Straight away the role playing games and board game reviews are out the window and it’s a full colour page on 40k Rogue Trader featuring a really nice diorama with space marines and Orks inside what looks like a space hulk followed by a preview of it by Rick “Big Daddy” Priestley. Other releases are the Chaos Marauder card game and first edition Deathzone for Blood Bowl. I won’t make too much of a fuss about Blood Bowl until it gets its third edition in 1994. But suffice to say if 4th edition gets released later this year I will be bringing a retro review out at the same time.
This month Thrud extorts money from and old man to fuel his drinking habit, it’s rather hard to look at.
There is an interesting WFRP scenario that goes through a night at a tavern with 5 interconnecting plots. It has times for each event and if the adventurers are in the correct area at the correct time then certain events will play out. Without wanting to be a philistine it’s rather complicated and sounds like a nightmare to keep track of everything. But again with these type of articles it’s fun to read.
Next Gobbledigook goes to the tower of Saruman and gets dunked in a toilet by Nosferatu to wake up in the far future staking at the bulging metal crotch of a space marine who he vaporises with a peashooter. This actually happened and more worryingly it is part 1 of 2.
After a 14 page Judge Dredd adventure we get another article on having a second job while in an RPG, this time it’s rather more sensibly in Call of Cthulhu which would make sense putting a shopkeeper, conman and an actor together to fight otherworldly horrors.
After a article on the Judge Dredd Blockmania board game we get the very first actual rules article for 40k, the battle for Jadeberry hill, which follows on from the Battle at the Farm outlined in the rulebook. The names sadly needed more work at this time. The Crimson Fists space marines fighting against Snagrod the Arch Arsonist (Ok, there were fairly cool). Unfortunately it hinged on you a) having a games master and b) not telling the Ork player that an area of the battlefield is mined. I think it’s the first and last time a GM is mentioned for 40k in White Dwarf, they will slowly be removed from the game during the rules building process.
Next Eavy Metal get their hands on the multi part plastic Space Marine sprue. I might have been overly critical of this last issue but I should clarify that at the time this was a revolution. A cheap, easy to paint, easy to model, light kit that could be assembled multiple ways is something that Games Workshop would not rediscover until around 1998, nearly 9 years later. This was virtually untouched ground so the team was using markings from books on NATO to detail the shoulder pads of these models at the time.
Next up there is another article that touches on Roman Colosseums before going into detail on how to incorporate them into a fantasy Runequest setting. Articles like this give the magazine a weighty grown up feel as it’s almost like reading a history textbook at times. Insert Spartacus joke here.
Chainsaws and pit traps in blood bowl and the readers mail which is all about the high quality role playing articles that were published and we’re done again. I feel I should sum up these reviews so I’m going to start adding the following TLDR section on.
This is of interest to you in 2016 if:
- You’ve read an old copy of Rogue Trader and you would like to read a bit of blurb about it from its designer.
- You like interesting role playing ideas.
- You really like Judge Dredd.
- You want to feel a grown up reading about actual real life history.
In conclusion Games Workshop hadn’t really gotten good at making 40k look interesting enough at this point, everything from the rules to the paint schemes to the background material looks like a work in progress add this state of affairs would continue for the next 2-3 years before it really started ramping up.
