The changes in Dragon magazine continue with the size now going up to 56 pages and the content mixing fantasy and historical games but with a heavy emphasis on the first of these. The name little wars is, like last issue, gone from the cover, and although the editorial by Kask says that this will now be a mixed magazine it seems kind of clear that this is the beginning of phasing out the historical stuff and we’ll just get a bigger Dragon by the end of it. It makes business sense as it is by far TSR’s most successful line of games but I don’t think they can come out right and say it because they still have loads of Little Wars subscribers that they are shipping Dragon to now.

We get articles on how to keep Magic Users manageable at high levels, as they did become too powerful in 1ed, a complement to the Monster Manual on “chinese” Dragons, the East Asian sort of dragons which are indeed quite different from European ones. We also get another look at Lycanthropy which had already been a feature in a previous article. 

We also get a really long article by Gygax on Melee in D&D, defending the game’s system against accusations that it is not realistic enough and the balance that it maintains between realism and fun for the players. We finally get the return of Out on a Limb, a reader’s mail column, which is a quite good way to see how players react to some of the things in Dragon, such as Gygax angry diatribes against unfair reviewers (it seems like they wish he just ignored them rather than go down to their level). Articles on Psionics, humorous articles, an article on alignments/gods and the results of a monster creation competition finish off the issue.