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I was never one to be overly familiar with Dungeon Magazine. Sure, I’d seen my first Dragon at age 13, but Dungeon never made its way into my teenage life and so an early infatuation or understanding wasn’t there for me.Still, being a hardcore gamer, there had to be a point where I finally discovered that Dungeon was the cousin of Dragon, only instead of having articles it was filled with adventures. By the time this became known to me I’d pretty much given up on adventures and designed all my gaming sessions myself, but nonetheless a particular fondness for...

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,...

Today I’m going to take a look at the artwork from TSR’s X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d’Amberville). Now I’ve only played this module once, back in probably 1987 in my little room upstairs at my mom’s house with my old DM Mark and his neighbors Aaron and Jay. Truly, I don’t remember too much about the adventure save that it was one of the first ones where I ever ran one of my most powerful characters of all time, the eventual Hierophant of Cabal, Belmarillian the Watcher.There is a room [spoilers follow] in which characters are beset by mysterious dreams,...

The 1st Edition AD&D DM Screens are an instant classic, and above all other books and supplements for the game of D&D, these are the most recognized by the core of players. Why? Well, because everyone, and I mean everyone, at one time or the other between 1978 and 1983 stared at them for hours as they rolled dice.Even after TSR released a newer ‘Easley’ version of the screens, players still used these old Otus/Trampier ones, as I do today when I need to [although in the last two years I’ve forgone screens altogether].The three pieces of artwork included in...

I’m not overly familiar with West End Games, but I do know that during the height of my Dragon Magazine reading in the 1980s the company did a heavy amount of advertising. Thus, my intrigue about their 1983 production of Bug-Eyed Monsters: They Want our Women!Now certainly there is a heavy amount of 1960 camp to such a title, and the cover is certainly reminiscent of the silver age of science fiction pulp, In those two factors alone I was vested with a strong desire to not only own the game, but also a sense that it was my duty...