A very arty abstract cover – apparently by Dave Sutherland
What’s new
- Price increase from $1.50 to $2 – the first ever price rise for Dragon mag
Sorcerer’s Scroll
- The origin of Gamma World
Articles
- Editorial talks about GenCon XI – attendance affected by rain and proximity to Origins
- Guest editorial by Gygax about GenCon – he gives kudos to Origins and especially the MDG organisers, mentions only 1 group surviving round 2 of the D&D tourney. Of interest, in this age of cosplay, he notes the bad taste of people dressed up in WW2 uniforms
- The Battle for Snurre’s Hall – comprehensive report on the Origins 78 tournament (ie the G modules) with a write-up by the winning team with DM editorial comments
- Competitive D&D – article by Bob Blake about how to score a tournament including the system they used for the Origins G modules and the GenCon D modules
- D&D Player Personalities – pretty pointless article by what seems like a dubious DM
- Planning creative treasures – good ideas about adding flavour to treasure, eg linking items in a chest to some other room in the dungeon somehow
- Treasure location charts – yet more random tables
Variants
- Wish spells – how to categorise and possibly deal with them as a DM
- Australian mythos – ie Aboriginal stuff
- Systematic magic – an article which has a good idea – basically the notion of specialisations, ie choosing a spell type and progressing to learn the spells of that type as your level progresses. And then it mixes in a complicated way of using your ability scores as a form of spell points system. Which sounds horrifying!
- Spell determination for hostile magic users – when the DM is controlling a spell casting monster, this is basically some random tables to determine what spell of their repertoire they should cast
Ads of note
- Full page ad for the G series with a line at the bottom that states “Plus three new modules to be released at GenCon!” – this again puts into question the whole dating of Dragon mags – Gencon was in August – does this mean the October Dragon mag came out 2 months before in August? Absolutely not. After all, the editorial is a report about Gencon! But what it does mean is that if something appears in a Dragon mag in a review or ad, that generally means it was fact as of roughly 1-2 months before. (And that’s why module S1 is coming up next!)