Now that our look at White Dwarf has reached the issues where it is firmly established, I caught up with Lew Pulsipher, game designer and EN World columnist, who was one of the first writers for the nascent magazine.
Andrew Peregrine (AP): So I suppose the first question should be, how did you start writing for White Dwarf? Did you know the team already or was it your reputation as a games designer that got them to approach you?
Lew Pulsipher (LP): I lived in London from fall 76 for three years. My first game design other than Diplomacy variants was published during that time or later. So at that time I don’t think I had a reputation as a game designer! I don’t recall how I first got in touch with the Games Workshop guys. I had written some articles for Games and Puzzles magazine, and the editor, Albie Fiore, was probably involved in getting us in touch. It was natural for me to contribute to their White Dwarf magazine when they started it. Keep in mind this was more than 45 years ago, so I often don’t remember details.
AP: Given that we didn’t have the internet in the ancient days of 1977, how did you deliver your work to the magazine? Did you have to post floppy discs or even go into the office and type directly into the system?
LP: More ancient than you might think: I didn’t own a PC until 1983, heck, the IBM PC wasn’t released until 1981. And even then, there was no such thing as a “word processor” program, and some computers had only cassette tapes to use for storage. I was writing on a cheap little typewriter (with carbon copies) and I delivered the articles in person!
AP: Were you freelance or part of a core team? Did you get commissioned to write particular things, or did you simply submit articles and hope they were what they were after?
LP: I was a freelancer, there was no core team. They may have occasionally asked me to write about a particular topic; in general I wrote what I thought people would want to read and submitted that. Same as I now for EN World’s “Worlds of Design.” We did arrange for me to write a D&D supplement booklet (this is before AD&D), but Games Workshop then lost the license to Don Turnbull and company, so that supplement never saw the light of day. After Games Workshop got the opportunity to do the Fiend Folio for TSR, I walked into the office one day and they asked me if they could use some of the monsters I’d submitted for White Dwarf in the Fiend Folio. So that’s how I got into the list of contributors. The most notable of those monsters was the “elemental princes of evil,” though I saw recently that I’m not even mentioned anymore in the Wikipedia article about Archomentals, as they’re now called.
AP: What was the White Dwarf office like? Were there wild gaming parties or desperate journalist panicking over deadlines? Did the team manage to socialise or even play games together at all?
LP: The shop was downstairs and the administrative work and magazine was done upstairs Steve Jackson was an indefatigable worker, Ian Livingston was the front man and wheel-and-deal business person. I don’t recall staying for long periods even though it was a fair trip by subway from where I lived. So no wild gaming parties that I took part in, nor any panicking. I don’t recall ever meeting any of the other contributors to the magazine, at least not at the offices.
AP: Back to a little more about you, what were the games that got you into the hobby, and how did you first come across these “new-fangled” role playing games?
LP: I’ve always been a game player. The first wargame that caught my fancy was Conflict, followed by American Heritage Broadsides, then Risk. When I was about 12 I got into Avalon Hill wargames like Stalingrad and Afrika Korp. On my 18th birthday I became a fan of the game Diplomacy, ultimately running my own fanzines and designing a very large number of variations of the game, some of them amounting to mostly new games. Sometime before I was 25 word-of-mouth told me about another gamer living in my small village. He was into the new game Dungeons & Dragons. As you know, there are no overt chance elements in Diplomacy, and my motto was “I hate dice games.” So I didn’t take to D&D immediately. I do love science fiction and fantasy, designing my own wargames of that type, and at a summer game convention I was staying with some guys who played D&D. So I was exposed to the game and took to it immediately as we played a session more or less overnight in a pickup camper in a parking lot at the convention site in Detroit. That was 1975.
AP: Most of your articles for White Dwarf were about how to play and run the game rather than specifically creating dungeons and monsters. Did you create a lot of your own dungeons at home, or were you not usually the DM?
LP: I was usually the GM (DM is too limited a term) though I tried to get other people to GM as well. We all made up our own stuff, because there wasn’t much commercial stuff available, far different from nowadays. And I was already used to making up my own stuff because I made up so very many Diplomacy variants in the 70s. But in fact there was no alternative to doing it yourself.
AP: Looking at these old adventures it feels to me like they were played in a very different way compared to today. I get the impression each adventure was effectively a challenge to see if the party would survive, rather than an adventure story. Is that a fair assessment? Was there much role-playing in terms of character and story arc in your games or was it more about “beating the dungeon”.
LP: The early players were wargamers. Often wargamers from that time were also science fiction and fantasy fans, but to us the game was a game not a storytelling machine, and the main objective was to survive. Detailed back stories? Hell no! We rolled up a character and got down to playing the game and the story of the character came from the events of the game. (I suppose also the assumption was that people who became novice adventurers were usually somewhat desperate nobodies.) Of course in that situation the players write the story (in a chaotic way of course). The GM set up a situation that seemed interesting and the players ran with it. When I ran the same adventure several times with different groups it would always go very differently each time. With skill checks non-existent before second edition, which was otherwise a lot like first edition cleaned up, there was considerable role-playing, but role-playing in service of winning (surviving) the game, of completing the mission, not role-playing for the sake of role-playing. People played vicariously, they didn’t think of themselves as actors in a role, they thought of their character as themselves. But I never heard anyone talk about “beating the dungeon.” When you “beat the game” you’re playing a puzzle, not a game. As in most single player games, especially video.
AP: So do you think the way you play RPGs has changed over the years? Are you a fan of character driven story games or do you still prefer the “old school” dungeon delve?
LP: I am not into story games. If I want a really good story I’ll read a science fiction or fantasy novel of my choice. Professional authors are going to be better at storytelling than your typical GM. Plus I want to feel that I can control my fate in a game, when you participate in the story your fate is controlled by the storyteller. I don’t like being led around by the nose. I am probably less dogmatic about “my way” of playing D&D that I used to be. Nothing wrong with character driven stories as long as the character is controlled by a player and not the GM. But professional quality stories and games are opposites, because the author of a professional quality story must control virtually everything that happens, and that’s the opposite of how a game works. It has a lot more in common with how a puzzle works. I despise puzzles.
AP: In the early days of White Dwarf the most popular games along with Dungeons and Dragons were Runequest, Chivalry and Sorcery and Traveller. Were you a fan of those too, and what games (wargame or RPG) do you prefer to play these days?
LP: I was sufficiently satisfied with and occupied by D&D that I never played any of those games, though I read the rules. (I did play Gamma World a bit.) If you wanted to find people to play an RPG, not an easy task back then, it helped a lot to be playing the by far most well-known and popular RPG. And I have to say I still prefer to play Advanced D&D (first edition D&D), though I have played third and fourth edition D&D extensively. My favourite game these days (other than a 2014 video game called Empire Deluxe Enhanced Edition) is “the game of designing games”. After that it’s Advanced D&D, and then my own design Britannia.
AP: Your series of articles “An Introduction to Dungeons and Dragons” seemed to be the most popular with readers. What is the work you are most proud of, and are there any articles you’d like to rewrite with the benefit of hindsight?
LP: Yes, those several part intro articles (I think there was more than one) got a lot of traction. Other than that the ones I most remember are the Barroom Brawl for D&D and the use of Moria as an introductory adventure for people new to D&D. It may have happened, but I can’t remember regretting an article in the sense of wanting to rewrite it. Some are certainly worth expanding or revising. But I may have been a better writer around age 30 than I am at age 74.
AP: What was your favourite article by someone else from those early days? Is there something you wish you’d been the one to write and would you have written it differently? If you have a favourite past issue of the magazine, which one would it be?
LP: I have read articles and thought something like “why didn’t I think of that?” or “that was really well done.” But that’s too long ago to remember any specifically. I don’t have a favourite issue, again that’s a long time ago. I’ve had a plan for some years to offer books of reprints of my magazine articles from back in the 70s and 80s. But that’s been derailed partly because I’m trying to write a book about RPG design, which incorporates some of those articles (revised of course).
Andrew Peregrine (AP): So I suppose the first question should be, how did you start writing for White Dwarf? Did you know the team already or was it your reputation as a games designer that got them to approach you?
Lew Pulsipher (LP): I lived in London from fall 76 for three years. My first game design other than Diplomacy variants was published during that time or later. So at that time I don’t think I had a reputation as a game designer! I don’t recall how I first got in touch with the Games Workshop guys. I had written some articles for Games and Puzzles magazine, and the editor, Albie Fiore, was probably involved in getting us in touch. It was natural for me to contribute to their White Dwarf magazine when they started it. Keep in mind this was more than 45 years ago, so I often don’t remember details.
AP: Given that we didn’t have the internet in the ancient days of 1977, how did you deliver your work to the magazine? Did you have to post floppy discs or even go into the office and type directly into the system?
LP: More ancient than you might think: I didn’t own a PC until 1983, heck, the IBM PC wasn’t released until 1981. And even then, there was no such thing as a “word processor” program, and some computers had only cassette tapes to use for storage. I was writing on a cheap little typewriter (with carbon copies) and I delivered the articles in person!
AP: Were you freelance or part of a core team? Did you get commissioned to write particular things, or did you simply submit articles and hope they were what they were after?
LP: I was a freelancer, there was no core team. They may have occasionally asked me to write about a particular topic; in general I wrote what I thought people would want to read and submitted that. Same as I now for EN World’s “Worlds of Design.” We did arrange for me to write a D&D supplement booklet (this is before AD&D), but Games Workshop then lost the license to Don Turnbull and company, so that supplement never saw the light of day. After Games Workshop got the opportunity to do the Fiend Folio for TSR, I walked into the office one day and they asked me if they could use some of the monsters I’d submitted for White Dwarf in the Fiend Folio. So that’s how I got into the list of contributors. The most notable of those monsters was the “elemental princes of evil,” though I saw recently that I’m not even mentioned anymore in the Wikipedia article about Archomentals, as they’re now called.
AP: What was the White Dwarf office like? Were there wild gaming parties or desperate journalist panicking over deadlines? Did the team manage to socialise or even play games together at all?
LP: The shop was downstairs and the administrative work and magazine was done upstairs Steve Jackson was an indefatigable worker, Ian Livingston was the front man and wheel-and-deal business person. I don’t recall staying for long periods even though it was a fair trip by subway from where I lived. So no wild gaming parties that I took part in, nor any panicking. I don’t recall ever meeting any of the other contributors to the magazine, at least not at the offices.
AP: Back to a little more about you, what were the games that got you into the hobby, and how did you first come across these “new-fangled” role playing games?
LP: I’ve always been a game player. The first wargame that caught my fancy was Conflict, followed by American Heritage Broadsides, then Risk. When I was about 12 I got into Avalon Hill wargames like Stalingrad and Afrika Korp. On my 18th birthday I became a fan of the game Diplomacy, ultimately running my own fanzines and designing a very large number of variations of the game, some of them amounting to mostly new games. Sometime before I was 25 word-of-mouth told me about another gamer living in my small village. He was into the new game Dungeons & Dragons. As you know, there are no overt chance elements in Diplomacy, and my motto was “I hate dice games.” So I didn’t take to D&D immediately. I do love science fiction and fantasy, designing my own wargames of that type, and at a summer game convention I was staying with some guys who played D&D. So I was exposed to the game and took to it immediately as we played a session more or less overnight in a pickup camper in a parking lot at the convention site in Detroit. That was 1975.
AP: Most of your articles for White Dwarf were about how to play and run the game rather than specifically creating dungeons and monsters. Did you create a lot of your own dungeons at home, or were you not usually the DM?
LP: I was usually the GM (DM is too limited a term) though I tried to get other people to GM as well. We all made up our own stuff, because there wasn’t much commercial stuff available, far different from nowadays. And I was already used to making up my own stuff because I made up so very many Diplomacy variants in the 70s. But in fact there was no alternative to doing it yourself.
AP: Looking at these old adventures it feels to me like they were played in a very different way compared to today. I get the impression each adventure was effectively a challenge to see if the party would survive, rather than an adventure story. Is that a fair assessment? Was there much role-playing in terms of character and story arc in your games or was it more about “beating the dungeon”.
LP: The early players were wargamers. Often wargamers from that time were also science fiction and fantasy fans, but to us the game was a game not a storytelling machine, and the main objective was to survive. Detailed back stories? Hell no! We rolled up a character and got down to playing the game and the story of the character came from the events of the game. (I suppose also the assumption was that people who became novice adventurers were usually somewhat desperate nobodies.) Of course in that situation the players write the story (in a chaotic way of course). The GM set up a situation that seemed interesting and the players ran with it. When I ran the same adventure several times with different groups it would always go very differently each time. With skill checks non-existent before second edition, which was otherwise a lot like first edition cleaned up, there was considerable role-playing, but role-playing in service of winning (surviving) the game, of completing the mission, not role-playing for the sake of role-playing. People played vicariously, they didn’t think of themselves as actors in a role, they thought of their character as themselves. But I never heard anyone talk about “beating the dungeon.” When you “beat the game” you’re playing a puzzle, not a game. As in most single player games, especially video.
AP: So do you think the way you play RPGs has changed over the years? Are you a fan of character driven story games or do you still prefer the “old school” dungeon delve?
LP: I am not into story games. If I want a really good story I’ll read a science fiction or fantasy novel of my choice. Professional authors are going to be better at storytelling than your typical GM. Plus I want to feel that I can control my fate in a game, when you participate in the story your fate is controlled by the storyteller. I don’t like being led around by the nose. I am probably less dogmatic about “my way” of playing D&D that I used to be. Nothing wrong with character driven stories as long as the character is controlled by a player and not the GM. But professional quality stories and games are opposites, because the author of a professional quality story must control virtually everything that happens, and that’s the opposite of how a game works. It has a lot more in common with how a puzzle works. I despise puzzles.
AP: In the early days of White Dwarf the most popular games along with Dungeons and Dragons were Runequest, Chivalry and Sorcery and Traveller. Were you a fan of those too, and what games (wargame or RPG) do you prefer to play these days?
LP: I was sufficiently satisfied with and occupied by D&D that I never played any of those games, though I read the rules. (I did play Gamma World a bit.) If you wanted to find people to play an RPG, not an easy task back then, it helped a lot to be playing the by far most well-known and popular RPG. And I have to say I still prefer to play Advanced D&D (first edition D&D), though I have played third and fourth edition D&D extensively. My favourite game these days (other than a 2014 video game called Empire Deluxe Enhanced Edition) is “the game of designing games”. After that it’s Advanced D&D, and then my own design Britannia.
AP: Your series of articles “An Introduction to Dungeons and Dragons” seemed to be the most popular with readers. What is the work you are most proud of, and are there any articles you’d like to rewrite with the benefit of hindsight?
LP: Yes, those several part intro articles (I think there was more than one) got a lot of traction. Other than that the ones I most remember are the Barroom Brawl for D&D and the use of Moria as an introductory adventure for people new to D&D. It may have happened, but I can’t remember regretting an article in the sense of wanting to rewrite it. Some are certainly worth expanding or revising. But I may have been a better writer around age 30 than I am at age 74.
AP: What was your favourite article by someone else from those early days? Is there something you wish you’d been the one to write and would you have written it differently? If you have a favourite past issue of the magazine, which one would it be?
LP: I have read articles and thought something like “why didn’t I think of that?” or “that was really well done.” But that’s too long ago to remember any specifically. I don’t have a favourite issue, again that’s a long time ago. I’ve had a plan for some years to offer books of reprints of my magazine articles from back in the 70s and 80s. But that’s been derailed partly because I’m trying to write a book about RPG design, which incorporates some of those articles (revised of course).
