On the tail of the Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed how another Dungeon Master and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.
Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will be compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. As new fanzines have appeared, there has been an interest in the fanzines of the past, and as that interest has grown, they have become highly collectible, and consequently more difficult to obtain and write about. However, in writing about them, the reader should be aware that these fanzines were written and published between thirty and forty years ago, typically by roleplayers in their teens and twenties. What this means is that sometimes the language and terminology used reflects this and though the language and terminology is not socially acceptable today, that use should not be held against the authors and publishers unduly.
The Beholder was a British fanzine first published in April, 1979. Dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, it ran to twenty-seven issues, the last being published in July, 1981. It was popular and would be awarded ‘Best Games Fanzine’ at the Games Day convention in 1980. After the final issue of The Beholder, the editors would go on to release a number of anthologies which collected content from the complete run of the fanzine such as Beholder Supplement Glossary of Magic, which collected many of the magical items which appeared in the fanzine and collated them into a series of tables for easy use by the Dungeon Master, and Fantasie Scenarios – The Fanzine Supplement No. 2, the first of several scenario anthologies.
The issue’s content opens with ‘View Point: Specialised Clerics Are More Interesting’ [sic] by John Norris. His viewpoint is that the Cleric Class as presented is unsatisfying and vague, calling Gygax’s design simplistic and the only thing that distinguishes one Cleric from another is the plain and boring Alignment system. He suggests that real clerics have “…[A]ll sorts of interesting foibles, some of which stem from the particular tenets of their various faiths and others which seem to be a kind of professional “occupational hazard” of clergy in the society to which they belong.” The article highlights one of the longstanding and oft-addressed complaints about the roleplaying game, in that Clerics are depicted as a holy warrior a la the Crusades, when in the fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons, Christianity was not the faith of choice and there were plenty of other options. The solution is typically to design pantheons with gods that grant different spells and demand different tenets and the article more or less suggests that with a detailed example of a ‘Subclass’. This is ‘The Way of Anubis’, which believes that it is the proper doom of all living things to die and that it is wrong to interfere with the dead, especially via resurrection. There is some divide in the faith too, between those that believe that the process should not be interfered with and those that believe its process should be hurried. In game terms, Clerics of the Way of Anubis better turn and dispel the undead and they cast Lay Undead better and more effectively than the standard Animate Dead spell. Counter to this, Clerics of the Way of Anubis do not use healing magic and are opposed to its use, even seeking to reverse the effects of such magic if used! Clerics of the Way of Anubis also seek to kill anyone who has been resurrected.
‘The Way of Anubis’ is a fascinating creation. One that follows through on the author’s initial complaint about the Cleric Class, but to an extreme. ‘The Way of Anubis’ is a Cleric Subclass is unplayable as a Player Character type since it is antithetical to what a standard Cleric is supposed to do in play and that is heal. One way which the author suggests getting around this is to keep the ‘The Way of Anubis’ Cleric’s faith hidden until the full meaning of his tenets are realised in play. This is odd in itself since a reason would have to be given why this was kept hidden and keeping it hidden feels like a dirty trick to play upon the players by the Dungeon Master. In a way, the article shows the reader how not to do it when it could have been exploring more options.
‘Monster Summoning’ gives eight new monsters. They include the Wood Golem for the Druid to create; the Thin Giant, essentially a giant with invisibility due to permanent Duo-dimension spell having been cast on them; the Bactos, a living cactus that uses its offshoots to pin victims against it and drain all moisture from their bodies, making resurrection impossible; and the Death Grub, an flying insect related to the Rot Grub, which does not attack, but instead infests dead bodies and again, resurrection impossible. The daftest monster is the Time Rat, a rat from the future with time travel powers that likes to come to the past and explore dungeons and is curious about adventuring parties. If attacked, it can cast Time Stop, after which it will steal any item its can, especially magical items, and then phase out back to the future. It is essentially a means to deprive Player Characters of their hard won magical items and it could have been a whole lot more interesting. Lastly, the Thin Giant is simply boring.
‘Monster Reaction Roll Tables’ provides a more detailed means of handing interactions between the adventurers and the dungeon denizens if the former are looking to do more than fight, whilst Andreas J. Sarker’s ‘More Gem Tables’ provides a means for the Dungeon Master to detail the gems that might be found as treasure. The included ‘Computer Program’ is a simple BASIC computer program, running to just fifteen lines of code and designed to generate attribute values for Dungeons & Dragons characters. This dates to a time when home computers could easily be programmed at home to run programs typed in.
‘The Dragon Race’ presents the Dragon as a playable Race. As a playable Race, the Dragon has high minimum attributes, can only be a Magic-User or a Fighter—and cannot cast magic if the latter, and has a breath weapon that inflicts damage equal to its Hit Points and can be used a limited number of times a day. They have a natural claw and bite attack, but the bite attack gets better for the Fighter Dragon. All Dragons can attack creatures and enemies that require magical weapons or attacks to hit, but need to be higher Level to attack creatures and enemies with higher magical protection. However, there are two downsides to the Dragon as a playable Race. One is that all Dragons are suspicious of everyone and everything and they are only accepted in society because they are feared, and mechanically, they suffer a high penalty to Experience Point gain. This is -20% for the Fighter Dragon and a massive -40% for the Magic-User Dragon! Honestly, this is not a bad version of the Dragon as a playable Race as the penalties do offset any advantages that the Dragon has and a player of a Dragon will see the characters of his fellow players racing ahead in terms of power and ability.
‘New Spells’ are taken from the ‘Barad-Dur Spellbook’. The eight spells include Mirage for the Illusionist, which makes something appear very attractive, like a fine meal or a pile of gold, and can be used as a distraction for all but the most intelligent and similarly, for the Illusionist, Premonition, with which the caster runs his finger across his neck as if to cut and then points at the victim of the spell, who gets a bad feeling that his about to die, and if he fails a Saving Throw, runs away! Effectively, a Fear spell then. The Clerical spell Cure Paralysis is good for after encounters with Ghouls and Ghasts and the like; Death Bomb turns a Magic-User into a living bomb if he is killed, potentially destroying every item on his body, if not his actual body, so good for the Dungeon Master to use on a villainous wizard; and Probability Travel gives the spell’s recipient the ability to see a few seconds into the future, see what he is going to do, and give him the opportunity to improve on it. In game terms, Probability Travel lets a player roll twice for his character’s next action and take the best result. So, Advantage in 1979, then?
Lastly, ‘Thoughts on NPC’s’ (sic), suggests ways of getting away from anonymous NPCs who are just there to provide services such as Cure Disease and Resurrection. Ultimately, the point of half the article is not about NPCs as such, as more finding ways of making the Player Characters work to access spells such as Cure Disease and Resurrection, whether that is through simple, but big payments or more interestingly, require a quest to get the right ingredients or components, or fulfil a task required by the caster. The other half is a call to make normal NPCs more interesting, especially those that adventure with the Player Characters, such as having an Assassin pose as a Paladin in a party of Good-aligned Player Characters. Arguably, this is a call to make NPCs more of a threat—in this case, an internal threat—than necessarily interesting.
The highlight of any issue of The Beholder is its scenario. ‘Legend of Leshy’ is what it calls a ‘stage-by-stage’ mini-scenario. What this means is that its plot and story will be revealed in discrete sections or scenes. Roughly designed for a group of five Player Characters of First and Second Level, one of whom should be a Druid, the scenario is based on Slavonic mythology and calls upon them to capture the ‘Leshachikha Bond’. The Leshachikha is the mortal wife of Leshy and bearer of the Leshonki, the children of Leshy. By capturing the ‘Leshachikha Bond’, it will free her from her subservience to Leshy. He is the spirit of the forest and tends to be good natured, though he does lead travellers astray. The scenario begins at the Ivanovich family farm where the Player Characters are staying, put up in a barn overnight. This barn is locked and the Player Characters are warned about the Keeper of the Barn and told not to enter the yard after 11 pm as there will be strange spirits about.
The farm and its inhabitants are nicely detailed and will be a challenge to get past as the Player Characters will need to break out of the barn and into the house in order to really get the scenario going. This is to begin the quest that spirit of the barn sets, which includes actually setting fire to the barn(!), and puts them on the path to capturing the ‘Leshachikha Bond’. Much of the scenario is an exploration of the surrounding wilderness, almost jump-cutting from one scene to the next, one encounter with a mystical inhabitant of the forest to the next, as the Player Characters go in search of the ‘Leshachikha Bond’. In places, the scenario can be quite tough physically, such as attempting to get across a battered rope bridge, but bar the occasional random encounter, is low in terms of combat. Most of the encounters will give clues as to where to search next and ultimately, if the Player Characters complete the quest, they will be well rewarded.
In 1979, ‘Legend of Leshy’ would have been a fine scenario. It is rough around the edges and the background to the scenario, based on Slavonic folklore, would not have been familiar to many players or Dungeon Masters, so adding it to a campaign would have been a challenge. (Today, there is at least a Wikipedia page.) More background would have helped and it would have been good if the possibility of the Player Characters returning to the Ivanovich family farm after the quest ends had been addressed. The main problem is the lack of detail on the otherwise large, two-page spread map of the region. The Dungeon Master really needs to work through the scenario hard in order to extract clues as to where various locations are on the map. That aside, ‘Legend of Leshy’ is a fine fantasy folkloric adventure, possessing an at time eerie and unsettling atmosphere that would have been enhanced by the lack of familiarity with the folklore.
Rounding out The Beholder Issue No. 5 is the ‘Contacts & Info’ section. Not only does this gives details of the then forthcoming Games Day which would take place on October 20th later that year, but lists a couple of players looking for players. This was how it was done back in the dawn of the hobby and people were then quite happy to hand out their address as contact details! One of the two is Simon Washbourne, later designer of roleplaying games such as Lashings of Ginger Beer.
Physically, The Beholder Issue No. 5 is slightly untidy in places, but readable. The layout is tight and that does make it difficult to read in places. The illustrations are reasonable, but the cartography simply lacks the detail its scenario requires. Of course, every issue of the fanzine was published when personal publishing was still analogue and the possibilities of the personal computer and personal desktop publishing were yet to come. In the case of The Beholder that would never be taken advantage of.
The Beholder has a high reputation for content that is of good quality and playable. The Beholder Issue No. 5 does not yet match that reputation, but as with previous issues, the signs are there and there is content aplenty that the Dungeon Master could have used in her game at the time and in some cases, still use to today. The standout piece is the scenario, ‘Legend of Leshy’, which is a rough, but interesting attempt to write a folklore-based scenario that just about works. It is certainly the best scenario in the fanzine to date. Elsewhere, the other articles are not quite as interesting or as thoughtful as in previous issues, though still very much concerned with what would have been traditional topics for Dungeons & Dragons at the time. The Beholder Issue No. 5 would have been a solid issue of the fanzine in 1979 and even today in 2025 is an enjoyable read.
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