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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4468733" data-attributes="member: 27780">The Dragon Issue 15: June 197836 pages. Dragons 2nd birthday. We start with another burst of bitching at the post office. As ever their reliability is seriously random. Always the case, and probably always will be the case. What are you to do. This also starts the period in which their page count starts expanding consistently, as opposed to just for the occasional special issue. I'll keep track of this, and as soon as I have reliable data for the whole run I intend to do a graph, so we can get a proper visual image of the rise and fall of the magazine. In this issue:The start of another tradition, although I don't think they know it yet, that of having Dragon related articles on every birthday issue. This time, its a set of new spells for dragons, to supplement their spell lists and increase their versatility. Surprisingly few of them would go into general use, and get converted to later editions, and so these still feel fresh and idiosyncratic. Which means they're ideal for screwing your players over with. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Pits! You never know what you might find at the bottom of them. And if the DM doesn't know either, he can roll on this random table. Just leave the loan sharks IN the pit please. Random events table for settlements: Something that would become important later on, in the domain management system in the Companion set. Like PC's, settlements need to face adversity on a regular basis to keep things from getting dull. Unfortunately, they didn't think ahead enough to include mechanical ramifications for these disasters, but the domain management stuff was a bit vague and heavily fiated anyway. We can do so much better nowadays. Monty haul and the German high command: The tales of insane twinkery and crossover madness continue. Epic lulz are had by all, and the legendary meme continues to spread through the gaming populace. More stuff on wandering monsters, how to decide on them, and how they should react to the players. Notes from another barely successful D&D player. This one has a lot of elements of using mundane techniques to simulate magical abilities, and other such trickery. A good reminder that often the best way to win in those days was to avoid rolling the dice at all costs. And creative thinking is more interesting than straight-up fights in any game. So this is still valuable advice for anyone who's GM will accept solutions based upon real world physics. The gospel of benwa: A joke story of the creation of the world, how it came to be, and how it was divided into law and chaos. Feels veeery dated, I'm afraid. D&D ground and spell scale area: Some stuff from Gary on why they used different scales of movement for indoor and outdoor stuff, how to reconcile them with miniatures, and spell effects, and the proper size of miniatures to mesh with the inches scale used. Rather dry stuff, with a distinct air of high gygaxese to it, but informative in revealing some implicit assumptions about the game. Particularly interesting is the fact that despite being adapted from a miniatures game, they used them very little in the first two years of the original group, before it was published. So though miniatures and their sale were intimately connected with the first few years of D&D as a published game, and would be so again, there had already been a certain amount of ebb and flow in that area. Weather in the wilderness: More random tables full of stuff that can be ported to any game with earthlike weather. If you can't be bothered to think up weather to suit the plot, and your players care, just roll here. Examining movement tactics in Stellar Conquest. Mobility, proper exploration, outmaneuvering your opponent in combat. All the usual things that should be common sense in any wargame. Another unremarkable article. Fiction: The green magician by L. Sprague deCamp. Another proper author who was a big influence on the game gets a story published in Dragon. A fairly entertaining time-travel story, this time involving interfering in the legend of Cuchulainn. Too be continued. Fineous fingers is illegible this issue, while wormy is just filler art. This isn't very good. More random encounters, this time for boot hill. Another fairly average issue, with good articles, bad articles and dull articles. As it's an anniversary issue, it feels like they've tried to get some big guns in, but the overall effect is just more business as usual. I'm starting to get a bit fed up with all these random tables. Still, quite a bit of that stuff is still usable now, this issue is still useful as a resource, and I've got another hint into D&D's early history, so it's not exactly a waste.</blockquote>

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