White Dwarf Wednesday #22

We close out 1980 and start 1981 with more subtle changes to White Dwarf.  We are getting to the tiem where so many of us started that these magazines now elicit memories of games past.

Let's start with this awesome cover.  Warrior riding a giant beetle while the Death Star-ish thing rises on the horizon. Really, does anything scream 80s Sci-Fi/Fantasy more?  Sure I suppose if he had a scantily clad barbarian queen/space princess on his side.  But this is good.

Page 1, we get what I think is the first full page ad for the Fantasy Trip.  I could be wrong.   All in all five pages of ads. Our editorial this issue is the discussion of what is the best Fantasy role-playing system.   Ian Livingstone is asking what the readers think is the best and why among D&D, C&S, RuneQuest, The Fantasy Trip and others.

Pictures from GamesDay '80 cover the next couple of pages and the 1980 awards results.

Mervyn Lemon gives us some advice on how to build 3-D dungeons.  A good one for today's world to be honest.

Rick D. Stuart writes "Robe and Blaster" upgrading Aristocracy in Traveller. Page and a half.

Treasure Chest is up next. It's a mixed bag.  Crystal Fruit (magical crystals full of fruit juice) and the Assissin's Quill (brass knuckles with crossbow bolts), Stonerings (turns you to stone till taken off), the Stones of Li-Chao (all sorts of cures), Tenser's Shield (floating disc turned on it's side) and others.

Open Box gets a little facelift and some new games.  Charles Vasey gives Mythology from Yaquinto Games a glowing 9/10.  Likewise John Lambsehd gives Metagaming's Stellar Conquest a 9/10.  Not doing as well are Runquest's Bestiary (Andy Slack gives it a 6/10) and Task Force Games' Asteroid Zero-Four (also a 6/10 from Alestrair Brown).

Lew Pulsipher pulls out all the stops and gives us an article about evil priests, "Black Priests" that also includes art of a nude woman about to be sacrificed.  Certainly not something we would see to today in any gaming magazine.   Odd, when I first saw this pic I thought her right arm had been cut off.  It is just how the blood spill is.

The class is, well, evil.  The have abilities of clerics, some Monster Summoning ala magic-users and even some thief and assassin talents.  They use cleric spells and cleric level titles only with the word "Black" added to them so Black Curate and so on.  Their experience point per level is more inline with magic-users.  We got a few "evil" classes around this time. Anti-Paladins, the revised Witch and Death Master from Dragon.  Not sure what this trend was about really.  I am guessing it was because the "normal" classes were very safe and played to be good.

Barney Sloane presents "The Search for the Temple of the Golden Spire" an AD&D min-module for 7 2nd-4th level characters.   It was used as a competition module at Dragonmeet III.  It is four pages long, but no scoring for competition.  Just good little adventure.

Letters concerns itself with alignments, again showing us there are no new arguments.

Star Base, the Sci-fi regular feature.  This is one of the first reader submissions, this time from S.L.A McIntyre on Port Facilities for Traveller.  And to understand how much Traveller was the only game in town,  the game's name is not even mentioned till 3/4 of the article.

Fiend Factory is back and again sporting the new design. This time we get some heavy hitters.  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are undead vassals of Orcus.  They remind me of Skeleton Warriors under the control of a Death Knight, and in fact that is probably how they were played, save that these warrirors have 12 HD and the leader is 16 HD.  We also get Ungoliant the (Demonic) Queen of the Spiders.  Yes we do.  She is more powerful than Lolth, but not as much personality.   There is the Capricorn (in case you forgot how close the 70s still were) which is an aquatic goat of some power and good.  Actually the concept of the monster is so interesting that it would be worth reviving it as a powerful celestial beast.  Might need to come back to this one.  We end the article with the Crystal Golem.  Not a bad little creature. Described as the only golem that an Illusionist can build.

Lew Pulsipher is back with a treatise on character stats in AD&D and what the numbers mean.  It is one of the first "Simulation" articles I ever recalled reading back in the day; and that is that AD&D is not a Simulation game.  But he does refer to it as a wargame.

We get News of the newest game company, Steve Jackson Games.  Chaosium is coming out with a boxed set for Runequest.  More news on their new Elric game. TSR releases A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity (one fo the first modules I went through in AD&D). And plenty of Traveller news with Games Workshop getting the ok to produce official Traveller material in the UK.

Classifieds and more ads follow.

A very solid issue that highlights the growth WD was experiencing at the time.  The switch in my mind will be complete over the next year or so.  D&D/AD&D and Traveller still reign supreme among the games.  That's fits my experiences as well. I bought Traveller because of the ads in Dragon and White Dwarf.

New Games!

Is there anything better than a new game?  Sure! Lots of new games.

Here is what I picked up over my lunch break.  Cause new games are fun.

B/X Companion.  The Book We Never Got.  You can now take your Basic/Expert characters past 14th level.

Deadlands: Hell on Earth Reloaded. I don't know a lot about this game, but it has a good pedigree, and it is Savage Worlds, so it can't be all bad. ;)

Primeval RPG Core Rulebook. I loved this show when it was on.  A bit like Torchwood, a bit of Doctor Who.  All British.  Well Cubicle 7 has finally got it out to us and it is great.  This game uses the same game system as Doctor Who (which is very nice) so you can have all your Time Travel shenanigans in one place.  This book will sit nice on the shelf next to my Doctor Who game.

Extreme Edge Volume Two Collection. Ok, so. I like the Hot Chicks RPG.  It's silly fun and it doesn't take itself seriously at all.  Plus I know Dakkar and he is a good guy.

Supers Unleashed. A simple supers game that has a lot of potential.  The layout is beyond simple into the sparse category and the artwork is the cover only.  So think of it as a minimalist game. It has a price to match.

More detailed reviews soon.

B/X Companion in PDF

One of the things I like most about the OSR are the products that don't give me things I already have, but things I have always wanted or never knew I needed.

B/X Companion is one of those products. (You can read all I have said about it in the past.)

Well it is now finally out as a PDF. Please stop by DriveThruRPG or RPGNow to get your copy.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/103412/B-X-Companion?affiliate_id=10748&

So if you have been waiting for this one, her is your chance.

Gods of the New Game

I still don't have a name yet for my new Realms based 4e game, but things are coming together really nice.

Now back when I said I didn't know anything about the Realms. Well that wasn't true.  I don't know much about the lands or the peoples.  I have no idea where Elminster is from, but I could pick him out in a police line up.   But one thing I do know about is the gods of the Realms.
Back when I was working on my first Witch netbook I picked up what was at that time my only Realms specific book, Faiths & Avatars.  I wanted some more info on various gods, various 2nd ed Kits and the human deities. Later I picked up Powers & Pantheons and Demihuman Deities.

So Gods, I know.
I have been playing around with the plots lines of the Spellplague and the events in HPE modules.
And I have decided that I have killed of a number of the Gods.

Here is who is living and who is dead and why.

Bahamut has taken on Tyr's and Torm's portfolios. Torm was killed by Asmodeus. Is now a greater power.

Bane - Dead. Why? can't stand him.  Plus I need Asmodeus as a greater threat. He killed Bane and absorbed all his power and portfolio.  Part of his Reckoning of Hell.  Asmodeus is still keeping Tharizdun chained up deep in Hell.

Kelemvor - Was killed by Orcus in the demon lord's attempt to regain his godhood.  In my games Orcus was not a human that rose up through the ranks of demon-hood, but rather he was Death Primordial/Titan that had the powers of a god.  He had been denounced and banished to the Abyss.  He is searching for an artifact to give him ultimate power.

Mystra is dead, as per the book.  But she won't stay that way for long.

The Raven Queen - from the D&D core and not the Realms I know.  She is alive, but she has not come into her power at all.  In fact she is currently in the guise of a teenage girl ala Death from the Endless.  She is the vessel of Kelemvor's power.

Sehanine, Selûne and Shar are much as they are in the books. However in my world there is also a heresy and a cult dedicated to the "Triune Goddess" or the "Triple Moon Goddess" who believe that all three deities are merely part of the same greater goddess.  They are respectively the Maiden, Mother and Crone.
The mother, Selûne,  is pregnant with the infant Mystra.   Since Kelemvor is dead, Shar is pulling double duties till the young Raven Queen is ready.

Others will appear (or die) as needed.

The Road to Winterhaven

The first session of my kids new D&D4 group happened yesterday and fun was had by all.

The road to Winterhaven has it's issues, but yesterday the band of heroes-to-be gathered together to defeat the kobold ambush.  Present were Dracnil, a Dragonborn Paladin/Warlord, Swift aka "The King" a Bard, Hunter a Ranger, Glock the Halfling theirf, Calinndin an Elandrin Swordmage, Drac of the North a Mul Barbarian and Nevar Bloodbrow a Dwarven Cleric.

Some time was spent on getting characters made and the first encounter.  There was also an impromptu skill challenge when one of their fellow passengers was missing after the combat.  Even the natural 20 from the Ranger could find no trace of her.

So far they have the mystery of the missing girl, a symbol they are sure represents some cult, and three of the seven have been hired to investigate the rest of the kobolds.

I am going to add in some bits of the Winterhaven I was working on back in 2003.  It was conceived as a town where witches roamed free.  The D&D4/Nentir Vale Winterhaven is different, but it sits on a nexus point of the Material World, the Shadowfell and the Feywild.   So there is more here than meets the eye.

I thought the kids did really well yesterday, especially the two that had never played before (though I guess their mom was a big player of Werewolf back in college).  In fact I think the extra XP award for best role playing has to go to one of the new kids (who is the youngest) and the next oldest (though he has been playing a lot longer).  In fact it was Drac of the North (one of the youngest) that got extra experience points for being the first to notice the missing girl.

Given how yesterday went the combat was long, but not much different than my 3.x game.  That will change I know.  Also as the kids (and I for that matter) become more accustomed to the rules things will move along better.

Next session is not for another 2 weeks, so progress will be a bit slow, but I think it will be fine.

No name for the group yet, I am going to let the kids choose.

Tomorrow it Begins!

Tomorrow I start my* new D&D group.  

So far where is what we know.

• We are playing D&D 4th Edition with the plan of going from 1st to 30th level
• I will have *7* players aged 8 to 12 1/2
• We are playing in the Forgotten Realms as it is in the 4th Ed books.
• We are going to do the H-P-E Modules starting with "The Keep On the Shadowfell"

Two of the kids are mine. Three are the sons of my friend Greg and two are friends of my oldest son.  The two new kids have never played anything before.

Greg's kids have played a lot of games, mine have played a variety of D&D games, most notably our 3.x Dragon Slayers game.

We are going with the Orcus wants to become the God of Death plot line.  The differences will be that it's Kelemvor that has died due to the Spellplauge and the Raven Queen is only a Godling, her power untapped. This makes her a more likely target to Orcus than the mature Raven Queen.  I'll admit there are some things from Amber Benson's "Death's Daughter" that I want to try out too.   I am still doing many of the ideas from this post back in 2010, except these characters are not the descendants of the 3.x characters and I am going to smash a world into this one.  

Honestly I think it is going to be great.  4e has it's detractors, but we still had fun with it.  Plus my son plays in a Castles & Crusades game with 3 of the other kids listed above and my two boys are still finishing up their 3.x game where I used all the old 1st Ed modules.  We get to do all sorts of schools here.

(*really my son's)

LinkWithin

Well I have been trying out LinkWithin on my blog for the 3rd time (or maybe the 4th) and this time it seems to work much better.

In earlier versions of the Other Side layout I had written large parts of my own CSS. The new Blogger layout now gives me the advanced features I wanted without needing to muck around with coding.  That is nice since my own coding also has disabled some of the nicer comments features.  It also was not very compatible with LinkWithin.

Well now it seems to work better.  I am not seeing how the algorithm works; for example how a post on the Zatanna and Hex Girls will also direct you to Dracula, Shakespeare, and D&D Basic.  But I guess in my world that makes sense.

The one thing I am noticing that my hits for older pages are way up.  That is a good thing.  I have over 1200 posts here now, some of that older stuff has to be good too!

Do you like the LinkWithin widget?  Are you finding any hidden treasures, not just here, but any blog that uses it?