Un-dressed By Moonlight: White Dwarf #5 (1978) reviewed

Ah, the spring of 1978. Blizzards continued to pound the UK, but at least we had The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy on the radio to cheer us up. Plus, women were happening. Anna Ford appeared reading the news on TV, Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher surged ahead of Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan in the polls, Kate Bush burst into the pop charts with Wuthering Heights, and Polly Wilson illustrated the cover of White Dwarf. What a time it was!

The 'Undressed By Moonlight' issue: Polly Wilson's naked witch frolics with her hideous rat-dog familiars

The Cover: Breasts!

Or one of them, anyway. But it's not objectification, because the artist is a woman. Polly Wilson joined the White Dwarf roster in issue #2 - you can often spot her distinctive PW monogram.  On this month's cover we see her signature 'stippling' effect: creating the appearance of shade and texture through patterns of dots.

Wilson had previously illustrated the UK (4th) edition of Tunnels & Trolls (1977) - beautiful!

Nudity in European media often produced shocked reactions from Americans, but Britain's best-selling daily newspaper, The Sun, had been displaying bare breasts on 'Page 3' since 1970. Female nudity was a bit of a Seventies thing.

And, joking aside, Wilson's naked witch isn't objectification at all. There's joy in her expression and body language, reaching for the moon, snakes in her hair, while her critters disport themselves strategically about her thighs. I call her a 'witch' but perhaps she is a Minoan goddess, maybe Ariadne from Greek myth. 

It's a bold cover, but not a style that White Dwarf will repeat: there will be a lot more barbarian chicks in chainmail bikinis, or slave girls draped over muscular barbarians, throughout the '70s and '80s. However, we will see more of Polly Wilson's illustrations in the magazine's Fiend Factory column, often with ornately decorated names for the monsters. A lot of her illustrations ended up in the AD&D Fiend Folio (1981)

The Spinescale appeared in issue #2: look closely for the PW monogram, bottom right

Editorial: a world without lawyers ...

Can you imagine a world without lawyers ?

Ian Livingstone's editorial gets round to addressing something that has been brewing in the hobby industry for a few months. You see, back in 1977, TSR (the company behind D&D) had received a cease-and-desist order from Tolkien Enterprises over their board game The Battle Of The Five Armies (based on the climax of The Hobbit​).

Gary Gygax later recalled the legal proceedings as follows:

The action also demanded we remove balrog, dragon, dwarf, elf, ent, goblin, hobbit, orc, and warg from the D&D game. Although only balrog and warg were unique names we agreed to hobbit as well, kept the rest, of course. The boardgame was dumped, and thus the suit was settled out of court at that. -- quoted in Cheers, Gary (2011)

This legal action meant the withdrawal of Five Armies from publication, and explains the disappearance of 'hobbits' and their replacement with 'halflings' in the new Basic D&D rules (and subsequent AD&D).

The action was brought by Tolkien Enterprises, not the Tolkien Estate. J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1971 and his Estate still controls the sale of his books, but Tolkien had sold the film and merchandising rights to Universal Artists in 1969. By 1977 the rights were owned by filmmaker Saul Zaentz, producer of the Oscar-winning One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Zaentz's company had already licensed an animated film of The Hobbit and was about to release Ralph Bakshi's Lord Of The Rings animated film.

1978 was a pretty good year for fantasy fans

Zaentz had a reputation for greed and litigiousness - go ask the band Creedence Clearwater Revival, who lost millions while Zaentz was running their record label. With someone like that merchandising Tolkien, little hobby companies had a target on their backs. The law suit against TSR certainly had a chilling effect on other companies creating Tolkien-themed miniatures, boardgames, or RPG materials. 

Livingstone puts it like this: "Holders of copyright tolerate some of the goings-on, but now the SF/F games and figures manufacturers are beginning to be squeezed."

Livingstone's approach to this is decidedly odd. He affects a sort of wide-eyed hippie idealism, saying: "Let's hope that such problems can be resolved so that in future the wargame tables will welcome the presence of Darth Vader with a light sabre, rather than a law suit, in hand." 

This idealism won't last: Games Workshop later trademarked 'space marine' in the context of Warhammer 40K, and aggressively defended the trade mark in contexts outside the game. In fact, in 1978, Games Workshop was already in an exclusive licensing deal with TSR for distributing D&D in the UK and had been for several years. If you were a little indie games designer in 1978 and you put out a game closely imitating D&D, GW would have been the ones sending you threatening letters (or ratting you out to TSR)

Livingstone is trying to square a circle. Games Workshop is becoming a rather successful business, but it still delights in a view of itself as a cottage industry . By deploring the nastiness of license and copyright holders, Livingstone positions White Dwarf as the voice of the player community, rather than the business community. He's staying loyal to his roots, the guy who lived in the back of Steve Jackson's van for three months while he was trying to sell that first batch of D&D sets he brought back from GenCon, the guy who produced Owl & Weasel on his typewriter. He's Keeping It Real. 

Chivalry & Sorcery

While analysing White Dwarf #4 I wondered to what extent gamers in the mid-'70s were 'fantasy roleplaying' in the sense we use the term today; i.e. trying to inhabit a different persona from your own, someone who doesn't have your personality or values or knowledge but who instead takes for granted an imagined setting that real people find fantastical. I was intrigued by accounts of players and DMs casually blurring distinctions between 'in character' (IC) and 'out of character' (OOC) knowledge.

Lew Pulsipher is an interesting figure in this regard. An American (born in Detroit, 1951), he discovered fantasy gaming through postal Diplomacy and was introduced to D&D at a Detroit games convention in 1975. He came to London in 1976 to research for his Doctorate in military history and got to know Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson there. 

Pulsipher's work in White Dwarf sets out his philosophy for D&D, which is that it's a game to be taken seriously, where players ought to exercise skill by making shrewd choices; indeed, D&D is a game "where you try to avoid having to rely on the dice to save you from disaster." Choice, consistency, consequences: these seem to be the 'three Cs' of Pulsipher's view of RPGs.

Lew Pulsipher is, as they say at the start of boxing matches, in the blue corner.

In the red corner, we have Ed Simbalist & Wilf Backhaus's Chivalry & Sorcery (1977), published by Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU). Ed & Wilf developed C&S out of their own D&D campaign and brought the manuscript (at first titled Chevalier) to GenCon in 1977 to show it to Gary Gygax. It was picked up instead by FGU's Scott Bizar who eradicated the last traces of D&D from the rules (which, by the way, are the first to use the term Games Master or GM) and produced them in a bright red book with densely-typed columns.

C&S is not a 'Pulsipherian' game. C&S is a game in which you immerse yourself in the role of a 12th century French knight, or bishop, or peasant, or alchemist. The High Medieval setting dominates the game and it dominates your character. You act like a medieval person. You think like one. Pulsipher explains: "The C&S world is dominated by the ideas of feudalism and chivalry, a world of order." He notes that this extends to ideas that are "offensive to the 20th century mind," meaning the subordination of women and (I suppose) the suppression of religious minorities, and absolute deference to your superiors in a rigid class system.

With setting being taken so seriously, player autonomy has to be limited. Pulsipher is shocked by the rules for morale: "imagine your bemusement when you want to fight on but your character wants to flee - the character wins the argument!" This is the first time in any issue of White Dwarf so far that I've seen a reference to a distinction between what the player wants to do and what their character might do instead.

Pulsipher isn't impressed with this approach, which he thinks makes it "hard to identify with one's character," adding that "personal identification is more important than living out diced fantasies."

Language needs to be teased apart here. When Lew Pulsipher writes about 'identifying with your character' he seems to mean identifying with it as a proxy, as a vehicle by which 'you' (the 1978 version of you, the real you) gets to explore an imagined setting. He explicitly says that "people who participate in role-playing games ... are unlikely to want to play a character as anything but their 20th century selves." This identification is compromised if you can't make your character do what you want it to do. If you can't make those all-important skilful choices, then RPGs devolve into "diced fantasies" and Lew Pulsipher is candid about his contempt for dice games (after all, he's a Diplomacy fan). 

Simbalist & Backhaus are also keen on players 'identifying' with their characters, but they aspire to something different: a sense of immersion, a way of leaving behind 1978-you, the real-you, and becoming, temporarily, someone else, someone who lives in 12th century France and inhabits a medieval mindset: essentially, anything but their 20th century selves.

A similar sensibility, albeit applied to D&D, is expressed by Bill Seligman in this issue's Letters Page.

They weren't alone in this sensibility. Back in 1966, a group of Californians gathered for an afternoon pageant, wearing medieval costume, practising swordplay, and speaking and acting 'in character.' They founded the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), which, as it spread, organised itself into 'kingdoms' with feudal ranks, and set up the popular 'Renaissance Fayres' as a way to inhabit an idealised, courtly, and chivalric way of life. The SCA was named by the fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley and its founder was the author Poul Anderson whose 'portal fantasies' (especially Three Hearts & Three Lions) had such an influence on D&D. C&S designer Wilf Backhaus was a 'baron' in the SCA.

Paol Anderson (a.k.a. Sir Bela of Eastmarch, third from left) hosts a tournament for the SCA in 1968

Of course, none of this aligns with Pulsipher's approach to RPGs, so his review of C&S might best be termed 'cautious.' He respects the mechanics for C&S, especially the magic system, and is impressed by the clarity of the rule book. He suspects D&D players will plunder the game for inspirations and house rules. 

But he doesn't think it will catch on: "most D&Ders will stick with their game" because "D&D's superior flexibility and diversity will appeal more than C&S's realism." There's just no beating D&D's "versatility, variety, and simplicity."

In a way, Lew Pulsipher turned out to be right. C&S was greatly admired: it went on to win the H.G. Wells award for All Time Best Ancient Medieval Rules at Origins '79. But most RPGers ignored it, or were outright intimidated by it. James Maliszewski sums the feeling up in his Grognardia retrospective: 

Many of the older guys I knew, the ones who initiated me into this weird hobby, were really down on C&S, seeing it as unnecessarily complex and too concerned over "realism." So, it was generally best not to admit to having an interest in such a game in their presence -- and I didn't.
-- James Maliszewski (2012)

But in another sense, Lew Pulsipher was wrong. What distinguished C&S wasn't, at the end of the day, its historical realism, but its philosophy of roleplaying, its focus on immersion and on belonging within an intensely realised fantasy setting. Maybe players didn't turn to C&S in huge numbers, but they turned to Runequest's Glorantha and (in 1985) to Pendragon. They turned to the World of Greyhawk, Mystara, and the Forgotten Realms. 

In this (I think) more important sense, C&S was the future of roleplaying.

Der Kriegspielers Fantastiques

John Norris reviews 25mm fantasy miniatures from Heritage Models, a US company. This line, the Kriegspielers Fantastiques ('the fantasy wargamers' in a horrific mangling of German and French) are Tolkien characters: Gandalf, the Fellowship, Haradrim and Gondorians, sundry trolls.

Wait, I hear you cry, Tolkien miniatures? But haven't they been lawyered by Saul Zaentz the same way TSR was?

I don't know the full story, but the miniatures were developed by Bruce 'Duke' Seifried. While in the UK on business, 'Duke' visited Prof. Tolkien and pitched the idea of pewter miniatures. Tolkien was intrigued and the two collaborated on sketches. Back in the States, 'Duke' started casting the figures; Tolkien died before he completed the range, but perhaps his collaboration meant that the project fell under the auspices of the Tolkien Estate, rather than Zaentz's Tolkien Enterprises.

Duke Seifried has some other claims to fame: he pioneered selling miniatures in blister packs and came up with the term 'adventure gaming' to distinguish games like D&D from wargaming, in the years before 'role-playing game' caught on. In the '80s, Duke Seifried went to work for TSR and developed their miniatures line, but was sacked in the First Great TSR Lay-Off of '83, perhaps because of his loyalty to embattled TSR President Gary Gygax.

'Duke' Seifried (1935-2018)

I cannot judge the quality of the miniatures from the B&W photographs, but Norris is impressed with most of them, especially the orcs and trolls, and he points out that "no manufacturer, in my opinion, makes really good elves, all of them being too much like humans" but says the Kriegspieler Fantastiques are "probably the best figures for standard elves available."

The prices are steep: "an average of about 30p for a 25mm figure." For comparison, Asgard Miniatures (reviewed in issue #2) was selling dwarves, wizards, and 'fighting bishops' for 12p; 30p bought you a big ogre or troll; in the same issue, Games Workshop was selling orcs and 'Gondor spearmen' for 10p. That was September 1977 and inflation was running at 15.8%, so prices have surely gone up. But not by that much!

Of course, these figures are US imports, with the prestigious Tolkien imprimatur. The US release of Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord Of The Rings at the end of this year (or the summer of '79 in the UK) would surely push up the enthusiasm for 'adventure gaming' in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Monsters Mild & Malign

Don Turnbull edits this column, which will be re-titled next issue as the more-familiar (and less-annoying) Fiend Factory.

The double-page showcases Polly Wilson's illustrations

I concluded after reviewing last issue that Games Workshop had form in failing to credit creatives. Don Turnbull belabours the point that these monsters are not his own creations and he credits them to Paul Jaquays (editor of The Dungeoneer) and Lee Gold (editor of Alarums & Excursions); Jaquays has already written to White Dwarf #3 to complain about lack of accreditation, so maybe some cogs have been turning. Next issue there will be an 'errata' for issues #4 and #5 giving specific credit to the creator of each monster, not just the editor of the fanzine or APA that printed them.

Turnbull continues to use a developed form of the Greyhawk format for D&D monsters, dropping mechanical details like Hit Dice and damage into a text description. Next issue, Fiend Factory will move to the new Holmes Basic D&D (and future AD&D Monster Manual) format of providing a standardised stat block, followed by a paragraph of description.

The monsters themselves are a merry collection that fit into the funhouse/variety dungeons that are so popular at this time. The beholder-variants from The Dungeoneer are an idea that will be developed by other designers. The gremlin, with its 'bad luck' passive defence, is also a concept that designers will return to. The bogy is a nice minor demon concept and the Cyborg is a minor golem; imps also get a treatment (prefiguring their appearance in the Monster Manual and later development into mephits in the Fiend Folio). There are novelty monsters, like the three-headed threep that functions as a fighter, cleric, and magic-user, and the gold-eater, which is a floating dismembered hand that devours gold through its palms (1d8 x 10gp per round): a luxurious version of the rust monster.

Turnbull's ongoing commentary, discussing how these monsters might be deployed and the impact they might have on players, is very welcome; it's a shame it will be dropped in future Fiend Factories. The Monstermark is welcome also: it alerts you to monsters that might be tougher than a cursory glance at their Hit Dice suggests. Yes, I'm actually pleased to see Turnbull persevering with the Monstermark.

D&D Campaigns

More Lew Pulsipher, this time looking at 'Rules Recommendations' for D&D. The context for this is the strange twilight zone between Original D&D and AD&D (due to arrive in the summer). When Pulsipher mentions "the new rules" he means Eric Holmes's Basic D&D rules, which succeed in collating and clarifying much (but not all) of the material previously scattered across half a dozen rulebooks and many more newsletter and fanzine articles. This means there's a lot of work for someone like Pulsipher to do in interpreting how D&D is supposed to work. 

For comparison, two spells from D&D Book 1: Men & Magic (1974, left) and the same spells from Holmes Basic D&D (1977, centre and right)

You can see from the excerpts above how cryptic Original D&D was and how much Holmes clarifies how a spell works, such as giving the occasions for throwing off the effect of Charm Person, the duration of Sleep, and the clarification that Sleep allows no saving throw.

Lew settles more ambiguities with his customary logic. You have to know the language of a charmed monster to give it commands; if someone else tells you the commands, you can at best give simple instructions and not during combat. Sleeping characters can be shaken awake in 2 melee rounds: short enough to give PCs a chance to awake their comrades when fighting spell-using enemies, but long enough to allow "the MU to slit sleepers' throats" during a battle.

Lew acknowledges that some DMs rule that hobbits (they aren't 'halflings' yet) and dwarves are also immune to Sleep spells. I'm struck by his suggestion that handling a magic item give an extra saving throw vs Charm Person, as a way of discouraging players from using charmed monsters to investigate possibly-cursed treasures found in dungeons. There's a little snapshot there of the mid-'70s D&D style, where magical treasures are a lottery you can't afford to pass up (because they are often insanely powerful, but not uncommonly deadly or debilitating). 

As usual, Lew's focus is on promoting player skill: magic shouldn't be so powerful it does all the work for you, but used wisely it should give a significant advantage. In other words, it's a resource in the wargame that is D&D, not an attempt to immerse you in a mystical or occult sensibility (as, perhaps, in Chivalry & Sorcery).

For me, the shock comes when Lew Pulsipher discusses how many characters a player should have. "According to the rules," he says, "each D&D player receives one character plus a number of followers." He acknowledges that "a few campaigns are played without followers, one character per player" but insists that "the majority of D&D campaigns ... permit a large number of characters ... for each player."

I had no idea about this, when I started playing D&D. Yes, my school buddy Simon let me create my 1st level Elf and gave me a bunch of followers, but he controlled the followers. When I inducted other friends into the game, I took it for granted that they would play single characters; if NPC 'help' was needed to make up the numbers, then as DM I controlled those characters and rolled dice for them. 

Pulsipher is describing a different settlement, where each player controls a "'family' of characters," perhaps with one nominated as their 'prime' PC who directs the others, but if the 'prime' PC dies they just take over running one of the others as their 'prime.'

He gives a lot of thought to the various ways in which players try to 'game' this arrangement: getting characters with poor scores killed off, retiring characters early to give themselves a chance to roll replacements that qualify for coveted subclasses, hoarding magic items with a "favoured character," even bringing along high-level 'guardian angels' to chaperone a low-level entourage so they can all take on tough challenges and rocket through the levels.

It explains Pulsipher's insistence that XP awards for monsters killed be divided by character and dungeon level, to stop high-level characters profiting from chaperoning the new ones and to discourage everyone from malingering in the 'easy' dungeon levels.

It also explains his hostility to the four-way alignment system. If a player is running a 'family' of characters, they are all broadly characterised as 'Lawfuls' or 'Chaotics' - this provides the rules of engagement in the dungeon (i.e. whether you can kill or torture prisoners or steal from other PCs). Four-way alignment gives every character a nuanced ethical personality and Pulsipher has argued in issue #3 that this will "reduce alignment differentiation to nil" as everyone will "act about the same, regardless of alignment."

What I think he meant by that was that a 'family' of characters where some are Lawful Good and other Chaotic Good or Lawful Evil will all just do whatever the 'prime' character wants them to do, regardless of their professed alignment - and that you no longer have a cadre of adventurers acting in a unified way, according to shared rules of engagement, so 'anything goes.'

To be fair, Pulsipher is already shifting ground. The "revised rules" (i.e. Holmes) incorporate Gary Gygax's four-way alignment, and Lew is a big believer in playing by the Rules As Written, so he distinguishes here between good and evil characters as well as lawful and chaotic ones. Nonetheless, this innovation has yet to have consequences for many people's playing styles.

The alignment chart from the Basic D&D rules (Eric Holmes, 1977)

The 'family' style of play has big implications. One is that players go into dungeons 'mob-handed.' A group of 3 or 4 players might, between them, control an expedition of a dozen to twenty characters. A lot of those characters will die horribly in the dungeon threshing machine, but the survivors will emerge enriched and empowered, then everyone dices up replacements for the dead guys.

This explains the lethality - and the arbitrary nature of the lethality - of the dungeons we have seen in previous White Dwarf issues. It explains why Pulsipher argues for the 'skill campaign': you can play D&D very carelessly, laughing as you hurl your characters into death traps, because sheer weight of numbers means some of your characters will emerge with gold and treasure and go up levels. Pulsipher prefers a game where, if the players are thoughtful and husband resources wisely, everyone will "get through with no casualties" - a quote from issue #4 where he criticises DMs who are careless with the treasures they place in the dungeon because they assume players will be careless with the lives of their PCs.

Roleplaying means something very different in this context, as does the "identification" with characters that Pulsipher mentions in his review of Chivalry & Sorcery. You 'identify' with a character in the sense that it's your favourite, you want it to go up levels and get more powerful. But it could die at any time and you would be disappointed, but you have plenty of others; they're just less interesting (because, probably, they're less powerful).

When you play a single character, especially one with lots of idiosyncratic details, you identify much more intensely. This is the direction C&S was taking, but nothing Lew Pulsipher has said so far suggests he (or many other D&D players) took much interest in this.

One-player-one-character became normative. I think the published Modules with their rosters of pre-generated PCs might have contributed to this. It's the default assumption when Gary Gygax, in the AD&D DM's Guide, writes about player characters. When I started as a DM in 1979, I took it for granted each player would focus on a single PC.

Nevertheless, the 'mob' of PCs eventually made a return to RPGs. Ars Magica (1987) proposed three PCs per player: a wizard, a powerful consort, and a humble soldier-guard. Nonetheless, you don't play all three at the same time. On an adventure, one person would play as their wizard, the others would be consorts or soldiers, and these roles would rotate from session to session. Blades In The Dark (2017) assumes each player has several characters who belong to the same criminal gang, but you play as different ones for different missions; Band Of Blades (2019) invites you to alternative between playing the leaders of a mercenary legion and the particular officers and soldiers who go out on missions.

Open Box

Two books are reviewed this issue which are unusual 'system agnostic' compendiums of monsters, clearly with D&D in mind, that beat the AD&D Monster Manual to the presses. Their existence (along with Don Turnbull's column in White Dwarf) speaks to the hunger for fresh monsters in every '70s D&D campaign - part of the "variety" Lew Pulsipher thought so essential to dungeons of the era. I can recall spending hours scouring encyclopaedias and books on Norse and Greek mythology, looking for inspirations for D&D monsters. It was as much a Seventies thing as female nudity, perhaps more so.

Lew Pulsipher reviews The Book of Monsters, as well as its companion guides to Demons and Sorcery, but concludes they are "not worth it" for those cost in the UK. Sorcery offers spell misfire tables and actual incantations for players to read out when casting spells (reminding me of Andy Holt's house rules in White Dwarf #2), but Lew astutely points out that the guide misses a trick by not making higher level spells more difficult to speak out loud.

These books were produced by a games store in Maryland called The Little Soldier. They became an imprint of Phoenix Games, who created the original versions of RPGs like Bushido and Aftermath.

Don Turnbull brings his Big Maths Brain to evaluating All The World's Monsters from Chaosium. Feeling that there are too few low-level monsters, he works out a Monstermark for every single one and -...  No, ha-ha, no he doesn't go that far. But he tabulates Armour Class and Hit Dice and demonstrates the collection skews towards AC2 monsters with 9+ HD. Classic Don! 

The general consensus is that these collections are too broad and indiscriminate; the perceived need is for fewer monsters described in better detail - a conclusion that will surprise those of you reading Don Turnbull's monster column, which so far offers lots of monsters in barely any detail at all, but that will change starting next issue. Don also argues selecting innovative or unusual monsters over dungeon-fodder.

Games company FGU have already featured this issue as the creators of Chivalry & Sorcery. War Of The Ring is their Lord of the Rings themed board game and it comes pre-savaged by Lew Pulsipher, who prefaced his C&S review by calling it a "travesty of a Diplomacy variant and insult to Tolkien." It was singled out by Ian Livingstone in his editorial as likely to suffer legal action from Tolkien Enterprises - and so it came to pass, the game was withdrawn and is now a rarity.

Reviewer Mike Westhead can't bring the hate like Lew Pulsipher can. He recognises it is a Diplomacy variant, but he likes the high quality board, the secret movement of hobbit pieces, and the multiple victory conditions: he calls it "quite intense and great fun" - but only awards it 5/10 so it can't have been that much fun.

Games Day III

Ian Livingstone reports from Games Day III, from 17 December 1977. Over a thousand delegates attended and Livingstone praises the "three brave girls" on the information stand who had to deal with the "hundreds of steaming, chaotic fantasy gamers" queuing outside. I wonder who those 'girls' were?

Games Day was a big success for Games Workshop. The first two had drawn hundreds, but this seems to have attracted at least twice the previous turnout. For comparison purposes, if 1500 gamers attended Games Day III, over in the USA in 1978, GenCon attracted just over 2000, and Origins Game Fair attracted maybe twice that. This tells you a lot about the disproportionate enthusiasm (and market share) of the UK hobby scene.

An indication of the surprisingly high turnout was the oversubscribed D&D tournament, run by Fred Hemmings (of course, he detailed his experience with Competitive D&D in previous issues of White Dwarf) and Hartley Patterson (of Midgard fame). More than 200 people wanted to take part, so the organisers set a D&D quiz with the highest scorers being allowed into the tournament.

Let's test ourselves with some D&D general knowledge from 1977:

Question	A	B	C	D	E
To what level can a Dwarvish bard progress?	2	4	6	8	10
What are the Hit Dice of a Hippogriff?	2+1	2+2	3	3+1	4
The easiest way to destroy Yellow Mold is:	magic	water	fire	brute force	other (specify)
What damage does an Ochre Jelly do?	1-8	1-10	1-12	2-12	2-16
A Minotaur has how many attacks?	1	2	3	4	5
Which need minimum scores to create a Ranger?	intelligence	wisdom	constitution	dexterity	charisma
A Silver Dragon breathes:	acid	fear	cold	fire	lightning
XP needed by an Illusionist to reach 2nd level?	1000	1500	2000	2500	3000
Which is NOT a 6th level Magic User spell?	part water	magic jar	geas	reincarnation	move earth
How many swords with a basic +3 do the rules list?	2	3	4	5	6

Obviously, there's some deeply nerdy recall being tested here, but clearly a LOT of contestants knew a LOT of these answers. It speaks to the obsessive nature of the hobby and its focus on, what was at the time, a pretty narrow (although widely scattered) range of rules materials that the fan could (and did) learn by heart.

Scroll down for (possible) answers.

Food and Water on the Starship Warden

Richard Edwards offers rules for foraging in the SF survivalist world of Metamorphosis Alpha. 

There's a rather witty Polly Wilson illustration too

Metamorphosis Alpha was reviewed way back in issue #1 as a SF RPG in which you play the survivors and mutants on a giant space ark, exploring your environment and learning its lost secrets. The game was to be replaced later this very year by Gamma World, so it's a delight to find someone playing it and supporting it with house rules.

And they are good house rules too! There's a Guide To Botany listing 20 different trees, herbs, and fungi to be found on the overgrown starship. Each gets a vivid description and some have unusual effects (poisonous, addictive, healing). There's a theme running through them (poisonous fungi are blue, edible ones are yellow) so the players can proceed by trial and error then generalise their conclusions - Lew Pulsipher would be proud.

There are simple rules for dehydration, based on time passing without water and armour worn, that lend themselves to D&D campaigns if PCs are trapped underground for long periods.

An article like this makes me feel sad that Metamorphosis Alpha didn't find a larger fanbase. It's also the first article devoted to house rules for a RPG that isn't D&D and, in terms of adding to a game rather than trying to fix it, it's the first proper article on house rules to appear in White Dwarf.

Kalgar

A serialised comic story begins. Kalgar is the tale of "a new Sword & Sorcery hero" that, alas, will only run for 4 issues. It looks GREAT. It was written and illustrated by David Lloyd and, if his art seems familiar, it's perhaps because you read V For Vendetta in the pages of Warrior starting in 1982. 

Kalgar is a warrior who fought in a civil war that has ravaged the land of Araquetta for 78 years. When the peace treaty is signed, Kalgar, a bit like Richard III, has no delight to pass away the time in a weak piping time of peace. So he takes off, refusing to hand over his weapons, and wanders like a morose ghost, until he is approached by a young woman who needs help that only a soldier can provide.

Pretty compelling prompt for a fantasy adventure; a bit like the trope of the cop who is told to turn in his badge but instead strikes out as a vigilante. I'm hooked!

Treasure Chest

Joseph Nicholas offers three magic treasures. The Rainbow Sword is, I see, inspired by Robert Plant's Celtic adventure episode in Led Zeppelin's movie The Song Remains the Same.

The Song Remains The Same (1976) mixed Led Zeppelin live footage with fantasy sequences like this. Some people loved it. Other people reacted by forming punk bands.

As a magic item, it's a headache, because it has indefinite mass charm powers, and might charm the wielder and the other PCs too. A decent idea for a plot device, but a bit heavy handed.

The Water of Beguilement and the Water of Enchantment are 'lottery items, like the infamous Deck Of Many Things, but without the cool Tarot symbolism. Lew Pulsipher has already inveighed against the presence of items like this in a campaign and I regard his argument as unanswerable.

I really liked Brian Asbury's Barbarian character class last issue, and Brian is back with the Asbury System, another attempt to 'fix' D&D by improving the XP system.

I started reading this with a yawn and a groan, but actually, it's pretty good. The basic idea is for players to keep track of the amount of damage they deal to monsters during play. Damage is converted to XP by being multiplied by a value derived from the monster's HD and the PC's level.

It works like this. If you are a 1st level Cleric and you bash a 2HD zombie for a total of 5 damage, you will earn (5dmg x 7 for a level 2 monster) 35XP. If your friend the 3rd level Paladin steps into to finish the thing off, dealing 5 damage too, he only earns (5dmg x 5 for a level 2 monster) 25XP.

Ah, you say, but what about Ghouls? They have 2HD but they are much worse than zombies because they have paralysing touch. Asbury suggests adding to the monster's effective level for each nasty power they have, with very nasty powers adding 2, 3, or even 4 levels. So the Ghoul would be level 4 (+1 for paralysing touch and +1 for multiple attacks), netting them both 55XP (1st and 3rd level characters get the same x11 multiplier for level 3 monsters).

Asbury points out some benefits of this system. For example, it rewards PCs for fights they didn't win, either because the monster escaped (like a Vampire going gaseous) or the party retreated.

It also rewards PCs proportionately based on their damage output. This is good news for Fighters, but puny Thieves will only score big if they backstab something. But I suppose Thieves' XP requirements are far lower than Fighters. 

What about Magic-Users? Sure, a good Sleep spell could knock out a whole bunch of Goblins and the caster gets the XP as if he had personally killed every one of them in battle - but lots of Magic-Users don't know Sleep and, anyway, if we follow Lew Pulsipher's advice, we want to reward casters for taking utility spells like Detect Magic and using it wisely. Brian Asbury will return to this topic next issue.

I come away from this impressed by the elegance of Asbury's system, but also by the willingness of '70s gamers to engage in book-keeping chores. The people I play D&D with today (OK, mostly youngsters, but there are some adults in this category) would shrink from logging every hit point of damage they dealt out and the monster they dealt it to. Maybe D&D Beyond has accustomed everyone to letting computers do the donkey work, or maybe standards of arithmetic and note-taking have plummeted since I Were A Lad, but I can't share Brian Asbury's sanguine confidence that "the amount of work the DM has to do ... is greatly reduced, since the players calculate their own points scored."

Letters & Adverts

There's a long letter from Bill Seligman in the USA, taking issue with Lew Pulsipher's advice to let players make their own dice rolls. Seligman has a quirky way of dramatising his points, but what he is saying is that rolling dice breaks the deep immersion we want from D&D and encourages players to cheat.

I'm not sure what Lew Pulsipher would say about cheating, but we've already discovered that Lew cares not a jot for deep immersion or anything like that. He wants the players to know their dice scores and combat matrices, so they can make those skilful choices that he considers D&D to be Really All About. Anything else is just "living out diced fantasies."

We've got the great divide here, between players (like Lew) who think of D&D as a wargame that is best when played with skill and agency, and those (like Bill) who see D&D as an immersive narrative, and worry that introducing explicit gaming elements breaks the imaginative spell and elicits pathological tendencies from players. 

Joseph Nicholas (the Led Zep fan from Open Box) writes in to praise the magazine generally.  The Editor pops up with some errata. Apparently, in the last issue, Don Turnbull's workings-out for his Balrog Monstermark had a printing mistake! I suspect anyone who remembers their own Maths teacher will struggle to suppress a smile at the thought of Don spotting the mistake and insisting that White Dwarf print the correct working out.

The News column announces Judges Guild releasing their Wilderlands of High Fantasy campaign setting, SPI's (fully licensed) Middle Earth board games, and (drum roll) the pending UK release of the AD&D Monster Manual and Players Handbook.

There's an advert for the 1978 Time-Lord Trophy. Apparently, a fan base has formed around the abstract board game 4th Dimension, published independently by J.A. Ball and reviewed in White Dwarf #3. Here they are, proposing a 'world championship' at Southampton University. They've got a bi-monthly news sheet and strategy booklets and promote it as "the TIME-WARPING challenge to Chess." I'm starting to see why TSR thought acquiring this game was a good idea. I wish I could track down a copy!

Back Cover

Fangorn is back! The art is by Chris 'Fangorn' Baker, who has given us two previous back covers as well as the front cover for White Dwarf #2.

For my money, this is his best yet. It's the alien warlord from the back cover of issue #1, complete with energy-crackle glaive, but minus the flying horse. He's got the psychedelic wings of the hot fairy from issue #3. It's a pose, but it's full of languid menace, the sense of inscrutable power at rest. Plus, he's getting better at anatomy: the proportions are much more realistic (the foreshortened legs could be a matter of perspective). This guy should be the BBEG in a space-fantasy campaign. More of this sort of thing!

In Retrospect

This is the strongest issue yet. The art and presentation look increasingly professional. Features that, frankly, outstayed their welcome (Competitive D&D, the Loremaster of Avallon, probably the Monstermark though I liked it) have disappeared. There's a sense of White Dwarf engaging with changes in the hobby going on right now (i.e. in early 1978).

Next issue will see the inauguration of Fiend Factory, which will give the readership a chance to contribute to the development of D&D in important ways, and a big review of Traveller, which is going to challenge the domination of the fantasy genre in the UK RPG scene. Games Workshop is changing too: the famous Hammersmith shop is about to open its doors.

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Quiz Answers

Or at least, I think these are the answers:

D, D, C, A, A, A-C, C, E, B, A

Bards were introduced in Strategic Review #6; Hippogriffs, Ochre Jelly, & Yellow Mold in D&D Book 2: Monsters & Treasure when all monsters did 1d8 damage; Rangers appeared in Strategic Review #2; Silver Dragons and Minotaurs featured in the Greyhawk supplement; Illusionists appeared in Strategic Review #4; spells appear in D&D Book 1: Men & Magic and geas is 5th level; Greyhawk lists a +3 sword and a +3 sword of cold,