When Dice Were Made of Flint #6

Thanks to everyone who enjoyed the first five columns last week. From now on, though, I’m shifting to weekly.

In the 1970s and 80s, there was no internet. No blogs, no vlogs, no YouTube, and definitely no e-commerce. Gamers had to buy their rulebooks and modules from actual shops or mail order services, and they had to buy them as physical products on paper.

There were no Facebook groups, Discord servers, subreddits. Even emailing lists and newsgroups (look it up, kids) were far in the future. Instead, we had magazines.

The magazine trade was booming at that time. British shops like W.H. Smith were filled with shelves, crammed with literally hundreds of magazines covering every interest from hot rods to flower arranging. Even so, hobby games were a very niche interest. Like everything else, the magazines had to be purchased from specialist shops. At least, the first one did – my first was issue 8 of White Dwarf – but there was always a mail-in subscription form so you could get further issues by post.

White Dwarf was the only British hobby gaming magazine at the time. Imported copies of Dragon could be obtained for £4.50 – about the cost of five pints of ale in a student bar, or six copies of White Dwarf. Games & Puzzles, available in some mainstream shops, carried a short article on D&D once in a blue moon, but it focused mainly on crosswords, wordsearches, chess, and the like. So until TSR UK’s Imagine magazine appeared in May 1983, White Dwarf was it.

In addition to D&D, White Dwarf covered RuneQuest and Traveller, two other games that Games Workshop first imported then printed under license. Other games were covered, mainly in the review column and through the occasional article or adventure, but these three made up the bulk of the magazine’s content through the late 70s and early 80s, with Call of Cthulhu – also imported by Games Workshop – being added when it was first released in 1981.

After Games Workshop moved to Nottingham and Warhammer began to take over from these games, White Dwarf was accused of becoming a house magazine, but the truth is that it always was: games printed or distributed by Games Workshop always took priority.

Imagine was unabashedly a house magazine. It was a little more expensive at £1.00 per issue, compared to White Dwarf’s cover price of 75p at the time, but almost everything was for AD&D, with occasional forays into BECMI when that series began to appear. More on those in a future column. Other TSR games received some coverage, but not much.

The content in these magazines was mainly written by outside contributors, and it was an appeal for submissions in White Dwarf, some time around 1980 or 1981, that led me to start my freelance writing career. It took me two years to get a piece accepted, and maybe I’ll tell you about some of the things that didn’t.

Next week, though, I’ll cover fanzines. They were a vital part of the scene in the pre-internet days.