430 in December 2013.Ī digital publication called Dragon+, which replaces the Dragon magazine, launched in 2015. Shortly after the last print issue shipped in mid-August 2007, Wizards of the Coast (part of Hasbro, Inc.), the publication's current intellectual property rightsholder, relaunched Dragon as an online magazine, continuing on the numbering of the print edition. The final printed issue was #359 in September 2007. originally launched the monthly printed magazine in 1976 to succeed the company's earlier publication, The Strategic Review.
I think it worth noting, too, that the origin of this series was in the UK, where RuneQuest rivaled and may have even exceeded Dungeons & Dragons in popularity. These articles were foundational to the Silver Age, being sophisticated (or decadent, depending on one's point of view) outgrowths of Gygaxian naturalism. The response to "The Ecology of the Piercer" was very positive, so much so that nearly every issue of Dragon that followed it for many years included an "Ecology of.
It's a pretty simple idea but a clever one that goes a long way to lending plausibility to what would otherwise be just a goofy monster. This the authors do by postulating that the piercer is a mollusk using a stalactite as protective covering/weapon in much the same way that a hermit crab does with seashells. There are no game stats included with the article instead it focuses on trying to make sense of one of the game's more bizarre creations. More to the point, "The Ecology of the Piercer" is, as I just noted, a very short article, written in the form of an address given by the wizard Pyrex to the Wizards Guild of Kabring, where he discusses the physiology and habits of the piercer. The idea of monster ecology articles is now so well entrenched in the minds of long-time D&D players that it's almost unnecessary to discuss the actual contents of this seminal article. More remarkable, I think, is how modest an article "The Ecology of the Piercer" is and, yet, it was the acorn from which a mighty oak would eventually grow. That in itself is pretty remarkable, as I cannot recall another Dragon article that was in fact a reprint of something that had appeared elsewhere (though I'm sure my readers will quickly point out many examples that falsify my memories).
When issue #72 of Dragon (April 1983) was released, it contained, in addition to the usual assortment of not particularly funny April Fool's articles, a very short article - one page of text plus a one-page illustration - called "The Ecology of the Piercer." Written by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards, it had originally appeared in the pages of the UK fanzine Dragonlords.