We finally get to the first number of The Dragon Magazine, a magazine that would accompany D&D for most of its life, only changing names when it went online becoming Dragon+ which is still going. As a magazine it isn’t very different from The Strategic Review that preceded it, in fact it keeps many of the same columns and even continues series started in SR. 

It’s easy to tell that this was a more expensive and serious magazine, in the first place it is now a whopping 30 pages. It also has a group of elite contributors, like Fritz Leiber writing a piece on his universe of Lankhmar. There’s also a couple of fiction sections, with one humorous story (which frankly isn’t that funny) and a pretty compelling start of an adventure with Garrison Ernst’s The Gnome Cache.

Strangely enough for the first issue of The Dragon, there isn’t so much time spent on D&D in this one. There are articles on how magic and science interact in D&D, about languages and language learning in the game, another on how to create wilderness scenarios and, most importantly a new beastie: The Bullette, a classic. Another article gives us the beginning of what would become skill checks with “How to Use Non-Prime Requisite Character Attributes” by Wesley D. Ives, a really complicated system for what is now actually as simple as rolling a d20 against your ability, but ok. Most of the rest of the magazine is used up with other games, particularly miniature ones with a long recreation of Tolkien’s Battle of Five Armies, and game reviews.