Closing out 1981 we get the December issue of Dragon with a cover by the great Phil Foglio starring his creations Phil and Dixie who get their first color comic strip inside this magazine. For D&D fans we get a whole rethink of the Bard class as well as a Sage Advice dedicated to questions about Bards and an interesting development of the idea of “songs instead of spells” for the bard class. 

The longest and most interesting article of the issue is Gygax’s second entry in a row about the world of Greyhawk for which he is just dumping a lot of info on us, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Here we get in his From The Sorcerer’s Scroll column a huge amount of information about north-central Flanaess. This includes a lot of reports on military movements and wars between factions like the Wolf Nomads, Iuz, the Bandit Kingdoms or the Duchy of Tehn, but this comes off as really dry because Gygax does not explore the reasons and motivations of each faction, this feels more like a “wargame” report than an actual developing of deep lore. Hopefully these get better.

In the bestiary we get the truly weird Shroom monster as well as a couple of other entries, and this issue introduced a new column, Off the Shelf, which gives us plenty of fantasy and science-fiction book reviews. We also get a three page Wormy this issue!