Leaning a bit heavily on what are pretty long fiction stories for a 30 page magazine about tabletop gaming, The Dragon #8 is still a pretty important issue for the history of D&D, if nothing more because of one article by Gary Gygax which is pretty formative for the game’s lore.

The Gygax article on Planes establishes for the first time, and experimentally, the concept of the several planes which will be the basis for the future conception of the various D&D settings. Even the name of the Prime Material Plane appears here first, as do the concepts of Positive and Negative material planes and elemental planes. We also get some of the Outer Planes that are still around in the game, even if some of the important planes like the Feywild and Shadowfel do not yet make an appearance.

Beyond this central article that opens the issue, we also get an article on developing towns for your campaign, a humorous article on Realism in D&D, an unnamed creature with a contest for readers to come up with a name, stats and backstory (it looks like a kind of infernal Naga), a needlessly complex article on determining carats of gems and jewelry and tables to determine which stones they are, and that is pretty much it. Worth reading the Gygax article at least, to see where Planes comes from.