Welcome to April ’85, a pretty short month for the standards of the mid-80s in terms of publications, but we do get an adventure module, a whole new novel and a couple of magazines, so we’ll start off with that and April’s Dragon Magazine. As it is a kind of on and off tradition, the April issue celebrates April Fools and there will be a humorous component to the magazine (except in the years in which they forgot).

This year they didn’t forget to make the April issue the “funny one”, as we can tell that immediately from the whimsical cover by Jack Crane, the go-to artist for funny covers for Dragon, now that Phil Foglio has gone on to do other things. In the contents page you also see some shenanigans going on with an editor column which is mirrored, but your faithful correspondent did flip the image to read it and it’s basically a long diatribe about how no one reads the editor’s letter and Kim Mohan gets no correspondence and he’s really sad about it, so he is going to quit writing them. All lies, of course. 

Some of the content is humorous, and you get spoof reader’s mail, the “Hopeless” character class, a funny adventure module for really high-level characters which is just a spoof of godlike “Monty Haul” PCs. You also get a little tribute to the aforementioned Phil Foglio with stats for a What’s New Dragon monster. On the more serious side of things, you get Gygax with new official rulings for Demi-Human classes… you can finally have a Dwarven Cleric or an Elven Ranger… What a concept!