News — Mark Nelson

Everyone has a ‘First Dragon’, and for me it was Dragon #88. Sure, I didn’t actually own it, as it was in the possession of a boy I didn’t get along with overly well, but he did sit across from me in art class and laid this issue on his desk one afternoon in middle-school. I was both amazed and intrigued by it, and when I actually got to flip through the pages I was blow away by the artwork I found [because of course at this time I had no idea how to actually play D&D] For that reason,...

In 1986, the market for TSR products was cooling. The company was in a spiritual tailspin after the dismissal of Gary Gygax, and shifting technology was a barbarian at the gate with Nintendo’s release of their NES that propelled Super Mario Brothers to the bestselling video game of all time.It was also a period when the bread and butter modules of the early 1980s were slipping, either to players having ‘grown up’ into DMs that preferred to run their own homebrews or just market share loss taking its inevitable toll. That said, TSR was still producing modules in their now...