The Early UK RPG Scene: A history through White Dwarf polls

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I speculate whether the reason for the decline in C&S (which this seems to be the start of rather than the end) is partially explained by its advocates switching in part to Runequest. While both very different, I think they both appealed to the crowd looking for something more "realistic" than D&D.

I think you are likely correct. Let's consider that in 1981:

- AD&D's three core books are out, Holmes Basic has had an honourable tour of service, Moldvay Basic is the new hotness. Though AD&D is somewhat arcane and, to the tastes of many, over-crunchy (did anyone use full combat system as written, arcane initiatve process and weapon speeds and all?), nonetheless it's now far, far easier to get into D&D than it was when the OD&D booklets were out. The level of clarity of presentation you need to hit to be able to say that your game is as easy or easier to understand as D&D just went up.

- Runequest 2nd has been out for some years, there's a Games Workshop printing of it in the UK (I don't think they ever did such a thing for Chivalry & Sorcery, if they had it in stock it was as an import). So not only is Runequest in the competition, it also has a leg up when it comes to Games Workshop's audience, because the company will obviously be pushing something it's printing in-house just a tad more than it does the competition.

- Chivalry & Sorcery is still on its first edition - its 2nd edition won't be out until 1983. That means that anyone who wants to play C&S must deal with the heinously awful presentation of the book, with the tiny, tiny text due to all the pages being shrunk down and printed 4 to a side. By comparison, the Runequest 2nd Edition core rules are about as nice a presentation as any fantasy system of this vintage got in this era.

- If you are looking to non-D&D fantasy RPGs because yu find the default setting of D&D dull, there aren't any alternate campaign settings out which you are excited about (I think Greyhawk is out but Greyhawk is literally Default D&D: the Game World), Runequest has the advantage here because it has a distinctive setting, Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition has an odd hodge-podge of Tolkien and the medieval period which might go deeper on the historical accuracy than D&D, but on a casual skim it's certainly going to look a lot like the same general sort of deal.

- If you are dissatisfied with the D&D mechanics and you want something which is a bit more polished, Runequest also has the advantage. C&S1 is very crunchy, but very tricky to get to grips with. It has mechanics which look a lot like classes and levels. Runequest 2nd is still crunchy, but not outrageously so, and slays a vast array of D&D sacred cows (no classes! skills go up gradually rather than in sudden level jumps! everyone can acquire magic!).

I think Chivalry & Sorcery managed to retain a kernel of a fandom in the UK after this - the current publisher's British, after all. But I can never remember a time when the C&S fandom was more visible and active than the Runequest fandom, and I would be willing to bet that this has held true at least as far back as this poll.
 
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If you are dissatisfied with the D&D mechanics and you want something which is a bit more polished, Runequest also has the advantage. C&S1 is very crunchy, but very tricky to get to grips with. It has mechanics which look a lot like classes and levels. Runequest 2nd is still crunchy, but not outrageously so, and slays a vast array of D&D sacred cows (no classes! skills go up gradually rather than in sudden level jumps! everyone can acquire magic!).
I just learned both recently and definitely C&S 1E is far more difficult to memorise than Runequest 2E. Also true of their most recent editions, i.e. C&S 5E and RQG.
 
Thanks for your recollections and welcome to The Pub!

I think your explanation for the demise of the big wargame companies is spot on and the two factors are related.

I came into the various hobbies around 1985 and light SPI board wargames like Sorceror and The Creature That Ate Sheboygan were a major part of my gaming diet, along with games from the less well remembered Dwarfstar.

But while it's an extreme example, Campaign for North Africa is a sign of a company going through its self indulgent phase; the wargame equivalent of Rick Wakeman's King Arthur on Ice. And even with less out there games, I do suspect that many people decided high levels of complexity were better handled by a computer.

Be interesting to see what happens to wargaming now though. I'm involved in megagaming (which is at least wargaming adjacent) and we've seen an increasing number of younger players turning up. Whether that will see a leap into wargames or not, it seems too early to say.
I'll admit to a U.S.-biased perspective, but I think the decline of hex-and-chit wargaming has a simpler explanation--the failure of S.P.I. as a company, which was (by insider accounts) mainly the result of mismanagement and especially mishandling of pricing and marketing. Redmond Simonson, the company's Creative Director (and much more) covered this in a GEnie post back in 1988, and Greg Costikyan in more depth in his article S.P.I. Died for Your Sins. If Costikyan is right--and I see no reason to doubt him--it is remarkable that S.P.I. was actually losing money on every capsule game (like The Creature that Ate Sheboygan) sold. By his account, S.P.I.'s dominance of the hex-and-chit wargame market was also fairly stunning:
In 1982, SPI was the largest wargame publisher in the world, not only in terms of number of titles produced, but in terms of dollar volume as well. Oh, Avalon Hill was a larger company, but much of Avalon Hill's sales came from sports games and its 'general interest' line. SPI was solely responsible for 60-70% of all the wargames sold in the world.

In 1982, the 30,000 subscribers of Strategy & Tactics, SPI's flagship magazine, were the most avid wargame enthusiasts on the globe. More than 50% of them, per SPI's own feedback, owned 100 or more wargames; most of them bought a dozen or more games every year, not counting the games they received as subscribers to the magazine. SPI estimated that perhaps 250,000 people, in the whole of North America, had ever bought a wargame; and the 30,000 subscribers to S&T bought an enormously disproportionate number of the games sold.
When S.P.I. folded and was acquired by T.S.R. in 1982, the behemoth behind hex-and-chit simply disappeared. This was too early for computers to have had much to do with the hobby's decline--how many people even had personal computers then? Over-complex games may have had something to do with it, but as Costikyan points out, there were lots of simpler games available as well.
 
Runequest 2nd has been out for some years, there's a Games Workshop printing of it in the UK (I don't think they ever did such a thing for Chivalry & Sorcery, if they had it in stock it was as an import). So not only is Runequest in the competition, it also has a leg up when it comes to Games Workshop's audience, because the company will obviously be pushing something it's printing in-house just a tad more than it does the competition.
That's the case. FGU do have a smallish but dedicated following and I think that persists. At some point in the future we'll see Scott Bizar fly over as a guest of honour for Games Day. Realistically, he wouldn't have been able to justify the expense without a local fanbase to meet.
- If you are dissatisfied with the D&D mechanics and you want something which is a bit more polished, Runequest also has the advantage. C&S1 is very crunchy, but very tricky to get to grips with. It has mechanics which look a lot like classes and levels. Runequest 2nd is still crunchy, but not outrageously so, and slays a vast array of D&D sacred cows (no classes! skills go up gradually rather than in sudden level jumps! everyone can acquire magic!).
Definitely my experience. I came across Runequest around 10/11 years old and we took to it.

Now a significant part of that was that I was taught it. For several years on my birthday, in an early example of paid GMing, my mum paid for a local university student to come and run a game for me and my friends. (Not only were his games really good, but obviously the fact we had a "grown up" GM made us very excited.

But we did play it on our own. I'm not going to pretend that it was sophisticated or that we got all the nuances and appeal of the setting. Mostly what I recall doing was using the random encounters table to roll up monsters to fight. But we were still able to handle the combat fine.

I think it's fair to say I would have found C&S completely opaque at that age. (Hell, I still find that with Space Opera).
I think Chivalry & Sorcery managed to retain a kernel of a fandom in the UK after this - the current publisher's British, after all. But I can never remember a time when the C&S fandom was more visible and active than the Runequest fandom, and I would be willing to bet that this has held true at least as far back as this poll.
A small but persistent fanbase can do a lot to keep a game going. We're still pretty much in that situation with En Garde! which also has a British publisher now.
 
1979 was a year when I was writing for White Dwarf, Military Modelling and my own Perfidious Albion: I was everwhere, but it was still a surprise to win that Award. It came just after I'd moved to London to join a City firm so my free time was about to shrink to nothing. The various hobbies were all closely connected with most gamers having more than one genre to their portfolio, as noted we'd all go to Games Day (in the Horticultural Hall I think) because there was bound to be something of interest. I remember a Workshop Christmas party in Hammersmith where the whole crew turned up, this was before the move to Park Royal and before the collapse of a number of US wargame companies (often blamed on RPGs, but more likely (a) computers and (b) overly big games)
Welcome to the pub. I definitely remember going to the Horticultural hall Games Days, and was a gamer in every available way - D&D, Runequest, Kingmaker, Squad Leader and miniatures.
 
C&S had a pretty rabid fanbase, The Loyal order of Chivalry and Sorcery, for a long time. I think third edition caused some fracturing but I could be wrong. I really only came in with Third Edition and played it a fair bit but I got into Rolemaster a bit later and liked it quite a bit better. I've read C&S 1e and I'm not quite sure why people find it so opaque or badly organized. It's not very far from D&D at its roots. It does seem to strike a particular desire for greater authenticity and a more medieval tone. It's a child of the SCA as is Runequest though they strike very different attitudes. I often think Galloway's Fantasy Wargaming is more a reaction to C&S than it is to Tunnels and Trolls though the author does call out both games in the text.
 
When S.P.I. folded and was acquired by T.S.R. in 1982, the behemoth behind hex-and-chit simply disappeared. This was too early for computers to have had much to do with the hobby's decline--how many people even had personal computers then? Over-complex games may have had something to do with it, but as Costikyan points out, there were lots of simpler games available as well.
In Jon Peterson's Game Wizards (his recent account of the business history of TSR in the pre-Lorraine Williams years), he talks about the death of SPI post-acquisition by TSR may well have been a genuinely unintended consequence on TSR's part: the idea being that they went into that loan arrangement with SPI on the basis of a preliminary understanding of SPI's finances which turned out to be wildly overoptimistic.

Once the loan happened and TSR got, among other things, some voting proxies among SPI's shareholders and got sight of the accounts (which was part of the deal), they took a look at the books, then discovered that SPI's status was way worse than they assumed (presumably because the aforementioned mismanagement meant that the company was vastly less profitable than it really should have been). At which point they decide it's a lost cause, activate the clause on the loan, and boom, SPI dead.

C&S had a pretty rabid fanbase, The Loyal order of Chivalry and Sorcery, for a long time. I think third edition caused some fracturing but I could be wrong. I really only came in with Third Edition and played it a fair bit but I got into Rolemaster a bit later and liked it quite a bit better. I've read C&S 1e and I'm not quite sure why people find it so opaque or badly organized. It's not very far from D&D at its roots. It does seem to strike a particular desire for greater authenticity and a more medieval tone. It's a child of the SCA as is Runequest though they strike very different attitudes. I often think Galloway's Fantasy Wargaming is more a reaction to C&S than it is to Tunnels and Trolls though the author does call out both games in the text.
It's a comparative thing. Yes, C&S 1E isn't totally opaque, you can figure it out if you work through it systematically (...and if you have a magnifying glass, or a copy of the reformatted PDF). But Runequest 2E, by the standards of 1970s RPGs, is really very nicely organised and explained; it, Classic Traveller, and Holmes Basic really set the bar at the time for clarity in RPG presentation. So because C&S was more opaque than Runequest - enough that Runequest had the clear advantage - that meant the "path of least resistance" tended to lead to Runequest, not C&S, unless you had a C&S group right there to teach you and no RQ group.

I think part of C&S 1E's reputation for being opaque comes from the fact that it seems to be very much based on a very particular set of assumptions on how a group of people will run roleplaying campaigns - ie, Ed and Wilf's home groups and their friends - but, as is often the case with RPGs of this vintage, the local assumptions were not actually as universally understood as the authors assumed they were, so it feels like you are reading an advanced manual for a very interesting sort of hybrid RPG-wargame-SCA mashup without much of a clear picture on how this is supposed to work in practice. Clearly people came to their own conclusions and figured things out and came up with their own models of playing it, just as they did with OD&D, but Chaosium I think had the edge in terms of getting across "this is what you do with all this". It helped that the 2E box came with the Apple Lane module as part of the package.
 
A small but persistent fanbase can do a lot to keep a game going. We're still pretty much in that situation with En Garde! which also has a British publisher now.
Of course, arguably the British Runequest fanbase is the best example of this because a group formed from their ranks became Chaosium.

Step 1: Be Reaching Moon Megacorp, major force in British RQ fanzines. Make friends with Greg Stafford.
Step 2: Become Moon Design, republish old RQ supplements in compilations, prove to Greg that you can do business as well as fandom.
Step 3: Greg and Sandy Petersen undertake an epic Heroquest to wrest Charlie Krank away from the big flashing control panel at Chaosium HQ before he sends the entire thing into a meltdown, summon Moon Design to become the new ruling brain of Chaosium.
Step 4: Sandy steps away from Chaosium to focus on his own endeavours. Greg dies. Congratulations: you are now Chaosium.
 
Re Kingmaker. The Philmar version was sold in a Monopoly style box not a classic Avlon Hill bookcase box and was sold through non-wargaming shops. This meant that it got a much wider reach than other similar games of the period. At least 2 of my friends in the early/mid 80's had Kingmaker when they had no other hobby wargames.

A modern COIN equivalent to Kingmaker could be a wonderful thing.
 
Mention of C&S brings back lots of memories of crunchy campaigns in the early Eighties. My brother had emigrated to Canada, met ED and Wilf and gamed with them by then. I got 1e as a birthday or Xmas gift and played the heck out of it. He wrote some stuff for the 2e Sourcebooks but later dropped out of the whole gaming thing. I wrote material for 3e and ran a pb email campaign set on the Welsh Marches for several years in the late Nineties. I've been only peripherally involved in the latest 5e version but still support it for nostalgia reasons.
 
I just learned both recently and definitely C&S 1E is far more difficult to memorise than Runequest 2E. Also true of their most recent editions, i.e. C&S 5E and RQG.
Why did you learn C&S 1e, if you don't mind my asking? It's hard to believe there are campaigns of it still running.
I've read C&S 1e and I'm not quite sure why people find it so opaque or badly organized. It's not very far from D&D at its roots. It does seem to strike a particular desire for greater authenticity and a more medieval tone. It's a child of the SCA as is Runequest though they strike very different attitudes.
In some ways C&S was like D&D, but I think some of its reputation for impenetrability stemmed from its requirement for a good deal of calculation, particularly in character generation. All of this was fairly simple arithmetic, but there was quite a bit of it, much more than D&D or Runequest (or Traveller or TFT, come to that). IIRC at the time we joked that C&S was D&D for people with calculators (since nobody had home computers then).
 
Why did you learn C&S 1e, if you don't mind my asking? It's hard to believe there are campaigns of it still running.
I've learned C&S 5E to run the Japanese supplement for a Sengoku Jidai game and I like to see where a ruleset came from and what changed over the editions.
 
Re Kingmaker. The Philmar version was sold in a Monopoly style box not a classic Avlon Hill bookcase box and was sold through non-wargaming shops. This meant that it got a much wider reach than other similar games of the period. At least 2 of my friends in the early/mid 80's had Kingmaker when they had no other hobby wargames.

A modern COIN equivalent to Kingmaker could be a wonderful thing.
That matches my experience. I've run into several people who were into nerdy things but weren't wargamers who were into Kingmaker. It had a decent sized fan base among non-gamers, though no where near the extent of Diplomacy.
 
That matches my experience. I've run into several people who were into nerdy things but weren't wargamers who were into Kingmaker. It had a decent sized fan base among non-gamers, though no where near the extent of Diplomacy.
The same guys (a family of 5 brothers) who I first played D&D were also my first experience of Kingmaker, which was great fun and didn't feel overtly 'wargamey'.
They were vicious Diplomacy players as well.
 
Next up is Games Day 81 (in White Dwarf 28). This took place on 26th September 1981. This makes for a useful cross reference as it's only a few months after the White Dwarf reader's poll.

BEST GAME (Any Type)

Ist - Dungeons & Dragons

2nd - Traveller

3rd - Runequest


BEST WARGAME

1st - Diplomacy

2nd - Kingmaker

3rd - Squad Leader


BEST SF/F GAME

1st - Dungeons & Dragons

2nd - Traveller

3rd -- Runequest
Very few changes here, although it's interesting to note that the ranking for "best game" and "best SF/F game" are identical. By this point Games Day is definitely an RPG convention first and foremost.

BEST ABSTRACT GAME
Ist - Rubik's Cube
2nd - Othello
3rd - Black Box

The abstract category always seems notably fluid and static compared to the others. I suspect this may be because of only being able to vote for proprietary games, otherwise Chess and Go would clean up every year.


BEST FAMILY GAME
I st - Monopoly
2nd - Cosmic Encounter
3rd - Risk

BEST TABLETOP RULES (Any Period)
Ist - Starfleet Battles
2nd - WRG Modern
3rd - Spacefarers

While the stalwart grogs who strongly resisted the incursion of non historical wargames into their hobby are mostly mocked now, this suggests they may have had a point. SF wargames (and by extension RPGs) probably were a threat to the hobby they loved.

BEST ELECTRONIC GAME
Ist - Battlezone
2nd -- Asteroids
3rd - Galaxian

BEST NEW GAME
1st - Ace of Aces
2nd --Valley of the Four WInds
3rd - Warlock
Ace of Aces is genuinely pretty innovative. Each player has a booklet with a drawing of the first person view from their cockpit. After they've both chosen a manuever they cross reference that to find a new page, which shows the results. I'm not sure if this was the first two player gamebook (as they'd later come to be known) but it's definitely an early contender. Valley of the Four Winds is an entry level wargame where the forces of good fight against an undead army. Warlock is a game of wizards chucking spells at each other. All of these are games I know and I rate them highly. It is telling that only Ace of Aces is a non Games Workshop game.
BEST GAMES PUBLISHER
I st - TSR Hobbies
2nd - GDW
3rd - Games Workshop
A real shift here as the big wargame publishers (SPI and Avalon Hill) fall off the list entirely. Also the first sign we've had that GW is going to be a contender able to compete with the big American names.
BEST GAMES INVENTOR
1st - Gary Gygax
2nd -Greg Stafford
3rd - Marc Miller
All well deserved obviously and the first sign that Greg Stafford now has name recognition in the UK. Notably, all of these designers designed games published by Games Workshop (in the case of TSR that obviously changed). I really don't think you can overstate the importance of GW to what games made it in the early British scene. Even with Dungeons and Dragons, it was obviously big enough to remain that way, but I suspect the end of the deal with GW helped its competitors get a footing.

BEST WARGAMES MAGAZINE

Ist - Military Modelling
2nd - Fire and Movement
3rd - Strategy and Tactics
BEST SF/F MAGAZINE

Ist - White Dwarf
2nd - Dragon
3rd -- The Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society

BEST GAMES FANZINE

Ist -- The Beholder
2nd - - Dragon Lords
3rd - The Storm Lord
New entry Dragon Lords has some big names, Ian Marsh, Mike Lewis and Marc Gascoigne. All apart from Mike Lewis (I think) were to work for Games Workshop. According to Grognard Files it's irreverent nature got it "the reputation of the Private Eye of RPGs". Gygax was apparently impressed as well. Grognard Files podcast here - https://thegrognardfiles.com/2017/07/15/episode-14-part-1-rpg-fanzines-with-ian-marsh/

BEST GAMES PERSONALITY
1st - Don Turnbull
2nd -- Ian Livingstone
3rd -- Charles Vasey

YANKEES GO HOME! GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!

Ahem, sorry. But the Brits do seem to have had a fit of national pride, voting entirely for local lads this year.

TSR UK were formed last year which I think may partially explain the lack of Gary Gygax this year; Don Turnbull picked up both his previous votes and most of the Gygax voters.

Ian Livingstone appears for the first time and you'll always find Steve Jackson in the kitchen at parties.

And of course Mister Vasey makes another appearance.
 
Mention of Chivalry and Sorcery made me look it up. It was familiar but I can't remember if we played it way back when. Tied with D&D/AD&D in the early days were my own home brewed efforts (some of which worked pretty good and others were just crap) and everything else was a hard sell to the group.

The main thing that stands out is mention of 5 point font. Five point. Five. This site only goes down to 9 as far as I can tell.

That made me groan. I mean, Mythras is a blur to me so C&S would be like:

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Anyway this walk down memory lane reminded me of something I saw the other day. God knows how this has survived since 1983 but it's what Games Workshop were selling at the time. Possibly later on from the time period you are talking about but just gives some idea of what was on offer in the UK in 1983 (I'd been playing RPGs a couple of years by this point and wanted to spread my gaming time amongst new games but was pretty skint most of the time as Mum & Dad didn't have much money and 3 kids+mortgage etc to cover first). I remember delivering free newspapers to homes in the driving rain and getting a pay packet that made me wonder why I bothered for hours of my life getting sodden wet through, then saved and scrimped until I could buy a new game.

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This was tucked away in one of the boxes of crap® from the ever giving lock up of despair™. Blame my Hoarding +1, +3 vs spouse who insist on 'selling all that crap you drag around' ©

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Of course, Games Workshop would want to punt it's own stuff first:

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An introduction to RPGs then pages of D&D and AD&D...

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There are more pages but this site won't let me post more than 20 images. If there's any interest I can dust off the scanner and put them in a PDF. The rest of the booklet covers what was available at the time (quick list in the order they appear: D&D, AD&D, Runequest, Traveller, Tunnels & Trolls, The Fantasy Trip, DragonQuest, Champions, Behind Enemy Lines, Man, Myth & Magic, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Boot Hill, Gangbusters, The Morrow Project, Killer, En Garde!, Swordbearer, Timeship, Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes, Espionage, Pirates and Plunder, Supervillains and more.)

The biggest games were given the most pages (in bold above) and the Wargames section was split between Games Designers Workshop and Avalon Hill.

I see a few games I didn't own from that list above but not too many. Our little group pretty much tried everything at one time or another in the early to mid 80s, much to the consternation of my mother who complained we were sat inside whilst the sun was belting down outside.

Good times, what I can remember of them.
 
I've at least played (if not owned) all of those board games apart from Apocalypse and Doctor Who and it reminds me)

a) how good early GW boardgames frequently were. (Including Calamity! By Andrew Lloyd Webber and about insurance. And yet, somehow, a great beer and crisps game).

b) how I really wish we could have a OSR for boardgames. In a broad sense; people rediscovering what made old boardgames so fun and both reissues and new "old style" games. Not in the narrow sense; nobody needs 50 retroclones of Quirks, good though the game is.

c) of all the Talisman clones (Relic, Talisman: Batman Supervillains, Talisman: Harry Potter, Talisman, um, Kingdom Hearts) perhaps the most fascinatingly insane is the unofficial The Quest for Shangri La which is Talisman as reimagined by the Insane Clown Posse. Glory at the blurb yourselves:

Who can say what rewards or tortures await us when the curtain of death is parted? Those who listen to the message of the Dark Carnival through the songs and lives of the Insane Clown Posse know of one such destination for the pure of heart: Shangri-La, with its fountains of FAYGO!!!!, music blasting over green fields, and fine hotties everywhere, in an endless existence free of care, drama, and death.


Shangri-La, paradise though it may be, is not beyond the reach of evil. A sinister shadow has fallen over its once radiant light - evidence of an evil beyond imagining!


Get ready to battle your way through Detroit, the Nethervoid, and the Dark Carnival as you travel the board on an epic Quest to cross The Bridge to Shangri-La. Only there can you solve the mystery by revealing one of the ten different ending cards!

I actually would love a copy of this but it only appears on the market rarely and when it does the price is stupidly high.
 
I can only imagine that copious amounts of hallucinogenic drugs were consumed during the creation of that game.

elf-bong.gif


My friend had that version of Talisman (Pretty sure it was that one) with every expansion going. Many games were started but few were ever finished.

I think another had the Judge Dredd boardgame but we never got round to playing it. I was a big fan of 2000AD from whenever it came out but actual play of the later RPG was a bit flat. There's only so much fun a bunch of Chaotic Neutral early teens can have upholding the law before it all turns to, well, shit really.
 
Why did you learn C&S 1e, if you don't mind my asking? It's hard to believe there are campaigns of it still running.

In some ways C&S was like D&D, but I think some of its reputation for impenetrability stemmed from its requirement for a good deal of calculation, particularly in character generation. All of this was fairly simple arithmetic, but there was quite a bit of it, much more than D&D or Runequest (or Traveller or TFT, come to that). IIRC at the time we joked that C&S was D&D for people with calculators (since nobody had home computers then).
One of the unique things about 1e C&S (I am not aware of another game that did this, but open to correction) was a d20 roll for alignment, with clear benefits to extreme rolls.

Not often copied either was the horoscope, with random bonuses (or maluses) for particular professions and classes.

Not knowingly outchromed 1e C&S.
 
And we're back! This time with Games Day 85 in White Dwarf 35.

It's notable that we're starting to see some real Games Workshop promotion by this point, with the three boardgame tournaments being Judge Dredd, Apocalypse and Battlecars, all GW properties. The two RPG tournaments are AD&D and Runequest. While GW do have an interest in the latter property, I still find it interesting that it's the "second game" by this point.

Selfishly, White Dwarf entirely fails to take future RPG historians into account and only gives us the winners for each award this year rather than the top 3.

Best RPG - D&D

Which edition isn't specified, but I'd guess it's mostly AD&D at this point.

Best SF Boardgame - Cosmic Encounter

Best Fantasy Boardgame - Dragon Pass

Best Historical Boardgame - Squad Leader

Best Abstract Game - Othello

Best Family Game - Monopoly

Best Puzzle - Rubik's Cube

Best Electronic Game - Atari Pacman

Best Tabletop Rules - WRG Ancients

A few interesting things to note here.

Charles Vasey's recollection that the whole hobby (RPGs, boardgames, wargames) were very much a unified whole seems to be borne out.

At this stage, it's notable how little GW are dominating the boardgame market and how they're happy to give this kind of publicity to other publishers.

I'm somewhat surprised by the Electronic Game winner not being ZX Spectrum. I'm wondering if electronic had a more specific meaning? Maybe the handheld single game machines I remember from my childhood?

Best SF/F Scenario - Griffin Mountain

Interesting. While Runequest's popularity is obviously helped by the fact it's GW published, it does seem to have a genuine fanbase outside of that.

No surprises in the magazine/fanzine categories so I'll skip those.

Best New Game - Stormbringer

Very significant indeed. This isn't the GW edition (two years too early for that), it's the Chaosium edition. It does seem that the GW/Chaosium partnership was greatly beneficial to both parties. My impression at least is that while Chaosium had its fans in the US, it was a much bigger deal in the UK.

Best Games Personality - Ian Livingstone

Best Games Inventor - Gary Gygax

Poor old Steve "always the bridesmaid never the bride" Jackson.
 
Definitely agree that Chaosium games , especially Runequest & CoC were a big deal in the UK in the 80's. I remember my gaming group being somewhat snobbish about D&D, proclaiming the realism and greater level of roleplay (we felt were) offered by Runequest/Glorantha. But we were teenage Grammar school boys , so I am going to cut my teenage self some slack on that.
 
Next up, we have the results of the White Dwarf 45 (September 1983) reader's poll in White Dwarf 49 (January 1984).

This had 700 respondents, which gives us an interesting idea of the size of the RPG scene at the time. (Very unscientific, but instinct says times that by around 10 which means 7000 or so gamers). Again, I'm not going to do all the questions, just those I think tell us something interesting. I'm going to try a different format this time with screenshots.

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A lot of this is what you'd expect. In particular, the request for more AD&D and the counterposted call for more coverage of niche RPGs is standard pretty much throughout. It's interesting that there's a specific call for more character classes here, not monsters etc. The other thing I think is notable is that there is a narrative that Bryan Ansell/Citadel Miniatures forced more miniature coverage into WD for commercial reasons. But while this may have been an element, there's also reader demand for the shift.

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To go through these in turn.

"The Dungeon Architect" is an extended piece by Roger Musson on how to construct a good dungeon. It's worth noting that he's not that interested in realism (and makes that clear) instead focusing on what makes a dungeon interesting for the players.

"Irilian" is really interesting. It's a six part series that includes both an AD&D scenario (the only scenario to make the cut here) but also a large amount of setting information on the city of Irilian. So it doubles as a campaign setting.

"The Town Planner" is naturally about how to construct and run games in villages, towns and cities. It's noticable that both this and "Dungeon Architect" are entirely system neutral

"Dealing with Demons" tackles demons in Runequest, including demonology.

"The Necromancer" is a AD&D character class and the source of much controversy at the time. Don Turnbull went so far as to describe it as "most distasteful". This naturally kicks off a letters war on the issue of evil characters in AD&D.

"Monster Have Feelings Too" is an article on roleplaying your monsters as intelligent creatures rather than just something for the PCs to slaughter. A bit old hat now, but a lot more exciting potentially at the time.

Overall, a few observations. WD readers are an esoteric lot in terms of what they like, but tend towards more design focused articles over new rules (apart from the necromancer). WD really doesn't give a shit about the Satanic Panic and quite likes its "edgy" nature. Even by this early on, cities were a very popular place for campaigns.

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Interesting split here, with a majority preferring multi systems. I've freely admitted to a bias on this issue before but I suspect part of the reason for the split is the divide between "people interested in RPGS, including AD&D" and "people only interested in AD&D who would rather not see support for any other game".

This is quite a big poll so it'll take several days to do properly!
 
'Dealing with Demons' and the associated scenario 'The lone and level sands' were some of my favourite things that WD ever did. Ran the scenario (placed it in the Gloranthan Wastes and made the main demon an avatar of Cacodemon) and it was a blast.
 
'Dealing with Demons' and the associated scenario 'The lone and level sands' were some of my favourite things that WD ever did. Ran the scenario (placed it in the Gloranthan Wastes and made the main demon an avatar of Cacodemon) and it was a blast.
I placed The Lone and Level Sands in The Dead Place (at the time, there really wasn't much on the Wastelands).
 
Enjoying the discussion on the early UK games scene. A few thoughts from another old RPG-er:

The early voting on favourite games may also have been influenced by the dearth of certain types of games. There just weren't that many quality games in the scifi/fantasy mould, for example, and what you may have been exposed to was limited by what you or your gaming friends had. In other words you voted for your preferences among what you knew. Kingmaker and Sorceror's Cave had a pretty good circulation, so not surprised to see them up there.

For some reason I still have the Games Day programmes from 1977 - the last one that was held at Seymour Hall before it moved to the Royal Horticultural Hall, I think - through 1984, and the explosion in exhibitors and size of the event is notable. There were many more options available, and gamers were more in contact with each other.

The comments about the early crossover in gaming interests is also a good observation. My early exposure was through the Military Modeling and Wargaming Club at my high school and so I played tabletop minis (mostly Napoleonics), wargames and family games like Escape from Colditz. We would try more or less anything though, and when Tunnels and Trolls and D&D arrived we engaged with those with great enthusiasm.

Attached is a scan from the programme for Dragonmeet 2, a convention that GW hosted in the summer of 79 (in Chelsea, I think) and which included the ballot form for the upcoming Games Day 79 awards. As you can see, I never sent my form in but my votes track pretty well with the direction of the results you're discussing, although with more of a wargames bias. Note on the voting instructions that "votes are not restricted to British products only; American products are OK."

Edited to add that I clearly didn't know what an abstract game was, and I'm rather horrified that I voted Monopoly as a top family game.

On a more general but related note, some years ago I made a lot more observations on my experience in the early role playing days in this list on Boardgamegeek: I've seen things you *people* wouldn't believe.
 

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Enjoying the discussion on the early UK games scene. A few thoughts from another old RPG-er:

The early voting on favourite games may also have been influenced by the dearth of certain types of games. There just weren't that many quality games in the scifi/fantasy mould, for example, and what you may have been exposed to was limited by what you or your gaming friends had. In other words you voted for your preferences among what you knew. Kingmaker and Sorceror's Cave had a pretty good circulation, so not surprised to see them up there.

For some reason I still have the Games Day programmes from 1977 - the last one that was held at Seymour Hall before it moved to the Royal Horticultural Hall, I think - through 1984, and the explosion in exhibitors and size of the event is notable. There were many more options available, and gamers were more in contact with each other.

The comments about the early crossover in gaming interests is also a good observation. My early exposure was through the Military Modeling and Wargaming Club at my high school and so I played tabletop minis (mostly Napoleonics), wargames and family games like Escape from Colditz. We would try more or less anything though, and when Tunnels and Trolls and D&D arrived we engaged with those with great enthusiasm.

Attached is a scan from the programme for Dragonmeet 2, a convention that GW hosted in the summer of 79 (in Chelsea, I think) and which included the ballot form for the upcoming Games Day 79 awards. As you can see, I never sent my form in but my votes track pretty well with the direction of the results you're discussing, although with more of a wargames bias. Note on the voting instructions that "votes are not restricted to British products only; American products are OK."

Edited to add that I clearly didn't know what an abstract game was, and I'm rather horrified that I voted Monopoly as a top gaming game.

On a more general but related note, some years ago I made a lot more observations on my experience in the early role playing days in this list on Boardgamegeek: I've seen things you *people* wouldn't believe.
Thanks for sharing that, Andy, and welcome to the Pub.
 
The point about boardgames raises an interesting thought.

One reason I think that RPGs were able to take hold (and this is likely the case in the US as well) is the nature of family boardgaming at the time.

You have games like Escape from Colditz, Totopoly and Buccaneer seeing family play. Those are all games with a strong sense of adventure (avoiding the word narrative so our more sensitive members don't get sidetracked ;). Not only that, but it's notable that the idea that kid's games should be short isn't a thing yet. Average seems to be around an hour and a half but Escape from Colditz is a much longer four hours.

Then you get the family games that were an attempt to recreate the feel of D&D like Sorcerer's Cave, Deathmaze, Talisman etc. which also saw play in some families. (They did in mine at least, including with my sister who wasn't interested in playing actual RPGs but was happy to spend a Sunday afternoon chanting "toad" at her brothers).

Dungeon is an interesting historical case because my understanding is that it was released after D&D but designed before it and was listed as an influence by Gygax.

You also have the family wargames like Risk and later Axis and Allies and the Milton Bradley Gamemaster series in general.

Those are all games with a strong sense of adventure (avoiding the word narrative so our more sensitive members don't get sidetracked ;). Not only that, but it's notable that the idea that kid's games should be short isn't a thing yet. Average seems to be around an hour and a half but Escape from Colditz is a much longer four hours. I also think it's valid to say that there's a higher tolerance for rules complexity at this point.

I speculate that's why we've seen a massive jump upwards in the average age of starting RPGers since the 80s. Escape from Colditz - Talisman - D&D seems an obvious gaming progression in a way that we don't necessarily have now. Whatever their good points, I think that games like Ticket to Ride or Settlers of Catan are more likely to drive people in the opposite direction as far as playstyle are concerned.

What this means is that for an actual genuine non D&D based old school revival you'd need to go back before people's first RPG and have an old school family boardgames revival first. Unfortunately the sheer financial barrier to entry there makes that unlikely. At the very least you'd need the clout to get games into the book shops and ideally you'd need them in the supermarkets. (Who do stock boardgames, they're just all Cluedo and variants on Monopoly).
 
And thanks for that Andy. As one of the second wave "munchkins" I do find the shift that seems to have taken place in a decade really interesting. (Including the fact that my group came to Warhammer through rpgs, rather than coming to rpgs via wargames).
 
Next up is Games Day 81 (in White Dwarf 28). This took place on 26th September 1981.
I looked through my Games Day programmes and it looks like they made a switch at Games Day 81 from having people write in their nominations for best games, etc. to a slate of nominees that you could choose from. I don't know how they came up with the list of nominees but this would guide the results. Also, computer voting!

By GD 82 they'd switched to simply announcing the winners which were decided based on postal ballots sent in during the year.

I've attached the 81 voting slate and the 82 and 84 winner listing from the Games Day programs for the respective years. I don't have 83 - IIRC I was in the US when that one took place.
 

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