The dragon on the cover is nice. It's the same cover as Dungeonquest by Peter Jones.
The editorial is a blast against nostalgia and favors looking towards the new. It is using the metaphor of rock bands and "Classic oldies" stations, but the message is clear. White Dwarf is changing and if you don't like that, well you can always listen to your dad's 8-Tracks.
Marginalia covers the Judge Dredd Companion. Of course given the 80s hair and giant shoulder pads it could have also been clothing catalog. It was the 80s after all.
An interesting bit, a couple of pages from Games Workshop mail-order store.
The next 50 pages are devoted to Warhmmer. Not that this is a bad thing, but I have nothing to contribute to it.
An article for Call of Cthulhu is next. Three cases for 1920s Call of Cthulhu. Seems like a weak effort to me.
The Madcap Laughs is next with Ruins in Madness for Stormbringer. At nine pages is also fairly long. It is nice and detailed.
We end with Letters and ads including a Dungeonquest one.
We all knew this was coming. Sure there are more pages, but less and less of the things I am interested and outside the focus of this blog. I was just talking with my son on Tuesday about Warhammer (because if you don't talk to your kids about Warhammer then who will?) and how I never got into it. We were at our FLGS and I showed him all the stuff you can buy for it and the new weekly WD. It dawned on me then and there that WH is younger man's game. Not that you need to be younger than me to play it, but you need a lot of time. Frankly I don't have that anymore. So I am popping in my 8-tracks. Get off my lawn.
But at this stage in WD "Warhammer" can still cover many things - there's Warhammer Fantasy Battles (the wargame) and then there's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (the RPG), then various Warhammer 40K stuff which at this point is a wargame.
ReplyDeleteWarhammer FRP is no more time-hungry than any other RPG, has no great requirement for vast armies of miniatures and is actually a pretty good system for the time.
However, even WHFRP articles have less utility than the old D&D ones for much the same reason as many of the games at this period do - they are much more setting-specific. D&D is such a hodge-podge of influences you can pretty much cherry pick to create your own setting, and bring in bits from all over. Ditto with Traveller and SF stuff. However it's much harder when you've got specific settings such the Old World (WHFRP), Glorantha (RQ), Mega-City One (JD), Alpha Complex (Paranoia) etc. Also a lot of the WD stuff is quite broken - the elven wardancers of the last issue are quite notorious.
Eh... there was a point when I started this :) As I recall there's still a bit of non-WH stuff until you get to issue 100, then even the WH roleplay stuff peters out to about issue 107 or so. I don't recall much about these issues, only #99 for personal reasons.