The Arcane Top 50 – Where Are They Now?

Arcane, a short-lived British tabletop gaming magazine from Future Publishing which ran from December 1995 to June 1997, is a name to conjure by for many gamers of around my age. I came to the hobby after White Dwarf had become a Games Workshop in-house advertising platform, and just as Dragon was on the verge of dropping its coverage of non-TSR RPGs altogether; that meant I got a brief taster of TSR having a broader scope of coverage, and missed out on the golden age of White Dwarf altogether.

With other RPG-focused gaming magazines available in the UK either consisting of patchy US imports or a few local magazines published on a decidedly variable basis (whatever did happen to ol’ Valkyrie?), the arrival of Arcane was immensely welcome. Sure, even by this early stage the Internet was already becoming an incomparable source of both homebrewed material and cutting-edge RPG news, but much of that was in the form of Usenet and forum discussions of variable quality or ASCII text files. To get something which was informative, read well, and looked nice, print media was still just about where it was at.

Truth be told, taking a look back at Arcane in more recent years I’m less impressed than I was at the time. It took largely the same approach to its own subject matter (primarily RPGs, with some secondary consideration to CCGs – because they were so hot at the time they really couldn’t be ignored – and perhaps a light sniff of board game content) that Future’s videogame magazines took to theirs, particularly the lighter-hearted PC Gamer/Amiga Power side of things rather than the likes of, say, Edge. That meant it focused more on brief news snippets, reviews, and fairly entry-level articles on subjects than it did on offering much in the way of in-depth treatment of matters.

The Unintentional Comedy of HoL

The danger of comedy, particularly when it comes to parody, is that sometimes it can unintentionally reveal just as much about the attitudes of the comedian and their audience as it does about the things they are spoofing.

Take, for instance, HoL. A deliberately sloppy mess of a game, HoL was initially self-published by Dirt Merchant Games. The guys at White Wolf caught wind of it, and thought it was so funny that they reprinted it under the Black Dog Game Factory imprint, which they used for material too spicy for the White Wolf label like Montreal By Night. This is, in itself, pretty funny – because whilst much of the overt sniping in HoL is directed at other targets, some of the attitudes that creep in end up making it an accidental (but quite apt) spoof of game design fashions and the RPG zeitgeist of the time.