The third issue of The Dragon comes around and this time the amount of fiction has been reduced, fortunately, with only Gygax’s The Goblin Cache serial continuing, and most of the magazine with the exception of a couple of articles is dedicated to D&D. Some of the D&D stuff is good, some of it is pretty atrocious. 

Let’s start with the bad stuff first. There’s a whole article on “Women and Magic” which sets up gender differences in D&D, it would have been much better if they didn’t though. Written by Len Lakofka, the article says that women characters do not have Charisma stats, but only Beauty stats as a replacement, which allows them to “charm men” and is useful particularly for thieves. Can only have a strength score of 14 maximum and can never be as good fighters as men, get fatigued by heavy armor and can’t carry large weapons without attack penalties. It’s all pretty much as cringe inducing as you would expect. The names for women’s levels in Thief include: Wench, Hag, Jade, Succubus and Gypsy… ouch. On the bad side we also have a specialist class called Jester which gives Dwarves and Halflings bonuses because being small is inherently amusing. Oh the 1970s…

On the good side there is a bunch of “birth tables” for D&D, with stats to randomly determine backgrounds and professions for characters in a way similar to how it is now done in character creation in fifth edition. There’s a bunch of new classes, Healers, Scribes, Samurai and Berserkers as well as a couple of joke classes like The Idiot and the aforementioned Jester. A mixed bag then, but an entertaining one.