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!
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