinkled in 'for colour.' Once again, 21st century hyper-liberalism has overtaken the rigid binaries of the '70s Cold War outlook.

Colouring Conan's Thews

What a horrid title! Thankfully, it doesn't become a lasting series. Which is a shame, in a way, because Eddie Jones offers solid advice, going through the different types of paints and brushes. It's probably too technical for a complete beginner. It's the sort of column that a later iteration of White Dwarf would devote itself to, teaching schoolboys how to paint Games Workshop-produced miniatures with Games Workshop-produced paints, in Games Workshop-approved colour schemes.

But those days lie in the far, far future.

Treasure Chest

For a change, there's no joke character class this week, but what does appear is an oddity. It's a version of the Assassin sub-class. Now, the Assassin class appeared in the 1975 Blackmoor supplement, which was made up of odds-and-sods from Dave Arneson's first RPG campaign. John Rothwell submits a variant of this "for use as a player character in smaller adventures" - meaning, as I take it, dungeon-based adventures rather than the wider campaigns in which assassins have a role that goes back to the original Vol. 3 of D&D White Box.

It's hard at first to see what Rothwell is adding here, except a novel gender bar (his assassins must be male) and a prohibition on 'knowingly' using magic weapons, which makes no sense.

Rather than functioning as a thief two levels lower, Rothwell's assassin functions as a hobbit (ahem, halfling) thief for climbing (which hobbits have a penalty at) and hiding/moving silently (which hobbits excel at, but Rothwell adds +10% bonus on top of that). The backstab ability is expanded with a 10% chance of outright killing the victim, going up to 15% at 5th level.​

What we have here is the assassin class, ripped out of the urban context that makes it meaningful, and retooled as a dungeon killing machine that excels at sneaking up on monsters and shivving them.

I shouldn't mock. I too re-tooled the assassin for White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game (i.e. Original D&D) and analysed its iterations in Blackmoor, AD&D, and Swords & Wizardry - you can read all about it here.

The rest of the column is taking up with Andy Holt's Loremaster of Avallon, which is his house rules for 'fixing' D&D: this week, the combat system.

I started off (in issue #1) with a lot of goodwill towards Andy's imaginative endeavour to do D&D with 'proper' spell casting and fancy combat manoeuvres, but my patience runs out with this stuff. As with Fred Hemmings' description of a competitive dungeon level, I defy anyone to understand what's going on here. Andy clearly has a clever system involving playing cards, parrying, weapon lengths and speeds, all very technical. He just can't communicate it coherently.

The whole enterprise stands under the judgement of Heaven anyway, because next year The Chaosium will publish Runequest and the whole crowd that wants parrying and hit locations and weapon speeds will migrate to that system and build mighty redoubt, from which they will sneer at anyone who's still rolling versus Armour Class in silly old D&D.

Letters and Adverts

The Letters Page is growing. Lew Pulsipher writes in to correct his review of Lankhmar from issue #2, but I'm left none the wiser. Nigel Galletty writes in to supply Monstermarks for varies orders of Balrog - getting this in just ahead of the Tolkien Enterprises court order, well done! Don Turnbull, ever the Maths Teacher, will write back in a future issue, correcting his student's work. Patrick Martin complains the D&D miniatures rarely depict adventurers, with backpacks and lanterns, et al. The Editor jumps in to plug GW's pals in Nottingham: Asgard Miniatures do an accessory pack of a dozen wineskins/torches for 15p (not cheap, but doubtless they're not big sellers).

The most interesting letter takes WD and Fred Hemmings to task over the session report for the tournament dungeon in Competitive D&D in issue #1. The article made the dungeon sound like a senseless affair of whimsy and unsolvable riddles. Now we learn that Merlin's Garden was taken (without credit) from issue #2 of US fanzine The Dungeoneer, in which it was presented as a puzzle-based dungeon for 2nd level+ PCs to attempt in a leisurely pace, not for 1st level characters to race through in a 1-hour tournament.

Two things about this. One is that there is no apology, or even acknowledgement, from the Editor, which is surprisingly graceless, especially given the conciliatory tone of the letter and Ed's willingness to jump in to plug Asgard Miniatures elsewhere on the page. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: last issue, Ian Livingstone came across as rather thin-skinned about criticism. The other thing is the identity of the letter writer: Paul Jacquays.

Jaquays published The Dungeoneer while an American college student, between 1976-78. It was a fanzine that could be found in UK as well as US hobby shops. The Dungeoneer was distinctive for publishing actual D&D scenarios - as I noted earlier, TSR disdained to produce these until Judges Guild started making money from them. The Fabled Garden of Merlin by Merle Davenport was published in issue #2 (Sep/Oct 1976, so just over a year earlier).

The Dungeoneer #2: the impressive cover art is also by Jaquays

Jaquays would start work for Judges Guild in the following year, and go on to create the company's two most celebrated D&D scenarios: Caverns of Thracia (1979) and Dark Tower (1980). Jaquays was a pioneering dungeon-designer, preferring non-linear scenarios and maps that allowed multiple routes to the climactic encounter. 'Jaquaysing' is a verb in RPG and video game design, meaning to create dynamic multi-solution scenario pathways.

The hobby remembers her as Jennell Jaquays, who passed away in 2024, leaving a huge legacy in gaming design and trans activism. It's ironic - and somewhat saddening - that one of her first appearances in UK media consists in showing warmth and grace after being treated rather carelessly by White Dwarf.

The adverts are creeping up in number - doubtless another reason for Ian Livingstone's sunny editorial mood (not sunny enough to apologise to Jaquays, but hey-ho). Tally Ho Games are still promoting Starship Troopers and Waddingtons keep pushing the dismal 4000AD (give it up, guys). We do see the first advert for Ral Partha miniatures. This company, founded by teenaged sculptor Tom Meier from his Ohio basement, became one of the most well-regarded manufacturers of imaginative fantasy miniatures. 

J.A. Ball takes out an ad to promote 4-D (reviewed in this issue) as the solution to your Christmas present problems. Ogre, which was so hot last month, is still being advertised, and there's a promotion for Games Day III in December, which by my calculations means the annual Games Day happened twice in 1977.

There's the first appearance of a News column. There's a first mention of SF RPG Traveller from GDW, which we know will go on to become an absolute classic. Underworld Oracle is billed as a UK fanzine similar to The Dungeoneer (so GW were definitely aware of Jaquays' publication, hmm.....). If we peer into the future, we can see that Oracle will gather a loyal fanbase but only last 7 issues. In film news, Star Wars is anticipated after Christmas, and Richard Donner's Superman in the new year. What a time to be alive!

Back Cover

I've been a bit sniffy about Christopher Barker's art in the first two issues, but his illustration for the back cover is a striking psychedelic fairy. Great stuff!

If you look closely, there's still some problems with proportion (the lower legs), but this is much more adventurous and, OK I'll say it, sexy than his previous works. The ecstatic expression, the iridescent wings, the hair floating upwards, the hands - so much to enjoy looking at here.

In Retrospect

A triumphant third issue, that sees 1977 out with a bang. White Dwarf at this point exudes confidence and a sense of purpose, but not magnanimity, not yet.

There's a great watershed up ahead. Star Wars will profoundly change the position of SF and Fantasy in popular culture - crucially, it will convince investors that there's money in geekiness, and a great surge of sales will follow. White Dwarf at the end of 1978 will only have produced six more issues, but will look and feel different. As will the wider hobby: messy, maddening Original D&D is on the way out, Holmes Basic D&D is coming, then AD&D and Gygax's definitive Modules; but 'roleplaying game' will no longer mean just D&D, because the great competitors Traveller and Runequest are on the way.

I can't wait!