News — Tom Baxa

The 1992 release of TSR’s Dark*Sun Dragon King’s hardcover for 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons [boy is that a mouthful!] hit right in the prime of my college years. I never collected Dark*Sun back then, but I played it with my roommate Rob in a single campaign that was a good deal of fun [because I was always the DM and got to get out from behind the screens for a while].Thus, I didn’t own this supplement when it came out and had to acquire it when I set about looking for Dark*Sun on eBay in probably 2005. It was...

Today I’m going to take a look at Dragon #174 from October 1991. Now what was I doing in October 1991 you might ask? Hmmm, well, I was in my junior year at Indiana University, living in my first off campus apartment with two roommates, and probably playing WAY too many RPGs. At the time, I’m pretty sure I was doing a good deal of Shadowrun 2nd Edition, some Darksun, Dangerous Journey’s, and of course a bit of D&D in the Forgotten Realms. I was not, however, reading Dragon Magazine, which by that point had fallen off my radar because...

In my continuing series of Dragon Magazine reviews, I take a look at Issue #179 from March 1992. Published by James M. Ward and Edited by Roger E. Moore the magazine sure has the correct pedigree to give readers great content and hasn’t yet lost the edge in the market to the advent of the Internet and the decline of paper periodicals. Art direction comes from Larry W. Smith and he has secured a very intriguing Larry Elmore cover without title. To me, this Elmore holds a rather unique place because it looks to be a non-good adventuring party actually...

Today at Art of the Genre I’ll be taking a look at Dragon #175 from November 1991. Published by James M. Ward and edited by Roger E. Moore, this probably long forgotten issue isn’t a blockbuster but it does contain a few seeds that can help players and DMs of 2nd Edition AD&D.I certainly don’t remember it, as I was in my 2nd year of college at the time and probably well into my encore comic collecting phase during the Marvel and DC ‘gold rush’ of that period. That being said, it is nice to be able to go and...

Beginning in 1991, TSR really started to push a new wave of boxed set campaign worlds for their AD&D 2nd Edition, and one of these was Dark Sun. The brainchild of Troy Denning & Timothy B. Brown it was the anti-Greyhawk, a world of hard lines, wastelands, and finite resources.  Athas, the world that hosted the Dark Sun universe, was a dying world, a closed sphere [for all you Spelljammer folks out there] and players got to take part in a gritty setting where survival was the end result of adventuring, not treasure and magical items. I played this game...