About Imagine Magazine

Imagine Magazine

Imagine, published in full as Imagine: Adventure Games Magazine, was a British monthly magazine dedicated to the role-playing games Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Published by TSR Hobbies (UK) Ltd, later TSR UK Ltd, and based in Cambridge, it ran from April 1983 to October 1985, producing 30 issues plus one special. It was the British counterpart to TSR's American magazine Dragon, created to serve and to grow the market for TSR's games in Britain against the lead of Games Workshop's White Dwarf.

Imagine is remembered for three contributions that outlived its short run. It created Pelinore, a complete campaign world serialised issue by issue; it published the comic strip The Sword of Alabron and its sequel Auchter's Axe; and it gave the young Neil Gaiman his first published short story, Featherquest, in May 1984, after he had joined the magazine as its film reviewer. Some of its official game material was later collected into the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons supplement Unearthed Arcana, and after its closure its staff carried its spirit into a successor magazine, Game Master.

TSR UK in Cambridge and the Challenge of White Dwarf

Imagine was published by the British arm of TSR, the American company that created Dungeons and Dragons, from its base in Cambridge. By 1983 the British role-playing hobby was expanding rapidly, but its dominant magazine was White Dwarf, published by Games Workshop, which covered role-playing games generally and TSR's rivals alongside TSR's own products. A house magazine gave TSR UK a direct channel to British players: a monthly showcase for its own games, its own settings and its own view of the hobby, in the manner of Dragon in the United States.

Gary Gygax, TSR's co-founder, later claimed that Imagine usually ran at a loss and was kept going to market TSR's lines against White Dwarf's British lead, an account preserved in Shannon Appelcline's history Designers and Dragons. That corporate rationale explains both the magazine's existence and its vulnerability. Imagine was a marketing investment as much as a publishing business, and when its parent company weighed the investment against its return, the magazine's literary and community achievements counted for less than its balance sheet. Its thirty issues were produced under that permanent, if unspoken, condition.

The People: Turnbull, Cockburn and Keith Thomson

Imagine's editor was Keith Thomson, and its publisher was Don Turnbull, a central figure in British role-playing whose name gave the magazine authority with hobbyists. Paul Cockburn served as assistant editor for most of the magazine's life, a continuity that shaped its voice. Together the team produced a magazine that, although a house organ, regularly covered the wider hobby: reviews, articles and adventures for other game systems available in Britain appeared alongside the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons material that was its core.

The editorial balance was delicate. Readers wanted a magazine about their hobby, not a catalogue, and Imagine's credibility depended on genuine criticism and on fiction and features with value beyond any single game. Special issues showed the range its staff could achieve: a superhero special tied to TSR's Marvel Super Heroes game, and an issue built around the author Michael Moorcock, with an interview, a short story and a scenario from Moorcock himself. Such features made Imagine a fantasy magazine that happened to be published by a games company, rather than the reverse.

Inside a Typical Issue

A typical issue of Imagine combined game material, fiction, reviews and features in a structure its readers came to know well. Adventures and rules articles for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and the basic Dungeons and Dragons game supplied the practical core that dungeon masters bought the magazine for, many issues including ready-to-play material. Reviews and news covered new releases across the hobby, film and book coverage placed role-playing within the wider fantasy culture its players inhabited, and short fiction appeared in most issues, usually from new writers but occasionally from established names.

That fiction policy made Imagine an entry point into professional writing. Fantasy in Britain in the early 1980s had few paying markets for short stories, and a monthly magazine that printed them, alongside names such as Anne McCaffrey and Brian Lumley, offered beginners a genuine showcase. The magazine's pages mixed the practical and the literary in a way that mirrored the hobby itself, in which players were simultaneously gamers, readers and aspiring creators. Imagine's table of contents, games and stories side by side, was a portrait of its audience.

Pelinore: A World Built Month by Month

Imagine's most ambitious serial feature was Pelinore, a campaign world published in monthly instalments. Pelinore was conceived as a flat world, centred on a region called the Domains, with a detailed city, Cerwyn and its surroundings among the settings developed for play. Month by month, readers received geography, settlements, personalities and scenarios, accumulating a complete, playable world from their back issues. For dungeon masters, who needed exactly this kind of grounded, street-level detail, Pelinore was the magazine's most useful gift.

Pelinore's afterlife proved longer than its parent magazine. When Imagine closed, the world was continued in Game Master magazine by the staff who had created it, and its material has since been gathered by enthusiasts into compilations that keep the setting playable decades later. Pelinore's tone, concerned with ordinary people, local government and the texture of daily life in a fantasy world as much as with dungeons and dragons, gave it a character distinct from the more heroic American settings of its day, and it remains the most studied British campaign world of its period.

The Sword of Alabron and Auchter's Axe

From its first issue, Imagine carried the adventure game comic The Sword of Alabron, which ran in issues 1 to 16. A comic strip inside a games magazine was a statement of intent: Imagine understood that its readers consumed fantasy in every medium, and a continuing illustrated adventure gave each issue a narrative thread to follow between game articles. Alabron's sixteen-issue run made it one of the magazine's signature features during its first year and a half.

Near the end of the run, the comic was revived as Auchter's Axe in issues 29 and 30, the magazine's final two issues. The revival reads, in retrospect, as a farewell gesture, bringing back a founding feature as the end approached. That the strip is still itemised in reference works and indexes of the magazine, alongside Pelinore, shows how completely Imagine's identity rested on its serial creations: a world and a comic that belonged to it alone, which no rival, not even White Dwarf, could offer its readers instead.

Neil Gaiman: Film Reviews and Featherquest

Imagine's most famous contributor arrived as a young journalist. Neil Gaiman wrote the magazine's film reviews, taking over from Colin Greenland, covering fantasy and science fiction cinema for its readers. In May 1984 the magazine published Featherquest, Gaiman's first published short story, and in March 1985 it published his story How to Sell the Ponti Bridge, later reprinted in his collection M is for Magic. The first fiction of one of the world's bestselling fantasy authors thus appeared in a British games magazine, a fact recorded in every account of Gaiman's early career.

The association illuminates Imagine's place in British fantasy culture. Its film pages were written by a reviewer who became a defining fantasist; its fiction pages launched him; its special issues carried figures such as Michael Moorcock, whose work had shaped the genre Gaiman inherited. A house magazine for a games company stood, briefly, at a crossing point of British fantasy, where the older generation of the New Wave, the games hobby and the next generation of authors all met. No marketing department could have planned that; an open fiction and reviews policy made it possible.

From Imagine to Unearthed Arcana

Some of the official Advanced Dungeons and Dragons material first published in Imagine was subsequently collected and used in Unearthed Arcana, the major rules supplement published by TSR in 1985. That migration, from a British house magazine into a core American rulebook, demonstrated that the Cambridge operation was not merely reprinting American content for a local market. British-designed material, tested before Imagine's readers, entered the permanent canon of the game.

For collectors and game historians, this gives Imagine an importance beyond nostalgia. Issues containing material later canonised in Unearthed Arcana are primary sources for the development of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in its first edition era, and the magazine's index is a map of British contributions to a game usually narrated as an American story. The flow of creativity across the Atlantic ran in both directions, and Imagine was its British port.

Closure in October 1985 and the Game Master Succession

Imagine's final issue appeared in October 1985, closing the run at 30 issues plus one special. The cancellation ended TSR UK's magazine experiment after two and a half years, leaving White Dwarf once again without a dedicated British rival for the Dungeons and Dragons audience. Gygax's later account, that the magazine had been sustained for strategic rather than commercial reasons, suggests the closure was a corporate decision about marketing spend as much as a verdict on the magazine's quality or sales.

The story did not quite end there. When some TSR UK staff were made redundant, they founded Game Master magazine to maintain the experience of Imagine and its popular features, including Pelinore, and Game Master published articles about Imagine's closure that criticised Gygax and TSR. The succession matters to the magazine's memory: its own creators wrote its first history, in anger and in detail, and preserved its features in a successor title. Imagine thus has an unusually complete record for a short-lived house magazine, documented by Appelcline's industry history, by the Dungeons and Dragons reference literature, by a 2026 DiGRA proceedings paper devoted to it, and by the continued life of everything it launched, from Pelinore to Neil Gaiman's fiction.