Years ago, the editors of Dragon used to compile the best articles from recent issues into special editions called the Best of Dragon. The practice ended in 1986 with the fifth volume in the series. Since then, excellent material from Dragon's pages has come and gone, some sneaking its way into official D&D products and some slipping away into the bookshelf-bound obscurity of an old magazine collection.

In 2003, Paizo Publishing hit upon the idea of producing hardcover compilations of articles and adventures from the Dragon and Dungeon back catalogues, updated for play in the current edition of the D&D game. Our first hardcover, the Shackled City Adventure Path, was released in August to excellent reviews. But the second book was really the first one we had imagined, and initial work began on it more than two years ago.

In my original vision, the Dragon Compendium would be a hardcover version of the old Best of Dragons, compiling excellent articles from the magazine's 29-year history and updating them to the most recent version of the game, so that all of those great gems that should have made it into the "canon" of printed material could finally appear in a single easy-to-reference source compatible with the game we're all playing right now. To begin the herculean task of assembling this monster, I spent several weeks with Paizo's complete printed archive of every issue of Dragon and Dragon's predecessor, a slim black and white newsletter called The Strategic Review, which comprised 7 issues printed between 1975 and 1976.

As I combed through the archive, I began marking articles that caught my eye with colored post-it notes. Yellow denoted items of historical interest to the D&D game, such as old advertisements or essays from the likes of Gary Gygax or Ed Greenwood. Blue was for monsters, green was for magic items, red for new classes, and so on. I'd remembered many of these excellent articles from the first time they appeared, or from the excellent (and now quite rare) CD-ROM compilation of Dragon's first 250 issues. It took weeks, but I finally made it through every single issue, and by the time I was done, I not only had a better understanding of the magazine's history and how I might better edit the modern Dragon, but I also had dozens of hanging file folders stuffed with photocopies of every single article that had caught my eye on the first pass.

This spelled trouble, because there was just no way we could reprint all of the great material that had originally seen publication in the pages of Dragon. The monsters alone would have filled three 256-page books, and I only had one to work with. Clearly, the book couldn't be the definitive guide to the best material from Dragon, simply because no book could possibly hope to contain all of the great articles that have appeared in Dragon's pages since the first issue launched back in June of 1976.

That's why we're calling this edition the Dragon Compendium, Volume 1. Our expectation is that the book's sales will justify further volumes in the series, so that we might do a book aimed at planar or "Oriental Adventures" material, and we might even do compilations of material germane to the official campaign settings. For this first installment, however, we've decided to aim at a general audience, providing top-quality material that will be useful to all players and Dungeon Masters.

So what made it into the book? We'll soon post a final table of contents, but I can reveal a few key items. This volume of the Compendium features five PC races (the diabolus, diopsid, dvati, lupin, and tibbit), seven standard classes (ranging from the battle dancer to the savant to the sha'ir), 10 prestige classes (including the arcanopath monk, the flux adept, and the osteomancer), and dozens of feats and magic items culled from the best Dragon articles in the magazine's history. But the Compendium is more than a simple collection of classes, spells, and magic items. It also features a lengthy chapter called "Classics," which reprints popular feature articles like "The Glyphs of Cerilon," from way back in issue #50, Ed Greenwood's "Runestones" article from Dragon #69, and Gary Jordan's infamous "Tesseracts (or, Making Meticulous Mappers Mad)," from issue #17. The articles in this section span three decades and three editions of the Dungeons & Dragons game, and represent a selection of the best Dragon has to offer.

Lastly, we round out the volume with more than two dozen monsters (including the orange, yellow, and purple dragons) and an appendix filled with lists of wondrous places, tests to determine the efficacy of your favorite dice, the famous "Good Hits and Bad Misses" critical hit and fumble charts, a pronunciation guide, and more.

Looking over the almost-final printouts, I'm not only amazed by how many great articles we managed to update and include, but I'm also stunned by how much amazing material remains to be culled for future volumes in what we hope will become a continuing series.

The Dragon Compendium is slated for release in late October. Ask your retailer to order it today or place a preorder of your own here on Paizo.com.