As I noted in my original retrospective on White Dwarf almost fifteen(!) years ago, I was an irregular reader of the magazine during my youth. I'd pick up an issue here or there, as I could find them and subscribed to it between 1983 and '85, but I was never as devoted to White Dwarf as I was to Dragon during my formative years in the hobby. Consequently, until I'd made the effort to work my way through its first 80 issues for this series, I can't honestly say that I had a truly good sense of White Dwarf' and its place in the history of the hobby. With the benefit of my recent education, I know a little better, though still in a slightly more "academic" way than those of you, both in Britain and elsewhere, who experienced the magazine in its original run.
I'm left with three insights I'd like to share. The first is a direct result of my having grown up on the other side of the Atlantic, namely, that White Dwarf was a window on another part of the hobby that I otherwise would never have seen. Hard as it is to remember now, given the speed and ease of contemporary telecommunications, the world of the late '70s and early '80s was much more divided and diverse. Certainly, there were global fads and trends, but they took longer to spread and, even when they did, they often manifested in unique ways in each country where they took hold. This is something I genuinely miss about the past, especially when compared to bland corporate slurry that predominates in so many fields today.
White Dwarf revealed to me, growing up in suburban Baltimore, Maryland, what roleplaying was like in Great Britain. I was frequently surprised not merely by the differences in content – the preponderance of RuneQuest articles during the time I was a subscriber, for example – but also by the differences in subject matter and presentation. White Dwarf's artwork was utterly unlike anything I'd seen in Dragon – dark, bizarre, and waggish, by turns gothic and punk. I didn't always like it, but it always held my attention, no doubt because it was genuinely different than the increasingly safe, antiseptic house style of TSR. Likewise, the content of most issues displayed a similar difference from what I was used to – a greater use of history, horror, and, of course, humor. Reading White Dwarf, there was never any question I was reading the product of another culture and that was (and is) quite appealing.
My second insight is that White Dwarf seems to have retained the madcap, chaotic energy of the early hobby longer than did Dragon or indeed most of the hobby on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. To some extent, this slightly scruffy, rough around the edges style became Games Workshop's brand identity, so it's possible that this seeming atavism might simply have been very good marketing. Still, there's no denying that it's intoxicating, even at several decades' remove. One of the things I really enjoyed about reading and re-reading the issues I covered in this series is once again feeling the vigor and enthusiasm of youth. I could sometimes feel the excitement of an article's author, the desire to share this absolutely crazy idea he hit upon one day while playing D&D with his mates one Saturday night. It's amazing stuff and, while this didn't always translate into a good or even usable article, I can't help but appreciate the fervor that engendered it.
Thirdly, and relatedly, I'd say that, when White Dwarf started to decline, its decline seemed far starker than that of Dragon. In part, I think that's because WD stayed closer to the wild, untidy roots of the hobby for longer into its run, making its eventual transition to a slick, safe house organ that much more apparent. Despite this, the magazine continued to offer up excellent articles until the very end of the time that I was reading it. Indeed, I have little doubt that, had I continued to do so, I'd have continued to find good material in its pages, maybe even great material. Yet, I also know that, by the tail end of the 1980s, White Dwarf was no longer the shambolic, quasi-amateur periodical that it had been at the start of the decade and that's a shame. What I most liked about White Dwarf, then and now, was its vitality. After a certain point – precisely when is probably hard to pin down – it was no longer a feral animal but a caged one.
Like Dragon, White Dwarf is one of the places where the hobby as we know was nurtured. It was the crucible of so much that has subsequently come to be known as "British fantasy," as well as the launching pad for the careers of many writers who would later gone to have a profound influence not just on the hobby but on fantasy and science fiction as well. Though it's still running to this day – the same cannot be said of Dragon or indeed any gaming magazine of my youth – it's a hollow imitation of what it was once was, not to mention a reminder of just how good it was in its early days. We shall not see its like again.
Great retrospective. It was fascinating to read all the reviews and get a snap shot in time. Thank you kindly for sticking with it, despite it getting to be a bit of a grind at the end.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this series of posts. I had not realized that I had forgotten so much about our hobby and those who helped build it.
ReplyDeleteAwesome retrospective, really enjoyed reading these. As an Australian, and a third-culture kid Australian at that, I always felt we got both primal US and UK RPG 80s feeds simultaneously, but always several months late. So, to me at least, both strands were equally viable, even within the same system/game/campaign. You can see this in the excellent but short-lived Australian Realms RPG magazine, whose house-world Unae, is a Mediterranean mash-up of early-ish Games Workshop grimdark and TSR/Forgotten Realms vanilla.
ReplyDeleteJust from my brief brush with the U series of modules, I found British D&D seemed more atmospheric and lived-in in its presentation than the US version. Less about leveling up, more about burrowing down into a specific culture.
ReplyDeleteA great summary. I think I started reading White Dwarf around #40 and stopped sometime around #80; I missed a few issues, found a couple of earlier issues and also bought one of the compendium issues.
ReplyDeleteIssues were hit and miss for me at the time, but most had at least one article that was able to inspire me.
Excellently put and evocatively phrased! This fired up my desire to read them as well, and made me sad about the caging of the animal.
ReplyDeleteThank you again for this great series.
ReplyDeleteDuring its first 80 or so issues, I could not agree more that White Dwarf felt more adult, more textured than Dragon.
Over the years, Dragon became more sanitised. White Dwarf remained the edgy, adult magazine that teenage me wanted to read for a long time.
As you said, there continued to be good episodes of WD after issue 80.
Issue 85 -- which featured a long RuneQuest adventure set in Prax -- was a great one. But I remember being surprised by it at the time.
Thanks again!
Unlike the majority of commenters, I continued to read WD well into the 1990s, and thoroughly enjoyed it for what it was - a magazine that became increasingly focused on GW's own RPGs and minis games. The latter eventually became all the company was about, but I'm as much a minis gamer as I am a roleplayer and that was fine by me. I'm sad that WD changed from the multi-subject mag it began as and transformed into a house organ, but if you like a company's games there's nothing wrong with a house organs. I regularly read (and subscribed to, in many cases) Interplay, Autoduel Quarterly, Interface, Adventurer's Club and Battletechnology, none of which had the kind of breadth that early WD did - or for that matter, the Space Gamer, Shadis, Adventure Gaming Monthly, White Wolf and others.
ReplyDeleteI can't identify exactly when WD became nothing but an advertising piece for GW's current games, but I do know when the serious descent of GW into an increasingly slick, corporate money machine began. That definitely came by 1998 with the release of Warhammer 40K 3rd edition, and it's been all downhill form there. Not coincidentally, that's also the point where WD became an increasingly rare purchase for me, rapidly trailing off to "never again" status.
Oddly enough, that was about the same point Dragon became a must-buy for me again after skipping a lot of late TSR-era issues. WotC is rightly vilified for their business practices these days, but in the early stages of their stewardship of the D&D 3rd ed was a real breath of fresh air following at least five years of watching TSR staggering toward oblivion from their own self-inflicted wounds.
I very much agree with you regarding the early days of WotC. Those were genuinely heady times that actually brought me back to D&D after having abandoned it for some years.
DeleteAye, it was a heck of revival after TSR's dying days. Even more so if you were working in the industry. The OGL at the times was so full of potential for everyone. I'm old enough to fondly recall WotC in the pre-Magic days when they were a tiny company making Primal Order and desperately begging for donations to help with the legal costs from Palladium's threats. Then Magic hit and everything changed.
DeleteTruly awful how badly their name has been tarnished by the later Hasbro days.
Great blogpost. White Dwarf was essential for us playing D&D in the early eighties in the UK, and this article sums up why. I remember so much of it - the dungeons, the classes (our first barbarian content) and a whole lot more.
ReplyDeleteI always found White Dwarf had more usable game content than Dragon at a smaller page count. Even some of the ads showing a bunch of viking miniatures or Greenskin minis (with names for each) were useful to me when I was a kid. I bought every Dragon issue i could and enjoyed reading them but just didn't find them very useful at the table.
ReplyDeleteAgree, WD was better value for money. Seem to recall Dragon was very expensive as it (of course) a US import.
DeleteI had no experience at all with White Dwarf in my youth (same era as yours, James), as the gaming stores I frequented did not carry it. When I did see it, at times when I got to a different store, I think it just seemed too unfamiliar for me to pick it up. The art, the style...all the reasons you mention above. Dragon was familiar. Now I think of it as a missed opportunity...I certainly loved all things British, and I would have benefited from being roused from my dogmatic (TSR) slumber.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your series on WD, thank you!
ReplyDeleteI started reading WB somewhere around issue 86, about where your series ended, and continued to subscribe till issue 150 or so. I was very heavily into the GW series of games back then, and still have good memories about those issues. As a beginning gamer, those issues were formative. I guess it shows that "a golden age" an be very individual and foremost linked to one's own formative experiences.
Somewhere in the mid 90s I bought all issues 1-86 in original WD binders. Funny enough, these are now the only issues I still have.