The Warlock Returns #1

I felt certain that I would be exactly the kind of person who would enjoy this fanzine. I liked Warlock the first time around and have a nostalgia for that period of gaming.

However either I remember the old material quite differently to what they were like or this is quite a big misfire in the revival department.

The magazine feels quite full of stuff. Fictional letters, weapons, monsters, new rules, book lists all are here along with a scenario.

The crunch leaves me cold, I’m not really interested in a description of weapons or rules for group combat in Stellar Adventures or assessing the deadliness of monsters.

Monsters were definitely a part of both Warlock and White Dwarf (and they were quite often boring forty years ago) but there’s no sense of fun or menace here just sub-types of dragons and all the tediousness that monster variants imply.

The scenario too lacks the dark fantasy and humour that I would associate with Fighting Fantasy. In it a manifest god sends their avatar to transform a city that has offended them. The player’s characters are caught up in the chaos and through puzzling and fighting can restore the city to a more normal state (although with a lingering effect that transforms people temporarily in donkeys).

In some ways I see how this is in some of the zanier spirit of the Fighting Fantasy series but it doesn’t feel quite right to me and reading doesn’t inspire me to what to run it for other people due to the single thread of puzzling solving that is required to end the scenario.

The best thing in the issue is the Dyson Logos character sheet which is a beauty and worth getting the digital version if you play the game.