Dean Morrissey gives us our cover for this month. Editor Kim Mohan tells us a story about a December 1981 Dragon that was supposed to go to Washington DC and instead ended up in Vienna Austria.
In a move that pre-sages the feature issues of the later 1980s, we have a huge feature on Elves, All About Elves. I should point out that much of this information now feels very familiar. But at the time, this was great world-building. While the debt to Tolkien is acknowledged, there is more here that is not Tolkien and that is great for AD&D (later editions).
Roger E. Morre is up first with The Elven Point of View. A lot of this material was reused for the Unearthed Arcana and can even be seen in the various Demi-human books of the AD&D 2nd Ed era.
Moore is back, with Georgia Moore, on The Gods of the Elves. While we are still a few years away from the Forgotten Realms, this material has become part of the cornerstones of Greenwood's world. The gods presented here, Hanali Celanil, Erevan Ilesere, Aerdrie Faenya, Labelas Enoreth, and Solonor Thelandria, are still used to this day.
Sage Advice covers elf-related questions.
Roger Moore, our MVP of Elves, is up again with The Half-Elven Point of View. Honestly, you can practically hear the birth cries of Tanis in this article.
By page 16 we are done with the elves. Which makes it a shorter "feature" but it punches way above it's weight class in terms of content.
On page 16 we get our monthly From the Sorcerer's Scroll by Gary Gygax. This one covers more Cantrips. Timely for me because I am reworking my witch cantrips for my Advanced Witches & Warlocks: Occult Adventures. And he has a lot of them.
A two-page ad for Asgard miniatures.
Ed Greenwood is up with Firearms, a coverage of early guns. There is a nice history and a table of various types of guns used with AD&D stats. Again, as with most of Ed's material, it is really useful.
Aside. The paper of this magazine is so thick. Not at all like the later ones and certainly not at all like magazines today.
Wear Wolf is our fiction piece by Joel Rosenberg. A modern werewolf tale of the "wolf skin" sort.
Mike Holthaus has a quiz for us. How Much Do You Know About Science in a Fantasy World? Some basic science applications to situations in a fantasy setting. Like, if you fall 3,000 ft, do you have enough time to cast a Fly spell?
Our centerfold game is Flight of Boodles. Comes complete with a fold-out game board.
Lest we forget, this is the April issue. I hate sounding like an old humorless grouch here, but I find most of the April issues to be very un-funny. This one at least is tolerable.
Roger Moore (again!) is up with the Jester class. Though this one is presented as an actual class option and not a joke class. Well...sort of jokey, but still very playable.
There is a parody of their usual "Giants in the Earth" series, again by Roger E. Moore, featuring some small characters that are supposed to be humorous.
Phil Foglio has a nice spread in Artist of the Month. Not a feature I remember very well, but there is a cool bit of art here.
A woman warrior saving a male one from a monster? Since when has D&D been so woke! Kidding of course. But there are certain segments of the fandom who freak out if this art were used today. I admit the color-by-numbers is a nice touch.
The Dragon's Bestiary features the Valley Giant (Jolly Green giant), Donald Duck, Tasmanian Devil, Marvin the Martian, a werebeaver, and the Bad New Bugbears. I am a little surprised no one sued.
Interesting ad for the short-lived Gen Con East in Chester, PA.
Gary is up with some Top Secret RPG material for Outfitting the New Agent.
Glenn Rahman has some playtest notes from his game, Trojan War.
Ah, now here is something fun. Stats and background on the Irish Pooka by Michael Fountain.
We get another point of view on Alignment from John Lees. This time, we delve a little bit into psychology and the ethics of the individuals. It also introduces the concept of alignment gradients, but not the mechanics behind them.
The notorious Spawn of Fashan gets a review from Lawrence Schick, where he advises us not to take the game very seriously. He is pretty much saying it is a parody and bad on purpose. Later on he admitted it wasn't a parody, but he still thought it was funny. I tried to play it once in college, around 1989 or so. Yeah, it is terrible.
Comics pages give us Wormy and What's New with Phil and Dixie! I don't think there were more than this, though my cover is detached; I think this was all the pages.
So this was great stuff for 1982. The big feature on Elves has appeared in many AD&D books over the years. Ed Greenwood's piece on guns is good if you want to bring them into your AD&D games. And the jester class is one of the better ones I have seen.
Thanks once again to Eric Harshbarger for sending me this issue!
1 comment:
No love for Eubeen Hadd, the 20th level Halfling Thief? Or Morc the Orc? I will about to using Idi Snitman and his troops at some point, but the details escape me. Maybe it was just convenient to have the stats?
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