I should note that this issue is really just "Best of The Dragon." There no other volumes to be a Vol. I for yet. But it will come soon.
Best of The Dragon
This best-of collection was initially published in 1980 and was edited by Tim Kask. It covers the Strategic Review and The Dragon vols I and II, or the first two years of The Dragon. So, from 1975 to 1978. Game-wise, this also covers the era of Original D&D and the dawn of AD&D.
What I want to get from this is a feel for what was going on then. 1975 to 1978 is a great time since this predates my own involvement in the game. I would not start playing until 1979. So the Best of Dragons were like hidden treasures of a bygone age. These were my "Glamdring" and "Orcrist" treasures. That is, if Gygax was Turgon and Lake Geneva was Gondolin.
This reads like a White Paper for AD&D. You can see how, where, and even why AD&D was made here with the various additions and rule guidelines. To expand on this further to my own interests, the lack of inclusion of the witch class seems a little odder.
There are a lot of articles here and they are packed together. I will mention them all, but some might not get much more than that. Others though are very interesting.
Section 1: Design/Designer's Forum
This all reads like rough drafts of the AD&D game presented from the D&D point of view. I should also add that Metamorphosis Alpha also gets some coverage.
Planes by Gary Gygax gives us our first look at what will become the famous D&D "wheel" cosmology. The color-coded planes of this article make it slightly more useful than its Player's Handbook counterpart.
How Green Was My Mutant, also by Gygax, gives us some random human mutation tables. I note these can be used in conjunction with the the random demons tables in the back of this issue. More on that later.
What follows are some more MA articles, Some Ideas Missed in Metamorphosis Alpha by James M. Ward and An Alternate Beginning Sequence for Metamorphosis: Alpha (note the colon) by Guy W. McLimore, Jr. It is easy to see the ideas brewing that would transform MA into Gamma World.
Hints for D&D Judges is a three-part series from Joe Fischer helping what will be called Dungeon Masters. I like the use of "Judge" here, very much old-school and the original idea for DM. Part 1 covers towns. Part 2 is Wilderness, and Part 3 is the Dungeon itself.
The amazing Lee Gold has a rare Dragon appearance with her article on Languages or Could You Repeat that in Auld Wormish? Given the discussions I have had here on languages, you know this is one that I have gone back to many times.
Tony Walston is up with The Development of Towns in D&D. It covers two pages and is packed really. I think some of this morphed into future articles about towns. Like all articles from this time, it is largely "here are your tools, go build it," which is great and works well for me. I am fairly sure that Grenda used some of this for all the cities he built and we adventured in.
On the other side of this is Let There Be A Method To Your Madness from Richard Gilbert. This article details how you should design your dungeons from the ground up, er, down. Followed by Daniel Clifton with Designing For Unique Wilderness Encounters. There is an assumption here, I think, that this is largely for a hex-crawl sort of adventure.
Jim Ward is back with two more MA-related articles, Deserted Cities of Mars and The Total Person In Metamorphosis Alpha.
Ok, now this one is an odd one. How Heavy Is My Giant is overtly a good article. It is a math-intensive guide on how much a giant-sized human should weigh. The article was "written" by Shlump Da Orc. Seriously? The article is good and whoever wrote it should be taking credit.
Rob Kuntz is up with Tolkien in Dungeons & Dragons. Knowing what I know now, this article hits a little differently. Though there is one solid point that was very true then and very true now. While there are similarities between Tolkien and D&D, they are not the same thing. The best example is the elves. D&D elves are not the immortals of Tolkien, nor should they be.
Jim Ward, our MVP of this collection, is up again with Notes From a Semi-Successful D&D Player. It is a bit of his reflections on playing as long as he had been at that point. He continues these thoughts on Some Thoughts on the Speed of a Lightning Bolt. This is less about how fast a lightning bolt moves, and more about how fast the wizard can cast the spell.
The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons & Dragons and Their Relationships to Good and Evil is next. It sounds like the title of a Master's Thesis, and in a way, it is. It was from Gary Gygax himself and it is in my opinion required reading. The graph of the soon-to-be AD&D alignment system is more complex than what we see in either Holmes Basic D&D or the AD&D Player's Handbook. There is a sense of "degree" or "intensity" in this. So, Demons are the most Chaotic Evil, then followed by Red Dragons (back then, yes), Trolls, and moving closer to Neutral, Orcs, Efreeti, Wereboars, and more. So not all creatures of the same alignment experience or act the exact same way. I think this distinction was lost later on. Suggesting that a Chaotic Evil creature can only act as chaotic evil.
This is the start of a series of articles by Gygax. There is a short article, Gary Gygax on Dungeons & Dragons which covers how Gary says he started the game. We know now of course it was much more involved that the handful of paragraphs here. This is followed by D&D is Only as Good as the DM. This is the first mention in this magazine of the "Dungeonmaster" (one word).
The Dungeons & Dragons Magic System is next from Gary and covers how the D&D magic system evolved out of Chainmail.
Section 2: Dragon Mirth
This section covers some of the "funnier" articles from TSR/The Dragon.
There is a Monster Reference Table Addition for a bunch of creatures they just made up for this. Sort of amusing I guess.
Jake Jaquet is up with The Search for the Forbidden Chamber. A bit of fiction.
Omar Kwalish (really Tim Kask) is up with What To Do When the Dog Eats Your Dice. Which is actually helpful, in a silly premise way. What to do if you don't have dice handy. Granted this is an artifact of the time. Everyone has a phone with access to dice rollers. But he also provides some solid 20th-century solutions like chits, cards, numbered straws/sticks, spinners, and even calculators with random functions. I used to use that one a lot.
Excerpt From An Interview With A Rust Monster from Michael McCrery is honestly best ignored. But I am sure someone out there enjoyed it.
While Sturmgeschutz & Sorcery is a silly idea from Gary Gygax, it has some practical uses. Namely, how much damage can a WWII tank do in D&D terms? The emphasis here is more Chainmail in origin than D&D, but it is still fun to read.
Section 3: Variants
Ok, now this section is much more interesting and gives us what The Dragon did the best: providing us with new material for our games.
Peter Aronson has two articles about Illusionists. The first gives us the class to 13th level and 5th level spell ability, and the next extends this to 14th level and 7th level spell ability. Both include a bunch of new spells. It honestly looks perfect to add to my Expert Set box.
Jim Ward is back with treasures found in Tombs & Crypts.
Gary is also next with Halflings, Dwarves, Clerics & Thieves in Dungeon! In this case, the Dungeon board game. I am going to make copies of this one and put it in all my copies of Dungeon. Not only are there new rules for these player types, but there are also new treasures and new monsters.
Doug Schwegman has a classic one for me next, the original Bard class in Statistics Regarding Classes: (Additions) - BARDS. I have played this Bard in the past and it works out great. The feel is more OD&D + Greyhawk, but that also means it would work well in Basic D&D and even AD&D. This is the one I used for my 1st Ed version of Nida.
Joe Fischer has a "new" Ranger class in The Original Ranger Class. Again, the presentation makes it look perfect for Basic D&D.
Charles Preston Goforth, Jr. is up from The Dragon #5 with Wizard Research Rules. This expands the rules covered in OD&D and again in The Dragon #2. It is a pretty solid set of rules for spell and magic item research. I'd have to compare it to later editions, but what strikes me about it is the simplicity of it all.
Ah. Next is the first version of the venerable Dragon Magazine Witch class in Witchcraft Supplement for Dungeons & Dragons. There is no author listed, not even Tim Kask knows who wrote it, but it is quite well written. It is overtly for OD&D Prime. Even before Greyhawk was released. The "Best Of" format has it neatly confined to 5 pages of text with some art. There is a lot to love about this article and class, really, and I am still puzzled why we never got an official witch class in old-school D&D. Though, I suppose if we had I'd be over here droning on about something else.
An ad for Fantasy Games Unlimited.
John M. Seaton is up with Monkish Combat in the Arena of Promotion, or how monks gain levels officially. It has diagrams that remind me of old martial-arts manuals.
Two pages of tables for Solo Dungeons & Dragons Adventures by Gary Gygax, with contributions from George A. Lord and play testing by Ernie Gygax and Robert Kuntz. I mean, it looks like it could work. I know for certain if I had seen this I would have tried to write a BASIC program to mimic this. I mean it would not be very difficult at all.
George Rihn is up with Lycanthropy - The Progress of the Disease. Which is basically discussing lycanthropes and XP progression for lycanthrope levels. It also looks pretty solid and I wonder why it didn't catch on. Though as I have mentioned many times, my Appendix N is more Hammer Horror than it is Pulp Fantasy; playing a werewolf is something that was going always come up in my games.
The Japanese Mythos are next by Jerome Arkenberg. This appeared originally in The Dragon #13 from 1978 and uses the format laid out by 1976's Gods, Demigods, & Heroes. There are three and half pages here and there are more entries than seen in the Japanese Mythos section of Deities & Demigods.
Paul Montgomery Crabaugh and Jon Pickens have two similar articles, Random Monsters and D&D Option: Demon Generation, respectively. With a few dice rolls you can create any sort of monster; living, undead or demon, to fill your dungeons. Combine these with the How Green was my Mutant article above and you can generate thousands. Again, this is exactly the sort of thing I would have tried to program in BASIC on my old TRS-80 Color Computer 2!
I said this was packed, right?
Ok, so a lot of great articles here that hit heavy on the nostalgia, but also still have some use today. I might try that random monster generator, or more to the point recombine it all and see what I can come up with. Maybe Python or something. Could be fun.
The Witch, of course, is the star for me. Love going back and looking at this older version.
One of the big issues I have with this collection is that while I can lump it all into a specific time, the time before I played, I miss the nuances of the times. I mean, I was very different from 1975 to 1978, and so was our hobby. I would have liked to see the date and issue each of these was published originally, like Best of Dragon Vol II does. I do miss the ads and the commentary from that time, though.
Still, it is a fascinating, if brief, glimpse into a time that remains a foreign country to me.
Should I do Best of Dragon Vol II? Have to think about that.
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