White Dwarf #1 Cover Art - Note Beaked Monsters similar Tomb of Horrors Ad

They appear to be summoned creatures. Are they Vrocks?

White Dwarf Weekly #101 Cover

I havent seen many issues of the weekly but it seemed nothing more than a color catalog rather than the wonderful old White Dwarf.

White Dwarf #180 Cover Art By Gerry Grace

Getting near the end of the years of fantastic artwork for WD covers.

White Dwarf #40 Cover Art By Emmanuel

Interesting cover, but not what I was looking for from WD (mainly fantasy stuff).

White Dwarf #338 Cover

A bit more realism in their fantasy art for this cover. I'm a fan of both thre first 100 issues and the early days when WD became just a mouth of Sauron for GW. That early artwork brought me into GW products in a way that the later covers and artwork turns me off. This is a nice bit of  artwork but still doesn't hold a candle to the early covers.

White Dwarf #277 Cover

Found the photo cover very disappointing. I'm not sure I'd like any photo instead of artwork but a take-away from a movie doesn't live up to the old WD stsandard of great covers for me.

White Dwarf #203 - Cover

White Dwarf #202 - Cover

Fntastic cover. The artwork is crowded but epic. There is so much detail and yet it is loud and in your face. The perspective is right on top of you. GW had some amazing artist.

White Dwarf #219 Cover

I've never been fond of the Biker Space Marines. The art is fine, though I like the earlier style of artwork myself from the early 100's. The bikes just make little sense to me even with a bit of science fantasy like 40K.

White Dwarf #18 Fiend Factory - Mandrake People

I was thinking about doing a series of posts on White Dwarf's Fiend Factory when this entry caught my eye. Rather than go back to the first issue with the column I've decided to start here and go back and forth with it till I'm caught up.

The Mandrake People is a creature inspired by one of Thomas Burnett Swann's stories. I'm not familiar with it and it sounds a bit like it may be a short story so I don't know how easy it will be to track down. I haven't read to much Swann. The few I have were short and I have the memory of them being tragic retellings of mythology, but most mythology kind of swings that way.

There are some great ideas here, the viagra babies gave me a chuckle, but the mildly vampiric Mandrake women were an excellent idea, which is why robbing fiction for game ideas is such a good idea.

White Dwarf #18 AD&D Mini-Scenario The Halls of Tizun Thane

The Halls of Tizun Thane by Albie Fiore

This is one of my favorite adventures from White Dwarf. It is recommended for a large party of 1st to 2nd level adventurers and is wildly inappropriate for such low level fodder. Several of the creatures encountered could slaughter the party by themselves, one group of monsters right at the start of the adventure before the players even make it to the halls. The way the scenario is set up it is an almost guarantee that they are going to all get killed unless the DM is in a railroady mood. While there is some slight amusement to be had for a DM in seeing all the PCs die a gruesome death I try to avoid such things without better warning than having an NPC tell the players not to do something that will stir their curiosity. Definitely some changes need to be made, but it is still a great adventure with a huge amount of material stuffed into 6 oversized pages.

White Dwarf #18 Cover Art (Or Lack There Of)

No artwork this issue, but on the death of the magazine I'm told it received total consciousness. Not the worst cover in the world and it does tie-in with the mini-scenario in this issue but disappointing none-the-less. This was arguably the worst Star Trek movie ever made but most of them were so bad that graduations of badness are hard to assign.  

White Dwarf #17 - My Life as a Werebear

By Lew Pulsipher

"I traveled the road many times, sat on the porch, played the games, been the dog, everything. I was even the scarecrow for a while."

After running AD&D for years I think all DMs have gone down this path and let their players run monsters. This is an early incarnation of that idea with some interesting twists such as a player running a Blink Dog pack or the example of the Lammasu as a player race/class, The general thrust of the article is that any 'monster' could be run by players and the special abilities of certain monsters only gained through experience which for some would also equate to age.

The examples provided are a good mix of monster types with the Stone Giant shown as perhaps the easiest to convert to a leveled race/class and the Werebear and Blink Dog pack more involved. I'd add more racial abilities to the Stone Giant and deal with the Werebear as a normal character with a specific class that is simply afflicted with lycanthropy. 

White Dwarf #17 Cover Art

Cover Art By Angus McKie

White Dwarf is hitting the Big Time with bit of artwork. I love this artwork and had many of Angus McKie's Sci-Fi illustrations in a number of books from the early 80's. He did work for Heavy Metal magazine and a segment of the movie. He was also a colorist for comics (a waste of the man's talents as he own artwork is fantastic). This is one of my favorite pieces of his artwork.

White Dwarf #16 Molten Magic

These are mainly sci-fi miniatures though there are a few fantasy (I believe the 3 from Archive Miniatures are all fantasy as well as 3 from Asgard and 1 from Citadel). A fairy poor selection but I would have liked to have had the Battlestar Galatica bootlegs from Q.T. Models. That Cylon raider looks to be a pretty good copy.

White Dwarf #16 - Paths of the Lil - Gamma World Scenario

By James Ward

This is an excellent write-up on a mutant race and their habitat. It isn't what I'd call a scenario as there isn't any kind of plot or story connected with it that I came across. I haven't played Gamma World in decades and I'm not into sci-fi RPGs at the moment so my main interest would be converting this to 1e AD&D which isn't too difficult.

I disagree with a few minor elements of the write-up. The Lil glow so the best time for them to be out and about would be in the brightest part of the day not the darkest. They are very small so I don't see how they would use a laser-rifle except as something set as a stationary device. This may be what is intended but the description read to me as if they were dragging the rifle into the brambles and dragging it back out again when dealing with intruders.

One main thing is the paths themselves. The Lil are 20cm tall. Why would they make paths that were 10meters wide? I could see them making traps to lure big people or creatures in but otherwise all their paths should be sized for them not for regular humans.

White Dwarf #16 Boot Hill Encounters

An undetailed listing but it can give a Boot Hill DM a starting place for encounters or encounter ideas. The tiny print in White Dwarf and the oversize pages always allowed them to pack in the information, which was a good thing considering how thin these early issues were.

White Dwarf #16 Cover Art

Cover Art By Les Edwards

Les Edwards is a Gawd among Games Workshop artists. If you are familiar with the golden era of White Dwarf or the Heroquest game you will know his work well. I like this cover but it really is not him at his best. The brown background, the minimal detail, certain rather prominent symbolism... but there are a number of cool things about this cover. The snake animating from the warriors shield immediately make me want to add it to my game as a magic item and with a bit of cut and paste I can show it to my players as it attacks them. But this is just the start of a Bee-u-tea-full friendship with Les Edwards work.

White Dwarf #15 Cover Art

Cover Art By Eddie Jones

Where's Little Joe when you need him? This is another bit of peculiar work by Eddie Jones who seemed to have made more of a reputation for Sci-Fi art. It doesn't help that it isn't particularly good or that it seems distinctly odd for the kind of fantasy/sci-fi RPG magazine White Dwarf was at this time. There was undoubtedly some kind of Horror or Pulp RPG out by '79 but nothing I remember playing or even being aware of at the time. It could be that the concept of D&D Werewolf was unknown to Eddie and instead he created a B-Movie Werewolf instead. Not one of my favorite covers (or artists) from the early days of White Dwarf.

White Dwarf #14 Gary Gygax Interview

Until the last year or so I was very interested in the original Greyhawk campaign and slightly interested in the squabbles between the people creating their own campaign rules and writing in 'zines about them and TSR/Gygax. The genesis of the rift between TSR, Gygax, and the creative DMs who were altering the game (or photocopying rulebooks) is pretty straight-forward. Money. This interview briefly touches on some of the other reasons for the rift (creative control) but it mainly contains a bit of biography on Gygax, TSR and the creation of D&D. An interesting read.