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The Citadel Judge Mortis has the thinnest ankles of any miniature I've ever owned. You can guess what happened to my one.

Mine too! Completely impossible to fix, as well...

[and]

Yes - I was reading up about Carl when I wrote today's blog post.  I saw he had a previous career in parapsychology before his gaming career.  I also found out I have a few of his fighting fantasy game books but that they were written under the name Keith Martin (and you'd be hard pressed to realise they were by anybody other than Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson* at casual glance).

Didn't realise you'd worked on the D20 line.  I wonder if I have anything you worked on?  I'm very patchy at the moment, but I'm trying to fill in the gaps before my prog slog blog gets to the 21st century :-)


* not that Steve Jackson, unless you were thinking about this Steve Jackson in the first place.

The Fighting Fantasy line had Steve Jackson and Steve Jackson working on it, unless you're thinking of Steve Jackson.

I had a couple of chapters in the Core rulebook and bits and pieces in most of the Dredd line, as well as a chapter in Gangs of Mega-City One (the chapter about the Doghouse in the Traveler Strontium Dog line was by me as well), so you've probably got something by me. However, Amazon likes to send me emails along the lines of 'hey, because you showed interest in the Rookie's Guide to the Undercity, we've got a used copy available for seven hundred times what you got paid to write it!' so I'm not sure if it'll be possible get that one (I think I might have stumbled onto some sort of money laundering operation or something!)

I think Hossanjo Valley and Griff Mountain are references to Bonanza - Hoss and Little Joe Cartwright were main characters, Griff King seems to have been a minor character for a while.

I tried to get in touch with Carl Sargent when I was working on the Judge Dredd D20 books, but apparently he'd 'disappeared' in the mid nineties. Turns out he'd just left the industry. Sadly, he died in 2017.

A quick glance suggests three of the things that first appeared in White Dwarf were later repackaged for the Companion (upthread) - counting that epic adventure as 'one thing'.

I think only the Something Special article made it into the Companion for certain (a collection of largely useless Special Abilities) and maybe the Crazy Files (I don't have that WD so they could be a different selection of Crazy Files) - the epic adventure 'To Live and Die in Mega-City One' (which I've played, but never read) was completely different to 'Fear and Loathing in Mega-City One' (which I've read but never played, and consists of absolutely massive amounts of background material that the Players have no way of finding out without a massive infodump shoehorned in somewhere...)

2000AD Prog 293: "Starbase one under attack!" Win the video game that talks to you!

Computer games everywhere!  Even in Rogue Trooper!

Couple more songs from 'Play it again, Sam!' for your playlist...

The telegram delivery robot starts this number...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en8siIQH2Ds

And the singing telegram itself seems to be this (even though prog 293 came out nearly three years before that movie...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6obUJYlIxk

Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One

Slight change of pace and format as I go in to Project XXX AKA what it says in the title!

Oh, I always wondered why GW boxsets always had a raffle ticket in them!

Love your Alan Ridgeway theory. Would any of the wise heads here know the truth?

I did a little research and apparently it was discussed on this very forum (didn't manage to find the thread).  (Assuming it isn't actually somebody called Alan Ridgeway) some thought it could be Tom Tully, but that's covered in the blog post.  If anybody knows then Ian Anorak Hollingsworth will - I'll ask him next time he posts on FB.

Steve Macmanus' book 'The Mighty One' speaks about Tom Tully being a Reading native and how he included details about the town in Mean Arena, and when asked on the Face Book he said he couldn't remember who Alan Ridgeway was but thought it was probably a Tom Tully pseudonym. I strongly suspect that Tully had got into trouble over the astonishingly gruesome murder of Doctor Jessup (really, the hero tricking an innocent opposing team into hunting someone down and then burning him to death is probably the most classically evil act in early 2000 AD history!) and was being kept under close editorial supervision.

I didn't have the catholic education that Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill had, but I can still picture the hymn-like dirge that is the Deviatus (I'm picking the second out of the three verses printed)

ISTR Pat Mills saying somewhere that the Deviatus was sung to the tune of 'Onward Christian Soldiers', so, yep, just a dirge...

2000AD Prog 219: Traffic duty – Mega-City One Style! "Dredd's stumm-gassed the mopad! All bikes move in!

Ruth Kreelman's in trouble (but not as much as Clacton Fuzz and Studs Boyce)!

With both Ruth Kreelman and Ruth Jensen appearing in these progs, this is the most Ruth that 2000 AD gets. It's largely Ruth-less for the rest of its history.

Ha ha!

Ahem, I'll get me coat...

I seem to have a vague memory of 'We're here because we're here' (sung to the tune of 'Auld Lang Syne') being a football chant  - don't know how accurate that memory is, though...

2000AD Sci-Fi Special 1981 2000AD Reviewed! Tharg Photo-Stripped! Nemesis Revealed!

I believe R. E. Wright was IPC's stock pseudonym so it can be anyone, really (it's usually someone else who's been heavily rewritten by Pat Mills, or Pat Mills rewritten by someone else, and some of the reprints in the 1982 Annual use it because it looks like no one could remember who actually wrote them at the time). And I think Southern Comfort is actually Alan Moore's very first attempt at writing a full length comic story - so it's been in the 'we've-paid-for-it-so-we've-got-to-use-it' drawer for a looong time.

Which book was that (obviously you don't know the title, but how did it begin)?

It was a SF update of Robin Hood - the force fields which aliens(?) used were powerless against bows and arrows. That really is all I can remember for sure about the story, but I remember the book itself being a hardcover. I've been digging around for years (on and off), but there's nothing which ever jumped out at me in any lists I've pulled. The annoying thing is that there are at least a dozen really similar plots, but the one I'm looking for was in circulation c. 1990-1992, ruling out a few obvious ones. I want to say the same rough look as Hale's Black Horse books, but don't quote me on that... Not sure if it had illustrations or not.

To prevent these things from happening again, as it really is the most annoying thing, I have been keeping notes of everything I've read since around 2003.

That's the Hood's Army Trilogy (Earth Invaded, Slaveworld and The Liberators) written by Christopher Evans under the pseudonym Nathan Elliott.

Billy Ocean comes from Romford. This is the most discombobulating fact I know.

Tornado No 14: The unbelievable is happening here at Wembley! Keegan, Brooking and Francis can only watch as young Davie Hunt skips past West Germany's Schwarzenbeck on his way to his tenth goal!

Dave Hunt was the editor of Battle - which of course means that England's new young star player was in fact Captain Hurricane! He later went on to obliterate the West German team in a Raging Fury...

I've not seen anybody else mention that Rog shares more than a few similarities with the Death Star...  Artificial planet - check.  Bristling with weapons - check.  Designed to dominate the galaxy - check.  Surrounded by huge ships - check.  Destroyed by small bomb being dropped into maintenance shaft - check.  So-called hero ends up killing many thousands of civilian workers and prisoners - check.

Of course,the Mekon had a Death Star (and Dan Dare was blowing it up with space torpedoes) back in 1958, which is way before it was cool...

Poor Tornado - everything went a bit pear-shaped before it even started publishing, and no one involved seems to have any sort of enthusiasm for it whatsoever (apart from whoever's playing the part of Billy Preston, but it's possible that he's just a bit manic looking anyway!)

I wonder if it would be remembered at all today if it hadn't merged with 2000 AD.