With a beautiful all-time classic painting by the great Robin Wood, who left us much too soon in 2021, this is one of my favourite Dragon covers, the detail of the reflection in each individual scale is particularly impressive. The interior of this issue isn’t as great as the cover, but that is by itself worth the price of admission.

The editorial of this issue starts off by announcing an upcoming volume whose name is now a fixture of D&D, Unearthed Arcana, announced as a kind of a compilation of all the official material published up until now on the magazine, with expanded content, Kim Mohan announces that it is coming out sometime in June. We’ll get there soon! Gygax gives us a column on how to calculate a God’s power and how they work in the world of AD&D.

There are also articles on how to use improvised weapons, the Ecology of the Gorgon by Ed Greenwood, who also brings us another instalment in his Pages from the Mages series, where Elminster describes Spell Books of the Forgotten Realms, and we get advice on how to deal with games with a lot of players. Reviews, the Ares Sci-Fi gaming section, some fiction and the usual comics (Wormy and SnarfQuest) make up the rest of the issue.