Move out of the way Rogue Trader, here comes Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition. Its weird to think that these days and generally since 1995 there was a 2 year wait between relaunching one 40k and then relaunching Warhammer Fantasy but back in 1987 we get 2 months. Without going too much into Warhammer Fantasy 3rd edition it simplified certain rules in a good way and spawned 5 years of Chaos releases.
This month in Critical Mass, the collected volume of Watchmen, Terry Pratchetts Mort and a fantasy anthology edited by GRR Martin. You can consider this a good month.
Thrudd and Gobbledigook offer their usual level of entertainment, usually I would try and sum up what happened in Gobbledigook but they seem to have cut the panels up and stitched them back together in a random order this month. I can’t tell if the result makes it better or worse.
Here is an interesting one, an article on running a Bar Room Brawl event using Warhammer Fantasy Role Play rules for between 5 and 10 players, its got a map and cut out tokens for weapons lying around. Where there ever roleplay groups with 10 players playing at the same time. It sounds incredibly complicated.
Next rules for Wardancers in Fantasy and the Slann who would later become the Lizardmen and even later be called Seraphon. At this point the models just looked weird.
The final part of the Judge Dredd adventure was published, you would have got tremendous value out of this magazine if you played Judge Dredd back then, more content was produced around it in the last months than in 40k and Fantasy combined and they had new editions released.
There is a Runequest adventure called Land of the Ninja followed by an Illuminations section from Iain McCaig, him from all the Fighting Fantasy book covers, it’s pretty interesting.
The first ever Chapter Approved article comes next, with rules from the Space Marine Jetbike or Jet-Cycle and the history of the Dark Angels chapter.
The models didn’t look great but were overshadowed by the Christmas Marines in the picture next to them which must be the first models designed, sculpted and painted while drunk.
Eavy metal tackle the dreaded subject of assembling a large heavy multi part miniature like a dragon. Again, this was before the internet was widely used so probably a lifesaver for modellers back then, the article actually looks pretty modern and would go on to get rave reviews in the letters sections of the following months.
The second part to the Stormbringer adventure last issue and we’re onto the letters page. Apparently a lot of people back then also thought badly of the Sabbat flexi disk and there were mixed feelings about replacing the board game review column with more of a preview article written by the games designer.
This is of interest to you in 2016 if:
- You wanted a look at the background that would eventually become Space Marine canon.
- You like Judge Dredd.
- Iain McCaig
- Dragons
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