The Dragon #12, February 1978

We have a few more issues of The Dragon to get through before our next product - the 1st edition Player's Handbook.  After that the pace of products begins picking up a bit more and we won't have to wade through quite so many magazine issues in between.

• An article on illusionists takes back up the class that originally debuted in The Strategic Review.  It gives a few updated rules and a few new spells, but I don't believe the content here really stuck going into the Player's Handbook - probably because it was already mostly complete at this point, being published only four months from now.
• We get a long list of the deities of Zoroastrianism Supplement IV-style.  I've already talked about what a waste that product was, so any information extending it is similarly so.
• Jim Ward has an article talking about how the initiative system introduced in Eldritch Wizardry was a great boon to wizards facing warriors, but that system was so ridiculously over-complicated I can't be bothered to care much.
• There's an article on the history of the druids, explaining the differences between our fantasy conception of them versus what little we know to be historically true.  It's interesting, but only really useful I suppose if you want to create your own historically accurate druid class.
• What could be more useless than a Supplement IV appendix for Zoroastrianism?  How about one for the freaking Lovecraft mythos?  Rob Kuntz wastes the second ever Sorcerer's Scroll on this.  That's right, Great Cthulhu himself gets the stat treatment!  Are you kidding me?  If there were ever one fictional pantheon of gods that should not be given stats of any kind, ever, it's this one.  The very first entry is for Azathoth.  Azathoth.  You can't fight Azathoth.  YOU CAN'T.  Even though the entry describes him as being the size of a star, he still has only 300 hit points (which seems to be the unofficial maximum possible hit points for any god).  Oh, and if you do kill him, the universe ends.  Yeah.
• The final entry of note in this issue is an excerpt from Andre Norton's upcoming novel Quag Keep.  This was the very first D&D-based novel and is set in Greyhawk, but apparently it did survive the test of time well, as I had never heard of it before getting into this project.  Still, I will be reading it as part of this blog when it comes up later in 1978.

That's all for now.  Join me next time for another Dragon issue.