Welcome to 1984! A momentous year for Dungeons and Dragons and the start of many new things. For the first time AD&D will have a new campaign setting, and with that campaign setting there will come the start of the novel publishing business that will be a large part of TSR and WoTC’s output until recently. I am talking, of course, of Dragonlance, and in this issue of Dragon magazine you can already see a reference to it in a mysterious advert with the Dragonlance symbol and under it just the words: “is coming from TSR”. But that is still a couple of months away in March, and the novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight will be coming around in April. 

So in the meanwhile let’s look at this issue of  Dragon magazine. Behind the cool cover by Steve Peregrine, we start off with the announcement that the magazine will stop publishing adventures from the Module Design contest in its middle pages. This makes some sense as they aren’t exactly up to professional standards and there are already adventures coming out in Polyhedron. Eventually in 1986 we will have a whole magazine dedicated to adventures with Dungeon, but not yet. 

Articles this issue include one about making poisons a bit more forgiving (something desperately needed in 1st edition), Ed Greenwood brings us the ecology of the Basilisk, taken from the library of Sulphon of Waterdeep, we get rules to use chariots in AD&D, an article on how to harvest spell components as well as the usual comics and cartoons at the end of the issue. A good one!