I will admit, I don't recall this one very well. I don't think I actually owned it.
The cover by Teanna Byerts is good, but I am not sure I recognize her name at all. Like many of the Dragon of this time frame, it is a themed issue, this time on "Aerial Adventuring."
Also, my copy is in pretty terrible shape. There are a lot of pages falling out, and it is missing the Forgotten Realms map, much to my disappointment. Though given that it is nearly 40 years old, this is hardly a shock.
Letters cover some of the changes in Dragon and some of the ones coming up. 1986-88 was a big transitional time at TSR as we all know now and there is evidence everywhere.
Roger E. Moore asks in the Editorial what other changes do people want, including a dedicated BBS (bulletin board system). Kudos for the forward thinking. I got onto a lot of BBS back in the day and TSR one would have been fun.
Checking my PDF it looks like I am missing the Forum page.
Ken Rolston is up first with Role-playing Reviews. He covers two books from the Warhammer Fantasy line, though he spends a lot of time talking about the merits of various other Fantasy RPGs including AD&D/D&D, GURPS Fantasy, RuneQuest and Harnmaster among others. When we get to warhammer he likes the character creation and combat, but doesn't seem to care for the magic system. Though he loves the races and monsters. The review is long, but not so long as to be overpowering. Given the impact that Warhammer will soon have on the hobby, it is likely the right size.
Sage Advice covers the Frank Mentzer-edited D&D Expert set.
Ah, page 17, we get into our feature articles.
Ed Greenwood is up first with Sailors on the Sea of Air, detailing the skyships of the Forgotten Realms. Since these pages were already falling out, I just took them and stuck them into my 1987 "Gray" Forgotten Realms boxed set. These are not Spelljammer ships, at least not yet, but they are a nice fantastical piece that separates what makes the Realms the Realms and not Greyhawk. Does Greyhawk have flying ships? Maybe, but they seem to work well here. Ed, of course, is dropping names here that will soon become minor D&D celebrities in their own right.
On a Wing and a Prayer is next from L. Gregory Smith and covers gliders for AD&D. Not quite as fantastical as flying ships. It seems to be complete. When were gliders first used? 1880s it seems.
Thomas Kane is back with Flying the Friendly (?) Skies, or a guide to aerial adventuring in the AD&D game. This covers mounts of various types and spells. He also gives us weather effects and altitude adjustments.
The Wings of Eagles by J. E. Keeping details the aarakocra as a PC and NPC race choice. I don't recall ever seeing anyone ever play one back then, so not sure if this article had much traction. Of course, today they are ubiquitous enough to be a character and a plot point in the last Dungeons & Dragons movie. Again my copy was falling out, so I just punched some holes into it and stuck it into my Monstrous Compendium for AD&D 2nd ed. There is even a god of aarakocra, Krocaa, listed.
This ends the feature.
Buy quirk of layout, Sage advice continues here on the same page with the updated Beastmaster XP tables. Now I kinda want to make an aarakocra beastmaster.
Joseph R. Ravitts is next with Kicks and Sticks, Introducing escrima to Oriental Adventures. A system of escrima martial arts as well as a class to use it, the Escrimador. It *seems* fine, but feels like a solution in search of a problem. Honestly, I never used Oriental Adventures much and got into their martial arts sections even less.
Rich Stump is up with Front-End Alignments about "Quasi-alignments" of gamers like "Chaotic Everywhere" and "Lawful Bored." Not really my thing, but I'm sure someone was amused. Feels like filler to me.
Far more useful is Rich Baldwin's Arcane Lore: The Secrets of Odeen the Arch-Mage. This details the known background of the Arch-Mage Odeen and, more importantly, the discovered spells of the Arch-Mage. There are five new spells here, nothing earth-breaking, but fun ones. Perfect for a quest to uncover this lost book.
Stuck in the middle of this issue is this AD&D Game 2d Edition Questionnaire. It is pretty comprehensive. The mail in reply card is still attached, but sadly I think I missed the window to send in my responses.
What is most interesting to me is what is here that made it into the game and what didn't.
Packing It All Away by Ian Chapman offers tips on what to pack for a wilderness adventure. Most of the people I gamed with were at the time or had been Boy Scouts, present company included (yes, I was a Boy Scout, no, I didn't stick with it because they didn't like Atheists then, still don't I think.). So this material was a bit of a repeat. We all had access to various Boy Scout manuals. Still this is a useful list of items and advice. Not sure if the GP values translate to other systems, though.
Ah, now here is a fun one. Ed Greenwood is back with The Ecology of the Gelatinous Cube. A monster that, by all accounts, was created just so Gary could mess with his players gets the full Ecology treatment. Here the deadliest of the all the Jello-O flavors gets situated into the dungeons of the Undermountain. Ed even manages to make these things make sense. They even get a proper name, Athcoids. Since this was already falling out, I punched holes in this one too and put it in my Monstrous Compendium binder. Blasphemy? Eh. The magazine is falling apart anyway, and this at least allows me to keep the best parts.
Michael Dobson give us some sneak peaks of AD&D 2nd Edition in The Game Wizards. I know that at the time I was excited to get this new AD&D. Despite starting in 1979 I always felt I was on my back foot when it came to AD&D 1st ed. I began with Holmes Basic and then on to Moldvay Basic before getting into AD&D proper. This of course is silly for me to think, since the Holmes Basic I was playing then was a combination of that and the AD&D Monster Manual. So I was only two years late for the start of AD&D. But still, I felt AD&D 2nd Ed would be "mine" the one I could invest into. This article covers the new AD&D, but also other offerings from TSR. I didn't fully comprehend then what was happening with TSR and Gygax even if I new the broad strokes. Still, it felt like a change, and I was already in the middle of my own changes that this felt custom-made for me. College and AD&D, 2nd ed., would be forever linked in my mind.
Peter R. Jahn has some rules for guns for various systems in Blasters & Blunderbusses. Really, I should say it is more system-agnostic.
Following on that is A Shot in the Arm, or a new damage system for Star Frontiers by Jason Pamental and David Packard. I enjoyed SF back in the day, but by 1987 I had moved on to other sci-fi games in my search to find the perfect sch-fi game for me. Eventually, I just had to write my own.
Thomas Kane is up again with The Most Secret of Secrets, real world secret tech for Top Secret and Top Secret/SI games. This includes such things as the Stealth Bomber and Stealth Fighter. I had a high-school buddy who became an engineer and was WAY into stealth tech. Then later on in college I had a roomate that bought all the flight simulators for the stealth fighters when they came out in the early 1990s. I liked this article for the coverage of the nearly forgotten Soviet "space plane," their answer to our space Shuttle.
Friend of the Other Side, Jeff Grubb is up with his Marvel-Phile discussing The Hulk and the Hulkbusters.
The Lessers are back with The Role of Computers, detailing what was high tech in the Summer of 1987. They cover the games Black Magic and Realms of Darkness as well some clues for other games. The DNA that all computer games share with D&D is always a little more obvious in these early games.
Small ads are next with the Gamer's Guide. Always a ton of great stuff here. Avil Enterprises still has its ad for illustrating your character. An ad for "Christian Adventure Novels," "Discipleship Games," and a few more.
Order form for back issues of Dragon. You can get issues as far back as #80 and all five volumes of "Best of Dragon." Minimum $15 for credit card orders, please.
The Convention Calendar covers all the best cons for late summer/early fall 1987, including Gen Con 20 in Milwaukee, WI, on August 20-23. I see the Midwest still dominates the Con scene, followed by the West Coast.
Dragonmirth, Snarf Quest, and Wormy provide us with our comics this issue.
All said and told, not a bad issue at all. Part of the transitional time of Dragon, D&D, and TSR. Some of those transitions were pretty obvious, others we only see in retrospect.
While some people claim that the best days of Dragon were behind it, as part of the Golden Age of TSR/D&D, I would argue that Dragon gained more focus and direction in these years, between the height of AD&D 1st edition and the beginning of AD&D 2nd edition. We are seeing the direction AD&D is about to go (again, this is retrospective), and honestly, I thought and still think it looked pretty good. I was not so creator-focused back then that the news of Gygax's, Mohan's, and then later Mentzer's departure affected me much. I suspected then that AD&D/D&D would go on. It did in fact.
Had I been more "creator-focused" I should have noticed more the rise of Ed Greenwood. It was not a meteroic rise, but a gradual one built up over years of steady and reliable output. Maybe I would have given the Realms more of a chance back then. But it would not be until the 2000s that I really looked into it all and not till much later that I would be playing in the Realms.
Still. One of the big reasons to keep doing these "This Old Dragons" is to appreciate what we had, how it has shaped the game and the gamers, and what we can still learn from it all today.
Speaking of which. I have been periodically buying large collections of Dragon magazines. I am now just about out. I'll have to check, but I might not have many of these left.
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