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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr Simon" data-source="post: 5980665" data-attributes="member: 21938">Part Eight: A New Era (Issues 71-80)<a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6718" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7442" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a> <a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=5977" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7117" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a>OverallThis period covers November 1985 to August 1986 and sees some big changes in the appearance of White Dwarf. Ian Livingstone leaves as editor and passes the reins to Ian Marsh (ex- of the Dragonlords fanzine). The reality anyway has been that Jamie Thompson has been doing the main editorial work for a while, whilst Livingstone has been off writing Fighting Fantasy books and running the company, but Jamie Thompson also went off to write gamebooks (according to the editorial. I didn’t know which, but there are some ninja-based ones with his name on them). Marsh’s tenure doesn’t last long, however, as he decides not to move to Nottingham with the company, and the editorship is handed on to former Imagine editor Paul Cockburn. With this change in command comes a change in internal style. The old system-based departments, which have been gradually phased out during the beginning of this period, vanish altogether. Open Box and Critical Mass remain as regulars, as do the cartoons and the news features. Tabletop Heroes morphs into ‘Eavy Metal, which begins with highlighting the figure-painting work of various artists and designers in the Citadel stable. This, along with more colour adverts for Citadel figures, can be seen with hindsight as the beginning of the miniatures magazine that the Dwarf will eventually become. Critical Mass is joined by a new column, 2020 Vision, a bimonthly feature by Colin Greenland that reviews films with a roughly SF/Fantasy slant. You know what though? The cover price remains the same, 95p.<a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=7021" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7677" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a> <a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6410" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7211" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a>GamesTie-ins are the order for 85/86, with the release of the Doctor Who RPG (FASA), Judge Dredd RPG (GW), DC Heroes (Mayfair), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Palladium) and Ghostbusters (West End Games), as well as Pendragon (Chaosium) and the D&D Master Set. Other releases that have little impact in White Dwarf are the Dragon Warriors RPG (released in paperback format and probably hindered in its initial impact by distributers sending one of each of the three books to different areas of the country), the Palladium RPG and Fantasy Hero, precursor to the Hero System.Plenty of support is released for Call of Cthulhu (which is updated as a 3rd edition and sold in the UK by GW under license) including the epic Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, and there is plenty of material for Paranoia and MERP (also both distributed in the UK by Games Workshop). Chaosium suddenly start supporting their Stormbringer game, several years after it was first released, with scenarios and background material, and TSR enter a new phase of AD&D releases including Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures and the long-awaited (but disappointing) T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil. It seems like every month the news section (currently titled Fracas) reports the progress of the Warhammer Role-Playing Game, but it has a long gestation and isn’t released in this period.<a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6364" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7177" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a> <a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6417" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7218" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a>ScenariosEach issue contains two full scenarios for a range of systems, probably the biggest variety in the run of the magazine (without specifically counting). Notably, of twenty scenarios, only eight are for AD&D and of these two are really for MERP with AD&D stats attached, one is really for Dragon Warriors and one is for AD&D and Call of Cthulhu, leaving four dedicated AD&D adventures. There are only one Traveller and one RuneQuest adventure, the rest being Call of Cthulhu, Judge Dredd and Golden Heroes/Champions.It doesn’t feel like there are any truly great adventures in this batch but a few stand out, mostly by the ever-reliable Marcus Rowland. First of his is Tower Trouble, the sole Traveller adventure. This is ambitious in scope, an attempt to hijack a space elevator (of the Fountains of Paradise kind) with all the details needed and in typical Traveller fashion letting the players and referee unfold the action by themselves. Marcus’ Fear of Flying is a short Call of Cthulhu adventure set aboard a 1920s passenger aircraft. The plane is presented in some good technical plans and is a real aircraft, although this particular make was never really used for passenger flight (although it could have been). Fun and madness in an enclosed space, a good filler for a longer CoC adventure. The Spungg Ones (still Marcus) is the first Judge Dredd scenario to be published; a bank heist with a typical Judge Dredd twist (bouncing fatties). I think it works quite well. Marcus’ other scenario, Ghost Jackal Kill, is a prelude to GW’s Statue of the Sorcerer adventure, featuring Dashiell Hammet and the Hounds of Tindalos. It’s quite straightforward, unusually for Marcus, but famously he massively underestimates the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles with a character driving there and back in one night. Oops.A Box of Old Bones by Dave Morris is predominantly for Dragon Warriors (the only thing published for that system) and is an atmospheric mystery/role-play adventure set in an abbey, with quite a good “real” mediaeval feel to it. The Dragon Warriors versions of the magic items are really good, feeling magical and strange rather than a set of mechanical bonuses. The Whispering Hat (that’s Whispering, not Sorting...) is good enough; placed in a doorway it creates a shadowy illusion of a person, but the creepy and dangerous Casket of Fays makes the Wand of Wonder look like a carnival sideshow with its random selection of dangerous contents. Castle in the Wind by Venetia Lee with Paul Stamforth is an Arabian Nights flavoured high adventure for AD&D with disguised princes and flying castles, a mix of roleplay and free-form action, good stuff. Terror at Trollmarsh (Peter and Janet Vialls) is another quite free-form AD&D adventure set in a sprawling manor house populated by characters inspired by Shakespeare (and, one case, prog-rock group Marillion!). Several intertwining plots and mysteries serve to keep the players on their toes. Interesting, but probably challenging to run and I found the various references too cute for my tastes.Graham Staplehurst’s Things Ancient and Modern has an intriguing idea at its core – players have two sets of characters. One set are AD&D characters in the Hyborean-style setting of Theem’hdra (based on the writings of Brian Lumley and very much in the style of Lovecraft, Ashton-Smith, Vance etc.). The other set are modern characters (set in some undefined time between 1900-1940, to be decided by the gamesmaster). These use Call of Cthulhu mechanics. An intertwined plotline involving the usual kind of eldritch evil creature results in the two groups swapping places in time, and events in one timeline influencing another. This is the first part, the second (and final) part is published in Issue 81. The ideas are good, and the setting evocative, but much of it is quite storyboarded and weighed down with lengthy speeches by NPCs. The idea could be expanded, though, for a longer campaign and these days you could have more mechanically compatible characters for the different time zones. There’s just enough detail on Theem’hdra to whet the appetite and allow a referee to run a longer campaign in that setting.The RuneQuest adventure, Hide of the Ancestor by Chris Watson, is simple but effective, basically involving a raid on a troll camp to recover the eponymous Hide, a tribal artefact for a new race, the ithillian-fane. These are lion-centaurs described in some detail and the article is as much a culture article as it is an adventure. A potentially good filler for an evening’s play.Two MERP adventures are given, both written by Graham Staplehurst, with AD&D stats included but they are both deeply entrenched in Middle Earth. The better one, in my opinion, is A Secret Wish which seeks to explain how Glorfindel is seen getting killed at the Fall of Gondolin (in the Silmarillion) yet turns up to rescue Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring. The answer here is that after Gondolin he’s been “rescued” by a Maia of Ulmo (i.e a nymph) who has fallen in love with his sleeping/hybernating form. A neat ethical dilemma, then, revolves around “rescuing” him. There are some interesting ideas on the way, including some tree-dwelling hobbits and The Osier, a relative of Old Man Willow. Replace Glorfindel with a legendary hero of your own campaign and it’s a very adaptable scenario. Graham’s other adventure, Star Spray, deals with Elwing, (wife of Earendil, mother of Elrond), and her ploy to be reunited with her husband. It’s a bit more storyboarded than A Secret Wish and so less successful, but there are some interesting encounters especially the odd trio of monsters occupying the island of Tol Thule.The two superhero scenarios seem okay. An American Dream by Simon Burley involves, ultimately, a fight on an aircraft carrier and a woman bred to be an all-American poster girl superhero who has gone renegade. There’s a bit where the player characters are captured because the plot requires them to be; I’ve never trusted this kind of plotting but maybe its acceptable in superhero RPGs where the play should be more like a comic book, I dunno. Pete Tamlyn’s Pilcomayo Project involves secret Nazi weapons in the jungles of Bolivia and erupting volcanos. Still story-boarded but less so than An American Dream, and all nicely over the top.That leaves Glen Woe (by Richard Halliwell) which is a short Warhammer skirmish to go with the larger MacDeath pack produced by GW. More bad puns on Shakespeare. The Necklace of Brisingamen (Graeme Drysdale) and Nightmare In Green (Graeme Davis) are by comparison to the others very simple (and a bit old-fashioned) dungeon crawls for D&D, Necklace being very full of set-piece rooms and Nightmare being heavy on the plant-based monsters. Functional, but neither very exciting, almost like some subtle propaganda to make D&D seem old and tired compared to other systems. Nightmare is actually the kind of adventure I would have expected from the Pool of the Standing Stones way back in issue 12. Maybe a mash-up could be performed?<a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6485" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7266" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a> <a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6861" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7558" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a>ArticlesThe old “Departments” quietly run to an end, to be replaced with much the same sort of articles but not specifically highlighted. This allows for a greater range of material to be published, and potentially of a more consistent quality without needing to fill a particular niche each month. Longest to stay is Treasure Chest which for this period is less about hardware and more about subsystems. For example Chris Felton gives a system for generating character background and Ian Berridge expands on musicianship. Like many things associated with AD&D this is a needlessly complex subsystem that tries too hard for “realism” over actual playability. A worthy attempt, nonetheless. Also of interest is an article title Life’s Rich Pageant (I can find no credit) which gives a random table of “down-time” events, something that also exists in Oriental Adventures but these tend to be more personal. One of the last bits of hardware published is the Destruction spell by Wesley Phoa, which destroys the universe. Its reverse, Creation, creates a universe but takes six days to cast. It’s like being back in the first issues! Fiend Factory bows out with an unremarkable selection of jungle creatures but before that it hosts an article by Ian Marsh called Just Good Fiends which discusses what makes a good monster, which is useful advice even if he does try to sneak in his “woods vampire” from Beyond a Shadow of a Dream again! (Thinking about it, this is yet another iteration of the Fey Stirge/Leanan-Sidhe that we saw back in the 30s).There are many more discursive articles, both about gameplay in general and about ideas that could be included in game settings. In the former camp, standouts include Peter Viall’s very well argued essay on alignment. This doesn’t just drag out the same old saws, but delves into different systems to see how they handle ethics and morality in a mechanical sense, if at all, and if not, how it affects play. Gamesmanship by Martin Hytch looks at how the mystery can be put back into gaming, particularly AD&D. I don’t agree with his conclusions that only the DM should keep track of mechanical things, but it’s an interesting read.Graeme Davis wades in with a couple of good quality articles. A Cast of Thousands examines the role of NPCs and looks at how to make them not only more interesting but also to give them a bigger role in the game world. Crime Inc. looks at organised crime, indispensible advice for any modern era game but also adaptable to fantasy Thieves’ Guilds. Issue 76 includes a couple of thief-related articles by Jon Smithers and Oliver Legrand which are also worth checking out. Jon’s is sage advice to thief characters regarding tactics and Oliver’s looks in more detail at Thieves’ Guilds and how they would work.Runerites rolls to a close with a couple of monsters and a look at non-combat skills, topped off by some ruminations by Oliver Dickinson regarding RQ3. He seems very cautious about it. RQ is replaced as “second tier fantasy game”, as far as material published in White Dwarf goes, by MERP, with some articles that do for MERP what Lew Pulsipher did a lot of for D&D back in the early days – ways of setting up a campaign (Graham Staplehurst) and worrying about how to explain going up levels (Micheal Veart). The first is interesting, the second less so.Meanwhile, over in science-fiction land there are a few Traveller articles, ending with the useful Mass Media by Andrew Swift all about, well, mass media and communications in Traveller and SF in general. Star Trek and Doctor Who get an article each, serviceable but limited in interest, both articles are a miscellany of rules tweaks. Judge Dredd boots his way in; the first article is an oddly useless one by Marcus Rowland concerning the Justice Department Accounts Division. Probably the most useful of the batch of articles is Hugh Tynan’s Something Special, a crunch article with new Special Abilities (although why the Two Heads one? It’s a bit like some of those “special abilities” from F.A.T.A.L.). Also potentially useful as a source of ideas is Pete Tamlyn’s Crazy File, with some new fads for citizens (not crazies, as you might expect).There’s plenty for Call of Cthulhu players. Marcus Rowland introduces some neat car chase rules in The Cars That Ate Sanity – useful for any BRP-based game with vehicles, I’d say. Gentlemen and Players by Richard Edwards and Chris Elliott gives two backgrounds for 1920s British investigators who want to emulate Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay; an entertaining and atmospheric read. AJ (Andy) Bradbury writes a mini-series on Cults of the Dark Gods, a sort of conspiracy theorist’s version of the historical links between the Assassins, Knights Templar, Freemasons and Nazis. Handy if you want a Dan Brown feel to your campaign. This is topped by an adventure, of sorts, called the Heart of the Dark which uses some of these theories. It’s intriguing in that it uses no stats or maps at all, but is ultimately a bit of a drawn-out shaggy dog story. Like I said - Dan Brown.Pete Tamlyn and Phil Masters give us plenty of meat on how to play superhero RPGs and how to incorporate elements such as superscience and magic into superhero settings. Well written and I like Pete’s section on how different UK papers would report on superheroes, a nice bit of satire.Talking of satire, Dave Langford provides a couple of fictional pieces alongside his usual Critical Mass column, the best of which is Play It Again, Frodo, where he takes various well known SF/F books and films and re-writes the plot as it would run in the hands of role-players. He does a good impersonation of Stephen Donaldson’s dense prose. Aside from some cosmetic changes, where the titles of reviewed books are highlighted, Critical Mass continues much as before, with reissues from the likes of Jack Vance, Robert Silverberg and Robert Heinlein and new authors like Guy Gavriel Kay, MIichael Scott Rohan, Kim Stanley Robinson and even some with just the two names like Judith Tarr and Barbara Hambly setting off on Book One of an Epic Quest to….As for the other review column, 2020 Vision, although not popular in readers polls its okay. Colin Greenland, then Alex Stewart, review some minor indie films as well as blockbusters such as Highlander and Back to the Future. Anyone heard of an animation called The Victor, or a film called Shadey?<a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6833" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7545" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a> <a href="http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6310" target="_blank"><img src="http://index.rpg.net/pictures/show-thumbnail.phtml?picid=7143" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a>General ThoughtsI was less able to pick out any truly stand-out articles for this period, and it may be in part that the sheer breadth of games covered means that each issue includes something of little relevance to many gamers. The trend towards more discursive, system-light or systemless articles is useful, however and I agree with the decision to retire the rather shoe-horned departments. The Travellers cartoon strip finishes forever, Thrud and Gook continues with Thrud widening its field of parody (getting a driving lesson from Mad Max, for example, and more prominence for the character of Carl the Artist, busting that Fourth Wall wide open). Tabletop Heroes becomes ‘Eavy Metal, a glossier-looking production that starts off by highlighting painting and modelling work by Citadel staff.Most fun comes from the letters pages, where several controversies rage. First off, Shirley Carbery’s letter complaining about the preponderance of chainmail bikinis and sexist attitudes sparks a reactionary response that comprises variously “it’s only a bit of fun”, “if you don’t like it go elsewhere”, “that’s what fantasy is supposed to be like” and “it’s a realistic portrayal of women in pseudo-mediaeval society” (This latter causes some confusion until it is clarified that whilst most of us would think of “pseudo-mediaeval” as meaning a made-up version of the middle ages it can mean a very specific period of history. That still doesn’t account for the presence of elves and dwarves in this “realistic” portrayal). Dragged into the light, these unreconstructed attitudes are exposed for what they are and we move forwards. Until, that is, Laurielle Miller writes from America to say that she’d be proud to pose in a chainmail bikini. Oh, the dribbling this provokes! I notice, however, that since issue 50 or so there have been more articles written, or co-written, by women.Controversy number two – young gamers. This seems to be founded on a couple of premises – that Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, TSR’s bendy toys and the D&D cartoon have led to an influx of “juvenile” players who are somehow watering down the hobby by “playing it wrong”. Also by widening its distribution and adding an estimated 20,000 new readers White Dwarf has somehow contributed to the “downfall” of roleplaying. There seems to be a subsection of older gamers who want to take their football and go home, because these damn youngsters with their 33rd level wizards didn’t have to work out hit points with a slide rule and walk uphill to their gaming both ways etc. etc., ignoring the fact that new blood is always a good thing and that, in fact, the hobby at this point in time thriving, with loads of new games and companies appearing. There’s even a rather unpleasant letter from Phil Masters on the matter, a surprise to read such words from him. The final controversy stems from Marcus Rowlands’ review of Twilight 2000 which he mostly spends deploring the American attitudes to foreign policy and the “Theatre Europe” nuclear war scenario. The two camps on this one basically fall into those who think that Marcus should have kept his personal politics out of the review, and those who agree with him and want to “America-bash”, quite unedifying all round. This is the first of a wave of “Better Dead than Red” games that came out around this time (just a few years before Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall). However, those are for next time.</blockquote>

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