Dr Simon Reads...

Issue 50: Livingstone The Editor   For the 50 th Issue, our old reliable chum Phil Masters is in charge of a “special edition” Fiend Factory that provides stats for the various characters that have come to grace the pages of White Dwarf. These are semi-serious at best, with dual stats for Dungeons and Dragons and RuneQuest. Could you use these in a game? In theory, yes. A few of them –Griselda and Wolfhead, Ugbash and Agaroth – would easily make for regular NPCs with no gimmick attached. There was also a boxed set of minis that came was produced to go with this, which I owned but sold many, many, years ago.   First up is the magazine’s mascot, The White Dwarf himself. Kind of a tricky individual to produce stats for, since the White Dwarf is only ever a little icon, and has never, in 50 issues of the magazine, expressed any personality (unlike, say, The Mighty Tharg of 2000AD). And so Phil attempts to encapsulate both a typical dwarf, plus the ethos of the mag...

Issue 49 The Giant Moth In case anyone was wondering why I decided to end this at issue 50, rather than go all the way through the Fiend Factories, here’s as good an example as any. This month’s theme is insect monsters. Pretty underwhelming, if you ask me, and emblematic of a creative well running dry. Also, by this stage in the RPG hobby, interest is shifting away from such dungeon-crawl elements as monsters, traps and treasure, and moving towards story-telling gaming (often at the expense of player freedom, but that’s another story). For all that, though, there are still some interesting monster ideas on offer.   A familiar face, Roger E Moore , returns, to give us the Skullcatcher , a kind of spider creature that likes to pull your head off. It requires pretty much its own set of rules in order to accommodate this kind of targeted attack, but in this case it’s not too clunky. I’d say, however, that the Darkmantle occupies this particular niche in modern iterations of th...

  Issue 48: Servitor Demons   Starting from issue 44, there is a lengthy series on demons and demonists, predominantly for RuneQuest. I assume that this is for the non-Gloranthan “Questworld” setting that GW were trying to push, but it’s got some great stuff in it. Part One gives the basic mechanics of demon summoning for RuneQuest, Part Two gives statistics for the lesser demons, and Part Three describes the demon lords. The demonic creatures are deliciously warped and different, perhaps most akin to something from Michael Moorcock. I particularly like the demon lord Bakshuro the Screamer, who lives in a dimension of pain that only he can endure. Last issue (47), our old pal Phil Masters came up with a Demonist class for D&D, and in this issue there are D&D stats for the lesser demons, put together by Liz Fletcher . In some cases her statistics are quite sparse, and I’ve had to go back to the RQ stats by Dave Morris to flesh them out. Also in this issue is a ...