Tuesday, November 15, 2022

White Dwarf: Issue #58

Issue #58 of White Dwarf (October 1984) has a terrific cover by Chris Achilleos, an artist whose work I've long appreciated. Ian Livingstone's editorial bemoans the fact that Chaosium has signed a deal with Avalon Hill to publish the next edition of RuneQuest, which will retail at a much higher price in the UK, owing to import costs. Those import costs will be necessary since Avalon Hill has terminated Games Workshop's license to produce a British edition of the game. Livingstone goes on to speculate that this move will undermine RQ's growth in the UK. Whether he was correct in his prediction, I can't say. All I know for sure is that, for several years in the 1980s, RuneQuest was more popular than Dungeons & Dragons in Britain, which baffled my younger self, who could scarcely conceive the possibility that D&D would ever play second fiddle to another fantasy RPG (or indeed any other game).

The issue proper begins with Stephen Dudley's "It's a Trap!," which looks at designing traps in AD&D and other fantasy games. Though short, it's a thoughtful look at the subject and includes an example to illustrate Dudley's main points. In short, he suggests that while traps need not be "realistic," they should nevertheless function according to an intelligible logic. Likewise, the referee should include a means of disarming them or, lacking that, a means to circumnavigate them, even if doing so presents different challenges. 

"Open Box" begins with a mediocre (5 out of 10) review of FGU's Lands of Adventure, a game I've long wanted to see but never have. If the review is any indication, I'm not missing much. More favorably reviewed is Middle-earth Role Playing. The game scores 9 out of 10 in its book form and 7 out of 10 in its boxed form, based on the fact that the boxed set is more expensive and doesn't offer enough any significant additional value. Bree and the Barrow Downs, on the other hand, only garners 6 out of 10, because it's more a sourcebook than an adventure and thus of much more limited utility. Q Manual for the James Bond 007 RPG receives a much deserved 9 out of 10. It's one of the few RPG equipment books I've ever felt deserving of real praise. Finally, there's Star Trek the Role Playing Game, another favorite of mine. The reviewer gives it 9 out of 10 and I'd be hard pressed to disagree.

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" keeps chugging along, reviewing plenty of novels I've never heard of, let alone read, along with a few I have. Most notable this issue is his praise for Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood and his dislike of Jack Chalker's Twilight at the Well of Souls. The third part of "Night's Dark Agents" by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards is surprisingly good. Whereas the previous two installments were filled with the usual mid-80s gaming material about ninjas, this one focuses on the nitty gritty details of how ninjas operated in the field. The material on their preparations and the tactics employed is both interesting and useful, as is the material intended for referees in running ninja-based games. Not being as enamored of ninjas as many gamers, I was impressed that this article held my attention as much as it did.

"Beyond the Final Frontier" by Graeme Davis is not, as its title might suggest, an article about roleplaying in the Star Trek universe. Rather, it's an examination of the beliefs of various real world historical cultures about death and the afterlife in the context of continuing to play a character in a fantasy RPG after he has died. The article is sadly short, but Davis offers some useful ideas for how to handle this in a campaign. "Grow Your Own Planets" presents a computer program, based on then-current astrophysics, that generates star systems and the details of the planets therein. Given the date of its creation, the program is necessarily limited in its output, but I can imagine it would have been very appealing to referees of science fiction RPGs.

"Strikeback" by Marcus L. Rowland is an adventure for use with Champions or Golden Heroes. The scenario is a fun one involving time travel, the Bavarian Illuminati, Baron Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and more. It's a kind of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen romp before the fact and, speaking as someone who made use of the adventure at the time, I highly recommend it. "Chun the Unavoidable" by Oliver Johnson, meanwhile, is an adaptation of certain elements of Jack Vance's The Dying Earth for use as a low-level AD&D scenario. I really liked this in my youth, largely for its write-ups of archveults, deodands, and pelgranes, in additional to the eponymous Chun the Unavoidable. 

"For a Few Credits More" by Thomas Price looks at the subject of money in Traveller. This is a solid treatment and I appreciate the way Price considers the ways that technology, whether high or low, might impact currency. Naturally, as an article written in the pre-Internet age, some details look dated – or perhaps "quaint" is a better word – but then Traveller has always been slightly retro, so this isn't really a knock against it. "Thinking in Colour" by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk presents helpful hints on the matter of shading, highlighting, and mixing paints for miniatures. Once again, I find myself wishing I'd devoted more time and effort to learning how to paint in my youth.

"Cameos" by Peter Whitelaw presents two short scenarios for use with RuneQuest. Both are set in Pavis and are quite short, so the referee will need to flesh them out considerably before making use of them. That said, they're both quite flavorful and do a good job of showing off what makes Glorantha such a compelling fantasy setting. "Bigby's Helping Hand" includes yet more ideas for using AD&D spells in unusual ways, along with ideas for using beggars as NPCs. Also included in this month's issue are further episodes of "Gobbledigook," "Thrud the Barbarian," and "The Travellers," the last of which receives a two-page spread.

This is a very good issue of White Dwarf and one whose content I enjoyed and made use of once upon a time. Re-reading it, I was reminded on several occasions of just how vibrant the magazine was at its height. There's a good variety of material and it's quite well presented. Though I was naturally more well inclined toward Dragon, there's little question in mind that, when White Dwarf was firing on all cylinders, it was the superior magazine. Issue #58 is a good example of that superiority. 

19 comments:

  1. You did not miss a thing as regards to Lands of Adventure. I bought it BITD based on the Author's rep , got a glance through and sat on my shelf until it eventually sold as part of an auction of gaming material in the early 90s.

    I bought it again about 20 years ago in my collecting days and after another skim through with older eyes, I concluded it wasn't worth the meager sum of $5 I paid.

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    1. Seconded. 5 out of 10 was being generous. It really has nothing to recommend it beyond whatever mystique obscurity grants it. And, I suppose, a fairly attractive cover.

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  2. They must have solved the RuneQuest conundrum as Games Workshop released its own version of the Avalon Hill third edition, albeit in 1987 after Sir Ian had stepped down as White Dwarf editor.

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  3. Livingstone was right about the AH RQ version - it ended up being about twice the price of the previous version. It was definitely more popular than D&D for a while, if my gaming club was any indication, but apart from a couple of people who decided to buy the AH set, everyone just stuck with the previous version, so I don't remember a single game of AH RQ taking place back in the 80s. When I moved away in the late 80s, the gaming scene I joined was both bigger (which was quite something - my previous club had over 60 members, and the new one had at least double that) and more diverse in terms of gaming, and while there were several RQ 2 games going on at any time, I don't remember a single AH RQ game going on there either. RQ was always popular in the 80s, but even then, it was eclipsed by Call of Cthulhu; even though RQ came out first, I think it grew in popularity because people mostly knew the system already from CoC.

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  4. I think the decision to partner with Avalon Hill to publish Runequest 3 did almost kill the line, which didn't return to Chaosium until its current iteration in 2019. According to Shannon Appelcline:

    "Avalon Hill’s decision to turn RuneQuest into a high-priced luxury game probably did more to kill the line than any of their later decisions. Before Avalon Hill, RuneQuest had been the second or third most popular fantasy roleplaying game in the United States and had won prizes two years running as the best-loved RPG of Britain. Under Avalon Hill, RuneQuest would slowly fade into obscurity over the next decade." (Designers and Dragons: The '80s p.221 (2014)).

    I stopped running RQ when this edition came out, partly because of price, but ironically we continued playing RQ with this third edition and still do because one of my roleplaying friends decided to pay the price for this new edition, and has run games in it ever since.

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  5. It's interesting that WD awarded the James Bond 007 Q Manual 9 out of 10, but the game itself only got 6 out of 10 (in issue 57).

    I fully agree with James about the quality of the manual, but it is, at the end of the day, just item stats.

    I think the game is worth a 9, mysrlf, with the Q Manual coming in at 7.5.

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  6. IIRC this was the first White Dwarf issue I bought off the rack, the "local" (an forty-five minute drive on a good day) comic/game store having finally started stocking it. Bought it largely on the strength of the Champions adventure (which was very good, agreed) and the Vance conversion stats for D&D, since I'd discovered him only a few years before this came out and was increasingly baffled why so few other local gamers seemed to know or appreciate his work. Became a regular purchase for me afterward, something I stuck with until well into the early 2000s before finally realizing it had become nothing but a hollow sales catalog trading on the strength of its former greatness.

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  7. Q Manual was one of those rare gaming books that you could share with non-gamers without much explanation. The stat boxes were discreet, and the flavor text really gave the gadgets, guns, and vehicles a lot of context within the James Bond books and movies.

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  8. I do remember GW publishing RQ3 at some point, though with all Glorantha material removed.
    It was split in two hardback A5/Digest-sized booklets, one of which was dubbed Advanced Runequest.

    See attached image
    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OCLTivC11eE/VNvd8ytOIbI/AAAAAAAAYEU/Y5wqLXyKEF4/s1600/20150211_175530.jpg

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  9. (I forgot that the GW version of RQ3 included a third book: Monsters)

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    1. That was also included in the "Deluxe" box of RQ3, along with a Gamemaster Book that included a lot of interesting notes on worldbuilding and other topics, including random encounter tables and price lists, and a fifth book giving an overview of Glorantha.

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  10. I sort of disagree, but not strongly, with a couple of previous commenters who said that Lands of Adventure is not worth seeking out. Its biggest problem is that it is not so much a game as notes toward a game. It is possible to build a game using the ideas and methods outlined, but it isn't really fully a game in itself. In that way, it does somewhat resemble the earliest edition of D&D, actually. I do think that some of its ideas are well worth examining, but unusual design choices like fixed weapon damage (a weapon will always do a certain amount of damage with each hit, the variation being introduced by the chance to hit and also the ability to take damage on each of several "hit point" pools) and a completely open skill system (you can choose to develop any skill that you can name, Referee permitting of course), especially combined with some truly bizarre justifications (the Agility score is derived from the Beauty score due to "gracefulness of movement", for instance), combine to make it a bit of a baffling prospect to work through. Still, I think that people interested in designing or tinkering with games could definitely find value in it.

    "Grow Your Own Planets" was an implementation in BASIC of the ACRETE algorithm, which was cutting-edge astrophysics about a decade earlier. You can still find versions of it out there in the wilds of the internet.

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  11. The GW RuneQuest hardbacks are roughly A4 in size. It's possible there were A5 versions, but I've never seen them.

    They also published Land of Ninja and Griffin Island in the same hardback format.

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  12. AH also published a one-book softcover edition during the "RQ renaissance" in the 1990s, which was just the entire Deluxe set but in one book. It was also the first, and only affordable AH edition, but by then the ship was well-sailed, the horse well-bolted, and even though they did eventually produce some good stuff, RQ was never going back to it's 1980s peak.

    Me, I think AH could have rescued RQ3 in the 1980s if they hadn't also messed-up on supplements. A good strong line of well-regarded supplements might have made the high price of the rules easier to swallow. That they failed there too just shows how little they understood what they were doing.

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    1. But it is interesting that the RQ fan community seems to have overwhelmingly switched to RQ3. I encounter very few folks who used RQ2 (let alone RQ1 that I STILL run) from the 90s on and now everyone has jumped to RQG.

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    2. It was basically the same game with a few tweaks, great ship rules, and ugly presentation. If you were not into Glorantha migrating to RQ3 made sense if you could afford it.

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    3. @Ruprecht: Including that important tweak of distinguishing between POW and Magic Points. So much confusion alleviated with one little adjustment!

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    4. I disagree with the "few tweaks" but then I also consider that the changes from RQ1 to RQ2 were more substantial than people understand.

      That said, in spectrum of all RPGs, all versions of RQ are the same... :-)

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  13. I bought the deluxe box the day it showed up on shelves and MC soon after. Loved reading RQ3, loved making characters, then I ran it a bit. Went right back to RQ2 and despite some great products late in its life, I've never had a desire to run it again- good ideas, poor execution.. Best RQ character sheet ever, tho. These days I use OQ for rules and original chaosium glorantha materials. The setting especially, as well as the new rules have just become too cumbersome for this old GM.

    I do still have a perfect bound Deluxe RQ3 from the 90s in my collection.

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