Odds & Ends #03 - Dragon Magazine

Dragon Magazine was a huge part of my life in the mid-to-late 1980s.  In the pre-internet era magazines were about all we had, and while my on-again-off-again subscriptions to Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated came weekly I had to wait an entire month for a new issue of Dragon to appear in my mailbox.  It was even more important in the summer months before I turned 16.  Without a car and living way out in the middle of nowhere meant there was pretty much nowhere to go.  There was one little general store I could ride my bike to without too much trouble.  If I wanted to go to the grocery store and small strip mall it was a ride that would probably require more like an hour each way thanks to the hills.  Those were quite literally the only places I could realistically get to.  So there were a lot of long summer days of just hanging out, and the arrival of Dragon meant hours and hours of new material to read and re-read, and if I was lucky there would even be a game inside.  

 

When I try to recall the first time I became aware of Dragon, my memory becomes murky.  I’ve been thinking about it a bit recently, and there are a few elements that I feel I can land on with some certainty.

 

We moved from Alaska to South Carolina (incredible shock to the system, both culturally and with respect to the weather) in the summer of 1982.  We lived in Columbia, the state’s largest city, but for the life of me I can’t remember ever going to a gaming store there.  Was there one?  Maybe.  What I do recall are the following two facts.  First, my father sometimes went to Charleston, SC on business trips.  Second, somehow I became aware that there was a gaming store in Charleston called The Green Dragon, and I asked him to go there on one of his trips and buy something for me.

 

Now to be clear, I didn’t remember the name of The Green Dragon until a few days ago, and this happened because I found it listed in an ad in an old copy of Dragon (more on that in a minute).  As it turns out, The Green Dragon is still alive and kicking today, which is pretty cool.  I’ve been wracking my brain to try to remember how I would have known about the shop.  There was no internet, and it’s not like we had a copy of the Charleston phonebook just laying around the house.  So how I knew about it, I don’t know.  It’s quite possible I had a copy or two of Dragon from our time in Alaska, though I don’t think I had a subscription yet (I know I had a subscription when we lived in SC, because I remember how long it took our forwarded mail, including my desperately wanted copies of Dragon, to get from there to Seattle when we moved in 1984).  Somehow I knew, and somewhat surprisingly dad actually went.

 

I vividly recall him returning from his trip one the evening and handing me some items he got for me.  I can’t tell you precisely what he picked up, but there’s one thing I know he brought home – issue #65 of Dragon.  The reason this was so important is because it wasn’t the current issue.  It was a back issue.  As a kid this blew my mind.  Magazines were things that were sold in bookstores or supermarkets or whatever, and they only sold the most recent issue.  The idea that you could actually buy older issues of magazines was something that I’d never considered up until that moment (remember, I was in the seventh grade), and from that point forward I was obsessed with the idea of getting my hands on back issues of Dragon.  I wanted to read all the articles.  In my mind it was a treasure-trove of information about the hobby.  It was like the RPG version of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

 It took a few more years until I was able to find a way to get back issues.  Somehow I found out about a guy who had a mailing list and sold back issues of Dragon and other RPG magazines, as well as some used games and modules. You’d mail him a few bucks and he’d send you a photocopy of his typed inventory list, with some individual items crossed out in pen to reflect stuff he’d sold.  It was that lo-tech in the late 1980s.  If you wanted to order, the deal was you’d send him a letter with what you wanted and a check, as well as some backup selections, because after all he might have already sold the one(s) you wanted.  So I’d obsess over figuring out which older copies I wanted and could afford, then come up with some secondary choices that were priced similar.  Then drop it in the mail with a check and wait for probably 3-4 weeks, hoping he still had the ones you wanted.  I got a lot of back issues from this guy.  I know for sure I bought issue #50 from him (June 1981), and I feel like I had one or two that were older than that as well.  I drooled over the idea of buying issue #1, but it was something like $150, which seemed like an impossible amount of money back then for a gaming magazine (a copy recently sold on eBay for $1,035). 

 

My best guess, based on looking at covers, is that I probably had a complete run starting around #72 and continuing until about #140, with a smattering of older issues.  I also was an inaugural subscriber to Dungeon Magazine (issue #1 of that runs about $150 today) and had other gaming mags like White Dwarf and Space Gamer.  I was voracious when it came to buying and reading this stuff, even though almost none if the info ever made it into an actual session or campaign.  

 

Fast-forward a few decades to the late 2000s.  I sold off all my stuff, got married, went to college, started a career, and bought a house.  I was also doing a bit of buying and selling on eBay, mostly sports memorabilia.  Somehow I came across the Dragon Magazine Archive, a CD-ROM collection of the first 250 issues of Dragon, and I got nostalgic.  I’ll bet I toyed with the idea of buying it for a year or so before I finally pulled the trigger.  If I recall it wasn’t cheap – I probably paid $90-100.  But eventually I bought a used copy, downloaded all the issues, then turned around and re-sold it, so at the end of the day I may have been out a few dollars.  I enjoyed poking around in these older issues from time to time, but had more or less forgotten about them until we got back into D&D earlier this year.  

 

Some things have clearly changed.  The mythology of the Nine Hells is different than it was back in Dragon issues 75-76, though I certainly remember thinking at the time how cool it would be to have a campaign in hell... and here I am, involved in one decades later.  I still get a kick out of reading some of these old articles, and it would be easy enough with some tweaks to incorporate some of the magic items, spells, and even character classes into 5e, which is something I just may need to do if I get a chance to DM again.

 

If you find yourself interested in old copies of Dragon, I have some good news for you.  The Internet Archive has every single issue available to view online HERE, and someone also went through the trouble of indexing every article in every issue HERE, which is tremendous.  And the best part is, it’s all free, so go check out that index, pull up some old issues, and enjoy the trip down the rabbit hole.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.