Dr Simon Reads...

Issue 9: The Whipper White Dwarf Issue 9’s Fiend Factory starts with Cricky Hitchcock’s Svart , a blue-skinned small humanoid creature, described as “ mediary between goblins and kobolds ”. I don’t know if that’s meant to mean that they are related to both, which seems an odd thing since the kobolds are reptilian creatures, or if they are meant to be a bit tougher than a kobold but weaker than a goblin. Either way, they seem pretty pointless as they don’t really offer anything that you couldn’t use a goblin or a kobold for. Don Turnbull reckons that they were inspired by the svart-alfar of the Wierdstone of Brisingamen, which itself only really uses elements of Norse folklore. But my recollection of the book is that the “ maggot-brood of Ymir ”, as they get colourfully called, could be rendered in game mechanics as simple goblins. The svarts make an appearance in Albie Fiore’s excellent dungeon adventure, The Lichway, also published in this issue (suggesting that Albie had a litt...

Dhammapada Six: The Wise I Can’t Do The Dishes, I’m Busy Being Wise. “ Should one find a man who points out faults and who reproves, let him follow such a wise and sagacious person as one would a guide to hidden treasure. It is always better, and never worse, to cultivate such an association.” Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Dhammapada). In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Dhammapda, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology. For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/3IbwtwE For the online Dhammapade that I use, see here https://bit.ly/3IgCiJr And now: Dhammapada Six: The Wise This chapter is less about what makes a person accounted “wise” in Buddhism (although it does touch on that), but is more about how those with wisdom interact with the world, and how the world should interact with them. Much like the Biblical Wisdom books, the Dhammapada urges the re...

Issue 8 The Tween In this issue’s Fiend Factory, there is an unofficial theme where the monsters all have a gimmick of some kind, often one that messes with a part of adventurers by manipulating them, fiddling with their game mechanics, and other fun things. The Stinwicodech by Eamon Bloomfield is a bipedal furry creature with a froglike face and a prehensile tongue. Each time that the stinwicodech hits a creature with its tongue it alternately raises a random ability score by 1 point, and lowers one by 1d6 (which in 1 st Ed D&D was quite a major deal). The name comes, rather cheesily, from the first two letters of the ability scores. I mean, it’s okay, but I see no rationale behind why this should happen. An undead shadow draining Strength makes sense, but this is really just metagaming.   Last issue I complained about the “artistic” headings for the monsters, and the mess for the Chaoticus Symbioticus is a case in point. By the time it went into the Fiend Folio h...

  Issue 7: Necrophidius   By Issue 7, White Dwarf is now a year old, and this is its first colour cover. Hurrah.   Fiend Factory has a plethora of creatures in this issue, and so with no further ado: First up is Gary Ames’ Rover , as seen in The Prisoner; a bouncy blob-ball thing that traps victims inside it and suffocates them. I mean, it is what it is, I guess. They were daft in The Prisoner except for a few occasions where they showed a kind of creepy intelligence by lurking aound corners. And talking of daft, Neville White’s Living Wall is described as being a relative of the gelatinous cube. The description is sometimes oddly in the past tense “ its attack was a paralising [sic] effect ” which makes me assume that Don simply plonked Neville’s writing straight into the column without, you know, editing . Why not just use a gelatinous cube? Or a mimic? Seems redundant to me to have a new creature for every bit of dungeon architecture. This made it into the Fie...