Dr Simon
Explorer
Part Seven: More Breadth, Less Depth (Issues 61-70)
Overall
These issues span the period from January 1985 to October 1985, during which time the general appearance and production values of the Dwarf remain much as they were in the previous year. The cover price goes up to 95p, and the main change is the introduction of yet more departments. The old stalwarts of Runerites and Starbase become bi-monthly, alternated with the new columns of Crawling Chaos (edited by Marc Gascoigne) for all things Call of Cthulhu, and Heroes and Villains (edited by Simon Burley) for all things superhero. Everything else continues much as it has done, except for the old Fiend Factory, now limping along, which opens its doors to other systems, and there is one final edition of Steve Jackson’s Crash Course (for Car Wars). Personally, I find that the standard of the covers declines as well but take a look and decide for yourself.
Games
It is during this period that the range of games covered by the magazine increases notably, with the regular inclusion of the new departments discussed above. Notable new releases during this period include Toon, Paranoia and RuneQuest 3rd Ed.. TSR bring out Marvel Superheroes to add to the growing number of supers RPGs, as well as the Conan RPG, the Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG and the Battlesystem rules. Pacesetter games bring out Star Ace and Timemaster to add to their stable with Chill, and the UK company Standard Games brings out the fairly minor fantasy game Dragonroar (most well known as the one with the solo adventure on tape, and for killer penguins and war hedgehogs). Still in the works are the Doctor Who RPG (FASA) and Judge Dredd RPG (Games Workshop) as well as Steve Jackson’s GURPS.
Scenarios
Each issue features two scenarios, and although D&D still dominates as the system of choice there are a range of settings including some of the more niche ones, such as the adventure Starfall for Star Trek by scenario-meister Marcus L Rowland, nicely written as always, with shades of Heinlein’s Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. There’s not too much in it that couldn’t be converted to other SF settings, which is just as well as the pickings are slim for Travellers. Probably the best of the Traveller adventures is Lone Dragon by Phil Masters with a good set-up in which spacefarers from one world pose as gods to the primitive inhabitants of another, with the PCs caught up in a civil war between the “gods” (which also sounds like a Star Trek storyline and could probably be converted to the STRPG). The odds at one point, however, are so heavily stacked against the players that railroading is inevitable; a pity as it mars an otherwise nicely flexible adventure. An Alien Werewolf in London by Jae Campbell takes another hoary SF plotline also seen in Original Trek – Jack the Ripper – in an unusual adventure set in Victorian London. Not an easy one to integrate into an ongoing campaign without completely altering the feel since it requires time travel. Graham Miller’s Smile Please is an adventure guaranteed to annoy your players with its Candid Camera/Big Brother kind of set-up (it reads more like a Paranoia adventure, really). One for Referees to enjoy and players to hate.
There are three Call of Cthulhu adventures set across the English countryside. Marcus L Rowland provides two – Draw The Blinds on Yesterday, a modern day scenario involving the last of the gorgons and depraved Wiltshire yokels whilst The Surrey Enigma is set in the 1920s and involves Jewish archaeologists, a Bronze Age horror and a cheeky Famous Five reference. The latter is more atmospheric, I think, although both feel a little lacking in cosmic horror. Not some of MLR’s better works, and I reckon he misses a trick by setting an adventure in Wiltshire and not utilising Stonehenge. AJ Bradbury’s Horse of the Invisible is a haunted house tale set in Norfolk, although the date is uncertain (from the pictures it looks Victorian). As an adventure it is marred by the narrative requirements of ghost stories – lots of unresolved “encounters” with mysterious bumps and manifestations makes it feel like the PCs are just along for the ride.
Superhero RPGs get a couple of adventures. Peking Duck by Phil Masters is basically a punch up in a Chinese restaurant whereas Reunion (Simon Burley) is more of a campaign involving shards of an alien intelligence and the various factions seeking them. I’m not much of a judge on this genre, but both look like they’d do the job.
To much controversy in the letters page there is another solo adventure (using Fighting Fantasy stats); a three-parter entitled The Dark Usurper (which is quite easy to complete). Fighting Fantasy is also used in Ian Marsh’s Beyond The Shadow Of A Dream, a referee-run adventure involving a mysterious woman loose in a city of thieves. It could prove an interesting campaign-opener but lacks much in the way of exciting atmosphere. The only remaining non-D&D scenario is Dawn of Unlight for MERP, a well-constructed but quite small adventure involving Ungoliant.
And so, to the D&D adventures. Pick of the bunch is A Plague From The Past, by Richard Andrews. This is the winner of a contest set in issue 61 and is all good fun. On the surface it seems like a Scooby-Doo style adventure like The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, but it takes that concept and loads it with all the good stuff you’d expect – ancient curses, haunted follies, mysterious lighthouses, family curses - and adds more, like a ghostly Miss Haversham character and a giant whose corpse forms a major part of the adventure landscape. Good stuff, meaty but with a light touch and plenty of flexibility in play.
There’s obviously something about coastal adventures in 1985, as most of the others revolve around the sea. Michael Heaton’s Murder at Flaxton is a low-level adventure involving smugglers, whilst The Sahuagin Heel (Graham Drysdale) and In Too Deep (Peter Blanchard) involve islands and underwater caverns. Both of these last two have complicated backstories that don’t really play out in the adventures (a notable difference to Plague), which are fairly standard dungeon crawls in the end and both wimp out of being too aquatic with their air-filled chambers. The non-aquatic adventures are also pretty standard dungeon crawls with something added. In the case of The Philosopher’s Stone by David Whiteland it’s a lengthy treatise and rules for alchemy in AD&D (with one location an alchemist’s lab where PCs can mess around with mysterious compounds) whereas in David Marsh’s Star of Darkness it is the Artificer class, a machinist in a magical world. Star has a good theme of nature vs. technology and the underlying concept of a magical symbol etched across the countryside is a good one, but the execution is nothing special, with a sequence of more rather tired-looking dungeons. The artificer class, like most new classes, seems to be very restricted in its scope.
Not a great batch of adventures – the best are Plague From The Past (by a long chalk) and Lone Dragon (which may need tweaking). The usually excellent Marcus Rowland produces some admittedly solid adventures but not up to his level of excellent invention. It feels a little like the adventures writers are feeling their way through the range of new genres.
Articles
There’s the ongoing mix of hardware and sage advice, and the most notable addition are the Crawling Chaos and Heroes and Villains departments. Call of Cthulhu and Supers RPGs are also well-served in the feature articles as well. I’m not a player of supers RPGs myself so most of these articles don’t interest me much, although some bits of sage advice on running games could be extracted. Simon Burley writes an introduction to superhero gaming and there some advice on types of non-player character by Phil Masters which is printed with an overwhelming background and almost unreadable (due to the printing, not the writing). The best of the “generic modern” articles is Dark Agents of This Night by Phil Masters, following on from the ninja articles from the last batch and updating the idea to discuss using ninjas in pulp, spy, superhero and science fiction settings, with some usable scenario ideas.
Another broadly usable concept comes from a Crawling Chaos article by Steve Williams and Mark White – the Bearers of The Mark. These are cultists who bear a mark on their foreheads that only other initiates can see. The aims of the cult aren’t specified but there are some useful spells and magic items to go with such a concept and could be ported into a fantasy campaign. Haunters of the Dark (Graeme Davis) is a good study of ghosts in Call of Cthulhu that could easily be adapted to RuneQuest or other systems.
As with the previous batch of issues, there is a trend away from hardware to articles full of ideas and concepts, particularly related to character in society. Jon Smithers’ News Of The World is an interesting and lengthy article on using politics and war to drive events in a campaign setting and Worldy Wiles by Anna Price is a very well-written Starbase article discussing cultures in Traveller, and how giving different worlds unique cultural quirks can make them more interesting (and spark adventure ideas). It’s scary how long it’s taken for someone to voice this opinion, really.
Peter Blanchard pens a series of three articles (Beneath The Waves) discussing underwater adventures in AD&D, although I find them a bit lacking in imagination. Strangely dismissing potions of water breathing out of hand as an uninteresting method of allowing surface dwellers to explore, he is also quick to reject many other more fantastic concepts in favour of scientific feasibility. Writing, for example, argues Peter, is not likely for underwater civilisations and thus they can’t have much in the way of culture. This ignores such possibilities as knot-writing (with kelp?) or complex whale-song style oral traditions, or runes etched in stones, or sculptures grown in trained coral, etc.
My favourite of the “ideas” articles, however, is Garth Nix’s Place of Damp And Darkness, imagining a culture of bargees who live in the sewers and underground watercourses of some ancient and mighty city. Very evocative.
As far as hardware goes, the best articles come from Runerites, with some more Celtic-themed spells (Dave Morris and Robert Dale), some RQ-specific divining skills (Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson) and barbarian magic involving daubing with runes (Barry Atkins) that allows for the woad-painted, naked savage kind of barbarian. Treasure Chest and Fiend Factory continue to do the usual kind of thing with few real stand-out articles. Graeme Davis’ alternative rules for poison are probably the most useful for the time, updating the “save or die” option of AD&D. James Carmichael presents some humourous yet useful items for Halflings, including different magical (smoking) pipes and the “Wayfood of the Matriarch” (a packed lunch!). There are some interesting new spells too; Martin Fowler and David Marsh come up with some “spells for friends” such as Life Candle (which burns with a bright flame as long as the person who lit it is safe) and Blood Brothers which gives the two participants the ability to sense each other and bonuses when fighting side by side. Know Value by John Rudd and Steven Cairns is a useful low-level spell that one would think would be essential adventuring preparation for appraising treasure.
Despite becoming open to all game systems, Fiend Factory continues to focus on AD&D, except for a group of superheroes described in issue 70 (The Starlight Pact, by Pete Haines and David Smith). Most creatures are pretty uninspiring, although some come with scenarios or useful information. Amongst the more interesting are the O Caber by John Chapman, elfish pine spirits with a detailed background and some scenario ideas, with potential for eco-warrior style adventures whilst the Noegyth Nibin (Steven Prizeman) take their inspiration from the Petty Dwarves of the Silmarillion, with a detailed tribe of individuals inspired by Mim’s gang. More Tolkien influence can be seen in Steve Palmer’s Vivimancer, something akin to the Maian Wizards with potent abilities of healing and inspiration, but with a rose theme as well. You could combine all three in a “standard” fantasy setting to give a twist to the common ingredients of elf, dwarf and wizard.
Open Box, Thrud, Gobbledigook, The Travellers, Tabletop Heroes and Critical Mass continue to do what they do with consistency except that Gobbledigook goes to a full page size with no evident need – it works best as a short joke (perhaps Bil was getting jealous of Critchlow and Harrison?). For those interested, Issues 68-70 include stats and background for the Travellers characters. A couple of significant publications pass under Dave Langford’s gaze in Critical Mass. He gives a glowing review to a new comedy fantasy novel called The Colour of Magic by Terry Something-or-Other. I can’t see that catching on myself. On the other hand, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the thin end of TSR’s wedge of novels gets a glance but he finds it so bad he can’t finish it!
General Thoughts
There’s a sense of treading water and trying to find a way of coping with so many new games in these issues. The release of RuneQuest 3 in a prohibitively expensive boxed import set, and the slow-down in Gloranthan support material, means that interest in RQ has stalled, with many people waiting and seeing what will happen next (including former RQ-regular Oliver Dickinson). The fading popularity in Traveller is unusual in that there are no really popular SF RPGs that have taken over from it; my guess would be a combination of the slowdown in published material, and perhaps the old game is feeling a bit tired. Many people may well have moved to other systems and other genres – certainly Cthulhu is thriving, as are the superhero RPGs if one goes by the coverage in White Dwarf.
Elsewhere there are many changes going on afoot in the RPG world. TSR UK closes Imagine magazine as a “rationalisation” of its products. Some former TSR employees form Pacesetter games, and in the times to come we will see the migration of TSR UK employees to Games Workshop including Jim Bambra and Phil Gallagher. Steve Perrin leaves Chaosium, according to one news items, and Games Workshop itself is set to move to Nottingham, with the mail order department leading the way. It feels a little like the innocent early days are well over, but there is still energy in the industry.
The letters pages are lively as ever, with some people still exhibiting the “That’s not proper D&D” attitudes as always, including Peter Murawski who complains about the ninja articles, John English who complains that the Cthulhu articles aren’t “Cthulhu enough” and George Stepanek who writes a very mean-spirited letter saying that younger gamers (i.e. those allegedly enticed in by Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon) have no place in the hobby and should not be allowed. I predict this’ll generate some lively response! And speaking of lively responses, Shirley Carbery writes in issue 70 to complain about the portrayal of women in fantasy RPGs and artwork. Oh, the fun this letter generates! But that’s for next time….
Overall
These issues span the period from January 1985 to October 1985, during which time the general appearance and production values of the Dwarf remain much as they were in the previous year. The cover price goes up to 95p, and the main change is the introduction of yet more departments. The old stalwarts of Runerites and Starbase become bi-monthly, alternated with the new columns of Crawling Chaos (edited by Marc Gascoigne) for all things Call of Cthulhu, and Heroes and Villains (edited by Simon Burley) for all things superhero. Everything else continues much as it has done, except for the old Fiend Factory, now limping along, which opens its doors to other systems, and there is one final edition of Steve Jackson’s Crash Course (for Car Wars). Personally, I find that the standard of the covers declines as well but take a look and decide for yourself.
Games
It is during this period that the range of games covered by the magazine increases notably, with the regular inclusion of the new departments discussed above. Notable new releases during this period include Toon, Paranoia and RuneQuest 3rd Ed.. TSR bring out Marvel Superheroes to add to the growing number of supers RPGs, as well as the Conan RPG, the Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG and the Battlesystem rules. Pacesetter games bring out Star Ace and Timemaster to add to their stable with Chill, and the UK company Standard Games brings out the fairly minor fantasy game Dragonroar (most well known as the one with the solo adventure on tape, and for killer penguins and war hedgehogs). Still in the works are the Doctor Who RPG (FASA) and Judge Dredd RPG (Games Workshop) as well as Steve Jackson’s GURPS.
Scenarios
Each issue features two scenarios, and although D&D still dominates as the system of choice there are a range of settings including some of the more niche ones, such as the adventure Starfall for Star Trek by scenario-meister Marcus L Rowland, nicely written as always, with shades of Heinlein’s Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. There’s not too much in it that couldn’t be converted to other SF settings, which is just as well as the pickings are slim for Travellers. Probably the best of the Traveller adventures is Lone Dragon by Phil Masters with a good set-up in which spacefarers from one world pose as gods to the primitive inhabitants of another, with the PCs caught up in a civil war between the “gods” (which also sounds like a Star Trek storyline and could probably be converted to the STRPG). The odds at one point, however, are so heavily stacked against the players that railroading is inevitable; a pity as it mars an otherwise nicely flexible adventure. An Alien Werewolf in London by Jae Campbell takes another hoary SF plotline also seen in Original Trek – Jack the Ripper – in an unusual adventure set in Victorian London. Not an easy one to integrate into an ongoing campaign without completely altering the feel since it requires time travel. Graham Miller’s Smile Please is an adventure guaranteed to annoy your players with its Candid Camera/Big Brother kind of set-up (it reads more like a Paranoia adventure, really). One for Referees to enjoy and players to hate.
There are three Call of Cthulhu adventures set across the English countryside. Marcus L Rowland provides two – Draw The Blinds on Yesterday, a modern day scenario involving the last of the gorgons and depraved Wiltshire yokels whilst The Surrey Enigma is set in the 1920s and involves Jewish archaeologists, a Bronze Age horror and a cheeky Famous Five reference. The latter is more atmospheric, I think, although both feel a little lacking in cosmic horror. Not some of MLR’s better works, and I reckon he misses a trick by setting an adventure in Wiltshire and not utilising Stonehenge. AJ Bradbury’s Horse of the Invisible is a haunted house tale set in Norfolk, although the date is uncertain (from the pictures it looks Victorian). As an adventure it is marred by the narrative requirements of ghost stories – lots of unresolved “encounters” with mysterious bumps and manifestations makes it feel like the PCs are just along for the ride.
Superhero RPGs get a couple of adventures. Peking Duck by Phil Masters is basically a punch up in a Chinese restaurant whereas Reunion (Simon Burley) is more of a campaign involving shards of an alien intelligence and the various factions seeking them. I’m not much of a judge on this genre, but both look like they’d do the job.
To much controversy in the letters page there is another solo adventure (using Fighting Fantasy stats); a three-parter entitled The Dark Usurper (which is quite easy to complete). Fighting Fantasy is also used in Ian Marsh’s Beyond The Shadow Of A Dream, a referee-run adventure involving a mysterious woman loose in a city of thieves. It could prove an interesting campaign-opener but lacks much in the way of exciting atmosphere. The only remaining non-D&D scenario is Dawn of Unlight for MERP, a well-constructed but quite small adventure involving Ungoliant.
And so, to the D&D adventures. Pick of the bunch is A Plague From The Past, by Richard Andrews. This is the winner of a contest set in issue 61 and is all good fun. On the surface it seems like a Scooby-Doo style adventure like The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, but it takes that concept and loads it with all the good stuff you’d expect – ancient curses, haunted follies, mysterious lighthouses, family curses - and adds more, like a ghostly Miss Haversham character and a giant whose corpse forms a major part of the adventure landscape. Good stuff, meaty but with a light touch and plenty of flexibility in play.
There’s obviously something about coastal adventures in 1985, as most of the others revolve around the sea. Michael Heaton’s Murder at Flaxton is a low-level adventure involving smugglers, whilst The Sahuagin Heel (Graham Drysdale) and In Too Deep (Peter Blanchard) involve islands and underwater caverns. Both of these last two have complicated backstories that don’t really play out in the adventures (a notable difference to Plague), which are fairly standard dungeon crawls in the end and both wimp out of being too aquatic with their air-filled chambers. The non-aquatic adventures are also pretty standard dungeon crawls with something added. In the case of The Philosopher’s Stone by David Whiteland it’s a lengthy treatise and rules for alchemy in AD&D (with one location an alchemist’s lab where PCs can mess around with mysterious compounds) whereas in David Marsh’s Star of Darkness it is the Artificer class, a machinist in a magical world. Star has a good theme of nature vs. technology and the underlying concept of a magical symbol etched across the countryside is a good one, but the execution is nothing special, with a sequence of more rather tired-looking dungeons. The artificer class, like most new classes, seems to be very restricted in its scope.
Not a great batch of adventures – the best are Plague From The Past (by a long chalk) and Lone Dragon (which may need tweaking). The usually excellent Marcus Rowland produces some admittedly solid adventures but not up to his level of excellent invention. It feels a little like the adventures writers are feeling their way through the range of new genres.
Articles
There’s the ongoing mix of hardware and sage advice, and the most notable addition are the Crawling Chaos and Heroes and Villains departments. Call of Cthulhu and Supers RPGs are also well-served in the feature articles as well. I’m not a player of supers RPGs myself so most of these articles don’t interest me much, although some bits of sage advice on running games could be extracted. Simon Burley writes an introduction to superhero gaming and there some advice on types of non-player character by Phil Masters which is printed with an overwhelming background and almost unreadable (due to the printing, not the writing). The best of the “generic modern” articles is Dark Agents of This Night by Phil Masters, following on from the ninja articles from the last batch and updating the idea to discuss using ninjas in pulp, spy, superhero and science fiction settings, with some usable scenario ideas.
Another broadly usable concept comes from a Crawling Chaos article by Steve Williams and Mark White – the Bearers of The Mark. These are cultists who bear a mark on their foreheads that only other initiates can see. The aims of the cult aren’t specified but there are some useful spells and magic items to go with such a concept and could be ported into a fantasy campaign. Haunters of the Dark (Graeme Davis) is a good study of ghosts in Call of Cthulhu that could easily be adapted to RuneQuest or other systems.
As with the previous batch of issues, there is a trend away from hardware to articles full of ideas and concepts, particularly related to character in society. Jon Smithers’ News Of The World is an interesting and lengthy article on using politics and war to drive events in a campaign setting and Worldy Wiles by Anna Price is a very well-written Starbase article discussing cultures in Traveller, and how giving different worlds unique cultural quirks can make them more interesting (and spark adventure ideas). It’s scary how long it’s taken for someone to voice this opinion, really.
Peter Blanchard pens a series of three articles (Beneath The Waves) discussing underwater adventures in AD&D, although I find them a bit lacking in imagination. Strangely dismissing potions of water breathing out of hand as an uninteresting method of allowing surface dwellers to explore, he is also quick to reject many other more fantastic concepts in favour of scientific feasibility. Writing, for example, argues Peter, is not likely for underwater civilisations and thus they can’t have much in the way of culture. This ignores such possibilities as knot-writing (with kelp?) or complex whale-song style oral traditions, or runes etched in stones, or sculptures grown in trained coral, etc.
My favourite of the “ideas” articles, however, is Garth Nix’s Place of Damp And Darkness, imagining a culture of bargees who live in the sewers and underground watercourses of some ancient and mighty city. Very evocative.
As far as hardware goes, the best articles come from Runerites, with some more Celtic-themed spells (Dave Morris and Robert Dale), some RQ-specific divining skills (Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson) and barbarian magic involving daubing with runes (Barry Atkins) that allows for the woad-painted, naked savage kind of barbarian. Treasure Chest and Fiend Factory continue to do the usual kind of thing with few real stand-out articles. Graeme Davis’ alternative rules for poison are probably the most useful for the time, updating the “save or die” option of AD&D. James Carmichael presents some humourous yet useful items for Halflings, including different magical (smoking) pipes and the “Wayfood of the Matriarch” (a packed lunch!). There are some interesting new spells too; Martin Fowler and David Marsh come up with some “spells for friends” such as Life Candle (which burns with a bright flame as long as the person who lit it is safe) and Blood Brothers which gives the two participants the ability to sense each other and bonuses when fighting side by side. Know Value by John Rudd and Steven Cairns is a useful low-level spell that one would think would be essential adventuring preparation for appraising treasure.
Despite becoming open to all game systems, Fiend Factory continues to focus on AD&D, except for a group of superheroes described in issue 70 (The Starlight Pact, by Pete Haines and David Smith). Most creatures are pretty uninspiring, although some come with scenarios or useful information. Amongst the more interesting are the O Caber by John Chapman, elfish pine spirits with a detailed background and some scenario ideas, with potential for eco-warrior style adventures whilst the Noegyth Nibin (Steven Prizeman) take their inspiration from the Petty Dwarves of the Silmarillion, with a detailed tribe of individuals inspired by Mim’s gang. More Tolkien influence can be seen in Steve Palmer’s Vivimancer, something akin to the Maian Wizards with potent abilities of healing and inspiration, but with a rose theme as well. You could combine all three in a “standard” fantasy setting to give a twist to the common ingredients of elf, dwarf and wizard.
Open Box, Thrud, Gobbledigook, The Travellers, Tabletop Heroes and Critical Mass continue to do what they do with consistency except that Gobbledigook goes to a full page size with no evident need – it works best as a short joke (perhaps Bil was getting jealous of Critchlow and Harrison?). For those interested, Issues 68-70 include stats and background for the Travellers characters. A couple of significant publications pass under Dave Langford’s gaze in Critical Mass. He gives a glowing review to a new comedy fantasy novel called The Colour of Magic by Terry Something-or-Other. I can’t see that catching on myself. On the other hand, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the thin end of TSR’s wedge of novels gets a glance but he finds it so bad he can’t finish it!
General Thoughts
There’s a sense of treading water and trying to find a way of coping with so many new games in these issues. The release of RuneQuest 3 in a prohibitively expensive boxed import set, and the slow-down in Gloranthan support material, means that interest in RQ has stalled, with many people waiting and seeing what will happen next (including former RQ-regular Oliver Dickinson). The fading popularity in Traveller is unusual in that there are no really popular SF RPGs that have taken over from it; my guess would be a combination of the slowdown in published material, and perhaps the old game is feeling a bit tired. Many people may well have moved to other systems and other genres – certainly Cthulhu is thriving, as are the superhero RPGs if one goes by the coverage in White Dwarf.
Elsewhere there are many changes going on afoot in the RPG world. TSR UK closes Imagine magazine as a “rationalisation” of its products. Some former TSR employees form Pacesetter games, and in the times to come we will see the migration of TSR UK employees to Games Workshop including Jim Bambra and Phil Gallagher. Steve Perrin leaves Chaosium, according to one news items, and Games Workshop itself is set to move to Nottingham, with the mail order department leading the way. It feels a little like the innocent early days are well over, but there is still energy in the industry.
The letters pages are lively as ever, with some people still exhibiting the “That’s not proper D&D” attitudes as always, including Peter Murawski who complains about the ninja articles, John English who complains that the Cthulhu articles aren’t “Cthulhu enough” and George Stepanek who writes a very mean-spirited letter saying that younger gamers (i.e. those allegedly enticed in by Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon) have no place in the hobby and should not be allowed. I predict this’ll generate some lively response! And speaking of lively responses, Shirley Carbery writes in issue 70 to complain about the portrayal of women in fantasy RPGs and artwork. Oh, the fun this letter generates! But that’s for next time….
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