Right on the cover we get a bit of Dungeons & Dragons history, with the first of many contributions by Clyde Caldwell to the art of Dragon magazine and TSR in general. An artist who would become, together with others like Larry Elmore, eternally associated with the classical 80s period of D&D, particularly when we move towards the fantasy settings of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, Clyde represented a shift to a more realistic painterly style which would eventually replace the more expressionistic and cartoonish art of such greats as Erol Otus and Bill Willingham. 

On the inside there are plenty of articles of interest for D&D fans, a couple of them focus on rethinking the Monk class, very often thought of as being the worst class in first edition D&D, so the idea would be to make it a more functional class for players. There is also a new NPC class added, the Oracle, in a really long article that ,as is usual with these NPC articles in Dragon magazine, gives the reader enough information to actually make these PC classes, rather than just NPCs. 

Then there is an article on how to make your campaign world work with D&D, and more importantly in the Up on a Soapbox column we get Judith Sampson, a D&D player with cerebral palsy writing about her experience of playing D&D while having to make adjustments due to her disability, a really fascinating article and not the kind of story that Dragon focused too much on. Then we have a one off AD&D adventure which had won their module contest, Lakofka’s column covering how to make doors more interesting in AD&D, and the usual Bestiary and comics entries.