White Dwarf Reflections #15

The editorial this issue is about awards in the industry. At this time there isn’t much for role-playing and many awards are still shared with wargames. Ian Livingstone mentions the Charles Roberts (founder of Avalon Hill) Awards, still running up to 2020 but very much awards for wargaming games design. He also mentions the Strategists Club Awards, which I can’t find out much about except people did win them. My only guess is that they were awards based on The Strategic Review, TSR’s house magazine that would eventually become The Dragon. All a far cry from the Origins, Ennies, Games Expo and Grog awards we have today specifically for RPGs.

On the Cover​

A Hammer horror-style werewolf moves tentatively across a bleak moor. This is another by Eddie Jones and one of his better ‘human’ figures.

Features​

While it’s not really a new feature, it is worth noting that in this issue the classified section now has a specific Games Club section to help gamers find other gamers. It’s nice evidence that White Dwarf was doing its best to connect gamers and build the community.

• The Barbarian (Ian Livingstone): Another complete ‘pull out and play’ wargame. This time one player is the heroic Barbarian searching the map for the sword and shield that will save the land. The other player controls the monsters looking to stop him. Lots of terrain types and strategy but simple and fun. Points go to White Dwarf again for making sure the map is in the middle of the magazine and has adverts on the back if you want to pull it out. We couldn’t just download the pdf back then!
• Decent into the Depths of the Earth (Don Turnbull): Clearly a big fan of this module series, Don Turnbull details his experiences running them for any DM thinking of giving them a go. It’s a very interesting read mainly for the style of play that I suspect was very much the norm. It’s not about role playing encounters but monsters and stats, and how the DM can manage the challenge of the modules fairly, equipping the PCs with what they need to survive. I say this not as a criticism of Mr Turnbull’s game but to note the changes in play styles.
• Expanding Universe (Andy Slack): The third part of Andy Slack’s series of Traveller expansions. This issue details stars and how to make them your home. It’s a great collection of tables and details for creating solar systems and planets for a campaign. A good start for any sci-fi campaign, although one now usually found in most space RPG corebooks.
• How to Lose Hit Points and Survive (Roger Musson): Roger’s article is another of his concerningly prescient rules suggestions. He suggests here that hit points are too arbitrary to make sense, and too easy to lose. So he suggests they should count only for minor damage and heal almost completely between combats with a decent rest. He then suggests any lasting damage reduces the character’s Constitution, which takes longer to heal, and when that is gone you die. While I’m not sure if 3rd edition D&D embraced this one, it was a feature of the d20 Star Wars rules set.

Regulars​

• Letters: No letters page either this week. Maybe the editor needed a break from the arguments!
• Molten Magic: No molten magic this month either, but it’ll be back next issue as its clearly gone alternate.
• News: No news section this issue, perhaps because the last one was so large. But with the Dungeon Master’s Guide coming out maybe no one wanted to release any products against it.
• Treasure Chest: A very mixed bag this issue, although that is the point of the article. We get a height and weight table, which to be honest I could really have used to fill in those character sheet sections. A quick new rule for energy draining monsters that reduces attribute points that recover, not hard earned levels. We also get a helpful detail on how many creatures of what hit dice fall asleep with a Sleep spell. Although later editions of D&D will just say “you can affect this many hit dice worth of adversaries, pick who you like”. Finally we have a selection of five new magic items from readers.

Fiend Factory​

A collection of new monsters created by readers:

• Dragon Dog (John Sapienza): Pretty much a variant of the Hell Hound but not so demonic.
• Heat Monster (Brian Henstock): Essentially this is a heat elemental, a flaming metal orb that levitates and releases fireballs.
• Pebble Gnome (William Maddox): This one is an interesting role play encounter. They are non-combatant but also immune to magic. Rather ahead of their time they are basically just there to chat to and role play with.
• Russian Doll Monster (Mike Ferguson): This is weird but a lot of fun. It starts as an ogre, and if you kill that a Bugbear tears out of the body, kill that and a smaller monster does the same until you are down to a Kobold. But upon killing that it turns out it’s all been a construct controlled by a Leprechaun!
• Techaranid (John & Deidre Evans): A very strange beast that changes form every time it suffers damage, and into a form more resistant to that damage. Could be a very messy fight but a lot of bookkeeping for the GM.
• Time Freezer (Guy Shearer): A very dangerous Wookie-like creature that can stop time to make a character appear dead, which might get them interred by their companions…

Open Box​

This month’s reviews are:

• Animal Encounters, Traveller Supplement (GDW): Supplement 2 for Traveller comes hot on the heels of last issues releases as the book pile for Traveller grows.
• King Arthur’s Knights, Board Game (The Chaosium): This game had a new edition in 2004, but maybe it’s time for another. In this game there are three knights, all with different strengths, who set out across a map of England to find adventure. The winner is the first to return to Camelot with enough Chivalry points. A little research suggests this was the first of Greg Stafford’s King Arthur games and his interest and research for this one led to the publication of the King Arthur Companion (a non-game book but still vital Pendragon resource). Given this, it seems highly likely the “King Arthur Sourcebook” mentioned in White Dwarf 10 might actually be a misnaming of the Companion.
• Microgames: Ice War and Black Hole, mini wargames (Metagaming): Another two in a series of small self-contained wargames that begun with Ogre. While none will become as well known or popular as Ogre, there are some gems in the series.
• Traveller Aids, Accessories (Judges Guild): This third-party company gets involved in Traveller with a screen, logbook and spaceship deck plans. A little odd GDW didn’t do this themselves. The accessories include a screen, logbook, and Starships & Spacecraft.
  
  
  

 

[Mark Hope]

Don Turnbull's notes on running the D modules closely mirror the prep I did for them a year or two back when running them under a houseruled 2e. He doesn't mention the roleplaying elements, but my notes don't contain a great deal of material on that too, even though I run a roleplay-heavy game. My notes are full of all the kinds of things he mentions though - NPC tactics, numbers, disposition, planning for larger encounters, preparing maps for set-pieces etc. I was interested to note that it wasn't all that far from what we were doing years later

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

A Hammer horror-style werewolf moves tentatively across a bleak moor.

He looks really nervous, doesn't he? "Is someone following me?"

The Barbarian (Ian Livingstone): Another complete ‘pull out and play’ wargame. This time one player is the heroic Barbarian searching the map for the sword and shield that will save the land. The other player controls the monsters looking to stop him. Lots of terrain types and strategy but simple and fun. Points go to White Dwarf again for making sure the map is in the middle of the magazine and has adverts on the back if you want to pull it out. We couldn’t just download the pdf back then!

There are so few choices available to the monster player that this might as well be a solo game, and it was inherently played as such IME. Not even a good game that way, but as a solo at least only one person's time is being wasted instead of two.

Weirdly, this would be also be published (with minimal changes - die cut counters and a color map) by Task Force Games as part of the dual Survival/The Barbarian "baggie' game - and in the same year, no less. I believe Survival came from another WD issue as well, but I've never seen an explanation for this odd arrangement between two companies that didn't really have much to do with one another.

I'm inclined to agree with Aaron Allston's review, which panned Barbarian and gave Survival a modestly positive review. Both games are pretty much random dice-fests with little in the way of strategy, but Survival at least had some replay value and a few significant choices to be made, as well as getting some further support through Nexus magazine. Also had a 16K computer game version that came out in 1983, although I've never actually seen it.

How to Lose Hit Points and Survive (Roger Musson): Roger’s article is another of his concerningly prescient rules suggestions. He suggests here that hit points are too arbitrary to make sense, and too easy to lose. So he suggests they should count only for minor damage and heal almost completely between combats with a decent rest. He then suggests any lasting damage reduces the character’s Constitution, which takes longer to heal, and when that is gone you die. While I’m not sure if 3rd edition D&D embraced this one, it was a feature of the d20 Star Wars rules set.

Well, kind of. It was 4e that introduced the idea of short rests to rapidly recover HP, but 3e could certainly kill you if you took enough Con damage although HP recovery (barring ubiquitous healing magic) was still slow. d20 Star Wars is the first WotC set I can think of that did an explicit divide between temporary/lasting damage tracks.

Don't think it was anywhere near the first to come up with the general idea though. For ex, Villains & Vigilantes has always had hit points (dying if they reach zero) and power points, with the option to "roll with the blow" and shunt damage over into PP loss instead of HP, up to a limit of 10% of current power per attack. Like many later systems with a split health/fatigue mechanic you also used spent PP to fuel powers and movement, so you could wind up having to make hard choices about how much to conserve them in longer fights. Champions has also always had a divide between BODY (the "kill you" stat) and STUN (which knocks you unconscious if depleted).

News: No news section this issue, perhaps because the last one was so large. But with the Dungeon Master’s Guide coming out maybe no one wanted to release any products against it.

This would have been a real negative for me back in the day, and might explain why I never owned a copy - although I might have just missed it, WD was not easy to get reliably in the US this early on. One of the major draws for gaming mags in the Long Ago Times was getting to see industry news and reviews - a role that's be completely usurped by the internet these days, of course.

Fiend Factory​

A collection of new monsters created by readers:

Did any of these weirdos make it into FF? I don't recall them if they did.

Microgames: Ice War and Black Hole, mini wargames (Metagaming): Another two in a series of small self-contained wargames that begun with Ogre. While none will become as well known or popular as Ogre, there are some gems in the series.

Melee and Wizard probably rival Ogre/GEV when it comes to "I've heard of that game" but they didn't sell as well overall.

That said, Ice War was definitely one of those gems and was extremely popular with the wargaming community for a few years, in large part due to having fantastic replay value and surprisingly tight balance unless you get very unlucky when trying to decide how to spend your unit point budget - some skews will play very badly into others, and you won't really know what you're facing until it's too late. Still well worth a play even today, and there's something strangely nostalgic and yet ludicrously inappropriate about having the Soviets invading Alaska for US oil in this day and age.

Black Hole isn't up to the same standard but is still somewhat interesting, with the only toroidal map I've ever seen in a wargame - the battle takes place on a small planetoid shaped like a donut, with a tiny black hole right in the center and few abandoned alien installations around the inner equator. The shape of the battlefield obvious has huge effects on lines of sight and lines of fire, and you can attempt risky "jumps" from any hex on the inner face of torus to any other which only occasionally wind up with getting sucked into the singularity by accident. Sadly, that's let down by a very lackluster combat system relying on a bare-bones old-fashioned CRT and a dire lack of unit variety (basically small, medium, and large vehicles, all of whose defensive stats are identical). This one could probably be pretty good with a remaster that addresses its weak spots, but I doubt it's ever going to happen.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Did any of these weirdos make it into FF? I don't recall them if they did.

No, it looks like we may have reached the cut off point for Fiend Folio, not that any of these are crying out for inclusion.

 

[R_Chance]

I remember this one for Andy Slack's Traveller article. WD had great material for Traveller. Thanks for bringing this one back to mind. I have the dead tree magazine, unfortunately there is no WD version of Dragon Archive (or is there?).

 

[ValamirCleaver]

View attachment 401388

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

This is the second time within the span of a week that song has come up.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This is the second time within the span of a week that song has come up.

Probably a bad moon a'risin'.

 

[ValamirCleaver]

Probably a bad moon a'risin'.