White Dwarf

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The good old times when GeeDubs was something...

White Dwarf is a monthly magazine from Games Workshop which has quite frankly gone to the fucking dogs.

In the beginning, it was just a magazine that advertised whatever games GW had the rights to publish in the UK, including Dungeons & Dragons (several monsters were actually born out of White Dwarf's "Fiend Factory" article, where fans submitted new monsters - this is where the Slaad came from), Traveler, and RuneQuest. When they produced their own game, Warhammer, it became a primary focus of their magazine. Issue 93 (from 1987) is a big one in /tg/ history, because that's when they announced Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

The halcyon days were around 1998-99, when 3rd edition 40k was shiny and new and Adrian 'WAAAAAAGH' Wood worked there on a reasonably frequent basis. The general level of grimdark was pretty low and they even included battle reports for the good specialty games as and when they got released, most notably Mordheim and Battlefleet Gothic. Oh and they used to actually put army lists before all of their battle reports, and gave the actual turn-by-turn play. They stopped doing the former because people with calculators were able to backwards engineer army lists from them and thus not buy codices (luckily the internet came along, making buying anything that can be stored in a PDF strictly optional), and they stopped the latter because it meant that their flavor-of-the-month army could get humiliated.

White Dwarf also used to have a Chapter Approved column with experimental rules and errata. The errata went away when GW realized that they could put errata online and use the saved space for more advertisements, and by the time the experimental rules became actual rules, GW was no longer doing playtesting in public.

Anyway, White Dwarf is alright, but no where near as awesome as it once was. The real point of decline was when it started shilling for the Lord of the Rings game that no-one ever played.

In 2012, GW re-released it. It became a decent magazine, but not worth ten dollars.

Grombrindal. The dwarf that's the magazine's mascot and the one after which it's named.

In January 2014, it became known that Games Workshop would reinvent White Dwarf again in February. White Dwarf was announced to became a $4, 32-page weekly magazine which would focus on the hobby, featuring, for example, model and book releases, rules updates, and modeling features. Games Workshop would also release a monthly 236-page "Warhammer Visions" magazine at $12, which would also be available for iPad. GW would convert all remaining White Dwarf subscriptions to this "Warhammer Visions" magazine. This magazine would focus on wider hobby news, Citadel model painting examples, various articles to deal with conversions, etc.

Although since 2016 they have gone back to the monthly model.

However, what this meant is where as before you paid one sum a month to get your hobby's magazine, at a stroke Games Workshop now wants you to buy five separate magazines a month with a combined cost that means you'll end up paying about four times what you were paying before. Think about it. The cost of an old white dwarf was about the cost of two of these weekly magazines now. So already you are having to pay double to get all four for the month. And that is not including the monthly magazine at $12 a pop.

Games Workshop could argue that it is dividing its adult and teen markets up to appeal to everyone by making them separate magazines (with the monthly aimed more at the hardcore fans) but really this is being biased against the hardcore players then, as to get all the news and features related to their hobby they have to get all five magazines a month while the teens who won't be as bothered to keep track of all the news can miss the monthly magazine for example if their pocket money is all gorged out on cheap vodka.

There is a whole unpleasant taste to the whole affair that has just tainted poor White Dwarf more then it has been....