Well the inevitable happened, one of the posts that I was supposed to make here fell by the wayside. So throw your minds back to March 1984 and here’s the missing review of Dragon 83!

This issue of Dragon is notable for a number of reasons but probably the most significant for the coming years of D&D and down until our days, is the fact that it truly marks the start of the Dragonlance era. The first piece of Dragonlance fiction is included in this magazine, a short story by Margaret Weis, entitled The Test of the Twins, a prequel to the Dragonlance Chronicles and not to be confused with the Test of the Twins novel from 1986, this tells of Raistlin’s graduation as a magic-user, explaining how he gets his hourglass eyes and going deep into his relationship with his brother Caramon. There’s also a good “setting the stage” for the novels call-out box in the story that is worth reading.

I was and am a big fan of Dragonlance fiction, so I had read this before (as a reprint in 1987’s Magic of Krynn anthology) but I didn’t know it was actually the first published bit of Dragonlance fiction. Definitely worth tracking down and the start of something special, so much so that there is still Dragonlance fiction coming out, and next month, August you can get the second volume in the most recent trilogy by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis: Dragons of Fate.  I read the previous entry and it was great fun. 

Otherwise the magazine is packed with fun stuff, from Ed Greenwood’s Anatomy of the Stirge, to an article on gems and what they do, and an adventure for high-level AD&D players featuring Baba Yaga, and an article on how to make hand to hand fighting more fluid, it’s all good. We also get a warning from Kim Mohan, that Ares magazine (the SF RPG sister to Dragon) has folded and so, from now on Dragon will include a section which will replace the content from Ares.