Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Retrospective: The Best of Dragon

The first copy of Dragon I ever purchased was issue #62, which first appeared in June 1982, though I'd read a smattering of issues before this. I began subscribing to Dragon with issue #68 (December 1982) and maintained that subscription for the next five years (stopping only when I went away to college). Consequently, I largely missed out on the first five or six years of the periodical's run.

I say "largely," because I had previously acquired two volumes of Best of (the) Dragon, which appeared in 1980 and 1981 and, through them, I got a small glimpse of the magazine's early days that would otherwise have been unknown to me. The first volume I bought while on vacation with my family; the second during Christmastime, probably from Waldenbooks, my usual purveyor of gaming magazines. For many years afterward, they were among my most prized gaming possessions and took them everywhere with me. It's a testament to my fastidiousness that I still have those very same copies today, not much worse for wear after more than four decades.

Of the two, Volume I was by far my favorite, if only because it was so strange – or so it seemed to me when I first set eyes on it. To begin, its cover, by John Barnes, is quite unlike the covers of Dragon with which I was already familiar, reminding me of some weird portrait one might find hanging on the wall of a reclusive eccentric. Having always been attracted to the weird, this was a point in the collection's favor and almost certainly contributed to my picking it up when I first laid eyes upon it.

The cover, though, wasn't the only thing I deemed weird at the time. The content, too, was unusual, featuring as it did a mishmash of content, some which made little immediate sense to me at the time. Take, for example, the plethora of articles about Metamorphosis Alpha. What was this game that seemed to be so much resemblance to my beloved Gamma World and yet was so obviously something else entirely? I'd read the name Metamorphosis Alpha before in both the Dungeon Masters Guide and Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, of course, but I never gave it much thought prior to reading these articles in Best of the Dragon, after which it became an obsession of sorts, as I feverishly sought, to no avail, to lay hands on a copy of this predecessor to Gamma World.

The weirdness didn't end there, though. Volume I was filled with what then seemed like oddities, such as James Ward's "Deserted Cities of Mars," Gary Gygax's "Sturmgeshutz and Sorcery," and strange variants of already existing AD&D classes, like the illusionist, ranger, and bard. At the time, I didn't realize that these articles were the original versions of these character classes, intended as additions to OD&D. Aside from the Holmes and Moldvay Basic Sets, I'd not yet seen anything directly connected to the 1974 version of the game and I was both baffled and fascinated by these articles. They lent the first volume an aura of mystery that kept me reading and re-reading its articles.

There were also plenty of articles I immediately appreciated and used in my games, like Lee Gold's "Languages" and "Demon Generation" by Jon Pickens. This was even more the case for Volume II, which contained a huge number of articles that piqued my interest, starting with all the so-called NPC classes. NPC classes were a staple of Dragon, even when I was regularly reading it. They occupied a peculiar place in the eyes of D&D players, since they weren't formally intended for use for players characters but everyone knew a referee who was lenient and allowed someone to play a samurai or berserker. Dragon, as the organ of TSR, pooh-poohed such behavior, of course, but these classes were very popular with readers and so they kept appearing. 

Volume II included lots of other goodies that appealed to me, such as the articles on tesseracts, undead, poison, and, of course, "The Politics of Hell" by Alexander von Thorn. That last article left a very strong impression on me as a kid and forever colored my conception of devils in D&D, despite its very idiosyncratic take on the infernal regions. When I came to Toronto in the early '90s, I discovered, quite by accident, that one of the owners of the game store I frequented here was, in fact, the author of that article. Life can be strange! 

Subsequent volumes of Best of Dragon never impressed me as much, because they covered time periods when I was a regular reader. I already had access to their contents, so why would I need them in anthologized form? Those first two volumes, though, were one of my earliest windows into the much more wild and woolly world of the hobby, one I'd missed by a couple of years and whose echoes, still occasionally heard even in the early 1980s, didn't always make sense to me. Best of Dragon filled in a few of the details, but what it really did was point me in the direction of seeking out more information about what had come before I started playing. I'm still very grateful for that.

8 comments:

  1. ""The Politics of Hell" by Alexander von Thorn. That last article left a very strong impression on me as a kid and forever colored my conception of devils in D&D, despite its very idiosyncratic take on the infernal regions. When I came to Toronto in the early '90s, I discovered, quite by accident, that one of the owners of the game store I frequented here was, in fact, the author of that article."

    Interesting. That article still stands out to me. I wonder how much (if any) of it was used for Planescape in later years.

    Of the game store owners I've known over the years, about half of them either published some games of their own or done small local fanzines (or both, in Keith Houghton's case) but I never ran into one who wrote for Dragon. Armadillo Games (Keith's long-gone store) did have some regulars who wrote for several mags - Ed Rotondaro did a ton of reviews and some articles for The Space Games, for ex, and we had a couple of people who cropped up in Nexus and Captain's Log. WG Armintrout wrote a lot of the (not very good) computing articles in TSG as well, and while he wasn't local back then he moved to the area somewhere in the 90s.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I’m very much with you on that first “Best of…” collection. I grew up in a very small town, the only people I knew in the gaming community were the three or four other people I gamed with and two cousins whose parents ran a five-and-dime (which is where I got all of my gaming materials; there was nowhere else and the only reason they carried it is that their kids convinced them to have a single rack of TSR stuff). I had no sense of what the rest of the gaming world looked like except through contemporary Dragon magazines… and that very weird Best of.

    My first Dragon was issue 57, with that amazing fantasy Betsy Ross cover and The Wandering Trees which still epitomizes the classic adventure to me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Loved S&S... managed to run my own version a few years ago...

    http://quindiastudios.blogspot.com/search?q=Sturmgeshutz+and+Sorcery

    ReplyDelete
  4. I’m pretty sure my first issue was #54 but those first two anthologies captivated me too. What’s odd is that I recall running across EPT for the first time in one of these but I see nothing in the tables of contents. Maybe it was referenced in one of the articles? If not, I wonder what I am remembering.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I remember getting "Best of" Vol.2 and 3, and being impressed by the usefulness of the articles to our AD&D games, while vol.1 (purchased later) was, indeed, weird, and thus seemed much less useful.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I still have my Best of Dragon volumes. Volume I was great because half or more of it's articles were from The Strategic Review which I had never seen. I always preferred the original Bard so Volume I was a great treasure. Sometimes I'm tempted also by the original Ranger.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I have very fond memories of Volumes I and II of "Best of Dragon" for similar reasons. And I too still own my copies.

    Regarding: "When I came to Toronto in the early '90s, I discovered, quite by accident, that one of the owners of the game store I frequented here was, in fact, the author of that article."
    Oh wow -- which game store was that? I was at U of T from 1988-1992 (did my BA there) and frequented the nearby game stores during that time (even though I did very little gaming those years). There was one right by campus (called "Worldbook" or something like that?). I remember it was quite good. And there also was the "Silver Snail" (which was mainly a comic store but had some good RPG items from time to time).

    ReplyDelete
  8. This was one of the first gaming magazines I purchased, besides early white dwarf and it had me enchanted with strange possibilities in gaming. I read it over and over and couldn't understand half of it but loved and pored over it. I still have it safe in the attic.

    ReplyDelete