Look at that font on the title! The Dragon has a new look and there are some nice changes happening to the magazine, they are using more color on the inside, the articles are becoming more consistently good and this font, that will remain with us for decades and becomes the iconic image of the magazine, particularly for those who came to the game later, like me (I still had three years of being unalive to go in 1979).

As contents go it’s a pretty good one, with the From the Sorcerer’s Scroll column given to The Judges Guild to talk about their work, a general article about Dwarves in literature and Dwarven armies, more stat block of famous characters in Giants of the Earth, including Fritz Liber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Burrough’s John Carter. One of the usual “pantheons” for D&D articles covers “The Mythos of Africa” with stats for “African gods and heroes”… this creates a bit of a problem because Africa is a whole continent with a bunch of different pantheons and this ends up being a mishmash with little cultural specificity… but it was the 70s after all. 

The Dragon Bestiary brings us The Horast, a new monster but one which has kind of been lost in the mists of time, and Bazaar of the Bizarre brings us the Bag of Wind, a Gygax created magical item which captures different winds with different properties that can be released by the character for various effects. All in all a good issue.