Here we go, showtime, it’s Rogue Trader in the front cover. Even Blood Royal gets 2 pages so let’s see if they can sell me on it. In the bafflingly titled “Awesome Lies” editorial section they even mention that Games Workshop are going to have a retail presence in 1988, man-children across the land rejoice.
Skipping through Critical Mass, a Space Marine themed Thrud we get to the obligatory AD&D adventure and a interesting article on magic in AD&D and we get to the first mention of Warhammer 40,000, it’s a full colour section with graphics, artwork and a explanation of what it is including a write up of some Space Wolves killing of a mutant population, a picture of the old plastic land raider supported by 10 of the very first space marine models and on the next page the plastic beaky marine squad.
You can pick 30, yes thirty, of those guys up for the modern day equivalent of £20 and the rules for an extra £30. So that’s 66 pence each per marine. Not bad value except that they look horrible. However at the time everything looked horrible so we can give them that.
Continuing the magazines theme of miniatures they advertise the first ever miniatures painting awards The Golden Demon Awards (presumably they didn’t need to put the disclaimer for last months article up for this), the entrants are pretty crazy, usually featuring elaborately sculpted bases or ridiculously large banners which to be fair a hard to pull off even today.
Next is a role play adventure that can take place in any Call of Cthulu, AD&D or WFRP setting as long as the GM provides the finer points like combat and characters. This goes to prove how very similar the three systems are at this point. There is a nice looking map to hand out to the players though which reminds me of what i spend so much time doing in Firewatch.
Finally we get a Blood Royal article on adding religion and after months of waiting it’s 2 pages long and assumes you’ve already brought and played it. Even worse there are still no pictures of the actual contents of the game or an idea of how it plays. Oh dear. I think this is the last time it’s mentioned in White Dwarf.
Next up its Eavy Metal and it’s a really good article on how to paint, it goes into detail of what to do and why, which is really appreciated because at this time miniatures had only just begun to be heavily featured and no one had a clue of how to paint them up. The only weird bit it where they attempt to illustrate the stages of painting by sketching out a picture of what the miniature should look like. Not sure why they didn’t just take photographs at different stages but maybe the limited colour sections were all used in advertising new models.
This is followed by rules for normal people in judge dredd and some illustrations which aren’t particularly great. The issue is capped off with a essay / inspiration guide for using magical familiars in role playing.
The issue was pretty interesting, it’s a bit hard to pin down the focus of the magazine at the moment as its publishing a lot of role playing articles as well as trying to promote Warhammer 40,000 which at this time has a lot of role playing elements in it. The advert count seemed to be down as well, slightly over 20 this time. Mind you you could count the whole article on 40k as one giant advert.
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