Gamer Deep Lore, Exhibit #4. Dragon Magazine, September, 1981
Building the Tabletop RPG was a huge team effort.
(On the advice of my lawyer, publicist, and priest, I offer no opinions on the cover art.)
Way back in the day, Dragon Magazine was the official magazine for Dungeons & Dragons (and occasionally other RPGs). I still have a pile of my old issues, and they reliably make fun reading.
At the time, tabletop RPGs were very much in their infancy. Everyone was trying to figure out how to make them work. How do you make good adventures? How do we do game balance? What systems need to be improved, and how?
If you care about these weird games, it was a really exciting time full of strange experiments, and Dragon Magazine was the petri dish. It was full of wild new ideas. 20% of them were good. 80% were madness. Mix this with cartoons and Gary Gygax's highly spicy opinions, and the first 100 issues of Dragon were a terrific read.
Here is my personal, very beat-up copy, which is full of good examples. And bad.
First edition AD&D came with a monk class, and it was really weak. Almost nobody ever played them. It was like being a wizard without spells. You just got beat up, died, and rolled up a real character.
The lead article was a massive tear-down rebuild job for the class. I can't remember meeting anyone who ever used it, but it was a really good job. It really tore the Gygax design a new asshole, and it says a lot for how cool a publisher olde-D&D did that their official magazine felt so free to criticize their flagship product. (If that happens today at all, it’s very rare.)
Dragon has tons of new character types. Some of them were cool and even got promoted to the main game. (Barbarian, for example.) Some of them were very half-baked. The Oracle, forever, sucks in a fight, but it is 100% able to predict that it will suck in a fight.
Most of these new classes explicitly said that they were intended to be NPCs. Yet, they all came with level charts, which you only really need for a character you are playing. I don't think anyone had hot pants to be an oracle. They can't kick ass. You want to kick ass.
Look! An ad for dice! Note that they are just white plastic, and they come with a crayon to color the numbers in. Really.
In 1981, dice technology was very crude. Sexy clear plastic dice with numbers you could actually read started coming a year or two later.
I have observed that, when people write about RPGs in our enlightened modern year, they thing they are discovering ideas and moral principles completely foreign to us dumb orc-people who played in the impossibly different time of the 1980s.
I assure you that we had every possible discussion and debate back then.
For example, we already knew that these games could provide an invaluable outlet for people with disabilities. Here is a moving article from a gamer with cerebral palsy, talking about what D&D meant to him.
And then, on the opposite page, an ad for Dragon subscriptions that ... would probably not be printed today.
I suppose I'm supposed to get all miffed and superior about this ad, but when I was a kid I thought it was funny. Bet the photo shoot was scary, though.
There were always new monster types, most of which were intensely bizarre. This may be the strangest one I ever saw. It's a lawful good lizard guy called as Argas. It gaines strength by eating gold and magic.
This is already not a good idea. But what elevates it to spectacular strangeness is that it comes with an experience table for a monster, the only time I ever recall seeing this. So you can keep track of how strong your argas is by how much you feed it.
What was this for? Is this a low-key character class? Should you have a hireling argas as a copper piece dump? If you feed your pet enough platinum, you get a free fireball a day?
OK, now I'm regretting not playing this.
On the next page, another new monster that's just dumb. Keep your off-brand gumby nonsense out of my game.
And we close with a tiny article. A half page at the back of the magazine. All dedicated to answering the question: "What level of cleric should be able to cure my character's lupus?"
So if I'm reading this correctly, you're gonna need a level 12 high priest to deal with leukemia, but a mere level 8 cleric can polish off pancreatic cancer. I'm so not sure why this table didn't make it into the official rules, but 5E D&D is being revised againagain. So it's not too late!
