The second issue of TSR, the TSR newsletter, starts off with the sad news of the passing of Don Kaye, cofounder of TSR and co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, just as the whole thing was starting to get off the ground. He was only 36 and died unexpectedly of a heart attack. 

However, the issue has some more interesting things for D&D’s history, there are three articles that cover D&D in the 8 pages of the magazine, 2 of which are particularly important. Firstly there’s a FAQ section on D&D, which points players to the original rules and also to the Greyhawk supplement that must have hit stores at about the same time as this issue. One of the questions the supplement helped answer was different weapon damage values, but in this issue they make the initiative rules more clear.

The other two articles bring us a new creature and a new class, both of which are now classics of the game. The new creature is the Roper accompanied by a terrible but terribly endearing illustration of the monster with some dragons next to it. The new class is the first iteration of the Ranger class, similar to what it is today, it was a mix between the fighter and the cleric, getting some spells at level 9 and being good at tracking things. They are classified here as a subclass of “Fighting Men”, the original Fighter class, much in the same way as the Paladin was.