Everybody had their own variations on it because it was pretty much impossible to play the game as written.” 4 In any case, the play cultures of the time adapted the rules from the White Box into multiple localized contexts both to suit the preferences of their group, and potentially-as Phil points out-to reconcile contradictions, and other problems within the rules as written. Phil is more critical of the presentation of the rules in the White Box: “Frankly it was shambolic. I had made up my own combat tables and came up with my own spells and that was kind of the circle that I played with, that was pretty standard.” 3 Cricky described the approach to play as “very much do-it-yourself,” as “the rules were fairly sketchy, and weren’t really developed in detail.” He continued to explain: “ In my circle of people that I played with, we used the publications as resources and suggestions, but we would make up our own rules. Only Martin quickly shifted to mainly playing the AD&D rules as it was made available in the UK over the period 1977-1979. The White Box and these other resources were central for all the interview subjects from the period when they began playing, up until the Fiend Folio was released in 1981. 2 Bob also mentioned that he followed several other British zines that predated White Dwarf. Cricky, Phil and Bob also recalled using the supplements to the White Box published by TSR, particularly Greyhawk. Cricky recalls being twelve years old, Martin, eleven.
Cricky Hitchcock, Bob Scurfield and Martin Stollery started playing when they were younger, in the early to middle years of high school. For Phil Masters and Roger Musson, it was a pastime they picked up while studying at University, Masters during his first year of study.
The five Fiend Folio authors that were interviewed all began playing D&D with the so-called “White Box,” which was the first published version of D&D, 1 which was available from 1974 in North America and was imported into the UK under license by Games Workshop (GW) from 1975 onwards. The contributors also shared their reflections on their payment, and how their creations had changed through Don Turnbull’s editing. Despite the quite different personal circumstances of the contributors, they all felt part of the larger ‘community’ of White Dwarf. All of the interviewed contributors were involved in writing for games in zines and magazines beyond their contribution to Fiend Folio, two of them quite extensively. We found that in general, the Fiend Folio contributors were early adopters of the hobby and had more experience of playing the original version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) than they had with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) when they designed their monsters. We then examined the subsequent document, focusing on locating parallel and repeated themes among the participants’ experiences while also noting dissimilarities.
The interviews that were recorded were later transcribed into text form. The interviews used a semi-structured format, beginning with questions about the interviewees’ history of playing and contributing to tabletop RPGs, and specifically about their experiences contributing to White Dwarf magazine and later to Fiend Folio, with the interviewee’s responses becoming the basis for more free-ranging conversations.
Each interview was conducted in the framework of Tampere University’s guidelines for ethical research.
Four of the five interviews we use in this article were conducted using the web conferencing software Zoom, the other was conducted over email, at the interviewee’s request. One of these contributor interviews-with Ian Livingstone editor of White Dwarf during the ’70s and early ’80s and co-founder of Games Workshop and Citadel-outlined such a different perspective that we decided to discuss it elsewhere in the future as it didn’t gel with the more mundane experiences we wished to uncover. However, due to scheduling issues and other miscellaneous mishaps, only six interviews have been conducted at the time of writing. Ten contributors were contacted this way and recruited for interviews via email. The interviewees were recruited using the list of authors in Fiend Folio and Google. We also hoped that by speaking with people involved in making the Fiend Folio we could conceptualize the book and the hobby itself as a process made up of many small contributions from people with a more-or-less committed and long-term engagement with the hobby. We were interested in exploring how contributors remembered their relationship with the hobby at the time, and what being included in the Fiend Folio meant for them. This article collects interviews with five writers of Fiend Folio monsters, offering an insight both into UK hobbyist culture of the time, and the processes of creating and submitting a monster for the anthology.