The Articles of Dragon: "Cantrips: Minor Magics for Would-Be Wizards"

You would think I'd remember issue #59 of Dragon (March 1982) for its 20+ pages of science fiction content, but, at the time I first read it, I was much more interested in Gary Gygax's latest "From the Sorceror's Scroll" column. Entitled "Cantrips: Minor Magics for Would-Be Wizards," this column is what first introduced 0-level spells into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax offers these up as the first preview of the AD&D "expansion volume" he was working on at the time and that he hoped would be released "next year" (i.e. 1983). He explains that this volume "will be for both players and DMs, with several new character classes, new weapons, scores of new spells, new magic items, etc." 

Needless to say, this was irresistible to my youthful, Gygax-loving, TSR fanboy self. I'd been playing AD&D – or, at least, using AD&D books to play a game we called "AD&D" – since sometime in 1980 and had, during that time, had dutifully acquired all its available volumes. The prospect of a new volume and one penned by Gygax himself filled us with excitement. That he was now sharing monthly glimpses into what this volume might contain in the pages of Dragon more or less assure that I'd be paying careful attention to the magazine from now on.

Of course, this first article in the series of previews didn't really interest me all that much. For whatever reason, my friends and I weren't all that keen on magic-users. It's not that we never played magic-users – well, I didn't, but that's another story – but that our favorite classes tended to be fighters, thieves, and clerics. With one exception, I can't recall a single player character who was a single-classed MU. All of the magic-users amongst our characters were multi-classed elves and even these were pretty uncommon. Consequently, I couldn't get too excited about cantrips, since I knew they wouldn't see much use at our table.

And I was correct in thinking this. Early on, shortly after the article was published, I suggested that we give these new minor spells a whirl to see if they'd actually be useful. As Gygax presents them, a magic-user can memorize four cantrips for every first-level spell he's willing to forgo. At that very favorable exchange rate, a couple of players thought it worth a try, selecting cantrips like exterminate, knot, tangle, and wilt in place of a single detect magic or light. The consensus, as I recall, was that some cantrips had value in certain limited situations, but that, by and large, few magic-users would ever willingly give up a spell slot for them. After that, I don't think we ever thought much about cantrips.

Nevertheless, this remains a memorable and important article for me even now – because it was the first article that suggested to me that the AD&D game's rules might change or evolve in any significant way. You must remember that, by the time I started playing, all three of AD&D's rulebooks had already been released. While both Deities & Demigods and the Fiend Folio came out after my introduction to the hobby, I didn't pay either of them much heed and indeed made comparatively little use of either of them. More to the point, neither one changed much of anything about the AD&D rules, so they could be safely ignored. However, this Gygax column from issue #59 heralded the dawn of a new era, one in which AD&D would, at last, change through the introduction of new character classes, spells, magic items, etc. That was a very big deal to me at the time, hence why I can recall reading this article for the first time, even more than forty years later.