Cover by Roger MacGowan
What’s new
- New assistant editor Gary Jaquet. Joe Orlowski has moved on to TSR Hobbies as GenCon Co-ordinator from TSR Periodicals
- Reintroduction of Featured Creature as The Dragon’s Bestiary
- New Giants in the Earth column by Lawrence Schick
- New column Bazaar of the Bizarre – new magic items/spells etc
Sorcerer’s Scroll
- Gygax talks history, saying the act of role playing (separate from specific rules) had been a part of wargaming for years before D&D, some history about the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, the C&C Society, etc. Gygax’s sand table sounds awesome. And then finally the history on the publication of D&D and supplements. He then goes on to talk about how AD&D is a different game – whereas D&D is wild and woolly and can be used in all sorts of crazy loose ways, AD&D is meant to be much stricter and have more rulings about how things work, reducing grey areas. This will mean players can move from group to group more easily and tournament play can be more easily judged.
Articles
- Deck of Fate – basically using a Tarot deck as a Deck of Fate and the results that will happen to a PC for each card
- D&D Meets the Electronic Age by Rick Krebs who wrote Gangbusters – basically a description of his group using BASIC to do things like roll dice and determine hit success and even provide simple text adventure stuff like “You are standing in an east west corridor. Which way?”
Design Forum
- Putting together a party on the spur of the moment – Gygax discusses quickly creating a party, for example at a convention, and gives a bunch of tables to generate said party – unlike a lot of these random table articles, this one is actually good
- The Thief: A deadly annoyance – some suggestions for players of thieves to do more than just climb walls and pick pockets
- Hirelings Have Feelings Too – bunch of considerations to not treat hirelings as just dumb yes-men
- Notes from a Very Successful D&D Moderator – awful article by an awful puffed up DM who ends it all by wishing his players -8 on their saving throws – what a douche-bag
Variants
- Chinese Undead – various special vampires and such
- Another View of the Nine-Point Alignment Scheme – a table showing a bunch of things and the alignment’s approach to them – eg whether someone of that alignment would use poison
- Strength comparison table – extending the strength table down to 0 and up to 27
Giants in the Earth
- Jack Vance’s Cugel the Clever, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, Talbot Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace
Bazaar of the Bizarre
- Overly detailed instructions on how to create a lich
Dragon’s Bestiary
- The Barghest