Dragon Mag Monday: #109

I think I put off writing this review of Dragon Magazine #109 for so long because despite really enjoying my look back at another issue that helped shape my approach to D&D, I dreaded how long this post would be because of that. I will endeavor to be brief. I shall inevitably fail.

The cover to my copy of this May 1986 issue is detached like so many of my copies from this era—though in this case I still have both front and back. The cover illustration is “Attack of the Taer” by Daniel Horne, an awkward image I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I love the composition and the lighting. I love the shine of the blade, the golden armor, the pubic hair quality of the dark gray fur of the taer’s face. On the other hand, the heroic figure is so dorky looking that even my desire to commend Horne for giving us a character that runs counter to the fantasy hero physical ideal is undermined by the result. The knight’s stance is too static seeming. The taer may look like he just took a swipe at our hero, but the fighter looks more like he’s posing.

I seem to remember a few letters in response to this cover in later issues, so I will keep an eye open for those reactions to see if they are worth sharing in future Dragon Mag Mondays. Before we get to the letters in this issue, however, there are two “special attractions” included in Dragon #109. There is a poster for a new game called “Agent 13.” I tore it out and hung it on my wall. It is long gone. I had forgotten it existed until rereading this and googling the art. The other is the preregistration booklet for GEN CON 19 (14 years before my first GEN CON). The pre-reg booklet takes up a lot of space, but in the pre-internet era it was the best option for reaching the tens of thousands of people who did plan to go to GEN CON while potentially juicing Dragon’s sales that month to boot. Dragon readers who felt that they would never go to GEN CON would write in to complain about the booklet taking up so much space (as Mohan mentions in his editorial). But I don’t think those complaints have much validity for this issue, which—despite giving over 22 heavier stock pages to a catalog of every game and event planned for GEN CON 1986—still has a lot to offer the reader.

On the letter’s page, Jim Robinson writes in to complain that he is feeling swamped by the waves of material coming out for his favorite game and that he cannot keep up. He asks why so many changes to artists and art style and books and rules, etc… and wonders if he is the only one who feels this way. The response seems obvious of course, especially in retrospect given the history of the game. Kim Mohan replies that AD&D can be as simple or complex as you choose to make it. He writes, “You aren’t required to own every accessory product.” And while Mohan is right (and continues to be right even unto the era of 5E), I think many DMs continue to feel swamped by all the new subclasses and feats and spells and playable species that arrive in new books—a feeling often exacerbated by internet gaming discourse.

As someone who has always excluded stuff (and included third party and homebrew material as well), I have a pretty firm opinion about the DM’s final say about what is in a campaign they plan to run. While it is good for a DM to remain open minded about adding game material, ultimately, they are responsible for maintaining the game and setting the tone, and what you include or exclude is a big part of that.

I used to carefully peruse new books and let players know exactly what I will allow and not allow. I don’t have time for all that anymore, and these days I just make it clear that we’re just using the core books (save for what I exclude or change from there) and any potential inclusion of player-facing material from other books (like subclasses) needs a discussion and collaboration with the DM.

In another letter, Brett Hansen of Pittsburgh, PA (Hey! That’s where I live! I wonder if he is still around) asks about a response to a letter in Dragon #106 saying that Gary Gygax has no plans to preview the mystic, savant, mountebank, and jester classes in the magazine, when in issue #65 Gygax said he would. Mohan’s answer is essentially “don’t hold us to what we say” and always assume that “unless things change” is appended to any future predictions.

Could this be evidence of trouble going on at TSR regarding Gygax’s role in the company? I would say yes, given that he’d already been pushed out of his company in October 1985 (though it had not been announced in the magazine yet). I can’t say how many D&D fans out there knew this had happened, but I know I didn’t, and this letter suggests that many others didn’t either. Mohan wasn’t about to divulge news yet, I guess. I don’t know what the lead up for issues of Dragon might have been back then, but what periodical publishing experience I have tells me that the May issue  (assuming it was actually released in May) would have been put to bed long after October of the previous year.

The Forum has some nuggets of interest, like pediatric psychologist Dr. John F. McDermott of Honolulu, Hawaii writing in for people to share their stories of positive gameplay to help combat negative stereotypes and promote it as a good way to make friends and develop problem-solving and social skills. Glen Sitton responds to Daniel Myer’s Forum letter from Dragon #107 complaining that too much of Gygax’s rules for D&D are based on his own campaigns (I briefly mentioned it), admonishing him to “change the names” and remind him that he should be “altering and omitting” specific campaign setting material as he sees fit. Sitton makes a good point that I generally agree with, though looking back from a game design perspective, some of the seemingly arbitrary rules of early D&D are bound to the quirky choices of both Gygax’s named setting—Greyhawk—and the more general implied setting of “generic” D&D.

I guess my retroactive boredom with The Forum is dwindling now that I am getting a sense of the running conversations and their nuances.

Getting to the primary content itself, Dragon #109 begins with “Customized Classes” by Paul Montgomery Crabaugh. This five-page article presents a system of tables for creating bespoke character classes for Dungeons & Dragons (not to be confused with the concurrent AD&D edition). Essentially, you could create any weird kind of combination of powers into your own class and it creates an XP table just for that class. Different abilities and powers provide a modifier percentage applied to a generic XP chart.  So, for example, being able to use any weapons or armor would modify the XP required for each level by 125% and getting the Elf class’s amazing saving throws would cost an additional +30%. Having access to a full complement of Magic User spells modifies the XP requirement by +275%. It also presents abilities not a part of the standard classes at the time, like shape-changing (+50% per maximum hit die of creature’s form you can take) and regeneration (+100%).

Remember, back in the pre-3E days each class had its own XP table. This was one way that the game tried to balance different classes. Yes, eventually a Magic-User was substantially more powerful that a Fighter, but an MU needed more XP to get to the same level. Thus, a character with 1.1 million XP would be 16th level if a fighter, but only 14th level if a Magic User. And so, with the system Crabaugh presents here, a new class could be created that has a fighter’s full attack progress, turn undead, and cast magic user spells, they would just need a lot more XP to progress in level. Another thing to remember, Basic D&D did not have multiclassing rules.

Despite the system being broken—you cannot use it to recreate the BECMI classes as they existed at the time of this article, the needed XP totals are off—an editor’s note at the end suggests it might be useful for tweaking AD&D classes. In fact, the 2E Dungeon Master’s Guide (which would come out three years later) presents a very similar optional system clearly based on this one for doing just that. In the past, I definitely made use of the system as a guideline and rule of thumb when creating specialty priests in 2E.

The last page of this article, in addition to having an ad for Skyrealms of Jorune, has a classified ad for jobs at TSR. They were looking for artists, graphic designers, keyliners, and folks to do marketing, but what stands out the most to me is the all-caps italics line reading, “WE ARE INTERESTED IN POST-COLLEGE EXPERIENCED PROFESSIONALS ONLY!” And then going on to detail the degree of experience they are looking for (3 to 5 years). The style of this message seems pretty unprofessional in itself, but then again, at the age I was when this came out I frequently dreamed about working for TSR one day, and can imagine there being a substantial number of D&D fans just a few years older than me at the time who felt similarly (despite working there sounding pretty miserable in retrospect, given TSR-era stories under both Gygax and Lorraine Williams) and would perhaps inundate the company’s offices with pointless applications given their lack of professional experience.

“The Barbarian Cleric” by Thomas M. Kane spends a lot of time using the primitive/civilized dyad unironically to try to make a spellcasting barbarian make sense given the barbarian class’s requirements regarding attitudes towards magic. Worst of all, in giving an example of a “primitive” society’s pantheon for such a cleric to serve, Kane suggests the “American Indian Pantheon”—a flattened and inaccurate hodge-podge of North American indigenous spirits and gods found in the 1E Deities & Demigods. Anyway, unlike most other classes presented in Dragon, this is not called an NPC class. And speaking of XP cost, it bears an enormous one. I never made use of this class as barbarians were never a part of my games until they were a core class in the 3E era.

Like most new spellcasting classes, the barbarian cleric comes with a few new spells, like “Hunt Nemesis” which allows them to summon the spirit they must fight to advance in levels (in addition to the ponderous XP requirements) and another called “Voodoo” is as cringey as you would imagine.

In “Fighters for a Price,” James A. Yates uses the story of Xenophon and the legendary march of the ten thousand to set the stage for explaining the use of mercenaries, both historically and (based on that) in D&D. I learned a lot from these kinds of articles, which basically served to fill in the gaps in the kinds of classical education that I guess inspired a lot of (war) gamers and world builders or that they autodidactically explored given their interest in historical warfare simulation.

Of course, the lore and exposition is complemented with six tables regarding where to find mercenaries and how to convince them to join you, how much they cost, and the various types (from human or dwarven archers to fire newt giant strider riders or hobgoblin heavy footmen).

“Worth Its Weight in Gold” is an article that still influences my take on dwarves 38 years later, even if the vast majority of its details have become hazy in the intervening years of evolving through actual use and shifting attitudes. John Olson’s overview of the cultural significance of dwarven beards is a fantastic example of the kind of detail possible in worldbuilding, even if it turns out that much of it reflects attitudes I find belie the possibilities of the fantastical by recapitulating various normative and toxic social structures. Despite this, I do credit it with forever convincing me that dwarven women are much more interesting with beards than without (in fact, I paint beards on all my women dwarf minis even when they aren’t sculpted to have one). I am just interested in how non-human cultures might perform other notions of masculinity and femininity and constructions of gender more generally. Still, despite what it provides in terms of the roles of beards in dwarven culture as a meaningful reflection of social status, gender role, and personal history, what really stuck out to me this time are the article’s fucked up gender politics and repeated cringe-inducing use of “females” as a noun.

“The Ecology of the Displacer Beast” is not by Ed Greenwood—but it is very much written in that style and the article reuses the fantastic Dave Trampier art for the creature from the original Monster Manual, art that reminds of me of an actually cool version of the once pervasive jaguar tattoo flash. There is not much of interest here except that the article includes potential damage from the displacer beast’s claw and bite attacks, which it only uses if “desperate.” This oversight in designing the monster has annoyed me for a long time. It has these two long spined tentacles, sure, but it also has six powerful puma-like legs and associated maw. Why would it not claw and bite? I am working on a rebuild of the displacer beast that takes its actual form into account. Look for it eventually on some Troglodyte Tuesday post.

I do also like how these “Ecology” articles add details to how and where one may encounter these monsters and what these lairs might be like. For example, the rocks outside of a displacer beast’s lair are scratched and scored where they sharpen the spines on their tentacles.

“The Role of Books” in this issue is not really worth writing about, though there is a review of Hickman and Weiss’s Time of the Twins, the first book in the second Dragonlance novel trilogy.

“War Machine Revisited” presents “details and extra rules for D&D game battles” by Garry Spiegle. Again, this article is about what we now call BECMI D&D, not AD&D. That said, I have yet to find as clear and quick and usable mass combat rules as the “War Machine” rules originally printed in the Companion Set. For years I bemoaned having gotten rid of those books, but just now I checked the Rules Cyclopedia and sure enough they are in there! I need to re-read them and scan a PDF of this article to read afterwards with that context in mind. I used them a few times both in my original B/X+C games (I used the Moldvay’s Basic and Expert sets with the Companion set when it came out. Not that I knew the difference back then. I never got the Master’s or Immortals sets) and later in some AD&D games.

“The Uncommon Tongue” is yet another article from this era that I count as influencing my game and world-building style. In it, Gregory Andersen discusses how to use Middle English (1150 to 1450 CE) to construct languages for a D&D world, especially in sprucing up ancient scrolls and the like, to create something foreign seeming but decipherable (at least for those fluent in English). I used the ideas in this article to develop the dialect of the Kingdom of Neergaard in my old homebrew, Aquerra. Anderson provides steps for converting contemporary English text into an older variety and an archaic word list to put to use. This is the kind of thing I love in creating the verisimilitude of a homebrew setting, but I’ve never had players who were interested in exploring it, so it is always a background vibe kind of thing and never came into direct play.

I remember “Locals Aren’t All Yokels” by Ralph Sizer well. This is the second article I’ve come across from this era that opens as a response to a letter in a previous issue. In this case, Sizer starts by mentioning a letter from Dragon #91, where someone claimed that “townsfolk and peasants would be very wary and respectful of adventurers because…they know that, say, a fifth level fighter could easily kill five of them each round, while they couldn’t hurt him.” It makes me wonder if these articles started out as letters themselves and Mohan or some other editor encouraged the writer to expand them into articles. Or, if the letters were so long already that they were edited down into articles. The snarky and combative tone of “Yokels” reinforces these two possibilities for me.

Sizer explains all the reasons why local folk might not be the pushovers the letter he refers to assumes they are. In other words, this is advice for combating PC abuse of common people. The argument comes down to “there might be high level peeps about that might fuck them up.” He means veterans of war or local militias, retired adventurers who are now lords, etc… And that explanation is fine, but more broadly the article got me thinking about the relationship between a town’s population, history, and government in a way that added depth to my worldbuilding. Ultimately, “Locals Are Not All Yokels” was nearly as influential to me as “Economics Made Easy” in Dragon #107, even if reading it again now I am put off by its tone and disappointed that it does not consider broader implications.

I guess a lot of stuff in this issue spoke to teenaged me because as soon as I started rereading “Blades with Personality” by Sam Chupp I remembered having read it more than once. It gives advice about developing the histories of magic swords (and other weapons) as a way to world-build and, more importantly, create a web of adventure hooks in your campaigns. By asking the simple questions of “1) Who made the sword? 2) Why did [they] make it? 3)What’s the sword’s history? and, 4) How did it get to the place where the adventurers found it?” even the most common seeming long sword +1 can have the influence of Excalibur in how an adventure unfolds.

On the other end of the spectrum, Stephen Martin’s “Giant-Sized Weapons” provides an overly detailed system for determining how much damage the giant weapons of… well, giants, might do.

Another article I remember well is “Hooves and Green Hair” by Bennet Marks. It reinforces D&D’s obsession with monster-fucking by presenting two new “half-” races. Marks puts forth the idea that satyrs and dryads are part of the same species with extreme sexual dimorphism but that can still procreate with humans to create half-satyrs (always male) and half-dryads (always female). I went back and checked the 1E Monster Manual and found no reference to these reproductive dynamics in either the satyr or dryad entry.

Despite presenting two sides of a new lineage, the whole thing is only one two-page spread mostly focused on the restrictions and abilities of the two “races” and some description of their typical points of view and relationships with other peoples. The half-dryad gets considerably less written about them than their goat-footed siblings.

I remember a short-lived half-satyr or two in some of my early AD&D games. In my current games, players interested in this kind of origin would be pointed to the Fey-Touched lineage (published in HOW I RUN IT #5 – currently out of print), which subsumes those humans (and other peoples) of elven or other fey descent.

Every issue I have covered as part of Dragon Mag Monday since #103 has included a “TSR Profiles” feature. I mentioned the one about Gary Gygax in that issue. This issue’s covers iconic artist Jeff Easley and art director Ruth Hoyer. I bring it up, not because there is much special in these profiles—though given the male-dominated perspective on early gaming, that a woman was in charge of developing the look of the game is interesting to me, as few women’s names are listed among the figures of the era—but because I figure someone might find this information helpful as a place to look, if doing research on people in the industry at the time.

Speaking of the industry, “TSR Previews” provides a glimpse into what the company was doing to try to diversify and seek out a market outside of D&D. In addition to “Terrible Swift Sword” and “Barbarossa”, two war games about the Civil War and WWII respectively, there are three licensed games, “The Paramount Game,” which is a board game about Hollywood and the movie industry, “The Broadway Game” which is similar but about the stage, and “The Honeymooners” game, which is based on the classic TV show of the 1950s whose recurring catchphrases made light of domestic abuse. The Jackie Gleason led show saw a huge resurgence in popularity in the 1980s when it became a late-night syndication regular for a lot of local stations. I used to catch it on WPIX 11 in New York City.

Filling out the rest of the issue, we find “Administrator’s Advice” for creating a TOP SECRET (TSR’s spy RPG) campaign, “Valkyrie” short fiction with some queer subtext, and the Arēs science fiction gaming section.

The Arēs section includes articles for SPACE OPERA (variant combat), STAR FRONTIERS (cults for the implied setting), TRAVELLER (mutants), GAMMA WORLD (more mutants!), MARVEL SUPERHEROES RPG (an index to all the characters appearing in previous “Marvel-Phile” installments), and some system agnostic advice for novice sci-fi gamers by Sherri Gilbert, entitled “The Keys to Good SF.”

In Dave Trampier’s continually amazingly rendered Wormy, a troll bounty hunter scoffs at a trap in the titular dragon’s game room (I never read enough Wormy to quite follow the story) and in SnarfQuest, Snarf and Telerie face off against an evil wizard, and we find out the woman warrior’s sword is enchanted to reflect spells back at their caster.

And there you have it, a jam-packed issue with a lot in it that helped shape my approach to D&D, worldbuilding, and RPGs in general. If you’d asked me about this issue before I reread it, I would not have been able to tell you what was in it, but now that I have re-read it, I cherish what it gave me, however, flawed. One last thing I will say about it is that the issue has very little interior art that is not part of an ad. You’d think that “Hooves and Green Hair,” for example, might include exemplary art for the two racial options it includes, or that “Blades with Personality” might include some illustrations of magic swords, but as I have noted about some past issues, interior art was either simply not a priority or they did not have the budget for it or both.

NEXT TIME: THE 10th ANNIVERSARY ISSUE!

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