Warlock Issue 1

Warlock
Warlock Issue 1
Outline
Location:	Titan and various
Publication details
Editor(s)-in-Chief:	Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone
Editor(s):	Tony Lacey (Penguin Editor) Philippa Dickinson (Desk Editor)
Interior Illustrator(s):	Maggie Kneen Russ Nicholson Tim Sell Jane Walmsley
Cover illustrator:	Alan Craddock
Publisher:	Penguin Books
First published:	May 1984

Warlock Issue 1 was published in 1985 as the first of the initially quarterly instalments of Warlock published by Penguin Books and at this stage the magazine was very much a Fighting Fantasy publication concentrating almost exclusively on the Fighting Fantasy phenomenon.

Cover

The front cover art was by Alan Craddock.

Contents

One Step Beyond

This contained interesting information on the origins of Fighting Fantasy and role-playing in general, citing Ian Livingstone's Dicing with Dragons as a good introductory reference book and noting at the end that Steve Jackson's Fighting Fantasy - The Introductory Role-Playing Game is due for publication in a couple of months.

Map of the Kingdom

A two page spread featuring a map labelled "Allansia: The Fighting Fantasy Land" and detailing the locations of the first six fantasy-based gamebooks. This was the first map published of Allansia and it was evident that the world was meant to extend beyond the eastern and southern reaches of the map because there was no delimited border. That is contains only information from those books and no forthcoming titles suggests that it was drawn and published before the commissioning of books #8, #9, #10 and #14 which were the next batch of titles scheduled. It is interesting to note that the world of Fighting Fantasy was referred to as "Allansia", when later Allansia became just a part. This probably explains why the lands of the first Sorcery! title are not featured.

"Out of the Pit"

This pre-dated the publishing of the book by the same name (Out of the Pit) and its popularity as a section may have had much to do with the compilation that would later be published. The monsters detailed were (with artwork and logo by Tim Sell):

• Bird Man
• Sentinel
• Messenger of Death
• Earth Demon

All would later appear in Out of the Pit. Interestingly, while a Bird Man was mentioned in The Shamutanti Hills, suggesting that book as the origin of the article entry, the Sentinel would feature in the very next issue in the shortened version of Caverns of the Snow Witch and the Messenger of Death would finally appear in Temple of Terror the following year. Both were therefore probably both in development by Livingstone at the time of the article and suggest that the article itself was penned by Livingstone. The Earth Demon would appear in The Dervish Stone in issue 4 suggesting that writer Paul Struth made some use of this first Out of the Pit article to write his competition entry.

Additionally there was a competition to send in descriptions of your own monsters, the best of which would be published in the next edition.

How to Map

This was a brief section providing mapping techniques when playing the gamebooks.

Fighting Fantasy Rules

For greater detail of the mechanics of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, see Game System

This gave a background as to how Fighting Fantasy works so as to prepare the reader for the adventure in this issue:

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Part One

Main article: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (book)#Warlock Magazine Edition

This was the first part of a modified version of the very first Fighting Fantasy gamebook of the same name. It came complete with an "Adventure Sheet", and the "Background" is modified from the original in the book, featuring a greater description of the area around the Firetop Mountain through the use of place names established in later books. It features one new illustration by Russ Nicholson (for paragraph (1) and replacing a similar illusration for the same paragraph from the book), alongside those reproduced from the book, and a title page by Tim Sell.

Warlock Competition

Main article: Fighting Fantasy Competitions

This was an invitation for readers to write their own adventures the prize including that the adventure would be published in a later edition of the magazine.

Adverts

• The colour advert on the inside front cover was for the Games Workshop boardgame Talisman.
• The back inside cover featured an advert for the first five Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.
• The back cover itself was an advert for the Sorcery! series of gamebooks. It was interesting for a number of reasons:

• It was marketed as a series for adults. Hence perhaps the fact that Penguin Books rather than Puffin Books published it.
• It had only the first two books in the series "as well as" the The Sorcery Spell Book, which was later incorporated into the back of these books once they began being published by Puffin Books. This indicates that the decision to sell the spell book separately had already been taken.
• The cover of Khare - Cityport of Traps has no number on it at all. Although the first book, The Shamutanti Hills was first published with a wrap around cover and had no number on its front, the first edition of Khare - Cityport of Traps did have the number on it as a number 2 in a corner triangle. Therefore the advert has a cover that was never released.
• It lists the second book as "NEW", not "coming soon", which is unusual as the book would not be published till August of that same year.