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.