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.