Collecting selected articles from The Strategic Review as well as the first two years of The Dragon Magazine, this was a cool way for more recent players to have access to articles which are actually foundational of the whole game as well as other TSR products (such as Metamorphosis Alpha).

This is usually catalogued as being published in 1980, but Dragon Magazine has adverts for it being on sale all the way back in September 1979 and stating that it would be shipping and on sale in September, so I’m putting it here. Anyway it really does not have any new content, so it’s a bit irrelevant if it came out now or a few months later.

Among the articles collected are Gygax historical reminiscences on the creation of D&D as well as his articles on Planes and Alignments which were the first places where those took shape as they exist now. Filling out the 70 pages of the magazine were plenty of other classic articles. At a time when back issues of the magazine were basically impossible to get, unless you knew a collector with a complete collection willing to part with them, this was really useful for fans of the games published by TSR.