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Dragon #72 is a magazine issue released in April 1983.

Content[]

Features[]

The following feature articles appeared in this issue:

Title Page Author Rules
The Chivalrous Cavalier 6 Gary Gygax AD&D 1e
The Ecology Of the Piercer 12 Chris Elliott & Richard Edwards AD&D 1e
Gems Galore 14 Ed Greenwood AD&D 1e
The Real Barbarians 24 Katharine Kerr
The PBM Scene 30 Michael Gray
File 13: The Game Inventor's Game 39 Tom Wham File 13
The True Story of File 13 47 Kim Mohan File 13
Duh Jock 50 Jon Mattson AD&D 1e
Spells For Everyone 51 L. Creede Lambard & Jerry Stoddard AD&D 1e
Everything We Think You Need To Know About Sex... 52 Roger E. Moore AD&D 1e
Level Titles Don't Do Justice 54 John T. Sapienza, Jr. AD&D 1e
A New Name? It's Elementary! 56 Jay Treat AD&D 1e
Spy's Advice 60 Merle Rasmussen & Allan Hammack Top Secret
Castles By Carroll IV: The Tower of London 62 Mike Carroll
Exploring Some Map Manuals 69 Lewis Pulsipher

Development and release[]

Development[]

Kim Mohan served as Editor-in-Chief.

Release[]

Dragon #72 was released by TSR in April 1983 for $3.00 US.

Reception and influence[]

Critical reception[]

This issue was rated #6 in The Top 10 Issues of Dragon, Dragon #359 (Sep 2007).

Influence on other works[]

The Ecology of the Piercer, by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards, was reprinted from the sci-fi and fantasy roleplaying magazine Dragonlords, and established the life cycle and mollusc-like anatomy of the creature going forward. The article was praised in a reader's letter in Dragon #75 (Jul 1983). Even more significantly, the article established the "Ecology of" article series, which printed 157 such articles until the closer of the magazine's print series in 2007. In 2025, RPG blog Grognardia described the series as foundational to the "Silver Age" of D&D.[1]

External links[]

References[]

Template:Navbox Dragon magazine

Dungeons & Dragons magazines
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