Monday Magazine Classics

A Place in the Wilderness

Lewis Pulsipher

White Dwarf #6

April/May 1978

 

Pulsipher names this one-page description based on Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters a “set-up” which “may be incorporated into your wilderness.” That’s a pretty apt description. I’m not sure it qualifies as an adventure (or “scenario” as WD was likely to call them), but it’s got the elements: setting, conflict, hook...

 This very much reminds me of The Wilderlands of High Fantasy from Judges Guild, those paragraph long hex descriptions. Take one of those paragraphs and expand the information to maybe 2/3rds of a page and you get this “set-up.” Bare-bones stats are given for Tracker, Heavy Trooper, Weaponer and Giant, none of whom appear in the previous paragraphs... (I assume “Weaponer” is the “50 rabble at arms,” but that’s just my guess).

 So, we’ve got a human settlement which breeds and trains dragons. There’s maybe a little north of 300 people here: “50 rabble at arms, 10 various specialists..., 8 heavy armoured horsemen..., one sixth level fighter chieftain, 80 women, and 160 children and old people.”

 Treasure is abstracted: “The primary treasure is dragon females... There is also a cache of precious metal and stones as the referee thinks appropriate.” Sigh...

 A paragraph is given to the Dragons, clearly the focus of this “set-up,” with bare-bones stats appearing for each type of new dragon (HD 1+1 to HD 5) with one glaring omission.

 Spider: substitute for a horse

Termagants: smaller than men, intelligent

Blue Horrors: larger, quick, intelligent

Murderers: not intelligent, heavy and low to the ground

Fiends: strong and low to the ground (“low enough to run underneath”)

Juggers: “ponderous and huge” [no stats given, though one assumes bigger than Fiends, so maybe HD 6 or 7?]

 Typical of the era, this is a page of inspiration, not a “complete adventure” as we’ve come to know and accept the idea (and, maybe, abuse the idea). That’s not to say it’s bad or incomplete. It is clearly a product of its time and it is adequate for what it sets out to do. This is certainly something that I could riff off of at the table in a hexcrawl, for example, or throw out as a rumor to the party and develop it further if it was something they wanted to pursue.

 

Other reviews:

I’m sure there are more, but all I could dig up was this brief comment:

https://www.enworld.org/threads/white-dwarf-the-first-100-issues-a-read-through-and-review.325009/

 

And this:

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/in-which-i-read-white-dwarf-from-issue-1.405199/page-4