A longer than usual Dragon magazine, stretching to 73 pages of material, it adds the second adventure module to come out in the magazine, entitled Doomkeep, it’s a self-contained adventure for competition purposes at GenCon XII. It was a Masters Tournament, so it involved all the TSR employees and other famous players, Robin Hostetter won the competition with Gygax coming in at number 16… oh well. 

In terms of articles this is not an issue particularly dedicated to AD&D, in fact this is a special issue dedicated to Divine Right, another TSR game. However, as usual you get the customary columns and features on AD&D, like the Bestiary, Sage Advice, Bazaar of the Bizarre as well as an article on a variant turn structure by Lenard Lakofka and another article on cursed and quirky items. 

Other than the competitive adventure module at the end of the issue you also get an article about tabulating scores in AD&D games for competitions. Its fascinating to see how much of the game was about competitions in the early years and how much that has kind of fallen by the wayside. In fact the cooperative nature of D&D is much more a feature of the game than seeing it as a competitive sport, however people did “win at Dungeons and Dragons” back in the day. However there are so many articles about how to score the game and how many problems arise from it that it was pretty clear that this wasn’t a naturally competitive game.