The Dragon #17, August 1978

What awaits us in this month's The Dragon?

• We start with an article on vampires, where the author gives advice both to the DM for playing vampires and to players for combating them.  It's short, but has a bit of worthwhile material.
• Another author updates the jousting system from Chainmail to account for fighter level in D&D.
• There's a lengthy and fun recounting of a D&D session from the Winter Fantasy I convention DM'ed by Gary Gygax where the players ended up being teleported to the Metamorphosis Alpha setting.  What follows is rather funny tale of magic users and clerics trying to come to terms with androids, ray guns, and mutants.
• Jim Ward has an interesting article introducing a proto-concept for specialist magic users.  It doesn't rely on the schools of magic like later specialism would, but rather groups spells by type, like attack, defense, detection, movement, etc.  It's not super compelling, and I doubt it was the seed for the specialist concept as it appeared in 2nd edition, but it's interesting from the standpoint of seeing people have ideas even in the infancy of the game that would later become staples of the system.
• There's a short and odd article on illusory sights and sounds for a DM to use in the dungeon.
• There's a section for new creatures, but two of them are jokes and the third is just pointless.  Tim Kask must have been really hard up for material for this issue.
• An article encourages the use of hyperdimensional geometry in dungeons to confuse mapmakers.  I've seen some material go overboard in its efforts to trip up mapmakers for sure, but still I feel this is a bit of a lost art nowadays.
• Jim Ward continues to be a prolific writer for the magazine with a second article, this time on ideas for dungeon level design based on historical periods.
• Another variant article introduces angels to the game.  Seeing as they're a natural complement to demons and devils I'm surprised it took this long for them to appear.

A few other non-D&D articles not worth mentioning round out the issue.  Next up we've got one more issue before diving in to the D series of modules.  I'll see you there.