White Dwarf

What happened

In 1975 three young Londoners, Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson and John Peake, founded Games Workshop, at first to make wooden board games and then, far more profitably, to import the new American roleplaying games. To reach their customers Livingstone and Jackson ran a newsletter, Owl and Weasel, which ran for 25 issues from February 1975. In mid-1977 it grew up. White Dwarf #1, dated June/July 1977, was a 20-page bimonthly on glossy paper with a two-color cover and a speculative print run of 4,000.

The new magazine had room for depth: reviews, long articles and complete scenarios. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s it concentrated on what it called the "big three" roleplaying games, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Chaosium's RuneQuest and the science-fiction game Traveller, all distributed in Britain through Games Workshop's shops. It also covered Call of Cthulhu, board games and fiction, and it had a looser, cheekier voice than its American counterpart, Dragon.

Why it mattered

White Dwarf gave British roleplaying its own identity. Its short scenarios, designed to be finished in a single evening, suited players with limited time and space. Regular features built a following: the satirical comic Thrud the Barbarian, Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" book reviews, and a stable of writers such as Phil Masters and Marcus L. Rowland who went on to careers in game design.

Its most famous contribution to D&D came from readers. The "Fiend Factory" column, edited by Don Turnbull, printed monsters sent in by fans. Games Workshop, then licensed to publish D&D material in Britain, planned to collect the best of them as a second monster book; after a business dispute delayed it, TSR itself published the Fiend Folio in August 1981. Most of its creatures were British, and many came from the column's first issues. The githyanki, astral pirates designed by a young Charles Stross (later a noted science-fiction novelist), made the cover and became D&D staples; the grell was another Fiend Factory creature that crossed over. The magazine was also where D&D's British critics spoke: Don Turnbull reviewed the new Dungeon Masters Guide in issue #16 at the end of 1979.

Legacy

The mid-1980s brought a change of direction. As Games Workshop built its own games, above all Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983) and its Citadel miniatures, White Dwarf narrowed its coverage. The last Dungeons & Dragons article appeared in issue 93, and by issue 102 the transformation was complete: the magazine now served Games Workshop's own lines, with painting guides, new army rules and the monthly "battle reports" that became a signature feature. A bearded dwarf, Grombrindal, "the White Dwarf," became a rules character in the Warhammer dwarf army and a recurring cover figure.

Livingstone and Jackson, meanwhile, had co-created the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, launched in 1982, which carried the same brand of British dungeon adventure to a far larger audience. White Dwarf celebrated its 300th issue in December 2004, went weekly in 2014 and returned to monthly publication in 2016. It is still published today, a promotional title rather than a hobby-wide forum, but its first decade remains one of the richest archives of early roleplaying.