With a great Clyde Caldwell cover, this issue marks a turn for Dragon magazine, as it is announced right on the editorial page, Dragon will from now on exclusively cover Fantasy tabletop role playing games. The science fiction stuff, like Star Frontiers and Gamma World will be moved to Ares magazine. This means that now I have to read Dragon cover to cover, more or less… oh no. 

There are a couple small articles here, like the really cool Ecology of the Beholder by Ed Greenwood and Roger Moore (not the 80s James Bond actor) as well as the Death Master NPC character class, a kind of assassin necromancer type that’s creepy as all hell. However the magazine is really dominated by two humongous sections.

The first of these sections is Ed Greenwoods second part of his monumental article on the Nine Hells, from page 22 to page 44 Greenwood covers the second half of the hells, Malbolge, Maladomini, Caina and Nessus as well as how magic, magical items and classes are affected by the hellish environment. This two-parter on the hells is almost like a little campaign setting of its own, great exhaustive work by Greenwood. The second article that takes up almost the remainder of the issue is a huge Index of articles and content for the first seven years and 74 issues of Dragon magazine, plus The Strategic Review (the direct ancestor of Dragon).