Long considered the source for new material for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (“official” or otherwise) and TSR’s many other game lines, my earliest issue of Dragon Magazine struck me on recent examination with two major impressions: many articles seemed contentious about what was “right” for the game and others provided lots of new material like monsters and spells.Īt the time issue #66 released D&D was eight years old (1974 being the official publication date of the original “ OD&D” edition), though the iterations of B/X D&D and AD&D familiar to most gamers released in 1977, about a year after Dragon Magazine began publication.
At my next visit to the local hobby store I picked up a copy my subscription form was soon in the mail. One day on the bus they were passing around and reading a gaming resource I’d never seen before: Dragon Magazine. I discovered Dungeons & Dragons in the spring of 1982 (as an Easter present from my parents, no less), and spent the following months reading rules, playing games, devising adventures, and otherwise consuming B/X D&D and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in what I fondly recall as the “Summer of D&D.” That autumn I started as a freshman in our town’s high school and was delighted to find a small clique of older students on my bus route who were quite into D&D (though I doubt the feeling was mutual). Although one might argue that print magazines remain an extinct dinosaur in our current Internet Age, such relics offer a glimpse into the adventure gaming hobby’s past that can help inform us how to move forward with such material in the future. Of the many gaming periodicals that have come or gone, they’re they only two to which I actively subscribed…though I received my share of promotional copies and subscriptions of other magazines over the years, and picked up single issues of others that contained articles relevant to my many, diverse interests. In looking through my first issues of Dragon Magazine and Challenge Magazine - acquired in my far younger days when the roleplaying game hobby was still new to many - I re-evaluated the nostalgic fondness I’ve felt for them these many years.
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