TSR’s Dungeon Magazine was the little brother of Dragon Magazine. Spun out of the older mag’s pages in 1986, here you could get three or so adventures every other month.

Dungeon never held the same mystique for me as Dragon. You don’t get the sense of zeitgeist, the cross-section of tabletop gaming culture and history. All you got in a given issue were a handful of scenarios for TSR published game systems that ranged from amateurish and predictable to surprisingly not bad. I never had much interest in running most of the games in the mag and, looking back on it now, it feels more like an experimental proving ground rather than a polished gaming product.

The art and layout was nearly always second to Dragon in quality too. Not so with the cover for Dungeon #24 by Paul Jaquays, though: an iconic depiction of the horrific mind flayer if ever there was one (which, incidentally, seems much more aesthetically in line with Stranger Things than the David Sutherland Monster Manual illustration that appeared in the second season). The cover adventure is Thunder Under Needlespire, which introduces a monster called the Draknor, which even mind flayers fear. Don’t remember Draknors? I wonder why.