White Dwarf Magazine

[Ilvarin]

Greetings!

 

I am fairly new to Magic World. I own the book, and have Advanced Sorcery on order. I love what I've read, but as yet have not had a chance to play. I hope to soon.

 

On to the point of this post. Back in the mists of time, before White Dwarf became a house organ for Games Workshop, each issue contained an absolute bazaar of RPG articles. RuneQuest seemed to feature prominently in the Brit game scene, and was given a lot of focus in those A4 pages. My question is this: how compatible and/or useful would options from that time period be today? I have access to a lot of it, but I don't really want to waste a lot of effort looking up articles that are either too much work, or outright useless.

 

As an aside, if anyone has had any success with any of this older material, please share what you used, the issue in which it appeared, and any conversion notes.

 

Thanks to all who took the time to read this missive. 

[SDLeary]

Certainly that information is adaptable. The core system is for all intents and purposes the same, though some details differ.

 

The RuneQuest stuff would work, you'd just ignore the info on hit locations, and the skill category modifiers would need to be recalculated (or not, your preference really).

 

The articles on Stormbringer would be the most compatible from a system standpoint, as this version of BRP served as the core when developing Magic World.

 

SDLeary

[NickMiddleton]

...On to the point of this post. Back in the mists of time, before White Dwarf became a house organ for Games Workshop, each issue contained an absolute bazaar of RPG articles. RuneQuest seemed to feature prominently in the Brit game scene, and was given a lot of focus in those A4 pages. My question is this: how compatible and/or useful would options from that time period be today? I have access to a lot of it, but I don't really want to waste a lot of effort looking up articles that are either too much work, or outright useless.

IIRC the earliest RQ material in WD was something like issue 13 or 14 (about when I fiest subscribed) - the Lair of the White Wyrm dungeon crawl (!). RQII, and subsequently Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer and RQIII featured pretty frequently up to the switch to "house magazine" status circa WD100. RQ had it's own column for a while (RuneRites).

Ben did try to reach out to some of the authors of the WD RQ material to investigate the possibilities of resurrecting some of that material for Magic World, but I don't believe anything came of it.

Frustratingly, Dave Morris (editor of the RuneRites column and author of several seminal articles including the excellent original "Dealing with Demons") did find a few years back a huge chunk of the material he and IIRC Oliver Johnson had drafter for GW's QuestWorld RQ continent - but in the "re-purposed for Dragon Warriors" form they created after GW dropped QuestWorld. As a fan of DW AND RQ / MW, I'd love to see either form released, but nothing's happened with it to my knowledge. Also, the recent Dragon Warriors project "In From the Cold" converts some of the best of Dave's stuff from White Dwarf (including the Dealing with Demons articles) to Dragon Warriors so probably precludes any official MW / BRP conversion.

 

RAW stats should go across fairly easily - I'd happily run an old RQ scenario with Magic World and just tweak the stats on the fly. Dropping hit locations and calculating Major wound levels is trivial. Skill levels are a bit quirkier - Magic world is more comfortable with skills over 100 than RQII/III but less so than early Stormbringer. Magic is more problematic, and magic systems vary quite wildly in power between RQII / Stormbringer (editions 1-3) and Magic World.

Cheers,

Nick

[Stoatbringer]

I have used some stuff from the older White Dwarfs. Some monsters and a few magic items.  
 

[BMonroe]

I was actually able to track down and get permission for repurposing lots of those articles. As it turns out Dave Morris wrote the lion's share of them (pseudonymously, often), and still was in contact with some of the authors of others.

 

So, I've got a list of which articles we can use, and which we're still trying to track down authors of (though not actively at this point).

Case in point, the "Fey Magic of the Southern Reaches" article in the back of Advanced Sorcery is actually a combination of the WD article "Celtic Magic", and some of the spells from RQIII's "Vikings" book.

[Sunwolfe]

Ah-ha! I thought it sounded a bit familiar from the RQIII Vikings side of things. That's awesome :-)