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.