The Dragon #14, May 1978

The Dragon marches on:

• There is an article reviewing the Nomad Gods board game by Chaosium.  It is the sequel to the very first Glorantha game, White Bear and Red Moon.  I have had no exposure to RuneQuest or the world of Glorantha, but every little bit I encounter makes me want to dive into it someday.
• There's also a review of Cosmic Encounter, my favorite board game of all time.  To be fair, I never got to play the original Eon game reviewed here, but rather the more common Mayfair version that came out later.  Still, if you've never played a game of Cosmic Encounter you haven't lived yet.  Several years ago I spent nearly $200 to get a copy of the long out-of-print Mayfair version, along with the More Cosmic Encounter expansion.  One of the greatest board games ever, hands down.
• The Sorcerer's Scroll this month is from Gary Gygax himself, discussing the place of the recently-released Holmes Basic Set and the direction of the game.  He states that the Holmes set is specifically targeted at new players to the game, and that while it is designed to lead them on to AD&D, it can also lead them on to OD&D (the original boxed set) just as well, since the product was in fact a rewrite and simplification of those rules.  "Basic D&D" clearly does not yet exist as a separate concept in the mind of TSR, and would only grow out of the fact that the original boxed set continued to sell well, indicating a separate market for it.  No doubt there is also some hedging of bets here as well, out of concern that AD&D might not be received well.
• Jim Ward starts a new series lampooning the TSR staff called "The Adventures of Monty Haul".  It basically describes a gaming session with greatly exaggerated parodies of the TSR personalities.  Good for a chuckle.
• There's an article on lycanthropy that proposes a system for player characters to carry on as infected were-beasts.  Honestly I've never been much of a fan of D&D's lycanthropy.  I have strong opinions on all aspects of RPGs, but especially those relating to horror genre creatures.  So I don't find this system particularly compelling, even if the author does try to balance the power of lycanthropes with some disadvantages.

Several other non-D&D articles round out this issue.  The Dragon has become a monthly publication with this issue, so we'll visit June's issue, then it will be time for the Player's Handbook.