Sometimes you start down one road and end up somewhere else. Sometimes you pick something up and don’t know why. Sometimes a memory fires but you don’t realize it. Sometimes that ends up being a good thing.
To put it another way, I didn’t mean to open this issue of Dragon. But here we are. Look at us.
This is the last issue of 1995, dropping in December. These were the days of the Birthright line, the Encyclopedia Magica, and Waldenbooks. Rifts Japan was the latest splat out of Palladium and everyone was pushing card games.
I also checked, and this was the last issue of this particular trade dress and internal layout. They started putting the magazine in polybags after this issue and changed a lot of the features. The following issue had a declaration of returning to their roots.
That usually means they caved to backlash. It isn’t terribly surprising. Gaming culture is a conservative culture.
Not that Dragon was pushing any avant-guard boundaries mind you. Issue 224 is interesting, sure. But this isn’t a Lacuna level mindfuck. It’s just not boring nonsense.
The first interesting piece is the regular column called First Quest. In it various luminaries of the industry would share their gaming origin story. These days it’s a podcasts standard.
In this case we get a nice anecdote from Steve Jackson. It follows a familiar pattern:
Bad gm first, doesn’t play for years, good gm, gets hooked for life.
It is the universal constant of all social activities. If it gets tied into identity formation at the same time, woo buddy watch out. True believer territory.
The first article, The Castle Designer’s Guide to Coping with Magic and the Supernatural is wild. Jeffrey Allen Paul, my hat is off to you. You took something ridiculous and made it more ridiculous and awesome.
The crux of the article is what would need to happen for medieval castles to even work in a world where AD&D level magic actually worked. If wizards could melt rock and dragons fly over walls, what do you even do? Why aren’t you just throwing up your arms in the air and calling it quits?
“Challenge accepted,” was clearly what Mr. Paul declared when asked. This article is wild. I was particularly tickled by the lead mixture added to clay bricks for interior walls. Why you ask? To block scrying wizards of course.
There are no stats, which I love. I am sure the audience at the time didn’t love it.
The article is followed by what amounts to material that was probably cut from The Complete Book of Elves. It is two useless pages on elven settlements that feel like filler, though I suppose thematically consistent.
It’s unfortunate, because the next gaming article is a meaty one on dwarven tomb construction. By Steven Schend, it's the kind of article only a dwarf lover would write. It is also thought provoking. The kind of thing that helps transform a game session from fun to memorable.
Speaking of memorable, the last article I want to hit on in this issue is the one about the Rod of Seven Parts by Skip Williams. The article itself is really a promo piece for the boxed set that would come out the following year. However, buried inside it is some gaming history. History I wasn’t aware of even until recently.
To be honest, the Rod of Seven Parts was never really on my radar back in the day. Those classic artifacts from Lake Geneva always felt like things from someone else’s game, so we never used them. Just wasn’t our speed.
Apparently though, Skip may have accidentally created the D&D version of the quest for a magic item that is broken into multiple pieces scattered across a dungeon. However, because Eldritch Wizardry had a naked lady on the cover, not a lot of people knew all the details about the rod back in the day. The full details had to get fleshed out over many products. An idea he had in 1977 didn’t get fully published until 1993!
Wild stuff.
Those are the highlights of that issue. There is more stuff, but it is striking to me how shallow so much of it is. The dangers of a narrow editorial focus I suppose.
Weekly Roundup
A Dracula returns, as to the alchemists, a new predator rises to take your money, and some fantastic work is about to kickstart.
