Anybody in the UK remember this article? "An Introduction to Fantasy Wargames" by Steve Jackson (the UK fellow of Games Workshop /Fighting Fantasy, not the American of SJG). The article, which may be a flier or torn from a magazine/book, was spotted recently in an Ebay auction for a UK Holmes Basic Set. Google didn't turn up any hits except for a much later GW book by a different author.
I have a Steve Jackson article from a 1981 Starburst explaining role-playing games, but first time I've seen this one. (I'm not in the UK, though.) Any idea what year this is from?
ReplyDeleteThere was also a book published in the late '80s by GW with the same title as this article. The author is Rick Priestley.
The auction was for a 3rd or 4th print UK Basic Set, which the Acaeum dates to Nov 1978, but I think more likely 1979. Of course the flier may or may not have come with the set originally.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info, I just found that Starburst article in a post on your blog. Different article, but similar in nature.
ReplyDeleteJust noticed there's a staple near the middle of the spine, possibly indicating it was taken out of magazine and then re-stapled.
ReplyDeleteI read a very similar article by Steve Jackson in "Space Voyager" in the early 1980s, a British magazine (although I was in Ireland when I read it). He seems to have been very active promoting the hobby around that time. It was illustrated by the artist known as "Fangorn", who might be familiar to owners of a British edition of Holmes Basic.
ReplyDeleteThat article was my first introduction to RPGs. It managed to hook me right away with the introductory paragraph telling of an adventurer being chased by goblins from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak, so much so that I adapted it for BLUEHOLME™.
It's possibly an article / publication in it's own right - maybe even a precursor to White Dwarf? Certainly it's documents like these which paved the way for Ian Livingstone's Dicing With Dragons. Perhaps it was bundled in with board game mail orders in the early days of Games Workshop. Just surmising.
ReplyDeleteI'd kill to even see the UK Holmes rules. Apparently it had a few Blanche illustrations too.
ReplyDeleteBilliam Babble It certainly is possible that it is a stand-alone flier. There were some earlier ones with a similar article. I have a post in preparation that will talk about these. I was actually trying to track down if this one was part of the same series or a magazine article, so I posted this here to see if anyone remembered it.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to see all of the UK rulebook artwork, follow this link to a thread on Dragonsfoot that has all of the art posted in nice scans. From what I've heard the text is all the same as the US version. holmes basic foreign editions | zenopusarchives
ReplyDeleteThanks for links! Ace. :)
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