White Dwarf Reflections #37 (January 1983)

It is with some measure of irony that in this month’s editorial Ian Livingstone asks “when will we see a British RPG on the scene?” It’s a fair question, with American companies TSR, GDW and Chaosium dominating the market. But don’t worry, Warhammer is on the way and it's going to do quite well! So Ian need not worry, British gaming is going to be fine. It’s something I notice every year at Dragonmeet.

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On the Cover
A faerie warrior armed with a light sword crouches in a desolate red wasteland over a patch of mysterious red jewels as the sun rises (or sets) above the mountains behind him. Whether he is foraging or tracking prey we do not know. We can tell it’s pretty warm at least as he doesn’t seem to need any clothing. Still, makes a change to see a scantily clad man on a fantasy cover.

This is another cover by Emmanuel, who is also doing a lot of interior work for White Dwarf as well. This is his fifth cover for the magazine, the others being issues 14, 23, 25 and 34, but issue 40 will be his last.

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Features

• Faeries (Alan E Paull): An excellent article that certainly introduced me to the history and mythology of old English faeries. A great summary of the oddity and attitudes of these mysterious and dangerous creatures and the potential for adventure.
• An Introduction to Traveller part II: Refereeing Traveller (Andy Slack): This issue we look at running Traveller, although again, much of this is useful for pretty much any RPG. This is a good series but it seems aimed at people who have never played an RPG, rather than (what I imagine are most of the readership) experienced gamers who have just not played Traveller.
• Bloodsuckers (Marcus L Rowland): This is another article I made wide use of. A collection of many different vampire powers, weaknesses and oddities that you might use to mix and match the bloodsuckers in your game to keep the players on their toes.
• The City in the Swamp (Graeme Davis): A very solid scenario with a good backstory and an excellent new monster. A guide offers to help the PCs through a swamp to a ruin rumoured to be full of treasure. But actually the guide is a shapechanged assassin looking to kill another one of his kind who failed a mission and is hiding there. The PCs are just to cause a distraction! Very good work and a solid adventure. The clawed toad creatures who live in the swamp are also a very nicely built monster.
• D&D Scenarios (Lew Pulsipher): A short but not especially focused article on potential scenario options for new gamers. I very much like the “get through Moria alive” idea (enter the dungeon and get out the other side without dying!) but I’m not a fan of refusing to let the players read any of the rulebooks to keep things simple.

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Regulars

News
There are some huge giant “miniatures” on the way from Citadel as well as a new catalogue that list their current range. Puffin will also be printing more Fighting Fantasy game books, with Citadel of Chaos and Forest of Doom next up. I do hope they remember to check Citadel for typos…

FASA have the rights to a Star Trek game, which will be a good success until Next Generation comes out and the licence shifts. They are also supplementing Behind Enemy Lines with a British supplement which will actually cover British commandos. FASA have also acquired the rights for Harry Harrison’s Deathworld series. But it looks like that one never happened. Anyone know the story there?

TSR has a crop of modules, not just for AD&D but Boot Hill and Star Frontiers too. They are N1: Against the Reptile God, U2: Danger at Dunwater (the sequel to Saltmarsh) and X3: Curse of Xanathon. Boot Hill gets BH3: Bullets and Ballots and Star Frontiers gets SF1: Planet of Mystery, helping the newly released game hit the ground running.

In other news the fall of the pound is making gaming more expensive in the UK except for British reprinted games. This might be what leads Games Workshop to create reprints themselves. If it wasn’t for their reprint of Call of Cthulhu halving the price (from £20 to £9.99) I might not have shifted from AD&D all those years ago. On that note, Chaosium is releasing Shadows of Yog Sothoth the first global campaign that will pave the way for Masks of Nyarlathotep.

Letters
A very mixed post bag this issue. There is praise and condemnation for the Necromancer. Don Turnbull of TSR UK is most incensed at the class’ mere existence, claiming it is totally against the spirit of D&D. I wonder if he is aware you could play three different version of evil alignment since it started? We also have a crop of corrections. One reader insists Infravision couldn’t possibly work, and saying “it's magic” isn’t an excuse (although I would venture that it is). Another reader takes issue with how Shuriken were presented in Runerites, saying Greg Stafford covered them in Wyrm’s Footprints. I will agree with another reader who wonders why thieves can’t use whips as defined by the Lashing Out article (although, just let thieves use whips, not a tough house rule). Finally one reader is grumpy that there are so many “introduction to” articles and takes exception to funny articles like “We have a referee malfunction”. I’d suggest the introduction article are useful to get casual people into the hobby, some might pick up White Dwarf to find out more after all (and when the article is actually funny, like the aforementioned one, I say more of it).

Starbase
This issue reveals the results of the competition in White Dwarf #32 to create a new vehicle. The winner is a square maglev drone that can be a medical evac unit, asteroid miner, firefighting unit or even a hazardous waste container. Nice work and highly multifunctional.

Runerites
Taking a leaf from Treasure Chest, Runerites offers a few new Rune spells and some notes on adding D&D spells to your Runequest game. There is also a fun indestructible box for keeping valuables in, just don’t lose the key!

Microview
The computer column skips this issue in line with its alternate months remit.

Treasure Chest
While the title is “Encumbrance without tears” you may weep at the maths in this one. To be fair, it is a simpler way to manage all the weights and bulk and its effect on movement. But most of the time I just look at a character sheet and say yes or no to what the player insists they are carrying! (Yes Bob, you might have the Strength to carry three suits of plate mail, but they are not going to fit in your backpack!).

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Fiend Factory
A loose collection of monsters this issue, under the rather desperate title of “species special”. I ask you, when have monsters not each been a species? Still, it’s a solid mixed bag with some nice beasties:

• Weed Delvers (Barney Sloane) This species of large intelligent squid come in three flavours. The basic weed delver, the larger and more dangerous warrior Octami and the magic using Ryll. They are a good design that would be a nice layered enemy in a water dungeon.
• Crestcat (Graham Head) A simple but very effective lion creature with camouflage fur. Effectively invisible, but as it technically isn’t invisible, ‘Detect Invisible’ spells etc. can’t spot it. Based on the novel “Novice” by James Schmitz.
• Javukchari (Phil Masters) A really interesting monster who look like humanoid vultures and eat the dead. The thing is, they believe all dead belong to them by right and being eaten by them is an honour. It will lead to some interesting conversations if you run into a group of them while taking a party member back home to get a resurrection spell!
• Antmen (Huw Roberts) Large bipedal ant people, pretty much as you’d expect.

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Open Box
This month’s reviews are:

• Soloquest, Solo Boxed Set for Runequest (Chaosium) After a slightly shaky start that saw enough typos to require a revision before printing in the UK, this proved a popular series spawning two further solo adventure sets. It contains three adventures run much like a Fighting Fantasy book, but using the Runequest system.
• Star Frontiers, Core RPG Boxed Set (TSR) TSR’s offering to the sci-fi gaming scene, which will become very popular, but never quite match Traveller. This game was more Star Wars than hard sci-fi in style and pretty much dominated that niche for a while, with solid support in terms of adventures from TSR. It’s a shame we’ve not seen a proper official 5e version. Sadly that dream has been the centre of the very sorry tale of NuTSR, but don’t let that debacle sour your impression of the game itself.
• Crasimoff’s World, Play by Mail game (KJC Games) One of the first play by mail games, which would go on to spawn a legion of these postal gaming campaigns. For those of you not alive before the 1990s, before the internet, you would subscribe to the game and receive the setting and rules and a “turn sheet” to fill in. Each week you would fill out a turn sheet detailing what moves you would like to make in the game and post it to the organisers. Your turn might detail where your party would travel and what they would investigate, also how prepared they were for fighting. The team running the game would collate what everyone was up to, manage any conflicts, and post you details of the results and a new blank turn sheet for next week. Games like this have contributed to both solo gaming and internet gaming, but sadly never really made the transition to use the internet instead of post. I suspect this was mainly due to the faster expectations of the internet where a week felt too slow for a result (and being faster wasn’t an option for the organisers). Crasimoff’s World regularly advertised in White Dwarf and grew in popularity enough for the organiser to turn it from a hobby into a business. The company closed in 2004, but that is still several years after the last Origins award for Best Play by Mail game was given (1990)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Javukchari (Phil Masters) A really interesting monster who look like humanoid vultures and eat the dead. The thing is, they believe all dead belong to them by right and being eaten by them is an honour. It will lead to some interesting conversations if you run into a group of them while taking a party member back home to get a resurrection spell!

OK, that's pretty great.

 

[Flying Toaster]

I would have been almost nine years old when this issue came out, and just getting interested in RPGs as the D&D craze peaked in the USA. I was friends with these two brothers whose parents were friends with my parents, and the older one had many of the popular RPGs of the time, including B/X D&D, AD&D 1E, Star Frontiers, and eventually WFRP 1E. My interest was first sparked by ancillary products like the D&D action figure toy line and the D&D cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings on US TV, but it really took off as I thumbed through my friend’s RPG rulebooks.

At first I mostly just looked at the illustrations and read the flavor text. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the various Star Frontiers species. The SF rulebook characterized Humans as unusually curious risk-takers and natural explorers who loved using tech gear to solve problems, inspiring a popular saying among the insectoid Vrusk species, “Mr. Human and his Indestructible Junk Show”. Science fiction has always been a mirror held up to modern society, but I wonder if anyone has ever written a book or academic paper about the particular ways in which sci-fi comments on human nature and history when contrasted with imaginary alien species and civilizations. Many sci-fi writers will follow the TSR route and produce a flattering picture of human adaptability and the drive to expand our horizons, but you also see counterpoints which portray humans as a ravenous, warlike plague spreading across the galaxy - effectively the “orks” of the setting.

I noticed all of the various faerie beings in the D&D rulebooks, but I rarely saw them actually used at the table. I did use the Quicklings from MM2 once in a homebrew wilderness adventure because I liked their high speed invisible attack powers, but that was about it. No one in my local groups really used fey much, probably because we thought they were a bit too childish - an irony that is always lost on children who want to grow up and become teenagers, and especially on boys who want to seem “macho” or “rugged”.

But we also rarely used classic Good-aligned beings like the metallic dragons, Blink Dogs, or Unicorns, simply because we were murder hobos who wanted to slay evil monsters and loot their treasures, not sit around jawing with the good guys. Apparently somebody at TSR agreed with us, because fey rarely showed up in the classic D&D modules, and Goodman Games definitely followed this example when they promised that DCC adventures would bring back the “good old days“ when NPCs were there to be killed.

I did not really understand at the time how the D&D sensibility was based not on the primary sources of European folklore and mythology in which faeries figure prominently, but on secondary sources like pulp sword & sorcery, which were Gary Gygax’s personal favorites. As a kid I would have enjoyed reading this article about fey beings but would probably not have actually used it, but now I really like the way WotC has used fey more than TSR ever did in products like Witchlight Carnival and the new Lorwyn digital supplement. The OSR is also using fey in creative settings like Dolmenwood.

I wonder if the City in the Swamp adventure allows the PCs to find the other assassin and get involved with why they did not carry out their mission, essentially picking a side in the conflict between the two, or is the plot just an excuse to lead the PCs into a standard hex crawl. Shapechanger or doppelganger species are staples of fantasy and SF precisely because of their potential for assassination, espionage, and impersonation.

“I’m not a fan of refusing to let the players read any of the rulebooks to keep things simple.”

I remember my older friend getting a bit nervous about letting me read his rulebooks, and making me promise not to memorize details like monster stats. He was probably worried about players knowing too much about the rules because he was remembering EGG’s advice in the AD&D rulebooks, which claimed that any player who so much as glanced at the DMG was a filthy cheater deserving an ignoble death (for their PC, right? ). The “Viking hat” style of adversarial judging common in that era often included attempts to keep players from owning or even reading the rules, but I am not sure why. It seems unlikely to have been a product of the hobby’s war gaming roots, because war games usually required players to read the rules as there was often no referee.

The letters touch on two perennial debates in the RPG scene. My adolescent D&D groups had a fair number of unwritten rules and unspoken assumptions, and two of them were “no Evil characters” and “no player vs. player”. We would joke about fighting city guards or picking pockets, but never actually did anything of the sort except in CRPGs with convenient save points, and even then only out of curiosity, before continuing with the noble quest plot written into the game. The only time we ever played Evil in D&D was in a goofy one-off which served as a last hurrah for our group.

The letter about infravision reminds me of how I always thought it was strange that the D&D rules often tried to describe the magical elements of the game in scientific (or pseudo-scientific) terms. I distinctly remember trying and failing to understand what exactly ultravision was for, and why so few PCs or monsters had it. There was also lots of obsolete medical jargon like “dipsomania” or “imbecile” which seemed to clash with the implied medieval setting. Looking back, I think it was a combination of at least three things: Gygax’s love of showing off his self-taught erudition and expansive vocabulary; the simulationist trend that was popular in RPGs of the time (the falling damage debates were the stuff of legend...); and the way pulp literature mixed elements like super-science and sorcery before the definitive split between fantasy and science fiction.

 

[rknop]

OK, that's pretty great.

Reminds me a bit of soul hunters from Babylon 5. (Which I realize came out well after this WD issue.)

 

[rknop]

Many sci-fi writers will follow the TSR route and produce a flattering picture of human adaptability and the drive to expand our horizons, but you also see counterpoints which portray humans as a ravenous, warlike plague spreading across the galaxy - effectively the “orks” of the setting.

Arguably, both of these are differently-biased characterizations (or stereotypes) of western european civilization from the second half of the second millennium CE. At least as far as their effect on the world as a whole.

 

[Starmaster]

A faerie warrior armed with a light sword crouches in a desolate red wasteland over a patch of mysterious red jewels

I don't think that's a patch of red jewels. I've always thought it was supposed to be drops of blood. The faerie is armed and I figure he's tracking a person or animal that he has wounded.

 

[werecorpse]

I enjoyed reading The City in the Swamp though never played it. A rare high level adventure with some fiend folio (or maybe at that time just fiend factory?) monsters in it. I can still recall the plot & some of the high level magic items available.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I enjoyed reading The City in the Swamp though never played it. A rare high level adventure with some fiend folio (or maybe at that time just fiend factory?) monsters in it. I can still recall the plot & some of the high level magic items available.

We're two years past the publication of the Fiend Folio at this point.