OD&D and Dragon Magazine

[Zulgyan]

So, which would be the last issue of Dragon that contains OD&D material, before the release of OAD&D?

[ffilz]

It's not really clear. And of course some would claim that when the first character class appeared, the game was heading towards AD&D land.

The Strategic Review has the most OD&D material, but the first dozen or two issues of Dragon are still very relevant to OD&D (even if somewhere they started to be more AD&D related).

Frank

[Zulgyan]

I really like the Witchcraft Supplement found in The Dragon #5.

[foster1941]

OD&D and AD&D overlapped in The Dragon for a long time (not surprisingly, since it took 2 full years for the complete AD&D set to be released). I believe the last OD&D-specific article appeared somewhere in the late 20s, around issue #27 or 29 or so. As a general rule, I'd say anything up to issue #14 is all OD&D, from there up to about issue #20 is mixed but predominantly OD&D, and after that is mixed but predominantly AD&D.

[Zulgyan]

I think we should stop when the AD&D monster manual is released.

What say you?

[foster1941]

That would be the most "purist" way to go about it, but that would cut you off around issue #6, meaning you'd be missing out on a lot of good stuff from the later issues! For instance, issue #17 (which I happen to know pretty well since it's the oldest one I actually have in hardcopy) includes articles on tesseracts in dungeons, vampires, specialist magic-users, expanding the jousting rules from Chainmail for D&D, and a very long story-article by Gary Gygax about combining D&D and Metamorphosis Alpha that is an absolute classic. All of it is either edition-neutral or OD&D-specific, despite the full-page ad for the newly-released AD&D Players Handbook that appears in the back.

This ENWorld thread of review/summaries for each issue of The Dragon from #14 up to #27 (an earlier, now lost, thread covered TSR and issues #1-13...) gives a good idea of what was in each issue during this transition period. The biggest breaking-point is probably issue #22, which included a 9-page preview of material from the forthcoming AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (including the combat & saving throw tables). So, to remain OD&D-pure, ending your collection at issue #21 (December 1978) might be the best call...

[badger2305]

I think it was issue #22 that was the merger of The Dragon and Little Wars; you might use that as a marker of when things shifted to AD&D.

However, there is Larry Schick's excellent home-brew pantheon that shows up in issue #23 or #25 (somewhere around there). It's a tough call.

[Zulgyan]

If its not system specific, you can find good stuff here and there in the different periods of the mag.