I have been spending part of my free time this summer cataloging my game collection with an Excel file.

I have a daunting amount of game stuff on my shelves...amazing what just a couple of bookshelves can hold!

Each of my Dragon magazines is cataloged by number, editor, publishing company and year.

Going back through them is quite a journey!  When you see and remember the covers, note the year, think of what was going on at the time...talk about memory lane!

You also see who edited the magazine and when.

The issue that stood out the most for me was Dragon 39, from July 1980

Tim Kask had moved on from TSR by July of 1980.  He became the editor of Adventure Gaming...another magazine I came across in my cataloging.  

Jake Jaquet was the editor of 39...a noteworthy issue because it included the original Anti-Paladin class.  (There was a dungeon master from Portland State University who wouldn't let any of us look at his copy of the magazine because he wanted to keep the Anti-Paladin's abilities a secret.)

"At the back of the magazine you'll find, all together for the first time in one issue, Finieous Fingers, Wormy and Jasmine.  "The Big Three" will be back as a group on every possible occasion from now on."  Dave Trampier was eight years away from his sudden vanishing from gaming.

During the summer of 1980 I was getting ready for my senior year in high school.  Football daily doubles were about to start.  (We lost our opening game against the Tillamook Cheesemakers...that was really their name!)  

I was at a summer camp for high school student body officers...a summer that also included Boy's State and one other camp, so I spent a lot of time away from home.  

There were a couple-three romances that summer...Tracy, Marie and Melody...and a girl named Jeannie, who was pissed off that I kissed her on the last day of school and I did not call her again before school started in the fall.  I was 13 months away from the day I first met my wife.

I remember the dungeon I wrote in my dorm room that month at Boy's State, on the University of Oregon campus.  It was called "The Pit of Morgar"; a name that I picked up from a pinball game called "Gorgar." The pinball machine was in the basement rec room of the U of O student union building and it would roar out "Gorrrgarrr!" in a deep monster voice whenever a player hit the right target.  It was 1980, so there was a poem that gave clues about the dungeon and its traps.  I still recall the last line:

Neath the flowing fields of cotton
In the dungeon long forgotten
In the dark where wisdom dies
In the pit where Morgar lies

(Laugh away...what were you writing when you were 17?)

My best friend, David, (who didn't play football but did play D&D) spent the summer working out and came back to school looking like a monster body builder.

My right elbow was killing me because I had destroyed it throwing the javelin that spring.

John Lennon was about to turn the impossibly old age of 40...and he had exactly six months to live.  

Richard Pryor was in the news for setting himself on fire while freebasing cocaine.  

Ronald Reagan was nominated that month at the GOP national convention.  "The Time is Now"  I would be just barely too young to vote for him in November.

That month, congress passed a law re-authorizing the Selective Service.  We would be the first class of American males since Vietnam who would be required to register for the draft on our 18th birthdays.  Some vowed to protest.  Most of us expected the Cold War to end with all of us nuked anyway.  (Try explaining the Cold War to a senior of the class of 2008!)

AC/DC released Back in Black and the US boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics (the two events were apparently unrelated).  

The US embassy personnel were still being held hostage in Teheran, and had six more months of imprisonment to go.  The wreckage of Jimmy Carter's failed rescue mission was still smoking in the Iranian desert.

James Dallas Egbert III had disappeared and been located by a private detective during the previous summer.  He would shoot himself in the head in August of 1980.  Silly parodies like Mazes and Monsters would appear on the bookshelves in 1981 and on television in 1982.  The Dungeon Master would not hit the market until 1984...the same year that Jack Chick would publish Dark Dungeons.  CBS would not get around to smearing Dungeons and Dragons on 60 Minutes until 1985.. another five years in the future.  D&D was still allowed in school, and in the home of my fundamentalist parents.

No one had heard of MTV, but it was only months away...except almost no one had cable TV either.  Cable TV was being sold to the public on the idea that pay-for-TV would have no commercials.

39 was the issue that Dragon went electronic.

In his editor's column, Jake Jaquet wrote, "Snap! Crackle! Zap!  THE DRAGON computes!"  The Dragon staff had acquired a spanking new TRS-80 computer.  "Level II, with 16K memory, 16K expansion interface, two floppy disk drives and a printer."

"Electronic gaming is looming on the horizon and THE DRAGON is going to be ready for it!"     The Electric Eye appeared for the first time in #39 as a monthly column.  There were definitions for terms like ASCII, bug, byte, hardcopy, ROM and RAM.

Today's teenagers find it hard to believe that computers as we know them did not really exist only a short time ago.  Those of us born in the 60's and early 70's have lived the rise of the computer as an intimate and domineering part of our lives.  We have lived in a profoundly important era of history, and school children will study it centuries from now.

That fall, my high school established its first "computer room."  It was in a converted janitor's closet.  A group of younger gamers met there to play D&D after school.  We called them "The Twits."  We were way too cool to game with them.

Douglas Bachmann wrote an Up on a Soap Box essay in Dragon 39 about morality in gaming.  "If someone uses a fantasy game or novel as a soap box or a pulpit, that person has...turned a form of art into a form of propaganda or pornography."  Bachman quotes heavily from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.  Although it is hard to explain now, such discussions seemed important at the time.

Jean Wells, Kim Mohan and Kyle Gray wrote an article about female fantasy player-characters and how they deserve equal rights.  It was the first of a number of essays quoting non-science about how women can tolerate pain better than men or should get a bonus to constitution or should have a +1 to jousting attacks because they have a lower center of gravity.  (Hint #1:  Jousting knights did not sit in saddles...they stood up in stirrups and leaned forward, using their legs to drive a lance against their opponents.  Hint#2:  There is no scientific reason why imaginary women should not be as good at slaying imaginary dragons as imaginary men might be.)  Again, it is difficult to explain why these discussions used to seem so important...but they did.

(I remember another essay in which Gary Gygax stated that most young women could outrun most young men in a distance race if they were equally in shape...establishing that Gary Gygax had never been in or seen a long distance race of any kind.)

Carl Parlegreco wrote "Good Hits and Bad Misses," that gave a set of critical hit and fumble charts.  "60-61 shield tangled with opponent (no effect if no shield)"  or "77 leg removed at ankle."  Suck on that morality!

There are ads in Dragon 39 for Ral Partha miniatures, Lou Zocchi's science fiction games, Lords of Valetia by Gamemasters Publishers Association, Runequest Foes, High Fantasy, City State of the World Emperor and Martian Metals...upside down on the back cover, as usual (calling on Earthlings to help save the Viking Mars Lander project).  There is also a color page advertising the new World of Greyhawk folio.

There are reviews of The Beastlord, by Yaquinto Games and Intruder, by Task Force Games.  

It is astonishing that there have been more than 300 issues of Dragon since 39...an entire lifetime in gaming.  

That is why it is so hard for many of us to accept that Dragon has morphed into pale pixels.  Now, Dragon really does byte!  People who have not bought or read a Dragon in more than 200 months are mourning its passing.  There is no way that a puny, shrunken computer waif can equal the granddaddy of all hardcopies.  Certainly not in the hearts of boys long grown to men.

I suppose it might make for a TV drama series...a character who time travels through his lifetime...able to revisit any month in his life for which he can find an old back issue of Dragon.  

I don't know if I'm going to go time traveling through all the rest of my Dragon magazines.  Time travel can be perilous.  Not all of the memories are sweet...although that's hardly Dragon's fault.  For now, I'll stick with Dragon 39 and the summer of 1980.

I put Dragon 39 back in its bag and stowed it back on the shelf with the others.  

Time to go look up Dragon online.

Mark  

Wonderful! thank you Mark

improvstone wrote:
Thanks Mark!

I notice in the news there was talk of the US reintroducing the draft so the War on Everything That Moves can be continued.

And nice of you to support the Aussie bands!  

First let me say that formcritic's post is what collecting is about. He should print up his post and make sure to include it with his Dragon Mag collection. It is the history of his Dragon Magazines, what they mean to him, that make them unique rather than one more copy just like thousands of others. So many of these histories have been lost already, it is great to hear of one that has been saved.

Secondly, I have a different opinion about the War and find it disturbing that poltical posts are on this site. America is at War and some of my own family and friends have bled and died in this one. They are fighting some truly evil sobs. I could go into detail but how about we keep our political opinions to ourselves and save our posts here for gaming.

Wasn't #39 the first issue without 'The' in the name? Maybe a good moment to define the end of Dragon's formative years & the beginning of its classical era.

FormCritic wrote:The US embassy personnel were still being held hostage in Teheran, and had six more months of imprisonment to go.

"Hello I'm Ted Koppel, & today was day 187."

I've been away from here for a while, but my first jaunt back, I saw this.

My God, Mark, I'm printing that out and putting it with MY "Dragon" collection.  While I'm quite a bit younger than you (I was just contemplating the horrors of preschool in 1980), it still was a trip down memory lane.

I know that I wasn't there at the start of all of it, but I've always taken the history of TSR and D&D fairly seriously.  It's hard not to when you collect and actually take the time to read older issues of Dragon, when the editorial columns, letter pages and forums were so often filled with points and counterpoints that define the era of that magazine.

I never grow tired of reading and learning more about my hobby (or "obsession" if you're my wife...).  I'm humbled to be in the presence of a true "master" as it were.  If my dad was still alive, I bet you and he could swap some great stories about those times.

Thank you again.

If it were possible to collect data on such things....

I believe that Dragon would possibly be the most photocopied monthly magazine in history.

How many other people here had a binder full of photocopied Dragon NPC classes?

Back in those days, the place to make photocopies was the local supermarket.  Copies were 10 cents apiece.  Ironically, by the time I had photocopied ten pages I was already well on the way to the $3 cover price.  

Which, of course, returns me to the time when $3 was a lot of money to me.

I remember one time back in 7th or 8th grade going into a Waldenbooks in Amarillo, Texas to pick up a couple of modules.  I bought The Forest Oracle and The Sentinel.  On my way past the rest of the D&D stuff I decided to peruse the Dragon magazines.  I have no idea which issue it was but there were some really cool descriptions of unique spellbooks and the spells they contained.  I spent a good thirty minutes copying down a handful of cool new spells on a piece of paper (no photocopier around and I couldnt afford both of the modules AND the Dragon mag) so my DM could use them later on in our campaign.  Little did I know that he had just purchased a subscription to Dragon a few weeks before and got the issue a week or so later.  

I used to borrow his magazines after he had read them and write down every piece of information (no access to a photocopier) that I wanted for myself.  I used to have handwritten copies of most of the unique spells, weapons, and the NPC classes like the Anti-Paladin, Deathmaster, and Incantatrix.  Now I can just print them out anytime I want.  

Thanks!  Good memories indeed.  I have about three notebooks chock full of copied articles, modules and more.

While I started collecting later than some (issue # 66), the articles never failed to spur the imagination.

And even then, when I wanted to use something from the magazine (without destroying it of course), Mom had an old Olympia (Olympic?) typewriter in the spare room that she let me use to copy articles out of my mags. The thing was so old, the body was cast iron and had adjustable pressure for the keys.

Transitioning from that old typewriter to my spankin' new Commodore 64 was a real bee-atch, let me tell you. (My parents made me pay for the third keyboard, after hitting the keys too hard on the first two.)