Welcome to the 80s! And the first thing we see from D&D in 1980 is the January issue of Dragon Magazine with a really cool cover, one of my favourites up until now, with that dragon just lounging on a bunch of skulls, like a lounge lizard, but bigger. 

Also near the beginning of the magazine in the reader’s mail section (Out on a Limb) we get a color picture of Gygax, which readers really wanted to see with him having by now become a near mythical character in the TTRPG milieu. We have an interesting article by H.R. Lovins on having your NPCs have a CAU (caution) score, this is basically a scale that goes from friendly to hostile as to how they regard PCs at first glance, this is pretty much something that is already done without really needing to make it a “score”, but it’s a cool idea nonetheless… and many years later would be a thing on PC Games from Dragon Age to The Sims. 

According to the editorial Gygax is now a very busy man, so the present Sorcerer’s Scroll will be his last article for the magazine for a while, and he dedicates this space to again explaining AD&Ds Magic System as well as what inspired it and why it is why it is instead of another system (such as Spell Points). Leomund’s Tiny Hut brings us some homebrewed changes to spells, completely unofficial suggestions by Lenard Lakofka and a large part of the issue is taken up with the DM listings for 1980. A new column shows up, The Electric Eye, covering innovations in PC Gaming, which in 1980 means fantasy text games on the Apple II (they don’t mention it, but the Zork series had started coming out in 1977 and was exactly that). 

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.