Tuesday, November 30, 2021

White Dwarf: Issue #18

Issue #18 of White Dwarf (April/May 1980) features an unusual cover image: a color still of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That's a particularly potent image for me, since I was a huge fan of Star Trek as a kid and, unlike many people my age, I absolutely loved The Motion Picture. I nevertheless find it strange to see this on the cover of WD, which I have long associated with less "mainstream" depictions of fantasy and science fiction subjects. 

All that aside, the cover at least has some relevance to the content of the issue. The very first article, entitled simply "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is a set of miniatures rules for use with Citadel's officially licensed Star Trek minis. Written by Tony Yates and Steve Jackson (the British one, of course), the rules are brief, focusing largely on combat, though there are mechanical nods to other activities. The article also includes statistics for the named characters of Trek (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc.) and a variety of alien species, as well as a scenario with a map. 

"Open Box" reviews three products, only one of which I have any familiarity. The first is Eon's Darkover boardgame based on the novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley. The review is quite lengthy for "Open Box" – slightly over a full page in length – and quite effusive (9 out of 10). The second, for Task Force's Swordquest, a fantasy boardgame, is more middling in its assessment (6 out of 10). The final review is Dra'k'ne Station, a Traveller adventure published by Judges Guild. The reviewer, Bob McWilliams, a name I strongly associate with excellent Traveller articles in White Dwarf, is quite impressed with the product (8 out of 10), which I suppose I can understand, given how comparatively little Traveller product existed by this time. For myself, I'm generally not all that impressed with most of Judges Guild's Traveller materials, including this one.

The centerpiece of the issue is Albie Fiore's The Halls of Tizun Thane about which I wrote a post at the start of this year. I don't have much to add to my comments from January, except to reiterate at how impressive the adventure is in terms of size and scope. The titular halls consist of more than sixty keyed rooms and there are a large number of NPCs (not to mention two new monsters) with which to interact. Adventures like this were a hallmark of White Dwarf as I remember it and I look forward to seeing more of them in the future.

"Treasure Tables" presents a number of different random tables, from a frankly bizarre one for "accurately" determining the handedness of a NPC to ones for generating weather patterns. I love tables as much as the next guy, but it's vital that they be useful and well made. Most of these are, sadly, are not. "The Fiend Factory" includes four new monsters, one of which is the couerl, a variation on the displacer beast, which is itself a ripoff of A.E. van Vogt's original couerl – a classic example of pop cultural recursion. "The Magic Brush" by Shawn Fuller is a lengthy treatment of the basic techniques of painting  miniatures and seems (to a non-painter) to be quite well done. I've long admired those with the skills to paint miniatures attractively, so articles like this hold my attention despite my own lack of direct experience in the area.

All in all, issue #18 of White Dwarf is a fairly mixed bag, as one might expect from almost any periodical. The high point is definitely Albie Fiore's adventure, which I hope heralds similarly excellent content in future issues. 

12 comments:

  1. I always loved the map of Halls of Tizun Thane, but I don't know if I ever really tried to run it. Someday I need to pull it out and try to use it.

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  2. I recall intensely disliking the Drakover game, too abstract for my tastes and didn't evoke the feel of the books at all. And that was years before I started hating Bradley as a person. Odd, since I loved everything else Eon published.

    Swordquest was pretty "meh" even for a Task Force minigame, noteworthy mostly for supporting both 2 and 3 player games about equally well. The Neutral player in a 3-way game did have a slightly harder victory condition IIRC.

    Did the couerl writeup get closer to van Vogt's version, or is it still just beating people to death physically while being hard to locate properly? Was never impressed with TSR's take on the displacer beast.

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    1. No, the coeurl doesn't really bear much connection to van Vogt version. It's just another feline monster.

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    2. Sigh. What's so hard about writing up a proper life-energy vampire with energy manipulation powers, especially if you're going to flat out steal the name? :)

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  3. Old White Dwarf was the best. I remember how disappointed I was as a kid when I finally found a new issue on the rack at my FLGS and realized it had just turned into a house organ for Games Workshop.

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    1. The transition was kind of jarring, wasn't it?

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  4. Wow, you've done it again, touching on a product that resonated tremendously with me as a youngster. Last week, it was Telengard. Today, the very game that served as my gateway to D&D and RPGs in general. That game was Swordquest, one of those Task Force games that came in a clear bag with a folded map, counters, and rulebook. The reviewer gave it 6 out of 10? Not from me. I loved it.

    The Goods, the Evils, and the Druids, three sides, three potential players scour the land in search of a magical sword. The game can also be played with two players or even one player, solo, since the basic mechanic is hidden counters (you go to a location, flip over a counter(s) and deal with that counter, encounter).

    There are three swords out there, two are phony. Your side has to find the one true sword, return it to the middle of the board, which I recall being a mountain, and test it to determine if it is, indeed, the one true sword. If it's the true sword you win the game. The first sword returned is the true sword on a roll of 1-2 on a d6; second sword, 1-4 on a d6; third is always the true sword if the first two tests failed.

    (Don't quote me on these die rolls. It may have been 1-3, 1-4, automatic success, but you get the idea.)

    There are monsters to fight, spells to find and use, and of course, the other players' forces--Good, Evil, or Druid--to deal with as well.

    Because of Swordquest, which I played around 1980, I became fascinated with all things of a sword and sorcery bent, leading up to Christmas Day, 1981, when I got the D&D Basic Set. Some great memories, great times. SQ was especially fun with three players, two were good, and solo could get tedious if that's the only way you played the game. Solo, I can understand a rating of 6/10, two or three players 8.5/10.

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    1. "(Don't quote me on these die rolls. It may have been 1-3, 1-4, automatic success, but you get the idea.)"

      No, you got them right. I recall it producing some weird decision making where people would hesitate to be first to bring back a sword because it had the lowest odds of being real. There were times when all three sides had one sword and no real likelihood of getting another and everyone just settled in to wait each other out. 33% chance of winning by being first wasn't good enough. :)

      I didn't like the game as much as you but it was certainly a unique entry in the minigames field, nothing quite like it on the market. Maybe if the world setting had come through a bit stronger for me I'd like it more. It felt like there was a lot of backstory there (eg the talking animal thing, the dragon, the factions themselves) just not quite shining through.

      For me SPI's Swords & Sorcery sits in the same spot Swordquest does for you, methinks. Also Divine Right and Dragon Pass, but those feel less personal-scale and more wargame-y than SQ or S&S.

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    2. Yes, hoarding swords was the main strategic concept everyone employed, as exhibited by my older brother when I played him the first time. The young, naive me would quickly return a found sword, roll the die, and take my chances, only to discover later my brother all ready had the other two and was just waiting for me to find and roll for the first. Lesson quickly learned.

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    3. Well, a third of the time going first just wins you the game right there, so it's not really that bad a strategy unless you know for sure the other player(s) have the other two sewn up.

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  5. Darkover had a "drunk party game" feeling we toyally embraced, but grew a little tiresome after a few replays, 9 out of 10 seems totally out of place.

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    1. I was much too young to be drinking when it came out. Makes me wonder if I'd have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been sober. Intoxication certainly doesn't hurt Cosmic Encounters any here in 2021. :)

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