It’s also to see the evolution of D&D and its creators’ opinions over the first decade of the game’s existence, something which I’ll be mining for future articles here. 'Queen takes Queen' was commissioned by Gygax magazine in 2014 to emulate the previous chessboard style covers I did 30 years ago for Dragon. Similarly, it was cool to see the original ads for Metamorphosis Alpha and Star Frontiers. For example, most of the miniatures shown in the 70’s issues of The Dragon would be consider atrocious compared to today’s sculpts. This product may be a perfect example of something that piracy, in the form of downloads of the original pdfs, is the only viable way of distribution due to the massive number of copyright issues involved in reproducing even a single issue, let alone hundreds.Īll that said, I’m really enjoying working my way through the back issues – there are a lot of interesting articles (and some garbage) and fiction, and even the ads are interesting due to their age.

From what I’ve read, WotC did not obtain releases from all of the authors, illustrators, and editors from past issues, and thus got taken to the cleaners due to copyright/IP infringement lawsuits (ironic, huh?). The CD-ROM is tough to find (the asking price for one listed on Amazon is $298!) evidently because it saw only a short production run due to copyright issues and/or poor sales.

I recently found myself a copy of the Dragon Magazine Archive on Ebay which is a compilation of the first 250 issues of Dragon Magazine.

Dragon magazine covers