This issue of Dragon brings slightly less than usual AD&D material, with a couple of long articles for other games,  but definitely enough content to keep fans happy and busy for the month.

It starts off with Ed Greenwood’s Smith NPC class exploration, followed by an article on the relative speed of boats and ships. Then we get Gygax weighing in on how to randomly determine social class backgrounds for characters, an idea that has been around since the early days of D&D and some of the earliest Dragon and The Strategic Review publications, but which now seems to be going forward as a component in the next rule revision. Frank Mentzer contributes two articles taking this idea on an complementing Gygax’s article.

Then there is an article helping us find a better way to calculate falling damage, through an exponential system, also by Mentzer. Roger Moore ads an article on how having “legendary characters” show up as NPCs can unbalance a campaign in his take on the Giants in the Earth column, while Gygax continues bringing us the Gods of Greyhawk. Moore also attempts to bring fantasy races into science fiction settings with Dwarves in Space, while Greenwood takes yet another go at bringing guns into AD&D.