The Dragon Magazine Number 39 - July 1980
So I’ve been posting these on Google Plus for a while, but the format just isn’t working for me anymore. So here goes trying out using my oft neglected blog. If you are running across this for the first time, I pluck a Dragon Magazine from the past around once a week, read through it and pull out nuggets and tidbits.
As always we start with the cover and we have a rough issue here. The artist clearly has skills, but the composition is really disjointed. It reminds me of work that you see that was clearly dictated by a client. As individual parts, they are technically sound, but the client didn’t have the vision to put it all together so you end up with something not quite right.
Clearly in 1988, TSR would license any property. I wonder if this ever got played or playtested.
It is so weird to think that this was a point of contention? Who cared if GenCon or Origins was the National Convention for gaming? Seriously?
Dragon at this time has this curious practice of having two to three different places to answer questions. This is from the Letters to the Editor section, but there was also Sage Advice and the Forum. Most of the time the Forum was home to just folks writing back and forth (like a modern BB) without editorial stepping in, but occasionally they would reply. A strange dynamic, but I thought this letter was the most interesting of the bunch.
I love this little bit of layout. As you sort through Dragon you can see the times where they had an inspired graphic designer working for them and when you couldn’t. The use of color to tie things together, the pulling of a graphic from how they made hex maps then, and the consistency of the placement of the titling for each article is really nice in this generation of the layout.
The article itself is pretty interesting as it gives you a method for quickly rolling up the buildings in a village, town or city. The thing is, I remember how we used to do this crap back in the day and you would be rolling forever because instead of mapping interesting stuff and leaving the rest blank to be filled in as needed, we would have notebooks filled with these details for thousands of buildings “just in case”. We were so stupid.
Bloodbowl! Orcs!
Man, I loved the TMNT line of books. The system was a slightly better version of the typical Paladium nonsense, but damn if those books didn’t have some great art. For a time this was our go-to game.
I forgot how hard it was to play a bard in 1st Edition, but this question brings it all flooding back to me. I wish I still had those books to look up all the details.
One thing interesting about Sage Advice at this point is that it was divided up by class. Does that mean players were sending in questions for clarification at this point or GMs?
Today we will end with an advert for a game I have never seen before and wish I could track down a copy. These old games are often terrible, but sometimes have these little inspired nuggets in them, be it an evocative map or a genius rule.
