White Dwarf
Entry updated 21 July 2025. Tagged: Game, Publication.
UK Games Magazine published by Games Workshop, first issue dated June/July 1977. A4 format, at first saddle-stapled, from 1987 perfect-bound. Initially bimonthly; monthly from #32 (August 1982); weekly from 1 February 2014 for 131 issues with numbering restarted from #1; monthly again from September 2016 to the present day.
This magazine developed from the Games Workshop newsletter Owl and Weasel (25 issues, February 1975-April 1977) edited by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. White Dwarf initially covered the entire field of fantasy and sf Board Games, Wargames and Role Playing Games, most prominently Dungeons & Dragons but including sf games such as the spacegoing Traveller. In its more relaxed early years the magazine ran occasional sf/fantasy fiction – the longest being the six-part "Valley of the Four Winds" (February-July 1979), a GW Board Game tie by David Langford writing as Rowland Flynn – and regular Comic strips including Carl Critchlow's Thrud the Barbarian (1983-1988), a generic Heroic Fantasy send-up whose vastly overmuscled and underbrained eponym was a very broad Parody of Robert E Howard's Conan the Barbarian, and Mark Harrison's The Travellers (1983-1986), knowingly milking a typical Traveller RPG campaign for comic effect. In 1984-1985 the editorial staff indulged themselves with seven issues of the Fanzine-like A5 supplement Black Sun, included with subscription copies: this poked fun at gamers, gaming and White Dwarf itself in a raucous manner that later corporate policy would not have allowed. From the late 1980s the magazine narrowed its focus to deal almost exclusively with Games Workshop's own miniatures-based Wargame products (see Warhammer 40,000); its last D&D-related article appeared in issue #93 (September 1987).
David Langford contributed the sf/fantasy book review column "Critical Mass" from March 1983 to October 1988, these columns being collected with subsequent review columns for other UK games magazines as The Complete Critical Assembly (coll 2001). After Langford's departure some further "Critical Mass" book review columns were written by David Pringle (November 1988-March 1989) and then David V Barrett (April-July 1989), before the feature was discontinued. Artists with entries in this encyclopedia who contributed to White Dwarf include Chris Achilleos, Paul Campbell, Les Edwards and Peter Jones. [DRL]
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