This, folks, is role-playing history right here. The Dragon made its debut a little over a year before I was born, so I've always felt a sort of kinship with the mag, even though I didn't start actually reading through it until I was around 10 years old.
I don't actually own this particular issue (the price for these early issues of Dragon on the second-hand market climb every year), but I do own a copy of The Dragon Magazine Archive, which was a digital collection of the first 250 issues of the magazine in PDF format, released by Wizards of the Coast in 1999 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons.
Wizards of the Coast got sued by several parties over the publication of The Dragon Magazine Archive because they didn't actually have the right to re-publish all of the non-work for hire content that had appeared in the magazine's pages over the years. The biggest problem areas for them were the various pieces of fiction, along with a number of the comics, including Kenzer & Co.'s Knights of the Dinner Table. The end result saw the archive pulled from store shelves not long after its publication, and as a result it's become something of a collector's item. I didn't know this was going to happen, I just saw it one day at Electronics Boutique and was like, "Hey, 250 issues of Dragon magazine for $49.99? Sign me up!"
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I'm pulling the images in this article from my copy of the Archive, so I can't exactly "source" them except to say that I ripped them myself, but don't actually own them. Understand? Cool.
Let's dig into The Dragon, issue 1, as edited by Tim Kask, with psychedelic 70's cover by artist Bill Hannan, and comprising 32 pages of content.
First, dig that cover. Whoever picked out the clashing colors for the font obviously had no idea what they were doing, since you can't hardly read the lime green on pink and purple letters, but aside from that, it's not bad.
I mean, it's not perfect either, but if you'd seen the artwork from The Strategic Review, which was the precursor to The Dragon, you'd understand what a step up this was in terms of design. And you have to admit, no matter what shelf you put this on, it would certainly draw eyes from across the room.
Actually opening the magazine reveals an ad for The Battle of Five Armies. This was the revised third edition of the game published by TSR, which came in a manila envelope with zip-lock baggies. If you plunked down your $5.00 back in 1976, you could turn it into a wonderful investment opportunity assuming you still had it today.
Following that, we have the editorial page, titled "Dragon Rumbles" for much of the magazine's early history. This explains what makes The Dragon different from its predecessor, what their plans are going forward, and reminds you to enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you want to have any hope of a reply to your letter, solicitation, or whatever you submit.
Next up, "Fafhrd and the Mouser Have Their Say" by Fritz Leiber. It's a bit of fiction packaged to talk about Leiber and co-designer Harry Fischer's new game Lankhmar, based on the world they created in their fantasy stories.
Then a series of small notices:
- UPS is on strike, making it hard to deliver The Dragon on time to subscribers.
- Despite what their advertising flyer says, neither Gary Gygax nor anyone else from TSR will be in attendance to run D&D at CITEX '76 (CITEX was Chicago, Illinois's version of Gen Con back in the day). But TSR disavows any connection with CITEX! CITEX is making false promises! DO NOT FALL FOR THEM!
- Diplomacy World, a quarterly publication put out by Walter Buchanan of Lebanon, Indiana, is available for subscription at $4.00 per year. And holy effin' cow, it's still being published in 2020! A full set of back issues is available for free download off their website. If you act soon, you can get your submission in for issue 150. This is nuts -- find me any other gaming hobbyist publication which was started back in 1974 which is still going strong nearly fifty years later.
- "Have you heard of Little Wars?" Little Wars was a sister publication to The Dragon, also published by TSR, which ran for a dozen issues before getting bundled with Dragon for its thirteenth and final issue, after which it was cancelled.
"The Battle of Five Armies in Miniature" sees Larry Smith, the game's designer, using a modified version of Gary Gygax's own Chainmail rules to run things a little differently. Having no experience with either game, I can't tell you if this made things run any better, but hey, it was pages and pages and pages of brand new charts and options, so don't let Larry Smith say he never gave you nuttin'.
We also get a fresh installment of "Dirt", a three-panel comic carried over from The Strategic Review, where the speakers are cloaked in darkness, meaning artist "jake" had only to draw in eyes and word balloons. This strip only exists to set up the next strip, as one character asks the other if he remembered to bring "it". According to the author's tease, "it" will be revealed next issue. Let's hope it's something funnier than this:
"How to Use Non-Prime Requisite Character Attributes" is Wesley D. Ives's attempt to add even more crunch to the D&D rules. "Crunch", for those unfamiliar with the slang, is a term used by gamers to describe the relative density of a given rule set. D&D is already pretty crunchy, all things considered, even in its original 1970's incarnation, but there's just no pleasing some people, so articles like this are the result.
What Ives has done here is come up with the concept of a 'skill check'. Under the 5E interpretation, a skill check is pretty straightforward: the DM decides how hard the task is and what skill it falls under, the player rolls a d20, adds any relevant modifiers like a proficiency bonus or attribute penalty, and if the end result is greater than the difficulty number the DM had in mind, you succeed.
Ives's system is a lot more complex, involving multiple different kinds of dice and basic addition and multiplication, plus consulting a couple of tables to determine the end results. Great if you thought Dungeons & Dragons was too light on math and dice rolling, but utterly ridiculous when a simple 'roll a d20 and compare it to the relevant attribute' works just as well and much faster.
"Magic and Science: Are They Compatible in D&D?". According to James Ward, they sure are, so he created some technological things you could incorporate in your game if you wanted to add more scientific complexity to the game. Given that we're still a few years off from official adventures like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and City of the Gods, which did exactly this, it's interesting to see the idea crop up here, although I'm sure Ward wasn't the first person to think dropping phasers and holograms into his fantasy campaign would be amusing.
"Languages or, 'Could You Repeat That in Auld Wormish?'". Lee Gold (the editor of the D&D amateur press association Alarums and Excursions, a post she holds to this day) delves into the concept of languages in D&D. This is more crunch, but not in the same way that Ives's contribution is crunchy. She's mainly musing about what it means when the rule books say that every creature has its own native language, and how characters could use these languages for roleplaying opportunities. She uses the example of a character in her campaign learning 'Balrog' -- not so he could talk with Balrogs, but rather so he could curse in it when he got upset. Likewise, a pair of characters who spoke 'Minotaur', and used it expressly to communicate with one another in a way the other party members couldn't understand. Examples similar to this are used in the Player's Handbook today to exemplify what different languages mean to the game.
Fifth Edition has gone a long way to simplify the idea of languages as they were originally conceived in the early editions, and this is for the better. They did away with weirdness like the 'alignment' language, which had a common vocabulary allowing you to communicate with any other being that shared your alignment, and simplified the number of languages to make it easier on players. Now, for instance, subterranean races can all communicate in 'Undercommon', underwater races use 'Deep Speech', demons and devils speak 'Infernal', and so forth. Lee's ideas, while interesting, also provide another layer of complication so I can't see many DMs or players really putting them into practice. The idea of a high-Intelligence Elf learning 'Horse' just to communicate with their mount instead of blowing gold on animal handling and training is still funny though.
"GenCon Update" - August 20th, 21st, and 22nd are going to be absolutely lit, yo! I'm talking seminars with Gary Gygax, MAR Barker, Dave Arneson, Rob Kuntz, Fritz Leiber! Oh yeah, how about a four-hour endurance test of Avalon Hill's Le Mans and an invitation-only, ten-player Fight In The Skies battle royale where the winner gets an engraved silver cup, just like a World War I German ace would have received?
Awwwwww yeah, we'll see you there for GenCon IX, beeyotch!
"Wargaming World" is a rundown of the various conventions, trade shows, and expos planned for the next three months, culminating (of course) with the aforementioned GenCon IX.
"The Search for the Forbidden Chamber" - Fiction by Jake Jaquet. A party of three complete idiots gets lost in the dungeon and encounters creatures you won't find in the Monster Manual, including a group of winos and a 'Recyclesaurous'.
This might have been hilarious in 1976, but...
OMGROFLWTFBBQ?!
Moving right along.
"Creature Features: The Bulette (aka LandShark)".
Ah yes...this classic Monster Manual staple made his first appearance right here. The story behind its creation is hilarious, involving a hatred of the French, a bag of plastic monsters from China, a Saturday Night Live skit, and a burning desire to kill the party's horses. Even if your PCs laughed the first time they encountered one, they'd never laugh again. Bulettes are downright terrifying to face in combat: heavily armored, able to burrow through the ground at lightning speed, a freakishly huge jump considering their size and weight, and the ability to move with terrifying silence, rendering them 90% immune to being surprised.
The artwork used for them here is the exact same picture used to depict them in the original Monster Manual. That's pretty cool. If you haven't thrown a Bulette at your party in a while (or ever), they're a great way of restoring control over a campaign which has gotten off the rails.
"Mapping the Dungeon" - Something you'd never see today. This was a regular feature which printed the names and addresses of people who were interested in role-playing and looking for new players to join them. Of note in this small group of a dozen names is "Jennell Jacquays", back when she was going by "Paul" and attending Spring Arbor College. Jacquays had artwork published in Dragon, worked for Judge's Guild for a few years, and even published an amateur 'zine of her own called The Dungeoneer for six issues.
"Hints for D&D Judges, Part 2: The Wilderness" - Know why you can't turn your adventures into campaigns? It's because you lack wilderness areas! But never fear, Joe Fischer will educate you on how to map out the wilderness surrounding your dungeons so you can stop sucking.
"Mighty Magic Miscellany" - In the basic D&D books, the rules for Illusionists only covered their advancement through 10th level. Here, Peter Aronson offers up advancement tables for levels 11 - 14, along with some new spells of 1st - 7th level.
"Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age Additions" - People have been writing to designers Lin Carter and Scott Bizar, begging for rules and stats for some of the peripheral nations not featured in the original game. So they're doing it here in the pages of Dragon.
Having never played Royal Armies, I've no idea if this material was any good or not, but surely somebody out there enjoyed it?
"Adventures In Fantasy" - A short comic wherein Richard Orbain illustrates why Wizards need a high Dexterity score.
"Hobbits and Thieves in Dungeon!" - Gary Gygax has playtested it, and it turns out you can add two more character types to your standard Dungeon! adventure without totally unbalancing things. These are the Hobbit and the Thief. Dungeon! is tons of fun, and I could see these two being fine additions for certain player types.
Next follows a bevy of press releases for new games: Classic Warfare, Citadel, and White Bear and Red Moon. Check the links if you want to know more about them -- I've never played any of them.
"The Gnome Cache" - The first part of an epic new fantasy novel by "Garrison Ernst" (a pseudonym for Gary Gygax), set in the world of Greyhawk. Gygax was a decently creative writer, and this is a fun story.
"The Three Kindreds of the Eldar" - If your D&D elves weren't Tolkien enough, Larry Smith wrote up some rules for using their Silvan, Sindar, and Noldor variants in the game.
Sure, why not?
Guys, I don't know if you heard, but GEN CON IX is totally coming.
The issue closes with a look at what's coming next issue (including part 2 of The Gnome Cache as well as the conclusion of "The Search for the Forbidden Chamber" -- be still my beating heart), and space for your address label.
And that's that. This is The Dragon in its infancy. It's taking its first steps into a larger world, and its wild to be able to see this second-hand for myself. This is a period of time when I literally did not exist, when the hobby I've grown up loving for over thirty years was still growing in ways its creators couldn't have foreseen. A lot of this stuff is completely outside my realm of knowledge, but with the internet, it's easy and fun to piece together the info.
If you enjoyed this, let me know in the comments. There could be more "Let's Reads" of The Dragon in the future. They printed over 300 issues, after all. That could keep me occupied for years.
What are some of your favorite memories of Dragon Magazine? Do you subscribe or read any RPG-related periodicals today? If you read Dragon or its sister publication Dungeon, which was your first issue? Let your nerd flag fly, fellow Hive Minds. You're among friends here. :)