White Dwarf magazine

White Dwarf is a magazine published by United Kingdom games manufacturer Games Workshop. Initially dedicated to all kinds of role-playing games the magazine is now dedicated just to those games produced by Games Workshop.

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone produced a magazine called "Owl and Weasel" which ran for approximately 25 issues before being re-vamped into "White Dwarf."

First published in 1977 and focused on wargaming, it received a strong boost when the first editions of the RPG Dungeons & Dragons, published in the UK by Games Workshop, referred to White Dwarf on its back page. This allowed people who had bought this game order the magazine directly from Games Workshop, establishing its circulation.

The magazine was hugely influential in the 1980s when it helped to popularise RPGs, including those American RPGs for which Games workshop had the UK licence. In addition to this a generation of writers passed through it offices and onto other RPG projects in the next decade, such as Phil Masters and Marcus Rowland.

The magazine has featured numerous articles and photographs about miniature figure painting.

Almost all British gamers have read White Dwarf, nicknamed by some as "Waste Drain", regularly at some point in their lives and pretty much all of them have an opinion as to when White Dwarf was "good". These periods are usually pre-issue 100 and often cluster around the issue 40 - 60 mark without any consensus ever being gained. Few are happy with the current incarnation, which is often little more than a house catalog.

For UK role-players the current successor to White Dwarf is Valkyrie and there are hopes that this magazine will replace the hole left in the hobby by this well-remembered magazine.