With a Thanksgiving humorous cover by Jack Crane, this is another issue packed to the gills with AD&D content, particularly with articles written by Gygax who was firing on all cylinders for this one, contributing 5 whole articles as well as co-writing a 6th article. All about AD&D, of course.

Let’s get through all the Gygax stuff here first, as usual at the time anything that Gygax was pretty much gospel gamewise, meaning that it was now official content. He starts off the issue by contributing a bunch of new Magic User spells, these include a bunch of iconic spells, such as those which include names of “mythical” magicians, like Melf’s Acid Arrow, Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, Evard’s Black Tentacles or Otiluke’s Resilient Sphere. Gygax also brings us new creatures in Featured Creatures, but more interesting we finally get some fleshing out of Greyhawk’s religion with an article on Deities and Demigods of Greyhawk, with entries on such gods as St. Cuthbert or Iuz. Gygax also writes some feedback on the feedback he got from an article on a previous issue on new character classes. Lastly he gives us an article on what is and is not official, this should be quite eye opening for those who think that first edition was “the good old days” and that the recent OGL debacle was something completely against its spirit. Gygax makes it pretty clear that if you are using rules or material that is not TSR official or approved by TSR you are not playing AD&D at all, and seems to be pretty angry at third party innovations… 

Finally he contributes comments and an introduction to Roger Moore’s article on the Astral Plane. An issue completely dominated by Gygax’s writing which is pretty interesting and revealing in a number of different ways, from fleshing out Greyhawk to glimpses into the backstage of the D&D business, it’s a pretty essential issue.