In the last few months there have been progressive changes to Dragon, more color, more images, more double spreads and now we even get, for the first time, a new opening piece. Called Cover to Cover the new feature will be the regular opening for the magazine, written by Jake Jacquet it covers the contents of the magazine and gives an overview of what we’re getting. Kask’s Dragon Rumbles continue but are now free to work more as an editorial rather than an overview of the issue. 

The issue is also themed and as we can see from the cover the theme are Jungles, so we get an article on how to create jungles for your game, how to populate them and what kind of adventures you can have there, as well as jungle civilizations and creatures, even the new monster in the Bestiary feature is a jungle monster. 

We get other usual features, with a new one by Jean Wells replying to rules questions from readers in Sage Advice. Gygax returns with Sorcerer’s Scroll this time about what makes a good setting for AD&D and how Tolkien is really bad as a template for a setting (his words not mine). Gygax also for the first time mentions that Drow would actually work pretty well as player characters… which is interesting seeing as that would later be a controversial move when the option became available. Lakofka’s Leomund’s Tiny Hut covers Death and Hitpoints, with some ideas about permanent damage to characters that didn’t really catch on.