When Dice Were Made of Flint #10

White Dwarf was bimonthly in the early 1980s, and through letters and readers’ polls, demand was building for it to go monthly. The usual response was that the main problem was a lack of material. I had been homebrewing AD&D material for a while, so I typed up a couple of articles, sent them off, and waited for fame and fortune to follow.

It didn’t.

What did follow was a diplomatically-worded letter from editor Jamie Thomson, explaining why my submissions weren’t fit for publication. I wrote some more, and sent them in. Another rejection letter. And so it went on for almost two years.

In my mind, it became a game in itself. Every month I sent in two more pieces. Sometimes they were rejected outright (but always with reasons, those being more courteous times), but increasingly the response was along the lines of “perhaps we can use this in the future.”

In White Dwarf 26 (Aug-Sept 1981), Ian Livingstone’s editorial put out a call for new writers to help the magazine go monthly, but that did not happen until issue 32 (August 1982) – which, coincidentally, contained my first published article. Seeing my name in print, and receiving a small cheque that went a very long way at student bar prices, set me on my way.

I’ll say more about my years as a starting freelancer in a future column, but I promised to write about some of the articles that never saw print. It’s been a long, long time, and I don’t remember all of them, but here are a few.

One of my first adventures was “The Tomb of Tuth-ankh-khefer,” with a map stolen from an archaeological report on one of the minor tombs from the Valley of the Kings and populated with undead, golems, and other decay-proof monsters as well as traps. I designed it as a party-killer, and it took a while for my gaming group to forgive me after the playtest. Jamie rightly rejected it as too deadly and not much fun.

Another article was a pure rip-off of the skills rules from Bushido. Frustrated by the limited nature of the AD&D rules in non-combat situations, I had characters roll for their parents’ mundane profession, which gave them skills like pottery and carpentry. Again, my players weren’t impressed, as our games were overwhelmingly dungeon-based and pottery was not that useful.

When Call of Cthulhu first appeared, I was not familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos, preferring Hammer and Universal horror. This led me to write a short series of articles under the somewhat arrogant title “Who Needs Nyarlathotep?” I researched ghosts, witches, and demonology as far back as the university library allowed, writing up skills, spells, and other rules. Part of this series was eventually published, in White Dwarf 67 and 68, but the rest has never seen the light of day.

Despite these false starts, I became a regular contributor to White Dwarf, and then to Imagine, gaining a reputation for quality and reliability that resulted in an offer to join Games Workshop and develop Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, some four years after my first byline.