Dragon Reflections #100

TSR Inc. published Dragon #100 in August 1985. It is 116 pages long and has a cover price of $3.95. This milestone issue features more Pages from the Mages, a new high-level adventure, and Dragonchess!

But first, a minor correction. Ever since issue #39, Dragon Magazine has been published by Dragon Publishing, a division of TSR Inc. However, as of issue 93, Dragon Publishing has disappeared, and the magazine lists TSR Inc. as the publishing entity. This change undoubtedly reflects some internal reorganisation, but I'm not aware of any broader significance.

The cover is by Dennis Kauth, and it is most unusual. Instead of a painting, Kauth created and photographed a paper sculpture depicting a faerie dragon gliding over a stream. It's a bold and distinctive image, and I thought it was quite lovely at the time. I'm not sure the digital reproduction does it justice.

There are several special attractions in this issue. First is Gary Gygax's short story, "At Moonset Blackcat Comes," which introduces readers to Gord of Greyhawk, the protagonist in Gygax's upcoming debut novel, Saga of Old City. This little tale is very much written in a classic swords-and-sorcery style, with obvious nods to both Fritz Leiber and R.E. Howard. Gygax's fiction has undoubtedly improved since the material he published in the early issues of Dragon, though I found this story a little slow to get going.

"The City Beyond the Gate" by Robert Schroeck is an AD&D adventure set on Earth. The party seeks the legendary Mace of Saint Cuthbert and is sent via a portal to modern London. As they scour the city, they must deal with cultural clashes, technology, and the severe limitations placed on their magic. It's an excellent premise and could be a lot of fun, but there are problems with the design. The adventure presents a broad overview of a lot of information but doesn't give the DM much help in gamifying the elements. One of the random encounters, for example, is simply "Truant officer". The DM will need to figure out how to make that fun.

In the same vein, the adventure includes an accurate floor plan of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and details one hundred locations within, most of which are not very interesting or relevant. For example, "20. Corridor displays: A. Chinese and Japanese lacquerwork and furniture; B. Ivories and leatherwork; C. Chimney pieces; D. Musical instruments; E. Plaster casts (sculptures)." Still, with a bit of work, a DM could turn this into an enjoyable evening's entertainment. Schroeck went on to write several GURPS books for Steve Jackson Games.

The final special attraction is Dragonchess, also by Gary Gygax. This game is a 3D chess variant played across three boards, representing air, earth, and the subterranean realms. The rules are extensive but clearly explained, and the game is fully playable. Although it appears more like a thought experiment than anything, Dragonchess has had a long afterlife, with people building sets and playing the game to this day.

On to the other features! "Score one for Sabratact" by Forest Baker describes a new outdoor martial sport in which players, wearing armour and wielding pre-modern weapons, score points by breaking small target cups mounted on their opponents. It is team-based, with an emphasis on tactics and co-operation. It appears there has been a recent revival of interest in this sport, with a small documentary released a few years ago.

Frank Mentzer's "All About the Druid/Ranger" tackles the rules ambiguity around the druid/ranger multiclass combination, which Gygax officially approved in issue #96. Many readers pointed out that AD&D druids must be True Neutral in alignment, while rangers must be some variant of Good. Mentzer declares that druid/rangers must be Neutral Good and then spends half a page justifying why. It all seems much ado about nothing.

Ed Greenwood returns with "Pages from the Mages V," adding more magical tomes to the Forgotten Realms. This month, we have Sabirine's Specular, Glanvyl's Workbook, The Red Book of War, and The Alcaistar. To Greenwood's credit, he keeps coming up with new and compelling ideas for these books.

In "The Chance of a Lifetime," Doug Niles offers a brief retrospective on the creation of the Battlesystem miniatures game, highlighting the challenges posed by scale, formations, and spell effects. And in "From First Draft to Last Gasp," editor Michael Dobson shares his perspective on the same design process.

The ARES Section returns, presenting about a dozen pages of science-fiction and superhero gaming material. It includes five articles:

• "Creative Conjuring" by Eric Walker presents a variant Marvel Super Heroes magic system.
• "Champions Plus" by Steven Maurer adds new skills and powers to Champions.
• "Charisma Counts" by S. D. Anderson expands charisma rules for Villains & Vigilantes.
• "Defenders of the Future" by William Tracy introduces the Guardians of the Galaxy to Marvel Super Heroes.
• "The Marvel-Phile" by Jeff Grubb details the Defenders Ensemble, also for Marvel Super Heroes.

And that's a wrap! Several large articles dominated this month, only one of which really interested me (the adventure). Most of the other features felt like filler. Overall, it was a disappointing issue for such an important milestone, especially given the higher price. Next month, we have a different approach to alignment, magic item charging, and a new Creature Catalog!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

TSR Inc. published Dragon #100 in August 1985. It is 116 pages long and has a cover price of $3.95. This milestone issue features more Pages from the Mages, a new high-level adventure, and Dragonchess!

View attachment 418876​

The cover is by Dennis Kauth, and it is most unusual. Instead of a painting, Kauth created and photographed a paper sculpture depicting a faerie dragon gliding over a stream. It's a bold and distinctive image, and I thought it was quite lovely at the time. I'm not sure the digital reproduction does it justice.

Love that cover. Like the later cover of #116, it really stands out by trying something different.

There are several special attractions in this issue. First is Gary Gygax's short story, "At Moonset Blackcat Comes," which introduces readers to Gord of Greyhawk, the protagonist in Gygax's upcoming debut novel, Saga of Old City. This little tale is very much written in a classic swords-and-sorcery style, with obvious nods to both Fritz Leiber and R.E. Howard. Gygax's fiction has undoubtedly improved since the material he published in the early issues of Dragon, though I found this story a little slow to get going.

Having read Gygax's Gord the Rogue novels, I don't know that his writing improved that much. Writing RPGs and writing fiction are two different skills.

"The City Beyond the Gate" by Robert Schroeck is an AD&D adventure set on Earth. The party seeks the legendary Mace of Saint Cuthbert and is sent via a portal to modern London. As they scour the city, they must deal with cultural clashes, technology, and the severe limitations placed on their magic. It's an excellent premise and could be a lot of fun, but there are problems with the design. The adventure presents a broad overview of a lot of information but doesn't give the DM much help in gamifying the elements. One of the random encounters, for example, is simply "Truant officer". The DM will need to figure out how to make that fun.

In the same vein, the adventure includes an accurate floor plan of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and details one hundred locations within, most of which are not very interesting or relevant. For example, "20. Corridor displays: A. Chinese and Japanese lacquerwork and furniture; B. Ivories and leatherwork; C. Chimney pieces; D. Musical instruments; E. Plaster casts (sculptures)." Still, with a bit of work, a DM could turn this into an enjoyable evening's entertainment. Schroeck went on to write several GURPS books for Steve Jackson Games.

The City Beyond the Gate is a wild adventure. As a kid (back when I was an inveterate genre purist), I suspect I would've hated it. As an adult, I can appreciate the fish-out-of-water, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home vibes.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That cover would be so easy to produce digitally today, I don't it has quite the same impact it did at the time. That was real work to do in 1985.

City Beyond the Gate was also notably written by someone who'd never been to England and who based all of the slang and details of British life off of one (I think obscure YA) novel. Letters to the editors were howling for months after it was published.

 

[orangefruitbat]

Love that cover. Like the later cover of #116, it really stands out by trying something different.


Having read Gygax's Gord the Rogue novels, I don't know that his writing improved that much. Writing RPGs and writing fiction are two different skills.


The City Beyond the Gate is a wild adventure. As a kid (back when I was an inveterate genre purist), I suspect I would've hated it. As an adult, I can appreciate the fish-out-of-water, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home vibes.

I loved the City Beyond the Gate adventure. So much fun - and you can meet Dr. Who (the Tom Baker incarnation).

 

[Voadam]

A friend of mine had this, I read the Gord short story and remember enjoying it at the time and skimmed a little of the City Beyond the Gate adventure. The Gord one involves the Lord of Cats and playing the chess game? I'd have to look it up in the CD files.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I loved the City Beyond the Gate adventure. So much fun - and you can meet Dr. Who (the Tom Baker incarnation).

It's a hoot. I imagine if the PCs really got into exploring how medieval fantasy characters would react to the real world, it gets even funnier.

 

[Zaukrie]

Great cover! I never loved the content though.

 

[Flying Toaster]

This was a major issue that definitely got lots of attention from my junior high school AD&D group, although we were reading it a couple of years later. It was one of a number of back issues I bought either from a hobby shop or by direct order from TSR. The paper sculpture cover was indeed very distinctive.

I had forgotten that this issue was the “world premiere” for Gord of Greyhawk. I bought and read the first two Gord novels, and enjoyed them well enough at the time, although in retrospect the sheer novelty of reading fiction by “the man himself” was probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting. By most accounts they do not hold up well today, even by the standards of 1980’s fantasy literature. I did not learn until years later that in his final Gord novel EGG would blow up the whole world of Greyhawk in a fit of pique related to his messy ouster from TSR. Knowing what we now know about his controlling tendencies, I suppose it is not too surprising.

This August issue would have been produced while Gygax was in the thick of his battle to take TSR back from the Blume brothers after years of financial mismanagement, but by October he would himself lose control to Lorraine Williams. So no one outside of TSR would have realized it at the time, but this issue, the UA hardback, and Temple of Elemental Evil would have been some of EGG’s last creative contributions to D&D. News travelled slowly back then, so my friends and I did not even hear that Gygax was out until maybe 1987 or so.

Several years before I got my own copy of this issue, I already knew about “The City Beyond the Gate” from a friend who was quite enthusiastic about it. He was two years older than me and had amassed an impressive hoard of 1980’s RPG material, including Star Frontiers, Gamma World, WFRP 1E, and an early printing of Deities and Demigods complete with the Lovecraft and Moorcock chapters (those Erol Otus drawings of Cthulhu beings are really something else... ). My interest in D&D began by browsing his collection, especially the AD&D monster card sets.

Our attempt to play the module fell a bit flat. He ran it as DM for me and his younger brother (my age), who was a casual player at best who mostly played fighters because they were easy to run and had no alignment restrictions (unlike most AD&D classes...). In retrospect, for middle school kids we were actually not that bad at understanding the tactical combat aspects of AD&D, but although we were never “murder hobos” we often struggled with puzzles, traps, and peaceful NPC interactions. Trying to get the Mace of St. Cuthbert out of the museum without killing anyone or getting arrested was a bit beyond our ken.

Years later I began reading about real medieval history and lore, and was fascinated by how different it all was from the boiled-down second or third hand ideas found in the pulp authors of Appendix N, the 1980’s fantasy lit boom, and of course D&D itself and all of the TTRPGs and CRPGs that followed in its wake. I was amused to learn that EGG’s St. Cuthbert, a minor demigod of the Greyhawk pantheon, was obviously inspired by a very real St. Cuthbert, a 7th c. monk, bishop, and hermit from the north of England who was later canonized. Since the fictional D&D Cuthbert bears little if any resemblance to the Anglo-Saxon churchman, Gygax must have read something about him and just cribbed the name (as did we all - the LOTR appendices were great when you needed a quick dwarf or elf name!). I have visited the V&A several times over the years, so it was funny to think of a museum primarily devoted to applied arts and design holding in its collection a medieval weapon that is really a holy undead-smiting artifact from another world.

I had forgotten that the druid / ranger article appeared in this issue, or that Frank Mentzer wrote it. IIRC it was reprinted in one of the Best of Dragon compilations, and it was very popular with my junior high AD&D group. We played lots of druid /rangers and druid / ranger / mages (an obvious subclass counterpart to the official cleric / fighter / mage). We tried to follow the spirit of the rules if not always the letter, because even as teens we could see that the official rules were a mess. I was glad to see that the 2E rules allowed druids to have any partially Neutral alignment (NG, NE, LN, CN), which opened up lots of interesting possibilities, including NE “dark druids” corrupting nature in the name of pure EEE-vil (). We used alignment as a roleplaying opportunity or adventure hook, never as a tool for DMs to control and punish players who just wanted to have fun.

Although the Forgotten Realms never held much appeal for me, I always enjoyed Ed Greenwood’s Dragon articles, including Pages From the Mages. They helped me think about how to make NPCs come to life, and especially about how to make spell books and magic items more... magical. Real medieval manuscripts have names, histories, and provenance just like these spell books, so I suspect Greenwood must have done some historical research to help bring his creations to life.

PS: I was never a big comics fan, so the Marvel Supers article on the Guardians of the Galaxy may have been the very first time I ever heard of them, but it left little impression on me at the time. Funny to think that three decades later they would play such a big part in a major motion picture franchise.

 

[Starmaster]

One interesting note about the cover that doesn't show up in the photo is that the purple areas (the faerie dragon and the word "Dragon") were embossed. I remember how pretty this cover was when I picked up the issue at my local game store back in '85. TSR also used to occasionally emboss some elements of their paperback novel covers back in the 1980s, which I thought was a classy touch for inexpensive paperbacks.

 

[Flying Toaster]

The City Beyond the Gate is a wild adventure. As a kid (back when I was an inveterate genre purist), I suspect I would've hated it. As an adult, I can appreciate the fish-out-of-water, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home vibes.

This adventure and the classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks were some of my first exposures to fantasy / science fiction crossovers, and like many others I usually thought of them in terms of the iconic ad campaign for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: two great tastes that did not taste great together, so keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate, etc etc. However I did actually play both adventures back in the day.

Now I realize that my Gen-X friends and I were living through the 1980’s boom in fantasy and SF media, including the ”divorce” that made genre crossovers increasingly rare. My friends and I dabbled a bit in the sword & sorcery or cosmic horror recommended by Appendix N, but we really were a new generation influenced more by Tolkien and LeGuin than by Howard, Leiber, or Lovecraft.

Movies played a big role too: relatively serious fantasy films like Dragonslayer and Boorman’s Excalibur, but also cheese like Hawk the Slayer and Krull. Schwarzenegger was our version of Conan, but our overall fantasy sensibility was really probably closer to light-hearted fare like Monty Python and the Holy Grail or The Princess Bride. James Maliszweski of Grognardia would probably be appalled, but even CRPGs like the Bard’s Tale, Ultima, and Wizardry series definitely imformed our ideas of what a dungeon crawl was all about.