With an iconic Clyde Caldwell cover, which sets the tone for 80s D&D art, and increasingly the cover art for Dragon magazine, as the more cartoonish style is falling out of favor, so much so that although Phil Foglio, who did the cover for #56, will continue with the magazine doing the What’s New with Phil and Dixie comic strip, he will not get another cover until the 2000s! The same happens to Erol Otus who had his last cover with issue #55. This marks a move to a more “serious” high fantasy, painterly style for the game.

In the interior we have a bunch of really useful articles, particularly for Clerics and Dwarves, with Lakofka adding new official Cleric spells in Leomund’s Tiny Hut column and a whole special section on Dwarves, drawing from several AD&D sources and beyond to give a general view of Dwarves in the game as well as their practices and beliefs, and a section on dwarven gods, some dwarven magical items in a special edition of Bazaar of the Bizarre and a whole Sage Advice column answering questions on dwarves.

This was the first of these special sections on one theme which would become a recurrent feature in Dragon from now on, pretty useful as a way to concentrate knowledge about a particular subject. Other AD&D articles here include an article on making archery in AD&D more realistic. Absent this month is Gygax’s info on the world of Greyhawk, but he would come back soon.