Retrospective: The Gamer's Handbook of the Marvel Universe

I've no doubt mentioned on numerous occasions that, as a kid, I was never a big reader of comic books – at least not superhero comic books. Even so, many of my friends were avid comic readers and, more than that, it would have been quite difficult growing up in the 1970s and '80s to not know at least a little bit about comic book superheroes, particularly those published by Marvel Comics, merchandise for which was seemingly everywhere at the time. So, while I never a devoted fan of the genre, I was familiar with its characters and storylines.

Consequently, once I got into roleplaying games, I inevitably picked up Champions and had a good time with it, though it was never going to rise as high in my affections as, say, Dungeons & Dragons or Traveller. Champions was too ponderous and math-heavy for my tastes and seemed, to my way of thinking at any rate, to be a poor fit with the fast and frenetic action of superhero slugfests. Champions was good enough, because I didn't have any other ready alternatives, but I never connected to it the way I did with other RPGs.

TSR's Marvel Super Heroes, on the other hand, was pretty close to perfect for my purposes. That it was published by TSR certainly helped, I am sure, but, unlike many of TSR's other non-D&D offerings, Marvel Super Heroes was one that I played regularly, because it hit a sweet spot in its design and presentation. This was a game that was meant to be played and my friends and I had a blast with it. Sure, one can quibble about its lack of a robust character creation system, but that mostly didn't matter, because the whole point of this game was taking on the roles of one of Marvel's immense pantheon of heroes. 

That's what made the Gamer's Handbook of the Marvel Universe, released in four 256-page volumes over the course of 1988, so appealing. Modeled on the 15-volume Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe series from Marvel Comics, TSR's Handbook provided game statistics for nearly every Marvel character ever to appear in its comics, as well as information on their history and even roleplaying notes. If you were playing Marvel Super Heroes, this was pretty much a must-have product, especially if, like me, your favorite heroes and villains had never appeared in other MSH products or in the pages of Jeff Grubb's excellent "The Marvel-Phile" series.

Much like the Monstrous Compendium for AD&D Second Edition, the Handbook's pages were five-hole punched so that they could be organized into a binder. Unlike the MC, I don't believe TSR ever produced officially-branded binders for this purpose, but my memory is hazy. Interestingly, Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, released between 1985 and 1987 in obvious imitation of Marvel's earlier effort, was released in a similar loose-leaf format. I have no idea whether TSR was, in turn, borrowing a page from DC or if it was simply something the company had, for whatever reason, hit upon as a useful format for releasing its products at the time.

I loved these books and regret that I no longer own my original copies of them. Unfortunately, they came out during my college years and a lot of things I acquired during that time went missing as I regularly moved between my parents' home and various dormitories. TSR released four more, slimmer follow-up volumes to the originals – annual updates that included new or overlooked characters, in addition to literal updates previously presented characters. I never saw any of these and so cannot speak to their specific contents, but I get the impression that, like the initial volumes, they were well-regarded and useful.

Thinking back on this series of products, I find myself remembering just how good Marvel Super Heroes was and how much I enjoyed playing it. Though I've played (or attempted to play) several other superhero RPGs in the years since, none has ever really grabbed me the way MSH did. That might just be because I'm not, as I said, a diehard superhero fan and thus have never really committed to the genre for roleplaying purposes. However, I prefer to think it's more likely that Marvel Super Heroes was just a solid, intuitive design that fit its subject matter in a way few others have. I miss it.

Chamber of Chills

I mentioned in my earlier post today that there was a Marvel comics adaptation of "The Thing on the Roof" in issue #3 of Chamber of Chills (March 1973), scripted by Roy Thomas (of Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan fame, among many others) and drawn by Frank Brunner. Here's the cover – and, no, nothing like this happens in either the story or the adaptation.

The adaptation is broadly faithful to Howard's story, though it eliminates the first part of it, where Tussmann comes to the narrator (here given the name of Mr Erwin rather than being unnamed) and asks his help in procuring a copy of the 1839 edition of Nameless Cults, instead launching straight into the narrator's visit to Tussmann's Sussex manor. It's also a bit more melodramatic, adding little flourishes here and there that I assume were intended to heighten the tension and horror of the tale.

Likewise, the comic ends with an actual revelation of the creature that is responsible for Tussmann's demise, something Howard intentionally leaves vague:

I can certainly see why Thomas and Brunner decided to depict the unseen Thing on the Roof, but, as is so often the case, I'm not sure it could ever have done justice to anyone's imagination of what the creature looked like. In any case, I'm nonetheless pleased to draw your attention to another comic book adaptation of a pulp writer. I think the role comics, especially Marvel comics, played in introducing a new generation to the works writers from decades before. Come to think of it, that'd a worthy topic for a post all its own ...

It's Clobberin' Time!

If you were reading Dragon magazine in the mid-1980s, advertisements for TSR's Marvel Super Heroes like this one were ubiquitous. The company worked very hard to get the word out about their new RPG and rightfully so. Though I was never (and still am not) much of a superhero guy, Jeff Grubb's design is so clever that I always had a blast playing MSH. That's no surprise: aside from (obviously) Dungeons & Dragons, Marvel Super Heroes is the only truly influential game TSR ever published and its impact on the hobby outlasted the game itself. 

The Articles of Dragon: "The Marvel-Phile"

The very first installment of Jeff Grubb’s "The Marvel-Phile" appeared in issue #88 of Dragon (August 1984). The column’s purpose was straightforward: to provide game statistics for Marvel Comics characters – famous, obscure, and in-between – for use with TSR’s newly released Marvel Super Heroes roleplaying game. Ultimately, the column would appear in 78 issues of the magazine, its last one appearing in issue #198 (October 1993), long after I'd stopped reading Dragon regularly. 

The debut entry of the column focused on Thor, Loki, and Ulik the Troll. It was an interesting choice to kick things off. Thor was, by 1984, one of Marvel’s most recognizable superheroes, a long-time member of the Avengers, and one of the publisher’s flagship solo characters. Loki, of course, was his long-standing nemesis and his inclusion made perfect sense. Ulik, however, was another matter. Though he’d been appearing in Thor comics since the 1960s, he was by no means a household name. His presence here, I think, highlighted the column’s larger mission, namely, showing that the Marvel Super Heroes RPG wasn’t just about Spider-Man, Captain America, or the Hulk. It was also about the sprawling, interconnected Marvel Universe, filled with strange and colorful characters who might otherwise never make it to the tabletop.

That was part of what made "The Marvel-Phile" special. Each column offered not just game stats but also background, history, and context, which were enough to orient players who might not be die-hard readers of Marvel comics. That certainly described me. I was never a huge fan of superheroes as a kid. I dabbled, to be sure, and I knew some of the heavy hitters thanks to Saturday morning cartoons and endless merchandising. But beyond that shallow familiarity, I often drew a blank when confronted with Marvel’s deeper roster. For me, Grubb’s column was a kind of primer. I might never have read the issues of Thor where the Thunder God encountered Ulik, but I knew who he was because Dragon explained it.

Looking back, it’s easy to see "The Marvel-Phile" as part of TSR’s broader strategy in the mid-1980s. With Marvel Super Heroes, the company had acquired the license to one of the biggest names in comics. Of course, translating that license into a lasting RPG line wasn’t simple. The game’s beloved FASERIP rules were quite innovative at the time, but its longevity depended on holding players' attention over the longer haul. The column in Dragon did just that, ensuring a steady stream of new material while simultaneously advertising the game to magazine’s already sizable readership.

Jeff Grubb was the perfect choice to write it. He was not only the designer of Marvel Super Heroes but also someone with an evident affection for its source material. His enthusiasm came through in every installment, making the column accessible to casual readers while still satisfying those with more extensive comic book knowledge. In many ways, "The Marvel-Phile" functioned like a bridge. It connected the gaming world and the comics world, inviting players to explore the latter while providing them with the mechanical tools to do so in the former.

As I noted at the beginning of this post, the column proved popular enough to become a semi-regular feature in the Ares Section of Dragon for almost a decade. For some readers, it was their first exposure to characters who would only much later become mainstream through movies and television. Decades before the Marvel Cinematic Universe made Loki and Thor household names, Grubb’s column was doing the work of introducing them and countless others to gamers around the world. That, I think, is the enduring significance of "The Marvel-Phile." Like many of the best features of Dragon, it simultaneously served practical gaming needs and provided a window onto a larger hobby culture. For me and, I suspect, for many others, it was as much an education in Marvel Comics as it was an aid to running a superhero RPG.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: Ares

I'm going to cheat for today's installment of this series. Rather than focusing on a single article from issue #84 of Dragon (April 1984), I'm instead going to talk about Ares, the magazine's new science fiction gaming section. First, a bit of background. Between 1980 and 1982, SPI published a gaming magazine entitled Ares. The magazine included a complete game in every issue (as was once typical of wargaming magazines), along with articles and reviews. Though not limited to sci-fi by any means, Ares did have a slightly science fictional bent to its content. There were eleven issues of Ares before TSR acquired SPI in 1982, followed by five more issues after the acquisition. The last stand-alone issue of Ares was published in "Winter 1983." TSR never really knew what to do with SPI's properties and wound up frittering them away over the course of the next few years, in the process alienating the company's considerable fanbase, many of whom (quite rightly) felt that TSR had handled the situation very badly. Though TSR tried to make some use of SPI's name and products, only the Ares name survived for long – and even then, "long" is a relative term.

From issue #84 to issue #111 (July 1986), Ares was one of my favorite sections of Dragon, since I've always been more of a SF fan than a fantasy one. The section featured articles on games like Traveller and Star Trek and Space Opera, as well as Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and a host of superhero games, especially Marvel Super Heroes. Because sci-fi has always played second (or third) banana to fantasy, you'd have expected that the pool of articles would have been pretty shallow in Ares but that wasn't the case. In my opinion, the quality of the articles in this section was consistently high, higher even than that of the rest of Dragon (which is saying something). However, its appeal was definitely more limited, which is why I suspect it was eventually killed. Why devote some many pages of each issue to genres that are also-rans compared to fantasy, especially D&D's brand of fantasy?

To this day, though, when I look back on the years when I subscribed to Dragon, the Ares articles are among those that stick out most prominently in my mind. Its coverage of Gamma World, for example, was truly excellent and I used a number of its Traveller rules variants over the years. And of course Jeff Grubb's regular "The Marvel-Phile" column was invaluable if you were running a Marvel Super Heroes campaign (or even if you weren't and were just a fan of the comics). I've always thought it a pity that a non-fantasy-centric gaming mag never really gained any degree of prominence. GDW's Challenge, where my first published writings appeared, was a decent stab at such a thing, but it eventually folded, too, much to my disappointment. Like Ares, Challenge filled a hole in the hobby that needed filling. In my opinion, it still does.

REPOST: Have Space Suit – Will Travel

[This is a repost of something I wrote almost four years ago. Last night, I found myself thinking about space suits in science fiction RPGs and decided to write a post about it. As usual, I soon realized I'd done it before. Rather than abandon the idea, I thought I'd repost this, since its initial appearance was very early after I'd returned to blogging and was therefore not widely read.]

When I was a child, I owned a copy of the Marvel Treasury Special adaptation of 2001 by Jack Kirby. I can't recall how I acquired it, though I suspect it was a gift by a well-meaning relative who knew that I liked science fiction. I am certain that I read the comic before I ever saw the movie (which wasn't released on home video until 1980). The combination of Clarke's story, Kubrick's visuals, and Kirby's art was a heady mix and I was equally enthralled and frightened by what I saw in those large newsprint pages. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I became a fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey when I finally did see the film and it remains one of my favorite movies. I recently re-watched it; my feelings toward it are unchanged: I consider it not only one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, but one of the greatest films regardless of genre. 

Even if you disagree with that assessment, it's hard to deny how influential the movie is. Without even paying close attention, you can recognize imagery, set designs, costuming, even plot details that have clear echoes in subsequent motion pictures. Ash from Alien owes a lot to HAL 9000, for example, particularly in his having been given a hidden agenda at odds with those of the human characters. Likewise, the Enterprise's encounter with V'ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture would have been impossible without the final act of 2001, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite."

Growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Apollo lunar lanading, astronauts and space suits were everywhere. 2001 has particularly stylish and iconic space suits – so much so that I am convinced the multi-colored thruster suits from the aforementioned Star Trek film are a tribute to those in Kubrick's masterpiece. Come to think of it, Alien also had remarkable space suits, but those are the work of French artist Jean Giraud, better known by his nom de plume, Moebius. 

On the other hand, science fiction like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica didn't have a place for space suits – flight helmets, yes, but not full suits of the sort seen elsewhere. It's probably for this reason that I've subconsciously come to divide space-oriented sci-fi into space suit and non-space suit categories, with the former being more "serious" than the latter. The lack of space suits is something I associate with action-oriented space opera rather than idea-based science fiction. Obviously, this is a completely unfair distinction, one largely based, I imagine, on the prominence that space suits had in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Nevertheless, it's a distinction that's been lurking at the back of my mind since childhood, affecting even my feelings about science fiction roleplaying games. One of the most basic and ubiquitous skills in GDW's Traveller is Vacc Suit (though I've never discovered the origin of the second "c" in the word). Consequently, I've always seen the game as a sober, serious, and indeed thoughtful game, compared to, say, TSR's Star Frontiers, which, while I have a great fondness for it, didn't even mention space suits or their equivalent until the release of the Knights Hawks expansion a year later. Ironically, it was Star Frontiers that saw an adventure module based on 2001: A Space Odyssey, not Traveller, which only goes to show how arbitrary distinctions like this can be.

Polyhedron: Issue #27

Issue #27 of Polyhedron (January 1986) features yet another cover by Roger Raupp, this time depicting a clan of dwarves. Raupp was a very prominent artist in the pages of both Polyhedron and Dragon during the second half of the 1980s – so prominent that, for me at least, his illustrations strongly define the look of that era. I also remember Raupp's work on many of the later Avalon Hill RuneQuest books, which, as I understand it, are very well regarded among Glorantha fans. 

Leaving aside the forgettable "Notes from HQ," the issue properly kicks off with "Dominion" by Jon Pickens, which introduces a new type of spell for use by AD&D magic-users. Unlike previous collections of new spells by Pickens, this one looks not to magic items for inspiration but rather psionics. All of the dominion spells concern "controlling the victim's voluntary muscles and sensory linkages." This is not mind control but rather bodily control of another being (with the senses being considered part of the body). It's an interesting approach and ultimately, I think, a better one than AD&D's psionics system, which, in addition to being mechanically dubious, didn't really mesh with the overall feel of the game.

"The Thorinson Clan" by Skip Olsen presents five dwarves, related by blood and marriage, from his Norse mythology-inspired AD&D campaign. These are the characters Roger Raupp portrayed on the cover. They're an interesting bunch and I must confess I appreciate the fact that Olsen's campaign is multi-generational, a style of play I think is under-appreciated (and one of the reasons I think so highly of Pendragon). Almost certainly coincidentally, this issue's installment of Errol Farstad's "The Critical Hit" offers a very positive review of Pendragon, which he calls "the stuff of which legends are made." Needless to say, I agree with his assessment.

Next up is "She-Rampage" by Susan Lawson and Tom Robertson, a scenario for use with Marvel Super Heroes. As you might guess based on its title, the scenario involved She-Hulk but also a number of other female Marvel characters, like Valkyrie, Spider-Woman, Thundra, and Tigra. There's also an original character, Lucky Penny, who's based on the Polyhedron's editor, Penny Petticord. The background to the adventure is rather convoluted and involves alternate Earths where one sex dominates the others. The male-dominated Earth, Machus, has learned of the existence of our Earth and sees the existence of super-powered women as a potential threat to be eliminated. This they attempt to do by traveling to our world and then – I am not making this up – releasing doctored photos and scurrilous stories in the pages of "a girlie magazine known as Pander." Naturally, the superheroines take exception to this and it's clobberin' time. I have no words.

Michael Przytarski's "Fletcher's Corner" looks at "problem players." More specifically, he's interested in two different types of players who can cause problems for the referee. The first is the "Sierra Club Player," who's memorized all the rulebooks and uses his knowledge to overcome every obstacle the referee sets before him. The second is the "Multi-Class Player," whose experience is so wide that he tells other players the best way to play their class. In each case, Pryztarski offers some advice on how best to handle these players. Like most articles of this sort, it's hard to judge how good his advice would have been at the time, because most of what he says is now commonsense and has been for a long time. 

"Alignment Theory" by Robert B. DesJardins is yet another attempt to make sense of AD&D's alignment. Like all such attempts, it's fine to the extent that you're willing to accept its premises. DesJardins argues that "law versus chaos" is a question of politics, while "good versus evil" is a question of heart (or morality). He makes this distinction in order to fight against the supposed notion that some players believe Lawful Good is more good than Chaotic Good – in short equating "law" with "good" and "chaos" with "evil." Was this a common belief then or now? I suppose it's possible players who entered the hobby through Dungeons & Dragons might have carried with them echoes of its threefold alignment system, but, even so, how common was it? I guess I long ago tired of alignment discussion, so it's difficult for me to care much about articles like this.

This month, "Dispel Confusion" focuses solely on rules and other questions about Star Frontiers, which surprised me. Meanwhile, "Gamma Mars: The Attack" by James M. Ward offers up a dozen new mutants to be used in conjunction with the "Gamma Mars" article from last issue. Most of these mutants are mutated Earth insects, but one represents the original Martian race, whose members have been lying beneath the planet's surface in wait for the right moment to strike against human colonists to the Red Planet. I find it notable that Ward was long interested in introducing extra-terrestrial beings into his post-apocalyptic settings, whether Gamma World or Metamorphosis Alpha. I wonder why it was an idea to which he returned so often?

As you can probably tell by this post, my enthusiasm for re-reading Polyhedron is waning. I'm very close to the end of the issues I owned in my youth, so I may simply be anticipating the conclusion of this series. On the other hand, I also think there's a certain tiredness to the newszine itself. The content has never been as uniformly good as that of Dragon and it's become even more variable as it has depended more and more on submissions by RPGA members, few of which are as polished or imaginative as those to be found elsewhere. The end result is a 'zine that's sometimes a bit of a chore to read, never mind comment about intelligently. 

Ah well. I'll soldier on.

Polyhedron: Issue #25

Issue #25 of Polyhedron (September 1985) features eye-catching artwork by the Marvel Bullpen, depicting the Hulk and long-time foe, the Abomination, bursting through the cover. Both characters appear in the issue's Marvel Super Heroes article – a first for the newszine. At the time, I was quite pleased by this expansion of Polyhedron's coverage, because I was a big fan of MSH and was always on the look-out for new material (particularly write-ups of Marvel characters that hadn't yet appeared elsewhere).

Normally, "Notes from HQ" is filled with RPGA-related ephemera and thus doesn't command my attention for long. This time, though, part of it is of greater interest, specifically the call for Dungeon Masters to submit "a store, tavern, house, city block, NPC, street encounter, guild" for inclusion in a fantasy setting to be used by the RPGA as a "home base" and possible locale for adventures. Robert Asprin's Thieves' World is referenced as an inspiration and it's stated that Gary Gygax has agreed to allow this city to be placed in his World of Greyhawk setting. If any of this sounds familiar, that's because I suspect the project was eventually retooled for use with the Forgotten Realms, becoming Ravens Bluff, the Living City, an RPGA staple for years to come.

Jon Pickens offers up a second part of his "Unofficial Magic-User Spells" series, again looking to existing magic items as source of new spells (like the ring of spell turning and ring of x-ray vision). It's fine, if a bit unimaginative, though I cannot forgive the consistent misspelling of "absorption" as "absorbtion" throughout, especially when the magic item that inspired it, the rod of absorption, spells it correctly. The "RPGA Network Player and Judge Standings" is hardly worth mentioning, since it's little more than three pages' worth of names. Looking through them, I spotted the usual assortment of TSR employees and freelancers, along with a few others whose names I recognized from Dragon and elsewhere. I wonder if any readers of this blog had earned enough tournament XP to make it onto the list?

Part II of Frank Mentzer's AD&D adventure, Needle, also appears in this issue. Having found the titular needle – a magical obelisk – in Part I, the characters are now tasked with removing it for transport back to their homeland while dealing with hostile bullywugs and pirates. The adventure is quite fascinating, in that it's mostly a matter of resource management and logistics. The characters command a team of workers and mercenaries over the course of the several weeks needed to achieve their goal. How well they manage their resources, as well as how they respond to various threats, determine whether or not their mission is successful. I have no idea how it would be to play, the idea behind this scenario sounds compelling.

Michael Przytarski's "Fletcher's Corner" returns, talking about high-level adventures this time. That's a topic of great interest to me, since there aren't a lot of good examples of them in my opinion and I'd love to read some good advice on how to create my own. Sadly, there's not much meat to this article. It's mostly brief nuggets ("Try not to be bring the gods into it") intended to keep things somewhat grounded and avoiding boredom ("Three red dragons are fun, but they can become tiresome"). Perhaps the article's brevity (one page) prevents Przytarski from getting into the weeds of this topic, I don't know. Regardless, I didn't find what I was looking for here, which is a shame. My quest continues.

"Rampage" by Roger E. Moore is a straightforward Marvel Super Heroes scenario, in which four different super-strong characters – the Hulk, Hercules, the Abomination, and Titania – in the streets of New York. It's not deep, but it's fun. I also appreciate the way that Moore presents different Karma award charts for each character as a way to highlight their differences. That's something I always liked about Marvel Super Heroes and that's harder to implement in a game where the characters are all original creations of the players rather than established personalities. 

With apologies to Rembert N. Parker, I'm going to pass over his "How to Succeed at Judging an RPGA Network Event," because it's of minimal interest to me. "Dispel Confusion" consists of two full pages of AD&D questions, with no other RPGs represented. By and large, the questions this issue concern ambiguities in the rules and, as such, aren't that interesting to discuss here. The most notable question concerned psionics and its use, with the answer noting that psionics will be revised "in the future." Rounding out the issue is a positive review of Paranoia, an old fave of mine, though it's been years since I've attempted to play it. Maybe I should change that.

As always, Polyhedron is so much more of a mixed bag than is Dragon and it's frustrating. Most issues contain good material, but very few are consistently good. That probably explains why I eventually stopped reading it, while I continued with Dragon well into the 1990s. I suspect this is because Polyhedron always had a much more "amateur" quality, which limited both its audience and its submissions. It's a real pity.

Polyhedron: Issue #24

Issue #24 of Polyhedron (July 1985), with its cover illustration by Roger Raupp, is another one I remember very clearly from my youth – and the cover is a big part of the reason why. When I first saw this odd collection of characters, I honestly had no idea what I was looking at. Were they supposed to be orcs or half-orcs or something else entirely? As I turned out, my guess wasn't far from the truth, but that initial perplexity compelled me to read the issue with great interest. Nearly forty years later, I still remember it.

"Notes from HQ" can be quickly dispensed with, since most of it concerns RPGA matters of little lasting interest. The main thing worth discussing is a note indicating that, in response to pleas from the editor in previous issues, there have been a number of submissions from RPGA members. Indeed, Penny Petticord states that "we have not rejected a single article." She quickly adds, though, that submissions are still very few in number and that "only a fraction of the so-called active membership has contributed." At the time there were supposedly "over 8000" RPGA members worldwide, so I can sympathize with Petticord's lament about the small number of submissions. 

"Letters" is quite interesting this issue. First, there's a letter in which a reader complains about the heavy D&D focus of Polyhedron, as well as the lack of support for Marvel Super Heroes. In response to the first part, the editors explain that Polyhedron can only publish those articles that are submitted to it, so, if anyone wants to see more non-D&D content, they'll need to make it happen themselves. As I think I said before, I wish I'd paid more attention to this sort of stuff when I was a subscriber, because I probably would have had better luck getting published in Polyhedron than I ever did in Dragon. In answer to the second part, the editors point out that, because MSH is a licensed game, Marvel itself must review and approve everything it publishes for the game. This makes it harder for any writer, especially those outside the TSR staff, to produce new articles to support it. Also among the letters published are a couple discussing the bad publicity Dungeons & Dragons is getting in their area, a consequence of the ongoing Satanic Panic. If I hadn't lived through those times, I'd hardly believed such things happened!

"Secrets of Success" by Steve Null offers tips on playing in RPGA tournaments. Never having participated in RPGA events, I must say I only briefly skimmed this article and saw nothing worthy of comment here. "Unofficial New Magic-User Spells" by Jon Pickens continues what he began in issue #22. The selection of new spells continues to focus replicating the effects of AD&D magic items, which is fine, but I'd have liked a little more variety myself. More notable, I feel, is that, like its predecessor, it includes the word "unofficial" in its title – a reminder that nothing that appears in Polyhedron carries the official TSR seal of approval. 

Part I of Frank Mentzer's AD&D adventure, "Needle," appears in this issue. Designed for characters of levels 8–10, this is another tournament adventure offered for the delectation of readers of Polyhedron, like most of the adventures published in its pages previously. The adventure concerns an expedition to locate and examine a powerful magic item – the titular Needle – that is found in a ruined city located in a far-off land. The characters are all members of an adventuring guild called SMART, which stands for Syndicate of Master Adventurers for the Recovery of Treasure. All the pregenerated characters have what I assume (hope?) are merely nicknames, like Slim, Smiley, Blondy, and Blaze. To be honest, I found this nomenclature detracted from my enjoyment of scenario, which is otherwise decent, filled with lots of challenges and puzzles. Maybe it's just me, but I prefer a slightly more serious tone when it comes to things like names.

Errol Farstad's "How Reviews are Done" is an overview of how RPGs and RPG products will be reviewed in Polyhedron, since such reviews are a new future in the newszine. All games are given a Difficulty rating from 1 to 4, with 1 being the easiest to learn for a newcomer and 4 being the hardest. Then, the product is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 in three other categories: Packaging, Rules and Explanations, and Miscellaneous. Taken together, these four ratings contribute to its Overall score, rated from 0 to 4 Stars. With the explanations out of the way, Farstad reviews Star Trek the Role Playing Game, to which he gives an overall rating of 3 Stars out of a possible 4. He had some minor (and frankly nitpicky) complaints about the game, which did not detract from his otherwise very positive opinion of it. Being a big fan of the old FASA game, I could not disagree with his assessment.

"The Grond Family & Friends" by Roger E. Moore is the first installment in a new series called "The New Rogues Gallery." Like the book after which its named, this series is intended to present write-ups and illustrations of characters from people's home campaigns – basically "Let me tell you about my character(s)" in written form. The eponymous John Grond is a half-ogre and it's his friends and family whom Roger Raupp depicted on the cover of this issue. Half-ogres were briefly described as a possible player character race by Gary Gygax in issue #29 of Dragon (September 1979). Moore apparently liked the idea enough to adopt and adapt for his own use. The article presents six characters, ranging from Grond himself (a 16th-level fighter) to his wife (a 4th-level half-ogre cleric) and followers, like Boron the Moron, a full ogre of limited intelligence.

"Fletcher's Corner" by Michael Przytarski – and people say my name is hard to spell – is the start of a new column devoted to "solving the everyday problems faced by anyone who judges role playing games." In short, it's another referee's advice column. Consequently, I expect it'll be filled with lots of good insights and advice that will be genuinely useful to someone who's sitting behind the screen for the first time but rather dull to the veterans among us. That's OK: there are always newcomers in need of advice and that's good for the hobby. For his inaugural column, Przytarski takes up the topic of introducing new characters (and, by extension, new players) to a campaign. It's a good topic and his advice is solid, though nothing I haven't heard before (or come to understand through years of play). It'll be interesting to see what he tackles next and whether I find it useful.

Concluding the issue is "Dispel Confusion," with answers to questions about D&D, AD&D, and Marvel Super Heroes. Sadly, none of the questions piqued my interest, because they were all very banal. Most pertained to discrepancies between two sections of the rules or details that had been inadvertently left out of the text – in short, the kinds of rules questions about which you can't say very much else. Personally, I've always enjoyed questions that afford the responder to pontificate a little about a philosophy of play or game design, but that's just me. Maybe next issue!

Stuck in the Past

As I've no doubt explained previously, I was never much of a comics reader as a kid – or, more precisely, I was never much of a superhero comics reader as a kid. With the exception of Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, which I picked up intermittently, the two comics I followed with any devotion were both science fiction titles, Star Wars (about which I've written many times before) and Micronauts (about which I don't believe I have). 

Nevertheless, like all American boys growing up in the 1970s, I was still very much aware of superheroes, thanks in no small part to their TV and movie adaptations, including cartoons. Perhaps because he was Marvel's most popular – and merchandised – character at the time, I had a special fondness for Spider-Man. I loved the terrible 1960s cartoon, which I saw in reruns, as well as the equally awful 1977 live action series, starring Nicholas Hammond of The Sound of Music Fame. I also remember watching the Adam West Batman series, various incarnations of Super Friends, the 1978 Superman movie, and probably others I've long forgotten.

As I got older, I retained a vague affection for the idea of superheroes, especially after I started playing RPGs. I can still vividly recall some of the adventures my friends and I had playing, first, Champions, and, later, Marvel Super Heroes. I remember, too, when we started to see big budget Hollywood movies featuring various costumed characters, starting with Tim Burton's Batman. The release of that movie in 1989 was a major cultural event and its success not only spawned three sequels but also paved the way for yet more superhero movies, a trend that has continued to the present day.

Despite not calling myself a fan of superheroes, I've seen more than my fair share of the superhero movies released in the last three decades, enjoying some more than others. One of the things that's always bugged me about these movies (and other adaptations) is how many of them continue to tread the same ground that their original source material did decades ago. There may indeed be nothing new under the sun, but did we really need to see another version of "The Dark Phoenix Saga?" For that matter, have there been any new superheroes or superhero stories produced in the last couple of decades with any staying power? Why are the biggest pop cultural characters all products of the 1980s or earlier?

I think about this often, most recently during a recent trip with my family. While perusing some weird snacks and candies in a store, I spied a tall, thin, red can featuring what looked to me like Larry Elmore's iconic cover painting for the Frank Mentzer-edited Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1984). Drawing closer, it turned that, yes, it was Elmore's artwork on a D&D-branded energy drink calling itself a "Hero's Potion of Power." Intrigued, I bought the thing, but I didn't have the courage to try it. That job fell to my daughter, who declared it "alright, but nothing special." 

On the same trip, we went to a bookstore not far from where I grew up. I hadn't found anything to purchase, so I stood out near the lobby of the store while my daughter paid for a book. When I looked over at the checkout counter, I saw a display filled with little boxes sporting an immediately recognizable color scheme. I did an almost comical double take, because I was sure that my aging eyes must have erred in some way, because I couldn't conceive that I was seeing what I, in fact, was seeing – the familiar blue and brown palette of the AD&D Monster Manual.

Sure enough, that's exactly what it was. Apparently, the boxes contain one of a series of randomized plastic monster figurines based on the illustrations of the original Monster Manual. This, frankly, befuddled me almost as much as the Hero's Potion of Power, but then I've never really understood the appeal of these expensive, randomized "loot boxes." Beyond that, why were the figurines based on the artwork of Dave Trampier and Dave Sutherland rather than more contemporary designs? Did it have something to do with D&D's 50th anniversary? I'm honestly not sure of the answer. For all I know, there may be similar loot boxes available for the monsters of later D&D editions, but my gut tells me that's unlikely to be the case. (If I'm mistaken about this, feel free to correct me in the comments).

Of course, this past Christmas, my wife bought me a Dungeons & Dragons T-shirt that she unexpectedly came across while shopping. She knows I'm normally not a wearer of such things – I abhor the brandification of the game – but the fact that the shirt featured the Erol Otus cover painting of Tom Moldvay's Basic Set was sufficiently unusual that she decided to take a chance. She was right to do so, because I was positively tickled by the gift and often wear it as a sleep shirt (I'd never wear it while out and about – I'm too old for that sort of thing).

I can't help but wonder why it is that, in the pop cultural sphere, so much of what is being presented and sold to us are the products of earlier generations of creative minds. Is this simply the result of a lack of imagination or is it because, on some level, we know that we'll never be able to come up with anything better than our predecessors? If I were to travel back in time to tell my younger self that, decades from now, there'd still be new Star Trek shows and Star Wars movies – or that I couldn't care less about any of them – I doubt he'd believe me and yet here we are. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but what does it mean when popular culture spends decades luxuriating in it? 

I'm as happy as anyone to see Erol Otus art on a T-shirt (even if he's unlikely to have profited from it in any way). At the same time, I think there's something not just decadent but even stagnant about endlessly recycling the pop culture of the 50s, 60, 70s, and 80s only even more vapid and rampantly consumerist than before. Have we simply run out of new ideas? Or do the new ideas simply lack the appeal of the older ones? What's really going on here and what does it mean?

Polyhedron: Issue #18

Serendipity is a funny thing. No sooner did I mention my childhood affection for Spider-Man than I find that issue #18 of Polyhedron (July 1984) features everyone's favorite web-slinger facing off against the Scorpion on its cover. This only makes sense, of course, since TSR's Marvel Super Heroes debuted around this time and was a big hit for the company. In fairly short order, it seemed as if there were nearly as many adventures being released for MSH as there were for Dungeons & Dragons, though my memory might well be faulty.

Spidey and the Scorpion form the basis for this issue's "Encounters" article, written by none other than Jeff Grubb, the designer of Marvel Super Heroes. Like all previous "Encounters" articles, this one is brief, but Grubb nevertheless makes the most of the limited space, presenting a scenario in which Spider-Man must rescue J. Jonah Jameson from a subway car that's been commandeered by Scorpion. It's straightforward and simple but does a good job, I think, of presenting the kind of situation in which the Web-head often found himself.

James M. Ward's "Cryptic Alliance of the Bi-Month" focuses on the mutant mirror image of the Knights of Genetic Purity, the Iron Society. Also known as the Mutationists, the Iron Society seeks to rid the post-apocalyptic Earth of all non-mutated life, with pure strain humans being the primary target of their ire. Needless to say, this makes the Society an object of fear in Gamma World and I always felt that they'd be used primarily as antagonists in most campaigns. Compared to the Knights, who might excellent villains in my opinion, the Iron Society somehow feels a bit more one-note and the article does little to change my mind on this, alas.

"Remarkable, Incredible, Amazing" by Steve Winter. As you might guess from its title, it's an overview of the then-newly released Marvel Super Heroes RPG. It's basically an advertisement intended to entice gamers into buying TSR's latest product and, in that respect, it does a fair job. Much more interesting is Roger E. Moore's "Kobolds and Robots and Mutants with Wings." Over the course of three pages. Moore talks first about the joys of "hybrid" games that mix and match rules and setting elements, something that even the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide discusses briefly. He then moves on to talk about various hybrid games he's run, such as when AD&D adventurers made use of a well of many worlds to travel to the universe of Bunnies & Burrows to fight rats in thrall with agents of the Cthulhu Mythos. Finally, he presents a lengthy discussion of kobalts – kobolds who traveled to Gamma World's setting, were mutated by radiation, and then bred true as a distinct species. Moore stats them up for both GW and AD&D and presents lots of information on how they could be used in both games. As I said, it's a very interesting article and a reminder of just how imaginative a writer Moore was.

"The Magic-User" by James M. Ward presents yet another "archetypical" [sic] example of a Dungeons & Dragons class, including her personality, skills, possessions, and holdings. In this case, that's Delsenora, an older woman who uses potions of longevity to retain her youth, who has a particular hatred for powerful undead, like vampires and liches. She also has a passion for flying through the use of magic. Consequently, she's built her castle high in the mountains, in a place otherwise inaccessible to those without flight. Appended to the end of Delsenora's description are two more magic-users, one by Ward (named Lidabmob – Bombadil spelled backwards) and another by Susan Lawson, presumably a RPGA member.

"Two Cents" by Joseph Wichman is a rambling opinion piece in which the author, another RPGA member, covers a number of vaguely related topics under the header of "roleplaying." He begins by arguing, contra the "Two Cents" column in issue #14, that roleplaying is not the same as acting and that any referee who expects his players to immerse themselves deeply in their roles is being unreasonable. He also touches on "troublesome" players, evil characters, and player vs character knowledge – all perennial topics in the gaming magazines of my youth. While I don't disagree with anything the author writes here, the article is somewhat frustrating to read, since it bounces around from one subject to the next.

"Layover at Lossend" by Russ Horn, yet another RPGA member, is a short Star Frontiers scenario set on the titular planet of Lossend. The format of the single-page scenario reminds me a bit of the "Encounters" feature, in that it includes of player characters to be used in conjunction with it. The adventure itself isn't particularly worthy of comment, since it's very short and sketchy, leaving most details to the referee to work out. What is interesting is that Horn refers to the referee – the official term for the Game Master in the game – as "the DM."  This is obviously just a small slip-up, both on the part of the writer and the Polyhedron editorial staff. However, I think points to the extent to which the terminology of Dungeons & Dragons had become the defaults in RPG discussions, even discussions about other games.

"Money Makes the World Go Round" by Art Dutra – again, an RPGA member – is a thoughtful little piece about the role of money and treasure in an ongoing D&D campaign. Dutra's focus is primarily from the side of the referee, highlighting the ways that money can be used to both motivate and impede player characters. He points out all the costs that PCs can incur during a campaign, especially those that are overlooked, like training and converting gems into coins, among many others. Dutra is absolutely correct, in my opinion, that referees often fail to take into account the, if you'll forgive the pun, value of money as a driver of a campaign. My only criticism is that focusing on taxes, exchanges rates, hidden costs, and other expenses can very quickly become tedious, or at least that's been my experience. Finding a way to keep money in mind without degenerating into an exercise in bookkeeping would be truly worthwhile topic for an article or essay.

Speaking of tedious, this issue's "Dispel Confusion" is largely filled with very persnickety rules questions of the sort that bore to tears. Whether because of laziness or a lack of intelligence, I've always been much more of a rulings guy rather than a rules guy, so this stuff frequently baffles me. I'm especially baffled by questions that begin "Can I ...?" as if the sender felt he needed TSR's permission to introduce something into his own campaign. I suppose these are the inevitable fruits of the company's attempts to maintain tight control over all of its games and to discourage its customers from buying or making use of "inferior" supplementary materials.

Issue #18 of Polyhedron shows the continued evolution of the 'zine. Perhaps the biggest change is the inclusion of many more articles submitted by RPGA members. That's a welcome change, though the quality of those submissions seems to vary quite a bit. Over time, I suspect that, too, will change, but, for the moment, it gives the issue a much more uneven feel than some of its immediate predecessors. Nevertheless, I look forward to seeing what future issues have in store. 

Conan and the Cup of Destiny

In the summers of my childhood, there were few delights more refreshing than 7-Eleven's Slurpee – the store's carbonated frozen ice beverage. During the 1970s, when I was growing up, it was not at all uncommon for Slurpees to come in a plastic cup festooned with images of professional athletes or folkloric monsters or Wild West historical figures. In a few cases, I'd hold on to the cup, wash it out, and then re-use it. For example, I held on to a cup featuring skeletal cowboys for quite some time, simply my younger self thought it looked cool.

In 1977. 7-Eleven produced a series of Slurpee cups that featured Marvel Comics characters. This was apparently the second such series, the first having come out two years prior, but I don't recall ever seeing the original run. In '77, I wasn't much of a comics reader, but I did like Spider-Man, thanks in large part to the 1967 show that I watched in reruns at an impressionable age. Consequently, I was quite keen to get a Spider-Man Slurpee cup and visited 7-Eleven multiple times during the summer in the hope of acquiring one.

Despite my best efforts, I was never successful in this endeavor, having to content myself instead with cups featuring characters I'd never heard of before, like Namor and Nova – and Conan the Barbarian. At that time – I would have been nearly eight years old – I'd never encountered the name Conan outside the middle name of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He was completely unknown to me and I recall being very puzzled by his inclusion in a series of cups that seemed otherwise to include only illustrations of superheroes, such as my beloved Spider-Man. Because Conan meant nothing to me at the time, I didn't keep the cup and moved on to other things.

This being the summer of 1977, foremost among those other things was George Lucas's space opera, Star Wars. Like every other little boy (and quite a few little girls), I was obsessed with Star Wars, snatching up as many tie-in products with it as I could. Among those tie-in products was a Marvel comics series, initially written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Howard Chaykin. The series began by adapting the 1977 film over the course of six issues and then moved on to wholly original material whose quality varied, but which I generally liked enough that I kept reading it for several years, right up until the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980.

Most issues included an advertisement for subscriptions to Marvel comics. Though I never subscribed to any comics – I relied on the spinner rack at the local drug store – I nevertheless would glance over these ads to see what other titles Marvel had on offer. That's where I saw Conan the Barbarian once again, sometimes with an image of the mighty thewed warrior himself. Who was this guy? As before, I was baffled by his presence among so many superheroes. Mind you, I was equally baffled by the presence of Howard the Duck as well, so what did I know?

Some time later – I can't quite recall when but certainly before I was first introduced to Dungeons & Dragons in late 1979 – I stumbled across the name Conan again. This time, it was at my local library, which I visited regularly. Middle River Public Library had been my gateway to so many fantasy and science fiction books and writers, forming the basis for so many of my fondest childhood memories. One day, I took notice a spinner rack filled with white paperback books all of which bore the name CONAN in large, colorful letters. I still had no idea who Conan was or why he seemed to keep popping up, but there was he was once more. I wasn't yet ready to answer this question, as these paperbacks seemed a bit too "adult" for my tastes, judging by their moody painted covers.

My initial judgment over this Conan fellow eventually seemed confirmed when a friend of mine, on a visit to the drugstore to pick up the latest issue of Star Wars, pointed out that there were comic books for sale behind the counter, "behind the counter" being childish code, for the place where they kept those magazines. Sure enough, my friend was correct. I caught glimpse of a comic entitled Savage Sword of Conan, whose cover art reminded me quite a bit of those white paperbacks I'd seen at the library. I was now certain I'd never figure out the mystery of Conan and his connection to Marvel comics.

That's where things stood for some time. It wasn't until sometime in 1981 or thereabouts, by which point I was an older and more worldly twelve years-old that I took up any serious interest in Conan. The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide mentions the "Conan series" in Appendix N, along with its author, Robert E. Howard. Holmes also includes a mention of Howard and Moldvay's bibliography cites Howard alongside many other authors whose books I had already read and enjoyed. Furthermore, many of the older guys I knew who played D&D seem to love Howard and Conan. Maybe, I decided, it was time to finally figure out who Conan was and why he seemed to be everywhere I went. So, I went off to the library and grabbed one of those paperbacks off the spinner rack and checked it out. The rest, as they say, is history.

I mention all of this because today is the birthday of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan and many other characters who are now among the most famous and enduring literary creations of all time. It's funny to consider that I first became acquainted with both of them thanks to comic books published more than three decades after Howard's death by a company that didn't even exist at the time of his demise. I think that's a testament to just how remarkable was REH's imagination that a shy, nerdy, and prudish kid growing up in suburban Baltimore would one day come to love the products of it. So many other writers, who lived longer and wrote more, have been forgotten by history, but Howard – and Conan – live on.

Happy birthday, Bob.

Splitting the Party

Within a few years of my entrance into the hobby, my friends and I were playing a wide range of different RPGs. Dungeons & Dragons remained our staple, of course, but we also regularly played other games. Playing those other games not only cleansed our palates genre-wise, but also medium-wise. For example, Champions and Marvel Super Heroes, being inspired by the medium of comic books, both included game mechanics intended to emulate the kinds of things you'd see in the sequential storytelling of those four-color magazines. Consequently, when we played those RPGs, we made an effort to do so in a way that mimicked the action we'd see in issues of our favorite DC or Marvel titles. I'm not sure we did this consciously. More likely, it was simply something that seemed right, given how clearly (and explicitly, in the case of Marvel Super Heroes) these games modeled themselves after their source material.

This mindset carried over into other RPGs, too. One that sticks very firmly in my mind – and that's relevant to the larger topic I want to discuss in this post – is Star Trek the Role Playing Game. As I've no doubt said too many times before, Star Trek was my original fandom, the gateway through which I entered more solidly into the wider world of nerdery. When FASA published their RPG adaptation of the TV series in 1982, I snapped it up immediately and ran the game almost non-stop over the course of several years in the mid-80s. Though the rules of the game made some effort to model the conventions of the show – the starship combat system is perhaps the most successful instance of this – they weren't as strongly wedded to emulation of that kind as were the superhero roleplaying games I mentioned above.

Even so, my friends and I, as if by suggestion, tried to replicate the beats of the 1966 Star Trek series as best we could in play. One of the ways I attempted this – I say "I," because I was almost always the referee – could be seen in my handling of landing parties. In our sessions, as in the television program, characters would sometimes split up, with some of them remaining aboard ship, while others transported down to the planet it was orbiting. The two groups would stay in communication with one another, conveying useful information back in forth, but there were often times when they were out of contact for short or extended periods of time. Occasionally, the lack of communication between ship and landing party was a major plot point, with each group of characters having to deal with a problem in isolation, with only part of the overall picture available to them. 

This set-up makes for good drama and I thought it'd make for good roleplaying too, especially since my friends and I were all fairly committed to bringing our sessions in line with the TV show. In those days, we regularly played in the basement of the home of two brothers. In sessions where one group of characters beamed down to a planet and another stayed in orbit, I'd physically separate them, sending one group upstairs to the living room or kitchen, while leaving the other in the basement. I'd shuttle back and forth between each group, handling their current situation in isolation. When they communicated with each other, I'd allow a player from one group to go to the other and they'd exchange information, as if they were using a communicator. This approach, while it slowed down play and involved a lot of running back and forth on my part, was often quite effective. I can still recall several sessions where the ignorance of one group of characters about the activities of the other led to memorable moments of roleplaying (and humor). Nowadays, I could probably handle this much more easily and effectively with technology unavailable to us in the 1980s. 

Ironically, in my House of Worms campaign, the characters recently found themselves in a situation where I could have made use of a technological solution – and I didn't do so. While exploring a mysterious location, the characters came across a large, pillar-like object with multiple open apertures leading inside. After some experimentation to determine that it was probably safe, several of them entered and all found themselves in a different place. As some of them eventually discovered, the pillar was a device of the Ancients called a superposition enclosure and it was being used to hold an Undying Wizard called Getúkmetèk prisoner. Each of the characters who entered found himself in a separate reality in which he experienced a possible past/present/future where he had achieved some goal he greatly desired. Meanwhile, there were several characters outside the superposition enclosure, none of whom had any idea what was going inside it.

Bear in mind that House of Worms has been, since its inception in 2015, an entirely online game. We use Discord for voice chat and the campaign's server could easily accommodate separate voice channels into which I could separate all the characters so that their players would have no idea what was happening elsewhere. I didn't do this, however, and I'm not entirely sure why. Part of it, I suspect, is that I was simply lazy. Unlike my teenage self, the thought of popping back and forth between voice channels seemed like too much work, even though the end result might have been dramatically effective. Part of it, too, is that I worry about players losing focus while I tended to a player segregated in his own channel. As I have been running it, all the players have the chance to hear what's happening to their comrades, even if their characters do not. That keeps everyone engaged and, more than once, hearing the reactions of the players to things their characters do not know was positively delightful.

Does anyone reading this have any experiences with this sort of thing? Have you ever split up players in this fashion and, if so, how did it turn out? I'm quite curious to know how others have done it.

Rhubarb

Though my series of White Dwarf retrospectives is complete, I continue to examine the advertisements that appeared in the magazines. I do this partly out of pure nostalgia – I enjoy being reminded of important RPG releases from my youth – but I also do it because, as a UK periodical, WD regularly had advertisements I never saw elsewhere. 

A good case in point is one for TSR's Marvel Super Heroes game. The ad consisted of the front page of The Daily Bugle, featuring several headlines and news articles. One of them is entitled "Mayor's Visitors Are Not Cannibals," which I've reproduced below.

What's fascinating about the "story" above is that it contains only a handful of intelligible words, with the rest of its text consisting of "blah," "harrumph," and "rhubarb" written over and over. "Rhubarb," for those who don't know, is the UK equivalent to the American "walla," a word repeated over and over again by extras in order to mimic the murmur of conversation by a crowd. Its appearance here is quite funny to me, since it's being used in written form to fill out the text of an imaginary article in an advertisement rather than as audio filler.

White Dwarf: Issue #80

And so, with issue #80 (August 1986), we come to the end of my retrospective on Games Workshop's White Dwarf. Even so, I'll likely have some concluding thoughts on the entire series next week, since I feel, after so many months of posts on the magazine, there's still a lot to be said about it. This issue features a strong cover illustration that recalls the work of Frank Frazetta – no surprise there, since the artist, Ken Kelly, was the nephew of Frazetta's wife and had the chance to study Frank's works and technique up close and personal.

Paul Cockburn's editorial focuses on a new Reader's Poll included at the end of the issue. The poll is quite lengthy, lengthier than many previous ones, in part, I suspect, because Games Workshop was trying to understand its current readership as it charted its course into the future. After nearly ten calendar years of publication, White Dwarf had changed a great deal, as had Games Workshop itself. It, therefore, makes sense that the company would want to take stock of its readers in order to better serve them.

"Open Box" kicks off with a very positive review of Games Workshop's printing of the third edition of Call of Cthulhu. Normally, I'd have a critical word or two about WD's habit of advertisements dressed up as a reviews, but, in this case, I'll make an exception. The GW hardcover printing of CoC's third edition is indeed an excellent product, one of the best versions of the game ever, in fact. I only wish I still had my copy. Also reviewed are two adventures for FASA's Doctor Who RPG, The Hartlewick Horror and The Legions of Death. The former receives greater praise, primarily because it's less complex and more suitable to referees of all levels of experience. Palladium's The Mechanoids gets a negative review, with the reviewer (Marcus L. Rowland again) suggesting that it'd work better as a war game than as an RPG. Destiny of Kings for AD&D is favored over Swords of the Daimyo (also for AD&D). Realms of Magic for Marvel Super Heroes is treated positively for the most part, though the reviewer (Peter Tamlyn) expresses some dissatisfaction with the added complexity this supplement introduces. He also criticizes the excessive use of the trademark symbol throughout the text, necessitated, no doubt, by Marvel's lawyers. Finally, there's Avalon Hill boardgame, Dark Emperor, by Greg Costikyan, which merits only middling praise.

Nigel Cole's "Combat in Doctor Who" attempts to correct some errors and oversights in FASA's RPG. Meanwhile, "Something Special" by Hugh Tynan introduces ten new special abilities for use by characters in Judge Dredd the Role-Playing Game. "Clouding the Issue" by Chris Barlow takes a look at the various detection spells available in AD&D with an eye toward sorting out the inconsistencies. "Crime Inc." by Graeme Davis presents a system for creating organized crime groups for use with any 20th century RPG. The system takes into account a group's size to give the referee an idea of how many members of various ranks it possesses, along with the extent of its reach into illicit activities. It's nothing fancy, but it looks genuinely useful in fleshing out enemy groups for a wide variety of RPGs. 

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" returns to form by providing capsule reviews of a plethora of books, most of which I've never read, the exception being The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. It's funny: I've rarely been a fan of Langford's columns, but, despite that, I think I'll miss reading them nonetheless. I suppose that's mostly a function of the fact that they've been a fixture of the magazine since issue #39, which grants them an almost-venerable status. On the other hand, I've always liked both "Thrud the Barbarian" and "Gobbledigook" (the latter reduced to half a page in this issue), so it makes sense that I might feel a pang of regret in saying goodbye to them.

"The Reliant" by Thomas M. Price presents an escape craft, complete with deck plans, "for SF role-playing games," though the titular spaceship is presented using terminology and concepts clearly derived from Traveller. "Roleplaying for Everyone" by Peter Tamlyn is a thoughtful essay on the development and expansion of the concept of roleplaying. Tamlyn looks at the evolution of RPG design and how it has facilitated (or impeded) the adoption of the hobby by a large segment of the public. He also examines the growth of solo gamebooks, like Fighting Fantasy, and ponders what impact they, along with the then-new How to Host a Murder games might have. It's a solid piece that's mostly interesting from a historical perspective, since it was written nearly forty years ago, but I found it a worthwhile read nonetheless.

The best thing in this issue, in my opinion, is Graham Staplehurst's adventure "Ancient & Modern." Described as "a scenario for schizophrenic roleplayers," it draws on work of author Brian Lumley, specifically his tales of the primal continent of Theem'hdra, a kind of Conan-meets-the-Cthulhu-Mythos sort of sword-and-sorcery setting. "Ancient & Modern" takes place in two times, the ancient past and the present day, with players portraying two sets of characters using two different game systems, most likely AD&D for the former and Call of Cthulhu for the latter, though the scenario is written to accommodate other possibilities. The outcome of events in Theem'hdra affect those in the 20th century, so there is a direct connection between the two halves of the scenario. I've long wanted to referee a scenario of this sort before, so I was very intrigued by "Ancient & Modern."

Closing out the issue is another installment of "'Eavy Metal," complete with many color photographs of beautifully painted miniature figures. As I'm certain I've said many times before, I genuinely appreciate articles like this, because I've never been very good at painting minis. Seeing what others more skilled than I have done with them is a treat and an education about a side of the hobby with which I have very little experience.

There you have, the final issue of White Dwarf that I'll be reading as part of a series of posts. I do wish that this had been a more remarkable issue than it was, so that it might have weakened my resolve to move on to something else. Alas, it was not and so I now must bid farewell to White Dwarf. For the most part, I enjoyed this trip down memory lane and am glad that I took the time to do it. After a final post next week, in which I attempt to sum up my various thoughts about WD and its place in the larger hobby, I'll move on to another topic. Polyhedron perhaps?

White Dwarf: Issue #79

With issue #79 of White Dwarf (July 1986), I reach the penultimate issue I'll cover in this series. Though I'm glad to have done it – and I hope it's been profitable for those of you reading along – I can't deny that my enthusiasm has been waning for some time now. Sadly, this issue did little to make me regret my decision to end the series with #80, though there are a couple of bright spots – like John Blanche's cover illustration ("Amazonia Gothique"), which I like for reasons I can't fully articulate.

This issue marks the first one featuring Paul Cockburn as editor. His inaugural editorial mentions that there will be still more changes in store for the magazine, though these will "come in bit by bit." Cockburn also notes that Citadel Miniatures would, from this point on, include "a small warning, intended to prevent figures being sold to that part of the public who might actually be harmed by lead content." He elaborates that there had recently been a Citadel ad in a magazine "aimed at a very young audience," which necessitated this warning. Maybe I'm just old and contrarian, but I felt a slight pang of sadness upon reading this. By 1986, the Old Days (and Old Ways) were already fading ...

"Open Box" takes a look at two related Palladium products, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness and its post-apocalyptic supplement, After the Bomb. Both products are positively reviewed, but the reviewer, Marcus L. Rowland, expresses a preference for the "present day setting of the original game," which he feels offers "more opportunities for plot development and diversity." Also reviewed is Secret Wars II for Marvel Super Heroes, which is judged "an awful lot better than Secret Wars I." Never having seen the original, it's not clear to me whether this is faint praise or not. Two Chaosium releases, Black Sword (for Stormbringer) and Terror from the Stars (for Call of Cthulhu) get positive reviews, as does West End's Ghostbusters. Acute Paranoia, a supplement for (naturally) Paranoia earns a more middling appraisal, largely due to its "disappointing" mini-scenarios.

"Where and Back Again" by Graham Staplehurst is one of the aforementioned bright spots of this issue. Dedicated to "Starting a Middle-earth Campaign," the article lays out all the decisions a referee looking to run a RPG campaign set in Tolkien's world must make. Staplehurst covers subjects like "style" (i.e. campaign frame), rules, and even source material. He also raises the question of how closely one might wish to hew to Middle-earth as described by the good professor and the consequences for choosing to deviate from that particular vision. It's a solid, thoughtful article on a topic that has long interested – and vexed – me. 

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" has only rarely been something I've enjoyed and this issue's installment does little to change my mind. More enjoyable (to me anyway) is his second contribution to the issue, an odd little article entitled "Play It Again, Frodo." Ostensibly, Langford's assignment is to demonstrate "how closely role-playing and literature are entwined" in order to help readers convince their "serious" friends that gaming isn't a silly hobby. He attempts to do this through a series of vignettes based around famous books or movies – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Conan, The Lord of the Rings, etc. – where he postulates that events go other (and humorously) than how they do in the originals. The idea here is that roleplaying allows to do things "your way" rather than being bound by the dictates of an omnipotent author. 

"20-20 Vision" by Alex Stewart reviews science fiction and fantasy movies. The bulk of this issue's column is devoted to the film, Highlander, in which "a medieval Scottish warrior with a French accent" is befriended by "Sean Connery's Glaswegian conquistador." Stewart calls the movie "a stylish, raucous and utterly preposterous D&D scenario transplanted bodily into contemporary New York." That's probably the most succinct (and amusing) way I've heard Highlander described and it does a good job, I think, of capturing the essence of its cheesy glory.

"All in the Mind" by Steven Palmer offers an alternate psionics system for use for AD&D. Palmer's system interests me for its relative simplicity – the article is only four pages long, as well as for its more flavorful elements. For example, there's a discussion of the heritability of psionic powers, as well as the inherent connection between twins. Neither of these elements plays a major role in his system, but the fact that they're mentioned at all is in stark contrast to the dreary, tedious treatment of psionics in the Players Handbook. 

"Ghost Jackal Kill" by Graeme Davis is a Call of Cthulhu scenario that's presented as a prequel to The Statue of the Sorcerer, a Games Workshop CoC adventure. The scenario is set in San Francisco and involves not only the Hounds of Tindalos, one my favorite type of Mythos entities. It also features real-world historical figures, specifically the actress Theda Bara and writer Dashiell Hammett. Normally, I tend to be leery of the inclusion of such people in RPG adventures, but, in this case, I think it works, particularly Hammett, who did actually work as a detective for the Pinkertons and drew on those experiences for his fiction. In any case, it's a good, short scenario and another of the issue's stand-outs in my opinion.

"Think About It" by Phil Masters examines the purpose and use of the Intelligence score (or its equivalent) in roleplaying games. Because it's an overview of a large topic, it's necessarily brief in its examination, but it does a good job, I think, of presenting different options and approaches to handling Intelligence in RPGs. "'Eavy Metal" provides tips on converting miniature figures, along with some nice color photographs. 

"Psi-Judges" by Carl Sargent – a name that would feature prominently on the covers of many RPG products throughout the late '80s and into the 1990s – is an expansion of Judge Dredd: The Roleplaying Game focused on, of course, psi-judges. Interestingly, it's equal parts a rules expansion and a roleplaying expansion. There's information on how to play a psi-judge in the game, alongside discussions of game balance and other matters. "Gobbledigook" and "Thrud the Barbarian" are still here, but I can't deny that I miss the presence of "The Travellers." The comic's absence really hits home to me just how much White Dwarf has changed from the days when I read (and enjoyed) it regularly.

One more week!