White Dwarf: Issue #11

Issue #11 of White Dwarf (February/March 1979) features a very odd cover painting by John Blanche. I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to depict, but, like so many of Blanche's work, it's undeniably compelling. Coincidentally, Ian Livingstone's editorial asks readers their opinions about the cover illustrations of the first ten issue of the magazine. I am very curious to see if a future editorial includes an acknowledgement of the results of this survey.

"Fire-Arms: 3000 A.D." by Brian Asbury is a catalog of ten new weapons for use with GDW's Traveller RPG. Unsurprisingly, the weapons include a blaster pistol and a plasma blade, two commonly referenced "omissions" in the game's equipment lists. The "Fiend Factory" presents eight more monsters for use with Dungeons & Dragons. Eight seems to be the default number of new monsters in each issues. I wonder if there's any significance to it beyond, say, the space allocated to the column. 

Lewis Pulsipher's "A Bar-Room Brawl – D&D Style" is a mini-game of sorts, based on an event at UK Games Day III event that Pulsipher than used as inspiration for his own event at Dragonmeet 1. The premise is, as its title suggests, a brawl in your typical fantasy inn, filled with a variety of characters and monsters (23 of them, in fact). Complementing the article is a hex map and cut-out counters to adjudicate location of combatants and objects in the barroom. Also accompanying the article are Pulsipher's recollections of having run this scenario at the convention. I appreciate details like this and wish more articles included them.

"Humanoid Variations for Starships & Spacemen" by Charles Elsden is a very short article describing a few new aliens for use with FGU's Starships & Spacemen. These descriptions are completely devoid of any game statistics, though, which surprises me. "Open Box" reviews three games. Four – Dimension Six and SPI's Middle Earth – are given fairly mediocre reviews (5 out of 10). The third, of Chaosium's RuneQuest, is given a score of 9 and much praise. I find the review fascinating, because, by the time I started reading White Dwarf, the magazine had a reputation for being a source of much quality RQ material. The final review, of AD&D modules D1, D2, and D3, is even more glowing. Reviewer Don Turnbull gives the modules a score of perfect 10. I like those modules a great deal myself, but perfect? 

"Treasure Chest" presents three more monsters (which were originally submitted to "Fiend Factory," according to the column's introduction), a magic item, and a humorous class called the Weakling. Here's its advancement table:

Humorous character classes are a staple of old school gaming magazines, so this is very much in keeping with that tradition. The issue ends with part four of Rowland Flynn's "Valley of the Four Winds." Also of note is this advertisement on the back cover, about which I'd written long ago.