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.

Mail Call: These Old Dragons

 Quick mail call today.

Couldn't sleep one night so I got online one of the Facebook RPG Buy/Sell/Trade groups.

Long story short, I bought a bunch of Dragons I was missing. 

This works out well for me since I was running out of Dragons for "This Old Dragon."

I don't quite have them all for 2nd Edition yet, or more to the point, between 1995 and 1999, but I have a lot. With some other recent purchases, this should keep me occupied for a while.

I think I might pull these out in order. I have a lot I want to do for the span of 1984-1987 and I want to be sure I cover them.

This Old Dragon: Issue #85

 I am not completely sure why I have never done this one before now. Was I saving it for something special? I think I was, but I can't recall. What I do know is this: Dragon #85 is the first Dragon I ever bought for myself from Belobrajdic's Bookstores. Sure, I had borrowed a lot of Dragons, and I have even been given some. But this is the first one I bought because of the content. I'll get to that in a bit. 

It is the spring of 1984. I am a Freshman in high school. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is the #1 movie. Newly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Phil Collins "Against All Odds" is our #1 song and on shelves everywhere, and certainly my game table is This Old Dragon #85.

Ok, the art for this issue is quite striking and it immediately drew me in.  "The Innocent Power" by Susan Collins was one of the best I had seen on Dragon. It is what drew me in, but not what sold me. 

This issue is memory-rich for me. I went over every word and image in this issue. Case in point, the Ral Partha ad on the opposite side of the cover. It features "The Black Prince's Chariot of Fear" pulled by freaking Balrogs! Wait! Can you do that??  Yeah, I had seen many minis before, but this was different. This was me looking at this image in my own bedroom or out on my front porch (where I often worked on "D&D stuff" during the summer). Either way, 40 years later, it is still cool.

Kim Mohan is our Editor-in-Chief here, and he discusses two different electronic dice tools. I always wanted one of those, but could never justify the cost. What I did was program my calculator to be a dice roller. This was before I learned about pseudo-random numbers. The next part of the Editorial covers the "feature" of this issue, and why I bought it; it is all about Clerics. At the time, I played a lot of Clerics as Undead and Vampire hunters, not necessarily as healers. 

The Letters section is known as Out On A Limb at this point. Letters include a guy asking about copyrights on the various published D&D materials. Sure, use as you want, but don't try to resell anything. Some comments on typos. And more.

Ad for Gen Con 17. I am wearing my Gen 52 shirt as I am writing this. 

The Forum covers deeper opinions and reflections. I like the Forum, but this one bugged me at first. Every entry dealt with something from a previous issue so it made it hard to know what was being talked about. As I went on this discussion held more value to me.  Interestingly enough, one of the contributors in Katherine Kerr talking about one of her own articles.

Ad for Grenadier models. I bought one of the Fantasy Lords sets and then proceeded to try to paint them with Testor's paints. Yeah. I did that.

The Cleric Collection is the feature of this issue, and I ate it up.

Kim Mohan is up first with Here's To Your Health. This covers more first aid in AD&D. There is a nice overview of curing magic, including healing vs curing magic. 

Special Skills, Special Thrills from Roger E. Moore expands on an idea introduced by Gary Gygax in his World of Greyhawk setting. This expands, granting Clerics new powers based on their god, as detailed in Deities & Demigods. This includes not just powers but also the taboos they must follow.  There are enough examples here to apply to any god. This all basically became part of the rules in AD&D 2nd Ed and later editions. But back in 1984? This was great stuff, and I locked on to it. My Sun Priest, Necromancer, Healer, and yes, the Witch began here in their earliest forms. 

Nice ad for Powers & Perils. I had no idea before this that there were so many games. Yes, I knew about all the big names, but Powers & Perils was not one of those. The game still has an active presence online.

In our non-Editor entry, Fraser Sherman gives us a good companion piece to Moore's article. In Clerics Must be Deity-Bound he talks about the behavior clerics follow to earn those spells, turning, and even special powers. The example dialog between a Cleric of Thor, Tyr, Diancecht, and Aphrodite, and how each would deal with a couple of dozen guards. Let's ignore the logistics of how or why the four are in the same party and focus on the message. Clerics need to be different than each other. Again, this article is the model from which the later Faiths & Avatars books for the Forgotten Realms and AD&D 2nd edition game would take their ultimate form.

Ad for the Traveller book. Also called the Blue Book in my gaming circles, I think I ordered it that very summer along with Chill.  

Michael Gray is up with PBM: Problems by Mail, a discussion on the various issues currently bothering play-by-mail gamers.

I did not know it at the time, who did really, but the next article would set a tone for yet again, AD&D 2nd Edition and the Forgotten Realms. The Ecology of the Ixitxachitl by Dragon MVP Ed Greenwood. Here I learned about their worship of Demogorgon and even the rare vampire Ixitxachitl. 

Susan Shwatz has our fiction with Valkyrie Settlement. I am sure I read it at some point, but skimming it over, I can't recall much of it.  

What can be considered the first hero of English epics, Beowulf, is up but three different versions from three different authors, Robert Cook, Roger E. Moore, and Kyle Gray in Three Cheers for Beowulf.

For the price at the time, $3.00, I felt Dragon was a good deal, but when it added some like a mini-adventure like The Twofold Talisman, Adventure Two: The Ebon Stone by Roger Moore, Philip Tatercyznski, Douglas Niles, & Georgia Moore. I always wanted to get Part One, which I eventually got, but I ran this one a few times. There is some silly bits here, the Halfling D.V. for example. Still, it is fun and I might be giving it a little more latitude because I was not expecting to get an adventure in my issue of Dragon.

Speaking of adventures, Modules: What We're Hunting For, covers some guidelines on what sort of things the editors of Dragon are looking for. We are still a little bit away from Dungeon magazine, but I can't help but think this is related to that effort.

Dragonlance is still brand new and has not yet caught the gaming world by storm. But it will. A Stone's Throw Away by Roger E. Moore is the second short story set in the Dragonlance world to appear in Dragon. I won't go as far as to say I was/am a huge Dragonlance fan, but I did enjoy the novels, and I liked reading the adventures, but even then, I knew they were railroady and set to serve the needs of the main characters. One day, I would like to run them, but I would need to significantly rewrite them. 

Oh. Witch Hunt. An ad for this game hits on page 58, and I had to have it. I never found a copy 'til much later, but I still have it. 

Ken Rolston is up with more game reviews. In Advanced Hack-and-Slash, he covers four new games that all have heavy combat focuses. Up first is Warhammer. It looks fun, I wonder if it will catch on?  Rolston likes it and thinks it is a good entry into the mass combat fantasy rules category. REAPER: Fantasy Wargame Rules is next along with a scenario, Attack of the Fungoid Trolls. It was created in 1981 with 2/3rds of the designers of Warhammer. Rolston points out that criticisms of the game are unnecessary since most of the glaring errors and missteps have been corrected by Warhammer, but he has it here as a historical perspective. Next is the celebrated Lost Worlds playbooks from Nova Game Designs and designed by Ace of Aces' Alfred Leonardi. These books fascinated me because I always wanted to see how they worked. No one near me played it, and I never saw it in my local stores. Rolston likes the game and concept, but finds it expensive; each character needs a playbook at $6 per, and replayability is very low. Finally, Cry Havoc is not a Fantasy Wargame, but "a lovely model of what a perfect FRP combat wargame should look like." It is a medieval skirmish game that is easy to learn and play and is "superb in every way."

Providing the counterpoint, Katharine Kerr has her review of Warhammer in Warhammer FRP System Falls Flat. No. She is not a fan. 

We now come to the Ares section. Now I knew nothing about SPI or Ares prior to this, so I thought this was *just* the Sci-fi offering in a normally Fantasy magazine. But it did feel different. The Federation Guide to Luna is a great kick-off by Dale L. Kemper. I learn that it is part of a series detailing the Moon in different sci-fi settings. If this sounds a little like my notion of West Haven, then you would be correct. This is for the FASA Star Trek game.

John M. Maxstadt is up with Gamma Hazards, New Mutants for the GAMMA WORLD Game. These include some fungimals and the humbug. 

Roger E. Moore is more than pulling his weight this issue with some advice for Traveller players.

Lions, Tigers, & Superheroes covers animals for the Champions game by Leonard Carpenter. 

Starquestions is our "sage advice" for Star Frontiers.

Gamer's Guide has our small ads. This includes one of the previously alluded to dice rollers. A module for "the most popular fantasy roleplaying game." And The Game Master program on cassette for the Vic-20 and Timex-Sinclair and compatible with Dungeons & Dragons.

The Convention Calendar is next for what is going on in the Summer of 1984.

Wormy is next with some weirf mutants. Dragon mirth has our comics, including the short-lived Talanalan by Kurt Erichsen.

We wrap it up with Elmore's Snarf Quest.

All in all, a fantastic issue. Though my perception may be colored by nostalgia. You never forget your first...Dragon really. The copy I have here is not my first. That one is long, long gone, but I hold on to this one as if it were some sort of sacred text. Yes, it is technically no different than Dragon #84 or #86, and they do not get the same sort of reverence out of me. 

This Old Dragon: Issue #124

Let's go back to a transitional time for me personally. August 1987. I was starting my first year at university, and pretty much everything in my life was changing. I had moved to a town that would be my home for the next 7 years and 2.5 degrees. I was about to meet the woman I was going to marry, though we never actually dated in college. Just hung around each other like 24 hours a day for five years. And in gaming, I was getting ready to move over to the "new" 2nd edition of the game that had been part of my life for 10 years or so. Stakeout was the number one movie. U2 and Madonna filled the airwaves, and on tables and shelves everywhere was This Old Dragon #124.

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. 

This Old Dragon: Issue #60

 Time to crack open another old Dragon. This is another one sent in by Eric Harshbarger. While the cover has fallen off of this one and there is a slight musty smell, it is in rather good condition. We head back to April 1982. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts dominate the airwaves with "I Love Rock & Roll."  The teen sex comedy "Porky's" is in the theatres. And on tables and shelves everywhere is This Old Dragon #60.

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!

This Old Dragon #100

 Today I have another Dragon from Eric Harshbarger , and honestly, it is one of my favorites. Dragon #100 was a special issue all around. Dragon had already celebrated 10 years and now this issue came with a thicker cover and an embossed "paper cut" dragon on the cover. While there was drama behind the scenes at TSR, many of us remained blissfully unaware and this issue celebrated Dragon, D&D, and all things TSR. It was a snapshot of the end of what many call the Golden Age of  Dungeons & Dragons.

In August 1985, I was getting ready to start my Junior Year in High School. I had just gotten my driver's license (late; I needed new glasses), and I had been playing AD&D all summer long. I had seen the movie "Back to the Future" at least a dozen times that summer, and "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News from the movie dominated the airwaves. And on tables everywhere was Issue #100 of This Old Dragon.

By this point, I had been buying Dragon magazine regularly for over a year. I couldn't rely on the other players in my group, so my DM and I split the duties; I'd buy one month, and he the next. But we both bought this one. 

Dennis Kauth is our cover artist for this issue, and it is a memorable one. It is a paper sculpture laid flat and photographed. The purple color of the faerie dragon was then added later. Why purple? Because they are the oldest and most powerful faerie dragons. This was his only Dragon Magazine cover, but he was also a key contributor to the BATTLESYSTEM game, building many of the 3D paper minis and cartography. 

Kim Mohan's Editorial is, as expected, reflective. Focusing on the his shared history with Dragon. 

Letters takes a different turn this month to answer some questions they often get. It is more of a Frequently Asked Questions feature. Questions like "why haven't you answered my letter?" to "how do you handle manuscript or art submissions?"

Score one for Sabratact, which covers the sport of the same name. Forest Baker is reporting on this form of sport combat, a bit like sparing but less LARPing than, say, SCA. Gary Gygax gives us an introduction. Essentially you wear armor and use blunt fencing like swords or other weapons. Your armor is affixed with discs with a paper surface. The goal is to take out your opponent's paper discs. Each disk has a different set of points and the first to score 10 points on their opponent wins. It is still being played and the official website even has pictures from this issue of Dragon.

Frank Mentzer is up with All About the Druid-Ranger. This article has some clarifications on the multiclass Druid-Ranger Gygax talked about in Issue #96. The controversy, of course, from the time Rangers could only be Good and Druids had to be true neutral. The solution is the obvious Neutral Good alignment, and the rest of the article is the rationale. We took this article as gospel. It was from the mind and hands of Gygax and Mentzer; how much more official could it be? 

Speaking of which, The Forum has discussions on the "legality" of altering the official AD&D system in game play. 

Ed Greenwood is next (wow, we are getting all the heavy hitters in this one) with Pages from the Mages V. There is less background fiction here, Elminster sitting in a canoe enjoying the summer night in Wisconsin, but the spells are just as fun. Many of these spells made their way into our big world-ending campaign of 1986. 

At Moonset Blackcat Comes is a tale about Gord the Rogue, the Cat Lord and Dragonchess from Gary Gygax. This is a bit of fiction to show the place of Dragonchess in Gary's world. While I thought the story was ok, it ignited my DM. There were two immediate impacts of this. The first was the increasing inclusion of the Catlord in our games. The second, well that is coming up.

Nice full-page ad for the Unearthed Arcana is next.

If Dungeons & Dragons is Gary's greatest feats as a game designer, then our next article should go down as one of his most overlooked feats. Dragonchess by Gary Gygax is an ambitious chess variant played on a 12 x 8 x 3 board. Yes, it is a 3D chess, with three levels. I won't go into detail here about how to play, there is a Wikipedia article for it, but I will get into how we played it.  I came over to Grenda's for our regular D&D session and he had built a Dragonchess set. Using plexiglass and long bolts he built the boards and marked out the grids with painter's tape. He used chess pieces from different sets and made the other pieces of random bits.  We played it...well. We tried to play it. We quickly saw that we kept forgetting about the other boards above and below. But, it was fun. 

I know there was some software out there that allowed you to play dragon chess. I am not sure if it still around. I have seen other people build their own boards and sets, and with 3D printing, making the pieces would be a lot easier (in fact, here they are). While I never played a full game of it, many half-attempts, I have very fond memories of this game. 

Our centerpiece, as if the Dragonchess wasn't enough, is one of my all time favorite Dragon Magazine adventures, The City Beyond the Gate by Robert Schroeck. This adventure takes your AD&D characters of at least 9th level and sends them through a gate to London of the 1980s!  I was already a huge Anglophile at this point. My favorite bands were Pink Floyd, The Police, The Who, Led Zeppelin, and still The Beatles. Doctor Who was my favorite television show. AND the adventure was about finding the Mace of St. Cuthbert. So this was custom-made for me, really. The adventure is a long one, 21 pages, and has maps and "tech item" flow charts as seen in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. 

The adventure was a lot of fun, and I am thinking of getting my Dragon DC-ROM and printing it out for my kids to use. I think they would find it great. If I were to re-run today, I think I might set it in Victorian London of the 1890s. Though...there is a lot of fun to be had in London of the 1980s. 

And I do love any map of London.

Wow, we are already into the Ares section of this Dragon. The "cover" has the then Guardians of the Galaxy on it. 

Creative Conjuring from Eric Walker is a variant magic system for Marvel Superheroes. Dr. Strange is featured throughout and he was always one of my favorite Marvel characters. I remember trying to figure out if I could use any of this with AD&D, but I never got it to work how I wanted. BUT given the time period, I am sure some of those notes went into one of the drafts of my witch class or characters. 

Champions gets some love for our first non-TSR RPG covered in CHAMPIONS Plus! by Steven Maurer. This has new powers for CHAMPIONS heroes. Again, I am not 100% certain, but I think some ideas here went into my witches. The "Domination" and "Vertigo" powers feel too familiar to me. 

Nice big ad for Mentzer's Masters Set rules. I think at the time I saw the Master's rules and the Unearthed Arcana as being similar products, one for D&D and the other for AD&D. That is not really the case, but it did solidify my decision to keep with AD&D and drop D&D. It would have been interesting if I had gone the other route, but I don't regret my choices. 

Charisma Counts! by S.D. Anderson gives us a charisma stat for Villains & Vigilantes. 

Defenders of the Future by William Tracy gives us the 1985 version of the Guardians of the Galaxy. The only one recognizable by today's audiences would be Yondu, and even then his comic version is different than his film version. 

The proper Marvel-Phile by good friend Jeff Grubb covers the Defenders; Gargoyle, Cloud, and Valkyrie. I always kinda liked Gargoyle and Valkyrie in the comics. 

Doug Niles talks about the BATTLESYSTEM project in The Chance of a Lifetime. He reflects on it's design and how he sees it fitting into the AD&D rules. 

We get another ad from Ramal LaMarr! Keep it funky Ramal!

From First Draft to Last Gasp by Michael Dobson covers the initial idea and creation of the BATTLESYSTEM game to it's final post editor form. Dobson was the editor of this massive project and he shares his own insight to how it was created back when it was called "Bloodstone Pass."

COMPRESSOR by Michael D. Selinker is a crossword puzzle.

Convention Calendar covers the cons of late summer to early winter of 1985. Sadly, nothing local to me then.

Gamers' Guide has our small ads.

Wormy, Dragonmirth, and Snarf Quest follow. 

Ok. So that was a crazy good issue. 

There is a lot here, and what I consider a collectible issue. 

It would be great for Dragonchess or adventure alone. And you know an issue is good if Ed Greenwood's contribution doesn't even crack the top three articles! There are many good issues coming up as well. 

This Old Dragon: Best of The Dragon Vol #1

 This is the first issue from the Eric C. Harshbarger collection. I did have a copy already, but it is in rather sad shape. I have had a copy of this issue for a bit. I was hesitant to review it since it not exactly the same as reviewing a proper issue of Dragon. This is a curated collection, or as it says on the cover, a Best of. Part of the fun of This Old Dragon is reflecting on the issue, what I was doing at the same time it was out, and finding the gems, or lumps of coal, in each one. But, I am very willing to make an exception for Best of The Dragon vol. 1 and Best of Dragon vol. II for various reasons. First, I am not likely to find the older issues they cover, especially from Vol 1. Secondly, these issues were part of my D&D experiences growing up. I remember getting my copy of Best of Vol. II at the same time I picked up Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. My old high school DM, Grenda, and I agreed he would buy the odd-numbered ones and I the even-numbered ones. So there is some added nostalgia for me. So lets get into it.

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. 

Mail Call: Dragons from the Eric Harshbarger Collection

 I got another email from Eric Harshbarger recently offering to send me some more Dragon Magazines for my "This Old Dragon" reviews. I mean, how could I say no.

Well, the package I got was beyond my expectations!

I have not checked if I have duplicates yet, nor have I checked which ones already have posts. But I will say this, they are in far better shape than the one I know I have duplicates of.

Looking forward to getting these out to you all.

Thank you, Eric for sending these along! 

If you can, check out Eric's website.

This Old Dragon #154

Today, we head back to the dawn of the 1990s. It's February 1990. I am working on my undergrad degree in Psych and decided to pick up a minor in Computer Science. I have some great friends, a girlfriend in the last half of the term, and I am having a great time. My roomate's kid brother comes to stay with us a couple of days, I opt to stay at my girlfriend's for a bit. But he has this really annoying friend who came with him playing all these bootlegs in my tape deck telling me I need to listen because this band he has been following is going to be HUGE. I ignore him. The band as it turns out, is Soundgarden. Maybe I should have listened.

The number one song on the radio is "Opposites Attract," a duo by Paula Abdul and an animated cat. The number one film was "Driving Miss Daisy" with Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy. On the shelves and tables is Issue #154 of this old Dragon.

I am getting to the bottom of this giant box of Dragons. Many of them don't even smell musty anymore. As usual, this one is missing a cover. This one features a "war dragon" with an undead rider by Bob Eggleton. 

The Letters section is a bit thin this month. Sage Advice covers some spells from AD&D 2nd Edition. 

James Ward is up with The Game Wizards: Angry Mothers from Heck. Basically Ward talks about the removal of Demons and Devils from AD&D 2nd ed as an appeal to the "Angry Mother Syndrome" which he sees as a good, but somewhat limiting policy. He does conclude that appealing more to heroic motives rather than just wanton killing of hack-and-slash is a noble endeavor. I don't disagree, but I also like fighting demons and devils. 

The Forum covers clerics, the relative merits of the D&D vs AD&D 1st ed vs AD&D 2nd games. I *get* the discussion, but I have admitted here before we so readily mixed the rules that seems like a non-issue to me. 

We get to the featured section of this issue, The Art of Making War. 

Our first article is from Eileen Lucas, with Warrior Kings and Empire Builders, where she borrows from history, and you should as well, to define your warrior leaders. She uses Julius Ceaser and Charlemagne as her examples. 

Eric Oppen is next with The Making of a Paladin.  A fun article about the purpose of playing a paladin. Oppen makes the claim that paladin is one of the most popular class. I can see that. I love playing paladins. Even today paladin is one of the classes most used in Baldur's Gate III.

Heraldry, politics, and feudalism in fantasy campaigns is next in Thomas M. Kane's All in the Family. Covers details on how heraldry originated and how they are designed.  It is a fairly detailed article to be honest. 

For King and Country from Dan Salas gives a new campaign model where the PCs are called to duty by their king. Well new at the time. This sort of game was well covered by Pendragon, Chivalry & Sorcerery, and AD&D's own Birthright.

Thomas M. Kane is back with another long article with How to Win Wars and Influence People. This one grabs details from AD&D 1st ed, 2nd ed and even battle system. There is a lot here, and I am wondering if this would have helped in the massive war I had run about 2-3 years before this article.  It is a great article that I am not 100% sure I get all of. I mean I like massive battles, every so often, but I don't run enough of them to have a lot of experience here.

A bunch ads and we are done with the special feature. While my issue has no cover, it does still have the GURPS poster intact.

Ken Rolston is up with Role-Playing Reviews with three Sci-Fantasy games, and all three are favorites of mine; Shadowrun, Spelljammer, and Space: 1889.

He loved Space: 1889, calling it "pure pleasure" and "comes with my unreserved recommendation." I concur. It might have been this review that made me want to check out this game. He felt Shadowrun was "adorable and surprising" and "impressive, exciting, and entertaining." Again, I concur. I remember driving back to University one night from my home town and talking with my old highschool DM who was getting ready to transfer there.  We talked about his Shadowrun campaign the whole 2.5 hour dirve down. I now have his old Shadowrun book. He also loved Spelljammer but felt that the AD&D 2nd ed rules was it's weakest point. 

I have to admit this article is what I remember the best of this whole issue. I was thinking how cool it would be to mix magic and sci-fi. An alchemy I have been trying to perfect for a while. You see in my Star Wars posts and certainly my BlackStar idea. 

Our fiction section is from all stars. Raistlin and the Knight of Solamnia from none other than Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, with illustrations from Larry Elmore. 

The Lessers, Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk are up with The Role of Computers. This month cover the Mines of Titan, M1 Tank Platoon, Star Fleet II, Ghostbusters II, and David Wolf: Secret Agent. I do note that most of the games are now PC-DOS games for the IBM compatible machines. I do miss seeing the Apple, Mac, and even Amiga games. 

Convention Calendar is next with the hottest cons of the winter and spring of 1990. I swear there were more cons then than now. Cons now are bigger for sure, but there doesn't seem to be as many. 

Novel Ideas comes to us from Will Larson and covers the novels coming out of TSR in the next months. They are "Dark Horse" by Mary Herbert, "Warsprite" by Jefferson Swycaffer, and "Nightwatch" a Greyhawk Adventures novel from Robin Bailey. I will freely admit, none of these sound familiar to me. 

Ah, now something I DO recognize, The Voyages of the Princess Ark, Part 2 from Bruce Heard. One day I will collect all of these. For the moment though I'll keep this one to the side. 

Dragonmirth gives us some comics. I recognize Yamara of course. But nothing in color.  There is a jab at the "Trump Game" which I am pretty happy to see. 

TSR Previews lets us know what is coming up in the next couple of months. More Spelljammer, more Monstrous Compendiums, and even a Buck Rogers novel. 

Marcus L. Rowland is stuck at the end of the issue with "Who Was That Masked Android?" overtly for Marvel super Heroes, but can be adapted to other supers games. 

We end with the small ads of Gamers Guide. There is a sub-section here dedicated to Play by Mail games. These were about to head to the same category as Ham Radio; still loved but by an ever decreasing fandom. 

All in all, not a bad issue, but not one that kept my attention then or even today, to be honest. 

This Old Dragon: Issue #152

I pulled a Dragon for today, started in on it, and got about a quarter through it before I realized it was one I had done already. I had a duplicate in my stack. Ah well. So instead, we go back to December 1989, the Eve of the 1990s. On the radio "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel and "Another Day in Paradise" by Phil Collins dominate. Gunge is still a little bit away for the mainstream. "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" and "Back to the Future II" dominate the box office. And on game tables and shelves everywhere is issue # 152 of This Old Dragon!

My copy lacks a cover, so I grabbed this image off of my Dragon Magazine CD-ROM. All these later and that purchase keeps paying off.

Our cover is by none other than the illustrious and late Jennell Jaquays. 

Letters discuss the issues of the day, namely more about the über-ridiculous character Waldorf and challenges to his title. Hopefully that is the last of that. Nitpicks on Hawks vs. Falcons and some bits on spells and dragon hunting. 

In his Editorial, Roger E. Moore discusses helping others in hard times, which was a novelty then and is talked about more and more now. In particular, he mentioned that gaming conventions rarely give to charity, whereas now that is much more commonplace. 

Forum has some discussions on using other game systems to aid D&D DMs (Marvel Super Heroes is given as the example), a thought that D&D in not really Medieval Europe, but 20th Century Earth where magic has prevented technology from advancing (neat idea really) and some ideas on various humanoids played intelligently. 

Sage Advice gives us some rule clarifications on the NEW AD&D 2nd Edition rules. 

Our Special Feature of this issue is all about the Underdark. Ok, this could be fun. Since I had to switch gears, I am discovering all of this issue as I write.

Up first, a nice surprise, Tony Jones (a name I don't recall) is up with The Ecology of the Umber Hulk. It's a rare (for the time) non-Ed Greenwood ecology article. Also I admit a certain fondness for the Umber Hulk. I think it was because when I first read about him in the Monster Manual, he was so different than other monsters I had seen before. Like all good Ecology of articles the details here can be used in any edition/version of the game. While the Umber Hulk growth table would need to be adjusted per game, the data is still good. There is even a good bibliography. 

Ads for Buck Rogers books and Activision video games. 

Thomas M. Kane is up with In a Cavern, In a Canyon. This covers metallurgy in fantasy games, though the emphasis is obviously AD&D here. It is still good and useful information and again, easily adaptable to new versions of the game. 

Another ad for the Science Fiction Book Club, which I am sad to report, has shut down after 70 years.

The Wanderers Below is a good set of random encounter tables from Buddy Pennington. The art is from module S4 by Jim Holloway and the list could be AD&D 2nd ed or 1st, I can't really tell to be honest. Likely works for both.

We break up our feature with Role-Playing Reviews from Jim Bambra. He covers Twilight: 2000, Top Secret S.I. and GURPS High Tech. 

Registration page for Gen Con 1990.

Eric Oppen is back with Servants of the Jeweled Dagger, a bit abotu the lives and habits of the duegar, the gray dwarves. It is a little like an Ecology of article, but less game stats. Not a bad piece at all. I read while thinking about the duegar you encounter in Baldur's Gate 3. It still works. 

None other than R.A. Salvatore is up for the fiction section The First Notch.

Greg Minter is next, is what is a loose interpretation on today's theme, In Quest of Adventure. It covers all sorts of quests, but for me the real treat is the Stephen Fabian art. 

My issue lacks the giant poster advertised. No idea what it was. 

The late Jim Ward waxes philosophical on "what do the simple folk do?" in The Game Wizards. He discusses well, I am not sure, it is a little rambling. 

The Lessers are all back with more video game reveiws in The Role of Computers. They loved DragonWars for the Apple II, and enjoyed The Kristal for the Amiga. They also got in a couple of MS-DOS games like Beyond the Black Hole and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. From what I can tell these are graphic (as in EGA) games and not text-based ones. An important distinction at this time that will soon no longer matter. 

TSR Previews gives us the new games and accessories for November and December 1989. A few novels to support the Top Secret, Dragonlance, and Buck Rogers lines.  Monstrous Compendium vol 3, the Bloodstone Lands, Pool of Radiance novel, and Kara-Tur trail maps leave no doubt that the Forgotten Realms is the darling of the time. 

Spider-Man to Wed Vanna White! from Fraser Sherman gives us the best article title of the issue. He discusses how to use real-world events in your Marvel Super Heroes games. I just watched the first two episodes of the Disney+ "Daredevil Born Again" and I can say Marvel does not have an issue using real world events in their tales.

Robert Bigelow has more new miniatures for us in Through the Looking Glass. I rather like the Joker and Batman minis from Grenadier Models. Very much in support of the Batman RPG. They have a real Neal Adams meet Jim Lee feel to them.

The Convention Calendar covers the last bit of 1989 and the winter of 1990. In general, I think there were more conventions back then. Am I wrong? I don't know. The Egyptian Campaign is listed. I can't recall if I went then or not. 

Not to be forgotten, we still have Make the Most of Your Missions from Merle and Jackie Rasmussen. This covers mission starters for the Top Secret SI game. 

Dragonmirth has our comics. Gamers Guide has our small ads. Among the ads is one to allow you edit your IBM versions of characters for Might and Magic and Pool of Radiance games. Just $15! Lots of ads produced on what look like AppleWriter printers.  Walter Moore will also draw your character, also just $15. Wonder if he is still in business?

Back page ads for the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Compendiums and Spelljamer. 

So not a bad issue really. The special feature had a lot of material and nearly all of it is still useful today. The tone has shifted completely to AD&D 2nd edition and away from 1st Edition or Basic/BECMI. This will continue until all other games except those from TSR are shut out. Dragon was not unique with this, all game magazines were doing this. 

The underdark features were good and ones I can see myself using. I still love looking at all the old ads too.