This Old Dragon: Issue #93

 I am opting to take this one first for a few reasons. One, I really wanted to go through all the Dragons from 1985-86 for my personal enjoyment. I also wanted to cover this one since I pulled it out for the cover when I talked about Jack Williamson's contributions to the Witches of Appendix N. This also gave me my third reason. This issue is falling apart, and what remains is mildewed and water-damaged. So I figure I'd better do it before it kills me with my allergies. So for this review, I'll take some pictures, but mostly I'll stick with my Dragon Magazine CD-ROM collection.

As I mentioned already, I want to do a deep dive into all the Dragons from 1985 to 1986, with some choice ones from 1984 and 1987. This one is a great place to start with the January 1985 issue.

I also mentioned Jeff Busch's cover yesterday. Just one in a series of were-tigresses, but this is one of the best.

Letters cover previous Dragon entries on the Height & Weight and the Crystalbrittle spell.

Gygax is up asking us if we would see a Dungeons & Dragons movie. I think we know the answer to that one. If it has Jeremy Irons, then no, if it has Chris Pine, then yes. Keep in mind that Chris Pine was 4 (4 and a half if you asked him) at the time this issue came out.

Our first substantial article is from no less than Gary Gygax himself, titled Life Beyond 15th Level. New Rules for Druids with Nowhere to Go. Covers the hierophant druid we will later see in the Unearthed Arcana. 

Gygax is up again in a rebuttal to the fundamentalists out there raging against D&D in Thinking for Yourself. I can't think of many Dragon readers who would be swayed by fundies. But this is Gygax's soapbox, and he can tell people what he wants.  I am not sure about the timing, but the infamous 60 Minutes segment will run in September. Likely, it was not filmed yet, but there was plenty going on. Egbert had died in 1980. Mazes and Monsters had hit TV in 1982. 

Arthur Collins has his "The Making of a Milieu. How to Start a World and Keep it Turning" about building a fantasy world. This is largely material we all do now, start small, build up, reject what doesn't work. He recommends building history into the world through layered maps and letting place names, borders, and institutions arise organically from that history. I am not sure about the NPC "mentor" per se, but guiding NPCs is a good idea. Something Ed Greenwood has done to great effect. 

Speaking Ed, he is up with an Ecology of article, The Ecology of the Eye of the Deep. Now these never get old for me, really. In fact, I tend to enjoy them more now than I ever used to. They are also, for the most part, still useful regardless of what edition you are playing. 

Short Hops and Big Drops: Here's How Far and How High Characters Can Jump by Stephen Inniss is another good one really. It's not a bad system and again, looks like something that would work for any system, not just D&D. 

Another article that still gets mentions today is Frank Mentzer's Ay pronunseeAYshun gyd: An Informal Index of the Right Things to Say. This one comes up every so often and is the "go to" guide for pronunciations for all sorts of D&D-related entries. 

Merle Rasmussen is up with another Top Secret article, Agencies and Alignments. The varied groups of the TOP SECRET Game. The article catalogs the various intelligence agencies, criminal organizations, and terrorist groups that player characters might work for or against. Each organization is described through a standardized set of categories, including headquarters, founding date, activities, objectives, and allies. The article also introduces an alignment system that measures agents' political, change-oriented, and economic beliefs on a spectrum, which can affect how well agents from different organizations cooperate during missions. The groups range from legitimate Western intelligence bodies like The Agency and HEARTS, to criminal syndicates like Hydra and The Cartel, to radical terrorist organizations like Red Dawn. I remember this article well. I thought these might be good for Chill, a game I was really getting into at the time, and was looking for agencies like S.A.V.E.

Lots of full-page ads for the new Twilight: 2000 RPG.

The Gypsy Train. A Moving Scenario for AD&D Game Play. Designed be Richard Fichera and artwork by Bob Marus. This is great adventure with a great hook. My son is running a Ravenloft campaign now, and this is rather perfect.  There are even cut-outs of the various wagons to use! The NPCs are not all designed to be enemies to the PCs or evil, and are presented with a variety of motivations and things they can do. Fairly detailed for a Dragon adventure. 

Eira is our short fiction by Josepha Sherman. 

Big ad for the Dungeons & Dragons 10th Anniversary pack. I wish I had grabbed one of these. According to Frank Mentzer, a lot of these ended up in a Lake Geneva landfill. 

Up now our Ares sci-fi section.

Friend of the Other Side, Jeff Grubb, is up with the Marvel Phile with more Avengers. In this issue, Mockingbird and Shroud, who feels like an occult Batman.

Space Opera gets some love with New Ships for Old from Stefan Jones. Or how to update your old starships. I remember trying to use this with Star Frontiers.

Peter C. Zelinski has New Brotherhoods minor cryptic alliances for Gamma World. I used this in conjunction with the Top Secret article for some Chill groups. I remember writing all of them out and trying to find a common format I could use. Don't recall how far I got.  Not all worked, but there was a lot of ideas here.

Speaking of which, nice ad for Chill.

Star Frontiers gets a nice feature on farming. Rare Wines and Ready Cash. Agricultural Trade in the Frontier by Tony Watson is actually a pretty useful article. We think of starships and space battles, but an army and colonists move on their stomachs, and food needs to be grown.

Gamers' Guide as our small ads. Not a lot in this issue. 

The Convention Calendar is also pretty small. No shock, really, it was January. 

Four full-color pages of Wormy. A page of Dragonmirth. And three pages of Snarf Quest. 

I managed to get through this one without Benadryl, which is a win. The issue is a good one, lots of great and memorable material. 

While hindsight tells me this was the beginning of the end of the Gygax-era of D&D/TSR there is nothing here to make me think that we knew this was coming back then. Are there signs? Yeah, if you know what you are looking for OR maybe that is just confirmation bias.

But I can say this, we are entering into an era of Dragon that over the next 4 to 5 years will produce some of the best content for long-time gamers. People might call that time the Silver Age, but there is nothing "Second Best" about the content of Dragon in the issues to come.