Friday 12 September 2014

Warlock Magazine


You know it's a good day at work when you get to spend a couple of hours reading Warlock Magazine... that's how my day ended today, reading all thirteen issues as background reading for an article I'm working on. For anyone who doesn't know, Warlock was the magazine of Jackson and Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, first published by Penguin and later by Games Workshop. Offering a slightly off-kilter view of GW's early history it makes for a very entertaining read (and thankfully it can all be found online very easily).

While the useful material for my work came in the letters pages, there's masses here to look at for the Oldhammer fan. Rick Priestley's articles and the full games included in the later issues are well worth a look. It was the adverts that really caught my attention. First, this one from issue 11 which shows the early ambitions of GW as the games shop that had it all:


And then there's this one, which begins to answer my questions about the origins of Orcs Waaagh!-ing... (which I wondered here) At the very least they were Waaarrr-ing in 1986!


If you haven't already added Warlock to your Oldhammer library (virtual or paper), I strongly recommend you take a look. And to any of you who wrote into the letters pages, you have my thanks!

2 comments:

  1. Ha, the demon on the cover of that Warlock issue was used for the Uriah Heep album Abominog in 82- cool!

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  2. Thatt is cool, I didn't know that. Lots of artwork seems to be reused at that point, the cover of Car Wars ends up on the FF book,and then, I think, on Dark Future. People even wrote in to complain about the recycling of images in the magazine!

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