The Dragon #10, October 1977

So...many...books......fingers...cramping.  Sorry, I'm just complaining about working on the Dragonlance section of my D&D product checklist.  I've had zero direct contact with the Dragonlance setting in my roleplaying career, and I had no idea just how many books had been written for it.  So many, in fact, that no one should ever write another Dragonlance novel ever again.  There is no way one setting can be rich enough to justify that many books.  That well has to be dry by now.  I'm looking forward to getting to those books, however.  All my friends in high school had read at least the Chronicles series, and I always felt I was missing out when they would talk about Dragonlance material.  I was too consumed with the Wheel of Time series at the time to make room in my reading for it.

Anyways, on to this month's Dragon issue:

• We start with an article where the author takes on two of the biggest problems with Basic D&D (since we passed the Holmes Basic Set in history at this point, I'm going to start referring to it as such, even though TSR hadn't quite created the distinction yet).  First, the fact that characters end up amassing too much gold, and second, that they get experience for all that excess gold they accumulate.  His solution is brilliant in its simplicity: instead of gaining experience when they acquire gold, players only gain experience (aside from killing monsters, of course) when they spend the gold.  It solves both problems nicely: draining excess wealth from players and slowing down their rate of progression.  Of course he gives guidelines for what qualifies as valid expenditures for the purpose of gaining experience.  Interestingly, while he gives clerics and mages the obvious outlets of sacrifices to their deity and magical research respectively, fighters and thieves can spend their gold for experience by partying.  Seriously, he gives guidelines for going on massive benders for the purposes of leveling up.  It's a unique solution if nothing else, I'll grant.
• Moving on, another author gives a set of tables for generating random terrain for wilderness encounters.  I have to say, I just have a hard time understanding the table-driven, randomly generated nature of the game (and one could say of roleplaying in general) at this point.  Why do you need tables to randomly generate terrain?  I could randomly generate impromptu wilderness maps for encounters off the top of my head all day long - it's just not that hard.  As if to underscore this point, the very next article is a series of tables for randomly creating new monsters.  I understand the abstract need - the article discusses the problem of players being familiar with all the monsters (by having read the books) and thus knowing exactly how to deal with each one.  New monsters are definitely required from time to time to keep players on their toes.  I can sympathize with these tables a little more, as creating new monsters is somewhat more involved than creating random terrain, but I still would much rather create the monster by hand than roll through a dozen different tables.  If you've read enough monster entries you have enough familiarity to know that a monster of so many hit dice is going to do a certain amount of damage and have special characteristics of a certain level of power to create one yourself without referring to tables.  I would love it if someone could give more insight into the obsession over every aspect of the game being driven by tables for random generation in this era.
• The next article is a breath of fresh air, discussing - gasp - realism in dungeon design.  The author's contention is that a dungeon should represent a logical layout based on the needs and preferences of the person or organization who built it, as opposed to what many early dungeons were - random rooms with random connections, leading to an overall absurd design that could have only been built by a madman.  This is of course common sense to any roleplayer who likes his world to be realistic, but as we've seen this sensibility was surprisingly rare early on in D&D history.
• This issue includes a rarity for The Dragon - a complete boardgame called Snit Smashing.  It's lighthearted and looks quite charming, and I'd love to give it a try sometime
• Another author takes issue with the fact that the rules do not describe how characters gain their new abilities when they level up, and so poses a system where new abilities are granted by the gods and characters must undertake certain rituals when they have gained enough experience to receive them.  All in all I don't find it very compelling.

That's all for D&D content in this issue.  A couple more issues and we'll be to the very first AD&D product - the Monster Manual.

The Dragon #9, September 1977

Apologies for the delay since the last post, but the last month has been quite a doozy for me, and when I have had time, I've been more devoting it to finishing up my D&D collector's checklist.  I'm finalizing the section on Dragonlance products right now, and after that I just have to do Forgotten Realms and then miscellaneous 2nd edition products and everything up through 2nd edition will be done.  I'll post a link to it once I've completed it, but it will probably be a few weeks more still.

This issue has virtually nothing worth commenting on.  A good half of it is devoted to the second half of Harry Fischer's short story on the Finzer family.  There is an article by Gygax on mixing players of different alignment and how different alignments have to interact in a society, but ultimately I don't feel it really said anything useful.  Other than that there are only some EPT and Boot Hill articles and a brief article by Jim Ward on randomly generating a tomb for your party to explore.

All in all scant material due to the fiction, but we only have two more issues to go before getting to the very first AD&D product.  I'll see you there.

Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (Holmes edition)

At last we come to the Holmes Basic Set.  As I said in the last post, this is one of the most pivotal products in the history of D&D, because this is effectively where Basic D&D and AD&D split from one another.  The two lines would remain related but separate for over twenty years until TSR was bought out by Wizards of the Coast, who brought the game back to a single line with D&D 3rd edition (although they didn't merge the two so much as just kill off Basic D&D).

So how did this happen?  Well, even though it is the very first Basic D&D product, the Holmes Basic Set was never originally meant to start a new product line.  It was originally intended to just be a cleaned up version of Original D&D (the original boxed set plus the supplements) that would introduce people to roleplaying and get them to go on to AD&D products (even though the 1st edition Player's Handbook was still a year away).  This is made clear by the preface which explicitly says so, and then the rest of the product refers to the AD&D rules several more times throughout (this would be a common tactic of TSR for years to come - there would be several more "intro to D&D"-type products).

But as the AD&D line took off, TSR continued to sell both this product and the Original D&D products because, well, they sold well.  There was a marked difference in the philosophies of the two games which obviously appealed to different kinds of players.  AD&D was a highly polished system with lots of rules covering every possible aspect of the game (which is how Gary Gygax felt it always should have been).  Original D&D was a much looser, free-form kind of game where a lot was left up to the DM and players.  Seeing that they had two economically viable customer bases - one committed to AD&D, one committed to the Holmes rules / Original D&D products - they decided to keep supporting both.  Support for Basic D&D was scant at first - really only consisting of modules B1 and B2 over the next four years - but they committed to the line in earnest in 1981, revising the Holmes rules into a new Basic Set and creating the Expert Set as a companion to cover levels 4-14, then both expanding the B series of modules and creating the X series for Expert-level characters.

But to bring it all back to where we are now in the timeline, this product was just meant to capture customers who were new to the whole roleplaying experience.  Let's jump in and take a look at the highlights:

• The purpose of this book, as discussed above, is evident from the way it teases the things to be found in the upcoming AD&D products.  Want to take your character beyond 3rd level?  AD&D.  Want to play something more than just a fighter, thief, cleric, or mage?  AD&D.  Want to have psionic powers?  AD&D.
• In discussing additional classes available in AD&D, it lists paladins, rangers, monks, druids, assassins, illusionists, and witches.  Yes, witches.  I'd be interested to know if this really was an intended class for 1st edition, and if so why it got dropped.
• The time and movement section is quite amusing.  First it states that an armored man can cover 120 feet per turn underground.  The very next sentence then informs us that a turn takes 10 minutes.  For those of you doing the math, that's a whopping 5 seconds per foot!  There's cautious and then there's come on.  But don't worry - an unarmored and unencumbered person doubles that rate.  And the game takes these rates very seriously, as it then informs us that a party must rest 10 minutes out of every hour from this break-neck pace.
• I just find the concept of measuring all weight in gold pieces naively charming.  In fact, the centrality of the gold piece to this rule set gives it such an unabashedly "all about the benjamins" kind of flavor.  When gold pieces not only translate directly into experience, but are also the common unit of measure of weight, you've basically created a game centered around avarice.
• The treatment of doors in dungeons is just hilarious.  It's one of those areas where it's clear the designers just threw realism out the window for the sake of making the game harder.  First, no door can just be opened automatically - they have to be either picked or smashed open.  Apparently every door in this universe is either locked or stuck really hard.  You would think this would make life hard for the monsters who live in dungeons, but the rules explicitly state that monsters can open them normally!  Keep in mind that a "monster" in this game can be just a normal man like a bandit.  So you can be chasing a bandit down a corridor, and if he comes to a door he can just open it and go through without a problem, but when the party gets there they have to smash the thing open.  But wouldn't the door still be open after he goes through it, you reasonably ask?  No, because all doors in this universe automatically close.  Keep in mind that self-closing doors were only invented within the last two hundred years, but every door in a dungeon must be deliberately spiked or wedged open.
• There's a small section devoted to the multiple uses of the word 'level' in D&D terminology - player level, monster level, dungeon level, and spell level.  This brings up two soapbox items for me.  First, why did the game drop the term 'level' for monsters in favor of hit dice?  I'm guessing it's to avoid confusion, since monsters don't 'level up' like players, but to me, '5th level monster' just sounds better than '5 HD monster'.  Second, I've never understood why spell levels couldn't be the same as player levels.  Sure, it would make for a lot more levels if 9th level spells became 18th level spells, 8th level spells 16th level, and so on, but for one mages wouldn't have to consult a table to find out what spells they could cast, and it would give a lot more granularity to spell levels, since let's face it, there is a lot of disparity in the power of spells within a single level as it is.
• It's becoming clear to me in reading these early products that the vast majority of a magic user's power and utility in these early times was meant to come from magic items, not from his memorized spells (because let's face it, there's nothing more pathetic than a 1st level magic user with his 1 piddling first level spell).  The game intended for magic users to always have a wand or at least some spell scrolls on hand that they could use without having to worry about hoarding them too much, because there was probably more around the corner.  I don't know if the game lost this sensibility through the years (while retaining the hideously slow Vancian progression) or it was just the DMs I played with, but it certainly was never that way for any of the mages I played.  I don't think any mage I ever played ever owned a wand.
• At last we come to the (in)famous mini-adventure at the end of the book - the tower of Zenopus.  Aside from the Temple of the Frog outlined in Supplement II: Blackmoor, this is the very first published D&D scenario.  I can't help but wonder how many players had their first experience wandering these halls.  The dungeon makes no sense whatsoever as an actual place, but it's charming in its simplicity.

Reading this product for the first time provided a fascinating glimpse into the history of the game at a turning point in its development.  I'm eagerly anticipating analyzing the divergence of the two strands of the game, but also how I'm sure they cross-pollinated one another.  I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.  We return to The Dragon for the meantime, as products are still scarce.  I'll see you there.

The Dragon #8, July 1977

This is our last issue before getting back to actual products, and it's a good one:

• Gary Gygax has a fantastic article on the planes of D&D.  My personal exposure to planar travel was a Planescape campaign I played in one summer, and again my surprise is how many of the design elements there go all the way back to the beginning here.  This isn't the first we've heard about the planes - the second-to-last Strategic Review had an article by Gygax discussing alignment, and casually in passing it named the eight planes associated with the eight alignments other than true neutral.  Here though we get the full treatment of inner, outer, ethereal, and astral planes that would be codified in the Manual of the Planes and later in Planescape (although the plane of Concordant Opposition - the true neutral plane - still does not appear).  A few notes:
• The Abyss is listed here as having 666 layers.  That would be retconned later into an infinite number of layers.  Heaven is listed as having seven layers and hell nine, although this isn't surprising since it's just a take on the seven heavens in the cosmology of several religions and Dante's nine circles of hell.
• He goes into detail about magic weapons and monsters that can only be hit by magic weapons, attributing that quality to the creature having part of its existence on another plane.  What follows is a convoluted discussion of how the rules should work when it comes to planar travel, but ultimately we get to the rule that magic weapons can only be removed from their home plane by as many planes as their plus value.
• The Prime Material plane is described as one of the inner planes, although this would later be corrected to the prime just being its own plane, separate from both the inner and outer planes.
• The names of the planes as given here, starting from the lawful good heaven and proceeding clockwise, are:
• The Seven Heavens (LG)
• The Happy Hunting Grounds (LG-NG)
• The Twin Paradises (NG)
• Olympus (NG-CG)
• Elysium (CG)
• Gladsheim (CG-CN)
• Limbo (CN)
• Pandemonium (CN-CE)
• The 666 Layers of the Abyss (CE)
• Tarterus (CE-NE)
• Hades (NE)
• Gehenna (NE-LE)
• The Nine Hells (LE)
• Acheron (LE-LN)
• Nirvana (LN)
• Arcadia (LN-LG)
• Note that he does not associate alignments with these planes in this article - I've done that for my own purposes (although he does mention Nirvana and Limbo as being planes of law and chaos respectively).  I do so because the list in this article is slightly different from the later standard in AD&D.  The Happy Hunting Grounds (Beastlands) would end up as the NG-CG plane, the Twin Paradises (Bytopia) would become the LG-NG plane, Olypmpus (Arborea) would become the CG plane, and Elysium would become the NG plane.  So a little shuffling of the upper planes took place, but all else is as it would later be.
• To get on my soapbox a little bit, I've always been a little surprised by the attempt to force all campaigns to share the same cosmology (and the ramifications regarding deities that comes with it).  I get the fact that the cosmology came first while official campaign settings came later, and so the trend was to make the latter serve the former instead of the other way around.  However, it's obvious that many of the campaign settings had a tendency towards pulling away from the standard cosmology anyway.  For instance, Dark Sun tried to isolate Athas from the rest of the planes (for good reason) and added the concepts of the Grey and the Black, there was the eternal question as to whether Tiamat of the Forgotten Realms was the same as Takhisis of Dragonlance or not, and finally Eberron and Forgotten Realms just tried to do their own thing in 3rd edition altogether.  Campaign setting crossovers - the one benefit a shared cosmology affords - ended up being rare, so it seems much more logical to me that each setting should have been allowed its own cosmology in the first place.
• There's a nice guide to building towns for D&D campaigns that presents a useful, top-down approach from laying out the town down to populating it with residents.  I love worldbuilding as much as I love playing actual games inside those worlds, so this sort of thing speaks to my heart.
• We get part one of a rather lengthy short story by Harry O. Fischer (co-creator of the Lankhmar stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser).  It's an amusing little tale of a modern day family of wizards, but it does take up an enormous chunk of the issue.
• We get the first sneak preview of TSR's Gamma World game in this issue.  The game would not be published for another year, but a short article here gives us the background for the post-apocalyptic setting.
• A couple of TSR personalities contribute some brief content as well:
• Rob Kuntz gives several tables for a more detailed determination of gem and jewelry treasure, if you would rather have your character find a flawless peridot, rather than "a 125 gp value gem".
• Brian Blume has a tongue-in-cheek article on using your own real-world capabilities to determine your character's statistics.
• Jim Ward has more mutants for Metamorphosis Alpha.  What's interesting about his list is that the names of the last several entries are obviously plays on TSR personalities: Blumer (Brian Blume), Kerask (Tim Kask), Gygarant (Gary Gygax), Sotherlan (Dave Sutherland), and Wardent (Jim Ward himself).  I'm not sure if "Carrin" and "Rabner" are also plays on names or not.  I'm not sure to what extent he sarcastically based the capabilities of these creatures on the people in question, but I'll close this article with the description of Ward's eponymous Wardent:

"This former human has regressed to a small (3 feet tall) furry bear-like creature with the following mental powers: Height-ened Intelligence, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Mental Defense Shield, Will Force, Mental Control over Physical States, Heightened Brain Talent, and it is a Scientific Genius. The creature has no special physical abilities except constant hunger, not only for food but valuable objects others may have."

Next time we read one of the most famous D&D products of all time: the Holmes Basic Set.  We truly close out the original D&D era now, as this product not only anticipated the new AD&D line, but also was in some sense responsible for the creation of the Basic D&D line.  Join me next time as we explore one of the most pivotal moments in the game's history.

The Dragon #7, June 1977

This issue marks the first anniversary for The Dragon.  As Tim Kask points out in the editorial, they're still trying to get second class mailing privileges a year later.

• The editorial clarifies that all material appearing in the magazine, whether additional rules, alternate rules, or just rules clarifications, are non-official when it comes to the game in question, unless authored by the game designers themselves and marked as official.  This was apparently a point of confusion for earlier readers.
• There's a fascinating, if short, article by Gygax on the history of D&D.  The most interesting part I find is that "The Great Kingdom" and the barony of Blackmoor, two classic Greyhawk locations, actually predate D&D altogether and go back to Gygax and Arneson's medieval wargaming campaigns.
• There's a wildly out of place article on a site in New Hampshire known as America's Stonehenge.  Supposedly a site of evidence of pre-Columbian European presence in America, it's generally regarded today as a hoax.  I have no idea what this is doing in The Dragon, and I'd like to know what Tim Kask was thinking including it.
• There's a fantastic (half sincere, half sarcastic) fiction piece called "The Journey Most Alone" by an author who simply chose to go by "Morno".  He had a short story in the previous issue that was alright enough (neither good or bad enough to comment on), but this - this is what happens when you write fiction after dropping too much acid.  In the previous story the wizard ("wysard" here for unknown reasons) Visaque mastered the element of fire, but now he must master the element of water.  What follows is a delightfully trippy fantastic journey that makes little to no sense.  It's the kind of thing that you can only shake your head at and mumble something about the 70s.
• Having done his best to bore readers to death in the last issue with an EPT miniature painting guide, M.A.R. Barker comes back in this issue to pick off any survivors with a tediously long article on military formations of the EPT nations.  Skip.
• The final Gnome Cache story appears in this issue.  The story isn't finished, but no more chapters ever appeared.  I'm guessing Gygax simply got too busy to ever get back to it.  It's a shame, because this chapter ends with the protagonist apparently encountering the cultists from the Temple of the Frog, a la Supplement II: Blackmoor.
• This month's Featured Creature (why did they change it??) is the prowler, which apparently did not catch on, because I don't think this one ever appears in any D&D material again.
• The Editor's Library features two things I'd like to follow up on at some point.  One is the Ogre boardgame.  I've never seen it in person, but it looks extremely interesting and I'd love to try it.  I like the fact that it's an asymmetric game - a rarity nowadays it seems - where one player controls the Ogre and the other player tries to stop it.  The other thing is a review of The Judge's Guild materials, which were playing aids for D&D.  Ads for them have been appearing in the last few issues, and they look amazing.  I'd like to go back and see what they were producing first hand, because it looks years ahead of it's time for this era of D&D.

Only one more issue, then we can delve into the Holmes Basic D&D set!

The Dragon #6, April 1977

It's been a week since I've published, but I've been doing a lot of reading since then, so I should be able to pump out several posts in the next few days.  For now the stream of Dragon issues marches on:

• The issue starts with some alternate rules for Metamorphosis Alpha that discuss starting the game as a human clone.  I'm not interested in the rules themselves, per se, but they bring to mind an issue I meant to discuss in a previous post but forgot to - the philosophy behind character creation.  The rules presented here are for "rolling up" a character in a very literal sense - most everything about the character is determined by dice roll.  Not only that, but as with D&D and other games of this era, some characters are just going to end up better than others depending on how you roll.  For instance, a character might end up with only 1 minor skill, or they could end up with as many as 2 major and 3 minor skills depending on how well you roll.  Even without context as to what major and minor skills are in this game, it's blatantly obvious that the latter character is going to be far more powerful and/or useful than the former.  This is in stark contrast to modern sensibilities, where games (whether tabletop or computer) go to great lengths to achieve the holy grail of balance between characters and character classes.  I would love to see if someone has done a detailed analysis of this aspect of the history of roleplaying, how we transitioned from an era where it was just accepted that some characters were going to be better than others due to chance, to the modern age where we insist - nay, rage on the forums with righteous indignation! - that all characters must be equally powerful and differentiated only by player skill.  Is it the product of societal changes, such as a rise of a socialist mindset that demands more in the way of equality of result?  Is it just the product of the MMO era?  After all, if there were random variations when creating characters in World of Warcraft, what would stop me from just rolling new characters until I got a good one (thus rendering the randomness pointless)?
• There's an interesting article on incorporating sea trade into a campaign - basically letting players act as traders and gain income through sponsoring merchant ships.  It lays out an interesting risk/reward table, where the farther a ship travels the more likely it is to gain a greater profit, but the greater the chance for the ship to be lost as well.  Okay, it's interesting to me anyway.  I know to some players the idea of planning merchant ship itineraries is ludicrously mundane and boring considering they could be out fighting dragons instead.  Personally I'm a huge fan of civilization-building games, and I tend to let this bleed over into roleplaying games.  I want my characters to not only gain power by going up in level, but to also be able to build their own little "empire", so to speak - but I know that's not everybody's cup of tea.  It's why I can't wait to get to the Birthright setting materials, although God knows how long it's going to take me to get there.  I know very little about the Birthright setting, but I do know it is a combination of standard role-playing and domain management, and I fully expect to geek out about it.
• Four whole pages are devoted to a painting guide for Empire of the Petal Throne miniatures.  Skip.
• There's a brief article on an alternate system for determining psionic powers that humorously boils down to basically throw out all the rules in Eldritch Wizardry.
• Another article describes an absurdly cumbersome morale system that now applies to PCs.  How would you like to play a character who just happened to roll a bravery score of 6 and ends up running from every combat?  I'm not a fan of rules like this.  If a player wants to play a cowardly character, that should be their choice, not the dice's.  I believe in the sanctity of player freedom: nothing - not the DM, not the dice - should dictate a character's actions unless some form of magic is involved.  I'll have a lot more to say about this when we get to the Ravenloft setting.
• The Creature Feature section seems to have changed names permanently to Featured Creature, which seems a step backwards to me.  The creature in question this month is the death angel, a kind of grim reaper-type being.  Meh.

There's an ad towards the end for the Dungeon Geomorph sets, which reminds me I've forgotten to mention them before.  Sets one through three were being released around this time, but even though they are D&D products, I won't be making posts on them - there's really nothing to say, given that they're nothing but pre-created dungeon maps.  But real products are almost back - two more issues to go!

The Dragon #5, March 1977

Another month, another Dragon:

• There's a very long article on witches in D&D - not as players, but as enemies.  It details different kinds of witches, the spells they use, and the magic items they possess.  It's fairly interesting and mostly well thought out, although the author does admit that he created them solely to be a challenge to the 11th level wizards in his game (if you have to create your own super-powerful monsters to challenge your players, you've probably done something wrong).
• This is the first issue where we start seeing significant content for Metamorphosis Alpha, the sci-fi roleplaying game invented by D&D personality Jim Ward.  I won't comment much on this material going forward since it's non-D&D, but I do find the premise of the game and what I can glean of the content to be interesting.
• This issue's Creature Feature (called Featured Creature here for some reason) introduces another classic, original D&D monster - the ankheg (here spelled anhkheg originally).  I've never encountered these in a table top session, but I do have fond memories of my party being torn apart by them in Baldur's Gate.
• The Out on a Limb segment (the letters column) is a little dull this month:
• There are a couple of letters supporting the inclusion of fiction in the magazine - obviously picked by Tim Kask to justify his editorial choices.  To be clear, I'm enjoying reading the fiction included in the magazine, I just think the magazine would have been better off with a strict focus on gaming.
• There's another article debating elves in Lord of the Rings.  Look, I'm as big of a Tolkien fan as anybody (as well as Star Wars, Star Trek, and other major fantasy and sci-fi franchises), but I never fail to be amused by fanboy rage over minutiae like this.  It's also humorous to know that fanboy rage is a phenomenon that predates the internet.
• Speaking of fiction, we get another Niall of the Far Travels story.  It's no Conan, but it's still enjoyable.  I had never thought of myself as interested in old-school sword and sorcery fiction, being more partial to high fantasy, but I have a growing appreciation for it.
• There's an article on research rules for wizards that's not particularly compelling.
• And if you still haven't gotten your fill of fanboy debates, there's a whole article debating that Gandalf was a 5th level wizard at best (as opposed to the ultra-high level wizard we would normally assume him to be).  This assertion is based on the analysis by the author that all magical effects performed by him in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings could be explained by spells 3rd level and below.  It just makes me chuckle.

We're almost out of the product desert - only two more issues to go!  Hang in there with me, as we'll get to explore the classic Holmes basic D&D rules. 

The Dragon #4, December 1976

I have little to say about this issue.  It is almost completely devoted to material for Empire of the Petal Throne.  If you're not familiar with it, EPT was one of the very first roleplaying games.  I want to say it was the second after D&D, being released in 1975 only a year after the original boxed set, but I can't find a source that can positively confirm that.  It was created by M.A.R. Barker who was inspired after seeing D&D to create his own game.  TSR purchased the distribution rights and it became one of their standard products early on, although it never really achieved widespread popularity like D&D.

The setup is interesting - it is a fantasy game, but yet takes place tens of thousands of years in the future.  The premise is that far in the future a planet is colonized by technologically advanced humans.  Then, for reasons not understood, the entire solar system the planet is in becomes trapped in its own pocket dimension, separated from the rest of the galaxy.  Cut off from civilization and nearly destroyed by cataclysm, over the next fifty thousand years society reverts to a primitive state, but artifacts from the previous age of technology can still be found and used, if not understood.  The shift to a pocket dimension also allows for contact with extra-planar beings, some of whom become the new gods of the world, and access to extra-planar powers allows magic to work.

It's an interesting setting, but it's not D&D material, which is what I'm really here for, so I don't have much to say about it.  I will comment that settings like this seemed to be a theme in the 70s - a technological age that has suffered catastrophe and devolved to a more primitive state.  Just in roleplaying alone you have EPT, Metamorphosis Alpha, and Gamma World.  I suppose with the Cold War, the end of Vietnam, trouble in the Middle East, and inflation it's not surprising that it was a difficult time whose zeitgeist produced pessimistic views of the future of humanity.

Fortunately The Dragon is still bimonthly at this point, so we only have a few more to go before getting back to actual products.  Join me next time for another issue.

The Dragon #3, October 1976

We continue our long stretch of Dragon issues:

• The editorial by Tim Kask is an excellent piece discussing the relationship between the fiction we read and the games we play.  Apparently he received a small but vociferous backlash against the amount of fiction included in the last issue.  His argument is that our ability to imagine is dependent on our background and what we have been exposed to.  The richer our exposure to concepts - regardless of whether we like them or dislike them - the richer our imagination will be, and thus he defends the inclusion of fiction in the magazine in order to provide fuel for the reader's imagination.  I certainly agree with his argument in general, but I believe it's still not the right choice editorially.  I believe people subscribed to The Dragon because they wanted a gaming magazine.  Do fantasy gamers need to constantly expand their horizons through fiction?  Of course, but that's up to them to do in the time and manner of their choosing.  There are/were already magazines devoted to fantasy and sci-fi literature.  The Dragon would have been better served with a tighter focus (which is eventually what happened anyway of course, as it became virtually exclusively a D&D magazine).
• There's an article on female characters that's simultaneously hilarious, bizarre, and more than a little sexist.  I don't recall the original boxed set saying anything about female characters, I'd have to check, but I think the assumption was just that if you want to play a female character, you just do, and they follow the exact same rules.  This article seems to assume that female characters should be fundamentally different from male characters.  First, they only get 1d8+1d6 for strength, which I don't have a problem with, but then they have a beauty score instead of charisma, which I do take issue with.  It provides new lists of level names for women, which makes sense, since the normal level names are somewhat masculine, but here's where it really gets cringeworthy.  The first four levels for thieves are named "Wench", "Hag", "Jade", and "Succubus".  No joke.  Female thieves get the ability to do tarot readings as a special ability.  It gets worse, as all female characters, if I understand the rules correctly, get certain female-only spells, like Charm Man and Seduction (but only if their beauty score is high enough!).  Remember ladies, your only real talent is your ability to seduce men!
• Another article addresses the issue of character backstory for I believe the first time.  Finally someone thinks to address the question, "Where do all these player characters come from?"  It also introduces non-class occupations that players can have as a result of their background - a primitive form of non-weapon proficiencies.  It's nice to see sensibilities for this sort of thing appearing, as you know how much I've remarked on the story-less, XP grinding-only nature of the game at this point.
• The very first Finieous Fingers comic appears in this issue.  Finieous would stick around for a few years in the early life of Dragon and was a notable first in comics dedicated to roleplaying.
• In the Out on a Limb letters section, there's an amusing exchange between a fan who wants to be able to photocopy material from D&D books and TSR staff who are adamant that doing so amounts to ripping them off.  I have a minor interest in intellectual property law and have eagerly watched the battles of the last twenty years between content creators and consumers due to the internet's influence.  It's interesting to know that it's old hat and nothing really ever changes.  There's also a humorous flame war between two letter writers over Tolkien's elves.  One of the writers had contributed an article in a previous issue separating out the various kinds of elves according to Tolkien's work and writing up stats for them.  The second author wrote in to say that the first had no idea what he was talking about, to which the first replied the same.  The Silmarillion was still a year away at this point, which would settle all such contention.
• The quest for sub-classes continues, with articles in this issue creating classes for healers, samurai, and berserkers (who are sort of barbarians who can change into a were-shape in the frenzy of battle).  Obviously these never quite caught on like the bard and illusionist (although the samurai would appear in Oriental Adventures), but it again shows the tension in the game over the philosophy of classes.  There's also a write-up for a jester class, but I'm not sure if it's meant to be taken seriously or is just a joke.
• A very confusing article gives rules for sage specialists.  The author seems to not understand the D&D rules, and I'm not sure why the editor included this one.  The supposed purpose of these sages is to copy spells into mages' and clerics' spellbooks, which ignores the fact that mages can already do this and clerics don't even have spellbooks.
• A final article gives expanded rules for dwarves and opens up the cleric and thief classes to them (a change that obviously would become lasting).  It's also notable that it is one of the first instances of a particular type of optional rule that would appear in material through 2nd edition - demihumans being able to exceed their normal racial limits if their attributes are high enough.

There was a lot of content in this issue, and I love it because I feel it shows the imagination of the player base really taking off, seeking to expand the game in ways unforeseen by its creators - with mixed success, as the discussions above show, but in the evolution of any game there are of course going to be good ideas as well as bad ideas that lead to dead ends.

The Dragon #2, August 1976

We begin a long stretch of Dragon issues, as it will be a year before the next official D&D product is released:

• The first D&D-related material of the magazine is an article regarding high level monk advancement.  The monk class introduced the concept of there being a limited number of characters of high level, and once a monk reaches a certain level, to advance he must defeat the next higher level monk in a challenge (a concept that was reused in the druid class and which lasted even into 2nd edition).  The article outlines a combat system for resolving these challenges.  One might naturally ask why it couldn't be resolved with the normal combat rules, which is what Supplement II: Blackmoor assumed in describing the process.  Of course it could, but I find this article fascinating because it shows a desire even at the very beginning of D&D for more tactical combat.  D&D at least through 2nd edition always suffered from "I attack with my sword...again" syndrome.  Combat was simple, but it was also too abstract, and fighters literally had nothing to do but declare which creature they were attacking and roll to hit.  The solution of course is a more detailed combat system, but its extremely easy to go too far and make combat a cumbersome affair where every encounter takes an hour to resolve.  The system presented here, while somewhat interesting for a primitive attempt, is just that.  It's a nice addition for special combats like monk advancement, but far too onerous for normal kobold swatting.  While I have mixed feelings about 4th edition, one thing it did excel at is providing a good tactical combat system that didn't get bogged down in its own rules.  As a final note, the author's homemade artwork demonstrating the various martial arts moves is simultaneously both adorable and awful:

• This issue is very fiction-heavy - I'm sure a deliberate effort on the part of the editor to create a more general fantasy magazine.  There's the second part of Gygax's "The Gnome Cache", a short story set in Greyhawk.  There's the conclusion of a short story started in the previous issue, which is a silly dungeon-crawl with 4th wall / anachronistic humor.  Finally there's a short story by Gardner Fox starring his new protagonist, Niall of the Far Travels, which is a Conan pastiche, although it's not a half-bad read for fans of sword & sorcery fiction.  I'm actually taking notes on the Gnome Cache stories, as I'm interesting to see if the various elements mentioned (mostly geographical locations) ended up actually making it into the formal Greyhawk campaign setting.
• There's a the conclusion of a three part series titled, "Hints for D&D Judges".  I don't believe I've commented on this one before, as the previous two installments weren't particularly noteworthy.  This one though caught my attention though because it emphasizes the comments I've been making about the tone of D&D at this point in its history.  It contains suggestions for dungeon elements.  Among its gems:
• A chest which is intelligent and fights the party as a 2nd to 9th level magic user.
• A suggestion that after the party defeats a red dragon, they discover that his "gold" is actually chocolate-centered candy.
• Gems that are worth 500 gold pieces, but which can be commanded to turn into a random monster - anything from a kobold to a dragon.

This is what I'm talking about when I discuss the non-serious tone of early gaming.  There's no concern with any kind of verisimilitude when creating dungeons.  An intelligent chest that can cast spells?  Why not?  I know some people react with the attitude of, "In a world with magic, being concerned with realism is pointless," but I contend that suspension of disbelief is not an infinite resource available to the participant.

• This issue's Creature Features introduces the remorhaz, one of the more interesting original creatures for D&D.
• An article introduces an alchemist class for the game.  While the bard and illusionist classes started in The Strategic Review / The Dragon and eventually made their way into the core game, the alchemist is one of those classes that never quite did.  However, the concept has always appealed to a certain portion of the player base, and thus write-ups of the class will continue to appear in later editions of the game in magazines and non-core sourcebooks.  The core issue is ultimately the philosophy behind defining a "class".  TSR made it clear up through 2nd edition that their philosophy was that classes were meant to be very general, and that you didn't need a plethora of specific classes.  Alchemists and witches - two of the most commonly requested "additional" classes - to them were just particular kinds of wizards and didn't need their own class (there's a specific discussion on this in one of the 2nd edition products, but I can't recall which one).  Personally I'm not a fan of the class concept at all, and prefer skill-based rule sets where the philosophy is "you are what you do".
• A final article - by the same author as the previous one - gives us some weapon rules that are a primitive version of weapon specialization and two-weapon fighting.

Join me next time as we continue to look at The Dragon's formative issues.

Supplement V: Swords and Spells

"Supplement V" appears nowhere in the actual product, but it is commonly known to all fans of OD&D by that description.  This product is an attempt to close the circle back with D&D's origins in Chainmail by providing an updated set of rules for fantastic miniature battles.  The rules for D&D combat are referenced as being the standard for 1:1 figure fights, and the full range of spells from D&D is available to wizard and cleric figures, but other than that this product has little to do with D&D.  As such I don't have much commentary on it.

TSR obviously still felt that wargaming and roleplaying went hand in hand at this point.  It's understandable - if the purpose of roleplaying is to play characters like those found in fantasy novels, it would make sense that players would want to recreate not just the individual fighting they do, but also the large scale battles these kinds of characters often participate in, such as the Battle of the Five Armies or the Battle of Helm's Deep.  However, we stand at the cusp of history here.  With AD&D a year or two away at this point the hobbies are about to diverge forever (although TSR would continue to try to tie the two together with the Battlesystem rules).

We have quite a few Dragon issues to go through now, as we're a year away from the next D&D product - the classic Holmes Basic Set, which was intended to be an introduction / bridge to AD&D, yet ironically ended up splitting the game into Basic D&D and AD&D.  It's an interesting milestone in the history of the game, and I hope you'll stick around to see it.

Supplement IV: Gods, Demigods, & Heroes

This supplement was the forerunner of the Deities and Demigods / Legends and Lore of later editions.  It's clear a lot of research went into this supplement, extensively covering the mythical characters from Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Celtic, Norse, Finnish, Hyborean (Conan), Melnibonean (Elric), Mayan/Aztec/Incan, and Chinese pantheons, as well as notable "normal" monsters and magic items.  But honestly I can't say what the point of all that research was, because this has to be a candidate for one of the most pointless supplements in D&D history across all editions.

What this could have been was an overview of the various classic mythologies - explaining the personalities of the gods, their relationships with each other, the domains they had authority over, and how all of that might impact a campaign world: how clerics of different gods might differ from one another, how a particular pantheon of religion affects a society, and so forth.  Sadly, this kind of sensibility is still many years away at this point, and what we get instead is reflective of the infant (and perhaps infantile) state of the game.

What the supplement is is nothing more than a monster manual for gods.  After a very brief foreword where Tim Kask ironically wags his finger at Monty Haul DMs and an introduction consisting of a single table outlining divine psionic abilities, we dive right into a tediously long list of gods where each god is reduced to six stats (AC, move, hit points, magic ability, fighting ability, and psionic ability) plus a very short paragraph that discusses any special abilities they have.  That's it.  That's the entire book.

What was the point?  TSR would later clarify they didn't intend gods to be just bigger monsters that players fought, but if that's so, then what is the purpose of this format?  In the foreword Kask points out the absurdity of a 40th level fighter when Odin himself "only" has 300 hit points, and that's a good point.  So is the point of this supplement just to show how much more powerful than players the gods are supposed to be?  You don't need a supplement for that.  You don't need rules at all when it comes to dealing with gods.  There's no "roll for initiative" when it comes to facing a god.  The rule is: he's a god, you're not, he wins, end of story.  If you give gods stats like this, it can only be for the purpose of having players actually fight them, but to do so you would have to be the 40th level fighter the foreword disdains.

After Eldritch Wizardry introduced so many epic game elements (even if in a primitive, crude form), it's sad that the followup hit such a low point.  Join me next time as we cover the very last supplement and close out the OD&D era.

The Dragon #1, June 1976

We enter a new era with Dragon #1 (although technically the name is The Dragon at this point, and will be until the 80s).  TSR's goal at the beginning was to have the magazine be more than a house-organ for its products, so we'll have to put up with a lot of non-D&D material for a while until we get to the point in history where it goes back to basically just being a D&D magazine again.

• The first D&D-related article is a rule on how to use character attributes to determine a player's success at any non-combat actions they want to attempt.  It's a very primitive attempt to address the need for skill checks in the game - something still far in the future at this point.  If you read the last post, you know I complained a lot about how ridiculously over-complex so many of the rules are at this point, and this article is no exception.  Here is the honest-to-God way this author thinks you should handle ability checks:  First, roll a d100 and consult a table.  The result of the d100 on the table indicates what type of die you should roll next (from a d4 to a d12).  You then roll this die and multiply the result by the appropriate attribute score.  This final number is then the percentage chance for the character to succeed at what they're attempting, which they now get to roll for.  I just can't even fathom how people of this era thought rules like this were a good idea.
• Jim Ward, a notable early D&D personality, has an article on mixing technology and magic in D&D.  It's a standard sufficiently-advanced-technology kind of argument, and it's not a surprising contribution from Ward, considering he went on to design both Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World, two classic sci-fi roleplaying games.  What surprises me is how willing the people playing the game in these early days were to mix genres so freely.  Despite D&D being heavily influenced by such serious works as The Lord of the Rings and Conan stories, there's a lightheartedness with which the game is treated.  From other articles and short stories in previous issues that I haven't specifically mentioned it's clear that early players didn't mind 4th wall humor, anachronisms, and out of genre material in their games.  It's just very puzzling to me, and it goes along with my previous observations of the lack of story in roleplaying at this point.  Once you invent the idea of fantasy roleplaying, I would think the immediate draw and next logical step would be the idea of playing the protagonists in a fantasy story.  After all, it's one thing to read about the exploits of Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, but what if you could actually be them in a game, making decisions that affect the climax of a story?  But for some reason this is not the direction the early game takes, and it continues to mystify me.
• There's an article on languages in D&D that isn't particularly interesting or useful.
• The Creature Features column continues on in The Dragon, and it now gives us the bulette.  I know it's a classic D&D monster, but I've always felt the bulette was rather silly, and I've never particularly been a fan.
• There's the first in a series of short stories by "Garrison Ernst" (a pseudonym of Gary Gygax) that introduces Oerth (the name of the planet in the Greyhawk setting).  Gary describes Oerth as sort of an alternate earth, with the history of the planet diverging from ours significantly about 2,500 years ago.  It's an interesting tidbit to fans of the Greyhawk setting to see the ancient origins of elements of the setting.

The Dragon is still only bi-monthly at this point, so next time we dive back into another OD&D supplement: Supplement IV: Gods, Demigods, and Heroes.

Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry

Finally we get back to an actual product.  I enjoy the magazine issues, but it's the products I'm really after in this project of mine.  This won't be an issue once we get a few more years into it, when TSR started cranking out multiple products per month.  But for now we still live in the original D&D era when supplements were few and far between.

Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry was certainly a landmark, and for many different reasons.  Let's just jump straight to the thing that stands out the most about this product - the cover art:

Well alright then.  This was the very first product with color cover art, and I just find it interesting this is the direction they decided to go.  A naked woman tied down to a sacrificial altar?  I mean, it definitely matches the feel of the title if nothing else (although it is a little ironic that there's not any actual wizard-specific material in this supplement).  It's very clear that this was a different era.  All I can say is that I'm sure they were glad that this product was out of print by the time the satanic panic of the 80s rolled around.  But enough about that, let's look at the content:

• The druid class, originally an enemy in Supplement I, now makes its appearance as a character class, along with many classic druid spells.  What strikes me so much about the writing of these early rules is just how loose they are and how much they leave up to the DM.  For instance, it mentions how mistletoe is important to druidic spells, and how the effectiveness of a spell is modified by how properly the mistletoe was gathered, but that's it - no actual rules for adjustments are given.  It's totally up to the DM to make them up.  This is an interesting rules philosophy, and I'm not sure if it really represented a belief that this kind of minutiae was up to the DM to decide, or if it was honestly just to save on space (and thus printing costs).  It certainly is the polar opposite of what we would get in 1st edition AD&D, which if anything had too many rules.
• This supplement notably introduces psionics to the game.  I personally love the idea of psionics in general, and I really loved the 2nd edition psionicist class.  I still think its rules are an excellent example of a non-Vancian magic system.  But I knew nothing previously about psionics prior to 2nd edition, other than bits of legend and lore passed on by friends.  Psionic powers here are something that any character class can have, but at the expense of their normal class features.  Once again, I'm shocked at just how many powers I'm familiar with from the 2nd edition rules go straight back to the very beginning here.  I'm also shocked at how absurdly over-complicated the rules for psionics are.  Now I'll admit that as I read these products I'm not paying as much attention to the rules as I would if I were trying to actually learn and master the system.  Still, after reading the rules on psionics I couldn't even begin to give you an overview of how the system works.
• As if to underscore my previous point, there is a section on a primitive initiative system for combat that is again over-complicated and doesn't make much sense.  This is something I've been noticing ever since Chainmail.  The concept of streamlined, easy to remember rules has yet to make its way into roleplaying.  To make matters worse, it's not just the rules themselves, but the writing as well.  Concepts are described in the most roundabout fashion possible.  It just shows how very, very far the roleplaying industry has come in forty years.
• Most notably, this supplement introduces demons to the game.  Yes, "demons" with a "d"!  As a child of 2nd edition, I was familiar only with baatezu and tanar'ri, 2nd edition's renamed devils and demons respectively.  Seeing the effects of the 80s satanic panic on the game as it happens is something I'm eagerly anticipating down the line.  And speaking of demons, the majority of the supplement's art is devoted to them:

Bless their heart, they're trying.

After the cover art, I find the fig-leaf whip placement rather amusing.  Naked woman on a sacrificial altar?  Fine.  Demon wang?  Too far.

What about one of the most iconic demon princes of all time?

Well, it could be worse, I suppose.  It's just a long way from the pants-wetting depiction we get on the cover of the 4th edition Monster Manual:

Progress, huzzah!

• Mind flayers, previously the subject of the very first Creature Feature in The Strategic Review #1, now get a more fleshed out entry among the other added monsters, which also include the classic psionic monsters of the game like the brain mole and thought eater.
• Many of the most classic D&D artifacts are introduced here for the first time: The Mace of St Cuthbert, the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords, the Rod of Seven Parts, the Machine of Lum the Mad, Heward's Mystical Organ, and several others, including the classic Vecna artifacts: the Hand, the Eye, and the Sword of Kas.  And although that may sound epic, the whole section is greatly disappointing.  The artifacts have very little - if any - lore attached to them.  The story of the Wind Dukes of Aaqa and the battle with the Queen of Chaos has yet to be invented for the Rod of Seven Parts, for example.  Each item is just a name, a very brief description, and then a list of how many powers of each kind it has on the traditional tables for artifact power and curses.  It doesn't even list suggested powers for each item!

Between druids, demons, psionics, and artifacts, this was certainly a landmark product in D&D history, and arguably the high point of the original D&D supplements.  Next time we return to the magazines for another landmark: Dragon #1.

The Strategic Review, April 1976

This is the very last issue of The Strategic Review, and the opening editor's column explains TSR's decision to create two separate magazines: The Dragon and Little Wars, as well as the expansion of each to 32 pages (although this issue already expands to 24 over the previous 16).  I love the explanation that one of the reasons for the decision was the fact that The Strategic Review had become a de facto house-organ, and TSR wanted a more generic magazine covering all aspects of fantasy and science fiction gaming.  I'm not sure they ever really achieved that, as everyone knows that Dragon is/was a house-organ for D&D (certainly by the time I entered D&D it was unashamedly so).  I'll be interested to see how that transition plays out over the course of the magazine's life.

• The issue starts out with an article by Gygax on the magic system in D&D.  It's not quite as informative as I would have hoped, but it does explain the choice of Vancian magic for the magic system.  (Interesting side note - the concept of a mana-based magic system was still a decade away.  Wikipedia says that the PC game Dungeon Master was the first game to include it.)  It also explains Vancian magic, as apparently many players did not understand the concept of spells having to be memorized and used up (which I can't blame them, given the very loose writing of the original boxed set).  Gygax also states that there is no intention to add any spell levels beyond 9th, a decision which codified an aspect of the game for decades to come.
• While not D&D related, there's another humorous editorial on TSR's spat with Avalon Hill over which gaming convention is THE national convention - GenCon or Origins.  Then, in the first ever letter column, the very first letter goes to Gary Gygax, who writes even more about this issue!  Apparently TSR really had a chip on its shoulder over this.
• The very first artifact for the game makes its appearance: the Cup and Talisman of Akbar ("Al'Akbar" in later material).
• There's a brief table given without context that introduces adjustments to thief skills based on dexterity.  It also attempts to give thieves exceptional dexterity analogous to fighters' exceptional strength.
• Gygax has another article basically shaming Monty haul DMs (although that term doesn't actually appear), saying they're not playing real D&D.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand I agree with him, as it's out of the spirit and intention of the game, but I'm also a big believer in people playing games the way they want to play them - if they enjoy the Monty haul style, more power to them.  Ultimately I think games should establish what "normal" play looks like, but ultimately rules should be our servant, not our master.

This issue also contained an add for the about-to-be-released Eldritch Wizardry supplement, and that's where our archaeological expedition takes us next.  I look forward to seeing you there.

The Strategic Review, February 1976

Another two months, another issue:

• Gary Gygax has an article expanding the alignment concept.  Up until now there has only been Law and Chaos, but now he adds the orthogonal axis of Good and Evil.  This thus creates five distinct alignments: lawful good, chaotic good, chaotic evil, lawful evil, and neutrality.  The in-between neutral alignments are yet to appear, however, the pictorial illustration nevertheless gives the names of the eight outer planes associated with all eight non-neutral alignments: heaven, paradise, elysium, limbo, the abyss, hades, hell, and nirvana for lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good, chaotic neutral, chaotic evil, neutral evil, lawful evil, and lawful neutral respectively, even though NG, CN, NE, and LN are not discussed as character alignments.  Not only are we witnessing the evolution of the concept of alignment in D&D, but we also get our very first glimpse of the development of the outer planes.
• The bard class is introduced.  The author admits that the class is an amalgamation of the nordic skald, the celtic bard, and the European minstrel from history.  The basic concepts of the class are all here, although the details are significantly different from later incarnations.  Bards don't learn spells like wizards, but instead collect magical instruments that allow them to cast certain spells.  Instead of having a song that increases party morale, the bard's song charms others.  Thieving and lore abilities appear as well, although again, the details are somewhat different.  What interests me most about the new classes being added to the game (all of which end up becoming staples of D&D and roleplaying in general) is that some are being created by non-TSR authors.  This was true of the illusionist class and now the bard class as well.  These are just fans of the game submitting their ideas to the magazine, having no conception of the legacy they're creating.  Can you imagine writing an article forty years ago simply out of a love for the game and a desire to contribute to it, only to have it cement our notions of canonical classes in modern day RPGs?

Most of the rest of the content is devoted to board games, miniatures, and other things (such as the very first fiction story in the magazine - something that will become a regular feature), so with that, I'll call it a day.

The Strategic Review, December 1975

The magazine went to a bi-monthly publishing schedule with this issue, no doubt as TSR continued to pick up steam as a company and had more news and content to put out.  It also saw yet another increase in size - from 12 to 16 pages.  What do we get in all that space?

• There's an interesting article where the various famous personalities of TSR (Gary Gygax, Brian Blume, Timothy Kask, etc.) give their own bios.  As I said early in this blog, my focus is on the history of D&D rather than the history of TSR.  Nevertheless, I do find this info interesting - to know a little more about the original minds behind the game.
• There's an article describing a miniatures game where the referee secretly pitted a German unit from Tractics against a unit of D&D monsters without either side's foreknowledge - each side thought they were going to play a standard WWII or fantasy miniatures battle respectively.  It's an interesting read and reflects on the philosophy of D&D (even though this was a miniatures game) at this point.  There's definitely a lighthearted sense about the game, and DMs are not afraid to throw out-of-genre material into their campaigns.  All in all, the game doesn't take itself too seriously.  I see this as an outgrowth of the lack of story-based roleplaying that I've been discussing - if there's no real story to worry about, then there's no need to worry about verisimilitude and consistency.
• There's an article (an editorial, really) that pretty much involves TSR whining about rival company Avalon Hill.  AH had recently started the Origins wargaming convention, and apparently in some of their marketing had referred to it as the "premier" wargaming convention, and the only "national" convention.  The article goes to great lengths to explain that GenCon (having completed its eighth year) is in fact THE national wargaming convention.  It reminds me of the article Gygax wrote an issue or two ago taking some game reviewer to task over his negative review of D&D.  Apparently the TSR folks had a chip on their shoulder when it came to their reputation.
• Besides some new creatures and new magic items there wasn't a lot of D&D content in this issue, so I'll stop here and move on to the next.  However, I haven't been giving much artwork lately, so I'll leave you with this jewel:
  

The Strategic Review, Winter 1975

Let's see, what did we get in the latest Strategic Review:

• Even more polearms!  Apparently Gary Gygax felt he hadn't exhausted the topic in the last issue, so we get another article discussing more varieties.  I'm sorry, I get it from a wargaming perspective, but from a roleplaying perspective it's just funny to me.
• The first add for the Dungeon! game appears in this issue.  I've never played it (or even seen it), but I would be interested, because material elsewhere makes it basically seem like a board game version of D&D.
• The upcoming relaunch of TSR's magazine line with The Dragon is teased in this issue.  There's no context or explanation that that's what's happening, just a box with the line, "The Dragon is coming!"
• The illusionist is detailed as a new class for D&D.  Being only familiar with specialist wizards in 2nd edition, I was not aware that previously the illusionist was actually its own class.  All new illusionist spells are detailed here, most all of which ended up becoming regular mage spells (in the illusion school, of course) in later editions.  I'll be interested to see down the road if there's any informative material on the switch to the specialist concept, and why the same concept was not applied to paladins and rangers, for example, making them "specialist fighters".
• Finally, the article that readers have been begging for ever since the magazine launched - a detailed etymology of Tsolyani names!  What in the world is that, you ask?  It's a fictitious language from the Empire of the Petal Throne roleplaying game, which I've never personally encountered but would be interested to learn more about.  The setting sounds fascinating - a post-apocalyptic "future past" type setting where a previously highly technological society has degenerated down to primitive technology and magic.  However, if you've ever struggled through the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, you know that nothing says tedium like a detailed phonetics lesson on a made-up language.
• A truly classic D&D magic item is introduced here - ioun stones (although technically they were borrowed from Jack Vance's novels).  I've always loved the idea, although sadly none of my D&D characters have ever gotten to possess one.

Supplement II: Blackmoor

Ah, Blackmoor - a strange beast of a supplement if there ever was one.  Released in September of 1975, the supplement continues the format of Greyhawk in separating its content into additions and clarifications to the three books of the original boxed set: Men and Magic, Monsters and Treasure, and Underworld and Wilderness Adventures.  What sets this book apart though is the devotion of almost entirely the third section (and nearly half of the book) to a thorough detailing of a section of Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign.  It's fascinating because Blackmoor was the first and oldest D&D campaign in existence, so we get to see a glimpse of what one of the creators of D&D thought the game should look like.  It does make for a somewhat odd supplement, however, being half rules and half adventure module.

This supplement introduces the infamous monk and assassin classes.  These classes always seemed especially polarizing to me - people either loathed them or missed them terribly in 2nd edition.  When I started up my own 2nd edition D&D campaign one of my players tried to convince me to allow him to roll a monk under the 1st edition rules (I declined).  Seeing them in their original context, the monk seems to me to be another quadratic character like wizards - feeble at low levels, but increasing exponentially in power as they level up and attain their special abilities: ridiculous attacks and damage with unarmed strikes, a fighter-like AC, and a ludicrous number of immunities.  As for the assassin, I'm not really sure what the thought process was for them - they're basically weaker thieves who can undertake assassination missions for gold and XP.

This supplement tries to introduce a hit location system to the rules, which obviously never had a lasting impact.  Now I admit I am a simulationist and like my RPGs to be as realistic as possible, so I like this sort of thing - in theory.  In reality, I and most other people never play with it because it just requires too much bookkeeping and causes combat to grind to a halt.

The section for new monsters and treasures is bizarrely focused exclusively on an undersea theme with no explanation as to why.  I guess Arneson's campaign had a lot of undersea excursions?  Nevertheless, we do get some more classic D&D monsters like the sahuagin and the ixitxachitl (and on a side note, if you can spell either of those words without looking them up, you know you've been playing D&D too long).

Finally, we get to a lengthy description of the Temple of the Frog, a location in Arneson's Blackmoor campaign.  It's really a prototype for the first modules TSR would release.  It gives a brief backstory for the location, then proceeds into multiple keyed maps describing it in minute detail for exploration purposes.  There's no "adventure" per se - unlike modern modules which have an unfolding story, this just gives a static description of the location.  It's only purpose is to be systematically explored and looted, which fits with the hack-and-slash philosophy of the game we've been discussing.

This was a slightly offbeat supplement to be sure.  We're at an odd point here in the history of TSR - only one product was released every few months or so as the company got going, as opposed to later years in which multiple products would be released every month.  So join me next time as we dive back into some issues of The Strategic Review.