Let's Read: The Strategic Review, Issue #1 (Spring 1975)

If it wasn't obvious from some of my previous posts about the hobby, I love pen-and-paper RPGs. I own and am competent to play or GM about half a dozen, but my first true love, like most people my age, is Dungeons & Dragons.

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, then you've probably figured out that when I get interested in a hobby, I'm not just interested in the specific piece of that hobby (the particular book, or comic, or laserdisc, or whatever), I'm also curious about how and where that particular piece falls in the hobby's history. I started playing D&D with the Holmes Basic Set, then moved on to first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons a few years later. I later picked up 2nd Edition, then 3rd Edition, and 3.5. I sat out 4th Edition, because honestly my shelves were getting to be too damn full and I was disappointed that Wizards of the Coast had dropped the Open Game License they'd used in 3E, but once 5E came out and the reviews were largely positive, sure enough, I had to pick up those core rulebooks and see what was what. Just a slave to the dice bag, I guess.

If you played D&D at any point between the mid-70's to the mid-2000's, you probably were also aware that TSR (and later Wizards of the Coast, and later Paizo) published two RPG-themed periodicals: Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine. Really creative titles, I know, but hey, they worked so I can hardly fault them. Dungeon was always about reader-submitted adventures, with each issue normally containing 5-6 different ones written for specific levels and/or campaign settings. Dragon on the other hand was a little more robust, starting off as a hobbyist publication put out by TSR which talked about a variety of games, then later morphed into a house organ for TSR and later Wizards of the Coast.

My first issues of Dragon were the ones my dad owned, and as a kid, I read through his collection (roughly 10 in total) cover-to-cover multiple times. As I got older, I myself started adding more issues to that collection: back issues and fresh-off-the-newsstand alike. Unfortunately, even in the mid-90's, early issues of Dragon were difficult to find, and when they could be found, they frequently commanded absurd prices on the second-hand market. I'd resigned myself to never being able to complete my collection.

All that changed in 1999, when Wizards of the Coast published The Dragon Magazine Archive, a five-CD compilation containing fully-indexed and searchable PDFs of the first 250 issues. You can click the link to see my review and read more of the history behind it and what a copyright debacle it turned into for Wizards of the Coast, but the point is that for a very brief period of time, for less than the cost of a single copy of issue #1, you got a complete virtual archive of two-and-a-half decades' worth of Dragon.

You also got seven issues of The Strategic Review, the small newsletter that would evolve into Dragon two years after its inception. Issue #1 is what I'm looking at today in this "Let's Read" installment.

---

The Strategic Review Vol. 1, No. 1 is a far cry from what we would eventually come to know as Dragon Magazine. It's six basic typeset pages with no color and almost no artwork save for a tiny piece in the lower-right corner of page five, and a couple of ad images on the last page. It has a quarterly release schedule, and a single copy costs fifty cents. Given that picking up a copy for yourself on eBay will likely set you back nearly $100 depending on condition, this seems like a bargain.

That it's so pedestrian isn't surprising, since Gary Gygax writes in the opening editorial:

In the future we will probably increase both the size and frequency of THE STRATEGIC REVIEW, but in order to get into the swing of things we thought we'd better to slowly at first.

They're getting their feet wet, figuring out what to try and where to go from there. In other words, it's every post from #introduceyourself you've ever read here.

---

As noted already, content in this issue is extremely light. Following Gygax's editorial explaining what The Strategic Review is and what it will one day (hopefully) become, there's the launch of "The Strategist's Club", where a single dollar buys you entrance into an elite group of The Strategic Review subscribers, all of whom will have the opportunity to participate in a grand event at GenCon VIII--details forthcoming next issue--and additional savings via the discount coupon printed in each issue. For this issue, the discount applies to Tractics, a Word War II-themed miniatures combat game from 1971 which had just been acquired by TSR earlier in '75. Tractics isn't the only game TSR has picked up the rights to either, so readers can expect to see more re-releases of strategy games from TSR in the future. There's also some talk about an up-and-coming game called Dungeons & Dragons they're working on getting printed. Wonder if anything comes of that? ;)

Creature Feature is the first installment of what would become a regular column in the newsletter. This introduces the Mind Flayer, a nightmarish opponent found in every incarnation of D&D. He's pretty much fully defined in this version, complete with its nasty Mind Blast and ability to insta-kill an unlucky PC by using its mouth tentacles to penetrate the noggin and consume the brain. Cruel, but effective. There's a reason these things went on to dominate large portions of the Underdark.

Wargaming World points out other potential periodicals of interest to people who like wargaming. I'm not familiar with any of the ones mentioned, as I've never been a big wargamer, but the second part of it features a changes list for the forthcoming second printing of Tractics, so people who already own the first edition don't need to fork out another $10 just to get the new rule-set. This is incredibly generous on TSR's part, since very little actually changes between the two editions. It's basically one new chart which replaces an older one.

Gary Gygax gets up on his soapbox for his Castle & Crusade column, with an essay about why the spear's seeming ineffectiveness in the Chainmail rules is both historically accurate and not as bad as it might first appear. One of the things you have to understand about Gary was his utter fascination with the minutia of historical combat. If you've read any Player's Handbook prior to 3E, you likely remember the enormous number of weapon variations on offer that were of the 'pole arm' class. Gary loved him some pole arms, and while this piece is about spears, they're still pointy things affixed to the end of long sticks. Pole arms are to Gygax as rectal prolapses are to @blewitt: whenever one is around, they're going to have an awful lot to say about the subject matter, whether you want to listen or not.

In fact, this is exactly what the Coming Next Issue... feature teases: "POLE ARMS and Their Relationship to CHAINMAIL" will happen in three months...along with a FAQ and a new monster for D&D, and additions/clarifications for the Cavaliers & Roundheads game.

The big daddy special feature of this issue is the Solo Dungeon Adventures article, which runs over three of the remaining four pages. It's a massive collection of random generation charts that allow a DM of any skill level to roll a whole bunch of dice a whole bunch of times to create their own unique underground layouts for exploration when there's no one else around to play (although you could easily adapt this to create a dungeon which you could then unleash on your PCs as well). It's so campaign-agnostic you could use it to build underground bits for pretty much any RPG, although the intended purpose is obviously for D&D.

In fact, its intended purpose for D&D was so obvious that they pretty much slapped this article into the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide as Appendix A, so if you thought it sounded familiar despite not having read this issue before, that's why. :)

The last page concludes with a request for readers to provide feedback, along with a half-page ad for several other TSR-published games, including Star Probe and Warriors of Mars, along with dice sets, miniature figures, and full-size art prints from the D&D rule booklets.

---

All told, this first issue is exactly what you'd expect from a first issue of a newsletter like this. Forty-three years later, it's interesting only from a historical perspective as the games it discusses are either long-defunct (TSR let Tractics go out of print in 1977, for example) or long out-of-print (the original Dungeons & Dragons, anybody?). If you don't care about the history of the hobby, and the talk of spears isn't getting you all lubed up and ready to stab some peeps, The Strategic Review won't be worth the paper it's printed on. For idiots like me though, this is an amazing look at a now-dead company which created the longest-running pen-and-paper RPG in history from a time before I was born.

And that, right there, is priceless.