Different World 4 (August/September 1979) has a sweet cartoony Jennell Jaquays cover (colored by Steve Oliff, the dude who would eventually trailblaze computer color for comics with the Epic Comics import of Akira – I knew that name was familiar when I saw it in issue 2). I appreciate the glaring yellow backing.

No Life and Roleplaying this issue, but Gigi starts out with an apology for joking about Tim Kask in issue 2 (about either new teeth or excessive cigarette smoking). The most interesting thing in this issue though is Greg Stafford’s article laying out Waha’s Quest. I don’t have any issue of Wyrm’s Footprints or any of Stafford’s RQ zines, so I can’t say for sure, but this is currently the earliest mention of HeroQuests that I know of – basically, RuneQuest is rules for adventuring in the physical world and Stafford envisioned HeroQuest as a set of rules for adventuring in the metaphysical realm of Glorantha’s gods and powers. Waha’s Quest is a “practice” quest, done in the real world in imitation of Waha’s deeds in the time before time. As far as I know, Stafford never released full rules for metaphysical HeroQuesting for RQ, though HQ did become its own RPG system (and RQ7 now has support for the practice). So this feels sort of like a glimpse of a RQ white whale, which is pretty cool.