Monthly Archives: February 2022

Company of the Blind Seer

“I’m starting with the most deadly dungeon level configuration and an overly generous treasure sequence to see if it’s possible that player characters might survive to reach 2nd level. If it doesn’t work, it won’t take long.”

—from “Dreaming Amon-Gorloth”

After the second foray into the Deep Halls, in which the party descended briefly to Level 4, they hauled out goodly treasure. Four characters advanced to 2nd level. One of those, the party leader, is blind, and two party members did not survive.

The Gygax Tax or Where Does All the Treasure Go

Different methods to reduce excessive wealth are discussed under the heading Wealth Extraction in “Running the Campaign.” Our recent delve yielded sufficient treasure to make an example.

Money Changer

All told, the party ported 7,600 coins of ancient mint—in silver, electrum, and gold—and two bejeweled necklaces out of the dungeon storeroom-cum-den of thieves.

The coins are declared at the town gate and taken to the money changer. Their total value, 3,375 g.p., is taxed 10%. The jewelry, worth 4,000 g.p., is not taxed.

Gygax suggests a 1% import duty on goods, such as jewelry (AD&D DMG, 90), but in the campaign we ignore single-digit percentages. The full value of gems and jewelry may be bartered. The money changer collects a 10% luxury tax should they be sold for coin.

So while experience is calculated from the full gold.jpgece value, the party comes away with 4,000 g.p. in jewelry and 3,038 g.p. in coin of the realm.

Restorative Spells

Hathor-Ra escorts Melqart to the temple. They learn that a cure for blindness requires 16,000 g.p.

Blindness from cobra’s spittle may be healed with a cure serious wounds spell (house rule). With the overly generous treasure stocking method, a restorative spell costs its level squared times 1,000 g.p.

Bank

Melqart, cursing ill luck, and Hathor then proceed to the bank, where they rent a small coffer (10 g.p.) to store the gold and jewelry.

Professional Expenses

From their shares, Hathor-Ra tithes 176 g.p. to the temple, and Melqart joins the Magic-User’s Guild, paying 500 g.p. in annual dues.

Upkeep

Upon receiving experience point awards, each PC immediately pays 1% of earned XP—that is, earned during the adventure, not total—in g.p. for upkeep. This includes room and board. PCs pay upkeep for their hirelings.

I pull this rule from OD&D (Vol. 3, 24). Though beneath our 10% threshold, taking a percentage from earned XP is less tedious than a daily or weekly payment.

Inability to pay one’s upkeep in full indicates a level of impoverishment, reflected in the character’s standing and reputation, i.e. NPC reactions. Failure to pay a hireling’s upkeep provokes an additional loyalty check.

I find upkeep’s impact on town encounters to be worth the effort. If a group feels otherwise, upkeep is easily ignored. In that case, we assume that PCs have in pocket whatever small sums are necessary for daily needs.

Company Charter

After a good night’s rest, Melqart considers the options. He proposes that the party form an adventuring company. The party agrees that Melqart will manage the company, with a hired assistant, until his sight is restored. Thereafter, the manager role will rotate through party members.

Treasure division:

  • All treasure obtained on adventures belongs to the Company.
  • Monetary treasure is divided into shares, which are disbursed by the Company.
  • Adventuring party members earn one share, while the Company Manager earns one-half share.
  • Magic items are distributed to individual members to the Company’s best benefit.

Company Manager responsibilities:

  • Submits to member oversight.
  • Keeps financial records.
  • Directs research in the absence of the party leader.
  • Organizes rescue parties.

The Company pays:

  • Necessary adventuring equipment, including that for hirelings.
  • Hireling advances on share.
  • Restorative magic to heal injuries suffered while on party business.
  • Research, magical or scholarly, conducted for party benefit.

The Company does not pay:

  • Upkeep.
  • Hireling fees or bonuses.
  • Professional expenses (tithes, guild fees, gambling debts).
  • Any other extras.
Cobra Staff
The Spitting Cobra, Melqart’s Last Visual Memory.
With 40 g.p. Melqart commissions an artisan to carve an ornament from acacia wood. It is to be affixed on a staff’s head. The spitting cobra becomes the symbol of the Company of the Blind Seer.

Current Party Composition

The following character records include those for the deceased, three new hirelings, and Melqart’s assistant Ur-Zaruund.

The party is not overly wealthy, I think, for 2nd-level characters. Especially considering that they are essentially 16,000 g.p. in debt to the future restoration of Melqart’s sight.

Melqart

Seer

Blind

Magic-User

2

Neutral

 

17 g.p.

50 g.p.

1,000 g.p.

4,700 XP

Hathor-Ra

Adept

Surviving

Cleric

2

Lawful Good

water walking potion

28 s.p.

533 g.p.

1,000 g.p.

2,999 XP

Penlod

Veteran Medium

Did Not Survive

Elf

1

Chaotic Good

Iltani

Warrior

Surviving

Fighter

2

Neutral

water walking potion

4 g.p.

400 g.p.

1,000 g.p.

3,999 XP

Idan Thyrsus

Apprentice

Did Not Survive

Thief

1

Neutral

Zagros

Warrior

Surviving

Fighter

2

Neutral

 

0 g.p.

481 g.p.

1,000 g.p.

3,999 XP

Astarte

Medium

Surviving

Magic-User

1

Neutral

spell scroll: shield

protection scroll: undead

0 g.p.

100 g.p.

0 g.p.

0 XP

Kildigir

Veteran

Surviving

Fighter

1

Lawful Good

 

0 g.p.

100 g.p.

0 g.p.

0 XP

Haxamanish

Apprentice

Surviving

Thief

1

Neutral

3 arrows

0 g.p.

100 g.p.

0 g.p.

0 XP

Ur-Zaruund

Medium

Surviving

Magic-User

1

Neutral

 

10 g.p.

100 g.p.

0 g.p.

0 XP

The Frieze, the Papyrus, the Spitting Cobra

The scene continues from the opening of “Holmes on a Coin’s Weight.”

Melqart and Hathor-Ra loaded treasure. The medium held a sack open at the hem, while the acolyte dumped the contents of an iron coffer into it. Gold coins rattled and clinked, like a stream of metallic pebbles.

Plate-armored Iltani, with sword and shield, stood over a sharper. The thief, bloody hands bound and tethered to an ankle, crouched beside a wall. The charmed harpy fed on three others in the room beyond a door, which was guarded by Zagros, also armor-clad with sword and shield.

The party’s own thief, Idan Thyrsus, lay face down. A dagger protruded from between shoulder blades.

Coins sacked, Melqart and Hathor strung necklaces around their necks, sequestering the jewels beneath robe and tunic.

Iltani, Zagros, and the hobbled sharper would each carry a large sack, Melqart a small. Hathor, otherwise unburdened, would port the corpse of Thyrsus back to base town, where she hired him the previous day.

“Wait,” said Melqart. “Where’s the papyrus?”

Hathor raised her eyebrows. “The oneiromancer said it would be in this room.”

“Maybe here…” Melqart approached the frieze, pushing aside an empty coffer with a foot.

The frieze covered the wall up to fifteen feet high under the barrel-vaulted ceiling. A line of life-size human figures, one foot before another, faced a larger figure, seated on the left. The upright figures were male and female. Males were bare chested, wearing only kilts. Females wore long gowns to the ankle. All were barefoot and held some object in both hands before them: the first a scroll, the second a tall jar, followed by a cornucopia, a jug, a bowl, and so on. The seated figure, male, wore a kilt. Two concentric circles haloed the head. Straight lines, like rays, protruded from the outermost.

Hathor stepped closer with the torch. Melqart felt the relief with fingertips, tracing outlines in smooth alabaster.

“It’s a procession,” said the cleric. “Subjects bring offerings. The king’s halo represents Gor’s double crown.”

“I don’t see any—” Melqart’s fingers slipped over the lip of the tall jar. “What’s this?” He rapped on the jar with a knuckle. It rang hollow.

Melqart gripped the jar by the lip and held it at the base. A tug revealed a crack between jar and relief. Wiggling the jar from side to side, he pulled, and it gave.

“Give me a hand,” said the magic-user.

Hathor lay the torch on the floor. Shadows leapt high up the wall. Together they pulled the jar from the niche and set it down on the floor.

Hathor went for the torch. Melqart stood up to peer inside the jar. From the shadow within, a cobra’s head raised to meet his gaze. Its hood spread, black eyes glinted, and it spat into Melqart’s face.

The medium recoiled with a grunt. Hathor struck out at the snake. The mace came down hard on the jar lip.

The cobra spilled from broken alabaster, coiling its three-foot length. Iltani and Zagros advanced from either side. The serpent soon writhed in two parts.

“Are you well, Melqart?” said Hathor.

Melqart blinked his eyes, opening wide. “I can’t see.”

The blind Melqart and the hobbled sharper in tow, the limp Thyrsus over a shoulder, Hathor-Ra led the party up to the dungeon’s first level. There, she rendered the papyrus, a rolled page with magical writing on it found in the jar, to the witch who called herself an oneiromancer.

Sharpers and Cobra
Sharpers and Cobra.
Sharpers (7th-level thieves) hideout on the dungeon’s 3rd level. A spitting cobra guards a papyrus concealed within an alabaster frieze.

The Wizard’s Castle

My grandmother—her grandchildren called her “Nanna”—lived in the small Middle Tennessee town where Garth and I used to live. Crows flew less than a mile from Nanna’s house to our old neighborhood. Encircling a murky lake, the neighborhood was bordered on the outer edges by woods and fields with a two-lane highway on one side.

During our elementary school years, Garth and I spent long summer days exploring the woods and fields or paddling the lake in a canoe. It had been only a year since I was last there. I would start high school in the fall. Not too old to go exploring—but everything now seemed changed.

The dry summer heat shrank the lake. Brown algae covered the shallow end. The fields, where we used to play “war” and “cowboys and Indians,” were thick with brambles. The grass, that hid us to the waist, was low and stubbly.

The woods appeared less dense. The trees not so high, their trunks more widely scattered. Leaves more brownish-green than the rich emerald I remembered. The bubbling stream we once built a dam across was dried up. Its rocky bed was quiet, narrow, and gray.

The whole world was less bright, like a pale reflection of itself, and I missed my best friend. It was too late to pick up where we left off, too soon to feel nostalgia.

I remember sunny days that week at Nanna’s but no bright fields or dappled woods. Instead, the sunlight splayed across the living room floor, where I had arranged sheets of graph paper like tiles. After the brief foray to the old neighborhood, I entertained myself by making a map.

I asked Nanna if she had graph paper. She had. She gave me a pad full. I asked for a pencil. She hadn’t. She gave me a Bic roller. It was red. That will do.

Kneeling between the sofa and the coffee table, I teased a sheet from the pad and set the roller at a point where two light blue lines crossed.

I wanted to draw a castle. I wanted it to be a big castle, where a wizard lived. I dragged a red line down the page’s long edge, made a corner, then another line along the short edge.

Pulling three more sheets, I laid them two by two on the table. I had to move a bouquet centerpiece to make enough space. Similar lines on the other sheets made a large red rectangle.

It seemed not big enough. I added sheets between each corner. Three by three didn’t fit on the coffee table, so I had to draw the lines at the table and move the arrangement to the carpeted floor. Now there was plenty of room, and the castle under construction was too rectangular. I added sheets on two opposite sides to make it four portrait pages wide by three deep.

In the center of a long wall, I put a double door, which were two small rectangles end to end. I knew how to draw doors, because I had seen them on Garth’s dungeon map. The center of four pages put the door on the edge at the meeting of two sheets. One door on each sheet, they lined up together when I laid them on the carpet.

Drawing the castle meant a lot of back and forth between the coffee table, where I got more sheets and added details, and the floor, where I laid sheets in place and admired the grandness of the wizard’s castle.

I thought the wizard must live in a forest. On more sheets around, I drew a moat and the edge of the woods. Trails crisscrossed the forest, and streams met the moat. I imagined Garth and myself exploring the woods—wearing chain mail and long cloaks—discovering the castle where a trail followed moat’s edge. That reminded me to add a drawbridge over the moat at the double doors.

I imagined Garth and myself exploring the woods—wearing chain mail and long cloaks—discovering the castle where a trail followed moat’s edge.

Outside the forest, a final sheet protruded from the six-by-five-page wizard’s domain. Straight, parallel lines and a few rectangles made streets and buildings in a town.

A rectangle beside the first street corner coming into town would be the tavern where adventurer’s could get the hook for expeditions to the wizard’s castle. I didn’t know how a tavern should be named. After a few minutes thought, I wrote “Joe’s Bar” next to the rectangle.

I didn’t know what a castle’s interior looked like, either. I knew only that adventurers should find monsters and treasures inside. Looking at my lists of monsters copied from the blue book, I guessed they must be hiding in corners and roaming the vast open space that was the one-room castle, while the wizard chants incantations from his books of spells.

The castle should have traps too. I knew about the covered pit trap, that it was ten feet deep, might be filled with spikes or monsters, and it was shown on the map with an “X” inside a square.

I knew about the covered pit trap, that it was ten feet deep, might be filled with spikes or monsters, and it was shown on the map with an “X” inside a square.

I drew an X in both squares after the double doors. Lacking imagination for other kinds of traps, I put more Xs inside squares at arbitrary places inside the castle. I had a lot of white space, so I drew a lot of Xs. Covered pits were the major hazard of the wizard’s castle.

I thought a pit might drop straight down to a level below. I also knew about sliding stairs that carried the unwary to a lower level. That gave me the idea to add upper levels to the castle.

I outlined the second floor, the same as the first, and drew Xs in a few squares. Then I switched to rectangles, one-by-two squares, with a long arrow to show a chute. Laying the leaf over its corresponding first-level sheet, I noted where the pit or the chute would come out and drew a square in dotted lines at that location.

With more overlays I made more levels above. Towers sprang up from the third level’s four corners. A large square central tower rose up to a fourth level. Then I thought to add support columns beneath the towers. Stairs at various locations went up and down between floors.

The wizard’s castle was full of means to get from top to bottom, some more quickly than others.

The Wizard’s Castle
A Reproduction from Memory of the Wizard’s Castle, Ground Level.
At ⅛ the original scale, this one fits on a single sheet. Light blue rectangles mark page edges. Red lines are made with a Bic.

When Nanna asked what I was drawing, I said, “It’s a castle.”

She said, “It doesn’t look much like a castle.”

I had to point out the forest and the moat. “This is the drawbridge that goes into the castle. Watch out for those traps.”

I didn’t think to tell her it was a plan view, looking down on the castle, not the perspective view she might have expected from a grandchild. Instead, I showed her how you had to walk up the stairs to each level, being careful to avoid prowling monsters.

I laid the top sheet over the third level of the central tower. It had a square, outlined in red. At the center, stairs went down.

“The best view is from the top floor. That’s where the wizard lives.”

Nanna was nonplussed. But at the end of the week, she made a good report to my mom. “That Steve is a good boy. He’s quiet and plays all day at his drawings.”

As then, still now, D&D for me is much about the maps.

Keys to the Deep Halls

The Deep Halls of Amon-Gorloth, Keyed by Sub-Levels and Encounter Areas
The Deep Halls of Amon-Gorloth, Keyed by Sublevels and Encounter Areas.
Encounter areas are numbered. Sublevels are noted with the level number followed by a letter designator, highlighted in purple. Map by Dyson Logos.

Getting Into the Deep Halls

Dreaming Amon-Gorloth is a dungeon and wilderness adventure campaign for character levels 1 to 9 intended for use with any old-school edition of the world’s most superlative role-playing game.

The should-be simple exercise of keying rooms is already a nightmare. The dungeon, consisting of 180 encounter areas, goes down seven levels. Each level is divided, by contiguous rooms, into 51 sublevels.

The first four dozen encounter areas by sublevel serve to demonstrate its twisted quality.

Sublevel Encounter Areas Sublevel Encounter Areas
2A. 1-3 3C. 23-25
2B. 4-8 2C. 26-29
1A. 9-12 3D. 30-31
3A. 13-14 3E. 32-33
4A. 15-18 4B. 34-40
3B. 19-22 4C. 41-48

A party might enter the dungeon and proceed immediately along 3. Grand Entry Hall (2A.) down to area 34. Nightmare Bazaar (4B.), or they might follow at least five other circuitous routes to the same destination.

Your Favorite Monsters from Holmes

I have worked out much of the campaign scenario, and Melqart and his “Company of the Blind Seer” have explored several chambers close to the entrance—as far as 57. Chamber of the Processional (3F.).

I’m taking your suggestions for favorite Holmesian monsters to place in sublevels and particular halls and chambers in the Deep Halls of Amon-Gorloth.

Recalculating a Coin’s Weight

In “Holmes on a Coin’s Weight,” we take the Editor’s proposed weight of a standard coin—twice that of a quarter—and calculate that 40 coins make a pound. This was prompted by questioning the validity of old-school D&D’s standard, ten coins to a pound, to measure encumbrance.  Now I’m curious about the real weight of coins made from precious metals.

Source of Incongruence

In his review of the TREASURE chapter of the Holmes manuscript, Zach Howard notes that the section with heading BASE TREASURE VALUES (Holmes, 34), in which the weight of a coin is specified as twice that of a quarter, is not present.1 We deduce, then, that neither the 1⁄10 nor the 1⁄40 pound coin is proposed by Holmes. Rather, the incongruous weights entered the publication during editing.

I added a brief mention in an update to the earlier article.

Precious Metal Coin Weights

A US quarter-dollar piece, 1.75 mm thick and 24.26 mm in diameter, has a volume of 808.93 mm3 or 0.81 cm3. By the weight of the precious metals from which D&D realms mint coins, we can calculate the number of coins in a pound by metal. We ignore electrum as the alloy varies in weight depending on its composition.

Precious Metal Pieces
Piece Copper Silver Gold Platinum Average
Volume (cm3) 0.81 0.81 0.81 0.81 0.81
1 cm3 Weight (lbs.) 0.0197 0.0231 0.0426 0.0473 0.0332
Piece Weight (lbs.) 0.0160 0.0187 0.0345 0.0383 0.0269
Pieces in 1 lb. 62.64 53.38 28.99 26.11 42.78

More precious metals are heavier. A pound of copper counts 64 pieces, while less than half that number make a pound of gold or platinum, 29 or 26 pieces respectively.

Forty Coins to a Pound

We could justify a pound of 40 coins by assuming most treasure hauls will have a mix of silver, gold, and platinum, with silver making up a half. We leave the copper pieces in a trail behind us, so we can find our way back to the hoard for a second load.2 The average of 53, 29, and 26 is 36 coins, which rounds up to an even 40.

And let’s take another look at the Holmes quarter-sized coin. Its weight, 0.025 pounds, is practically the average of the ensemble of precious metal coins: 0.027 pounds.

Precious Metal Pieces Compared to the Holmes Quarter
Piece Average of Precious Metal Pieces Holmes Quarter
Volume (cm3) 0.81 0.81
1 cm3 Weight (lbs.) 0.0332 0.0309
Piece Weight (lbs.) 0.0269 0.0250
Pieces in 1 lb. 42.78 40.00

The average number of pieces per pound is 42.78. Adding electrum (not shown) with equal parts gold and silver brings the average down to 41.74.

Aside: Early Calculations

That the average weight of precious metal coins comes so close to Holmes’s twice-a-quarter’s-weight makes me wonder whether some editor might have done the research and made the calculations.

In the Internet Age, out of sheer curiosity, I looked up the precise dimensions of a quarter and plugged them into a volume calculator, found a web page that gives weights of metals by volume, and entered a few simple formulas into an electronic spreadsheet.

Certainly, the average 1970s high school student could accomplish the same,3 though by other means. All the calculations—the coin’s volume and each formula for each metal—must be done by hand, possibly with the assistance of a handheld calculator. Before doing the numbers, the research to find the weights of precious metals—unless one had a set of encyclopedias on the home shelf or a reference work noting specific gravities of metals—required a library trip.

Again, it was doable without the web, but it took more time and effort. Whoever did it, if it was done prior to 1977, had to be motivated.

Ten Coins to a Pound

To weigh one-tenth of a pound, how big would a coin have to be?

The average weight of 1 cm3 of the given precious metals is 0.033178 lbs. One-tenth pound divided by 0.033178 is 3.014. So we need about 3 cm3 of metal. A coin of that volume and, let’s say, twice a quarter’s thickness, 3.5 mm, must have a diameter of 33.1 mm, which is 1.30 inches or just shy of 15⁄16.

Coincidentally, the Eisenhower dollar coin, with a 1½-inch diameter and 1⁄10-inch thickness, has a volume of 2.8958 cm3. It weighs 24.624 grams or 1⁄20 of a pound. So, instead of a quarter dollar, we might say coins in D&D are the size of an Eisenhower dollar and twice the weight.

In a world of fantasy adventure, I could go with a coin of such an important size. It’s treasure, after all. It ought to look like treasure!

Still, even at quarter-size, we could argue for the ten-coin pound. As Moldvay suggests, when measuring encumbrance, we mustn’t neglect bulk. A coin seems to be the antithesis of bulk. It’s small, stackable with others, creates minimal lost space between pieces, and fistfuls of them fill voids between silver goblets and gold statuettes.

But a sack of coins isn’t rigid. I’m guessing that the only difference between a sack of 1,750 metal pieces and a party member’s corpse carried over your shoulder is that one of them will pay for a round at the base town tavern.

Euro Equivalents
Euro Equivalents.
The 2- and 1-euro coins are just larger and just smaller than a quarter: 25.25 and 23.25 mm in diameter, respectively. The 50-cent piece is the closest match at 24.25 mm, though its thickness, 2.38 mm, is a third again that of a quarter.

Notes

1 Zenopus Archives blog, “Part 34: ‘Many Monsters Carry Treasure.’”

2 In adventurer jargon, copper pieces are called “dungeon marks.”

3 In a December 1983 Dragon article, David F. Godwin makes such calculations. “How many coins in a coffer?” (Dragon #80, 9) doesn’t question the tenth-pound coin but addresses the related problem of a coin hoard’s volume. One point Godwin makes is that, due to the heavier weights of metals, the volume of coins in a “full” sack is much less than the sack’s volume. Imagine a stack of ten quarters. It weighs one pound. Make six rows of stacks by ten columns. Rounding to convenient dimensions, a stack of ten quarters takes up a volume 1" × 1" × ¾". Stacked, the 600 coins take up 6" × 10" × ¾". Dump them into a large sack. Any more weight would burst the seams, but there’s still a lot of air in the volume. So much that even four times as many coins doesn’t begin to take up the space.

For an example of a large sack overfull, see the Erol Otus illustration in Moldvay’s D&D Basic Rulebook, B20.

Blue Flame, Tiny Stars

To my first best friend,
Who showed me how to play this game 40 years ago.
That has made all the difference.

Following is an ordered index of select episodes from the category Anecdotes and Old Games. I omit entries that discuss origins, rules, and other aspects of D&D and related games of the era. Included here are only the anecdotes recounting my earliest experience with D&D—playing the Holmes Basic edition.

Coming soon to DriveThruRPG in electronic formats!

Blue Flame, Tiny Stars

Man, You’ve Got to Play This Game!

Polyhedrons

The Pale Blue Book

Kaytar

A Neutral Human Fighter

The Scroll of the Dead

Lava Caves, Clacking Mandibles, and Red Glowing Glands

Dungeon Sense

Further Adventures with Kaytar

Monsters and Magic Spells

The Wizard’s Castle

All the Difference

Blue Flame Tiny Stars

Holmes on a Coin’s Weight

“…for 300 gold pieces are assumed to weigh about 30 pounds” (Holmes, 9).

Melqart raised the torch over his head. Flickering light glinted off gold and silver. An alabaster frieze decorated the far wall. Before it, coins spilled from coffers, chests, and brass urns. A gold chain adorned with precious stones sparkled red and green.

Melqart drew a breath. “How many rounds1 you reckon, Hathor?”

Hathor-Ra stood, shield lowered, mace pointing down, mouth agape.

“Hathor?”

She blinked at the dazzling mound. “Thousands and thousands!”

“How many sacks do we have?”

“Three large, one small… and I’ve got room in my backpack.”

In early D&D editions, the base unit to measure encumbrance is the “coin,” and ten of them weigh one pound. I struggled with that idea for a long time. Even if we assume that encumbrance is “a combination of weight and bulk,” as Tom Moldvay puts it (B20), a one-tenth-pound coin seems hardly credible. Eventually, I came around to accept the absurdity in favor of playability.

Ten coins to a pound started as early as OD&D, in which the average man weighs 1,750 coins (Vol. 1, 15). That the entry tops the encumbrance list is either to set a benchmark—175 lbs. was average for a 1970s American male—or to remind us it’s a dangerous world: there are rules for carrying a comrade’s corpse.

The ten-coin standard continued through AD&D and the “Basic” line (B/X, BECM/I, and the Rules Cyclopedia). It was abandoned in 2nd Edition, which uses pounds to measure encumbrance.

The quote at top from the section on encumbrance in Holmes Basic D&D pulls the heavy coin forward from OD&D. But Zach Howard’s reading of the Holmes manuscript implies that it wasn’t the Editor who wrote the encumbrance section,2 but rather a subsequent editor.3

Elsewhere in Holmes we read:

“All coins are roughly equal in size and weight, being approximately the circumference and thickness of a quarter and weighing about twice as much” (34).

Reading Zach Howard’s discussion of the Treasure section in the Holmes manuscript, I see that Holmes didn’t write about the size and weight of coins either. [22:30 13 February 2022 GMT]

This gives us the idea that Holmes used, at least in his own game, a smaller value for the weight of a coin.4 A US quarter-dollar piece weighs 5.67 grams. Twice that, 11.34, is 0.025 pounds. Using this as the standard, there are 40 coins in a pound.

Do you know what that means? You can carry four times more treasure out of the dungeon. That’s four times more treasure! More treasure for you, more treasure for me—more treasure for everyone!

Laden Thieves
Laden Thieves.
Adventurers carry 9,600 rounds in four large sacks.

Notes

1 A round, in adventurer jargon, is a precious-metal coin of any realm, past or present.

2 Zenopus Archives blog, “Part 6: ‘Fully Armored and Heavily Loaded’”

3 Howard suggests, with compelling evidence, Gary Gygax for the Editor’s editor: “Interlude: Who Edited the Editor?”

4 Written accounts from the Editor himself indicate that Holmes knew and used some rules from an early third-party OD&D supplement called Warlock. I wonder if a coin’s weight is addressed in those rules. Zenopus Archives blog, “Warlock or how to play D&D without playing D&D?”

Having now had the opportunity to read Warlock as printed in The Spartan #9 (August 1975), I can report that, other than that it weighs one unit, no mention of a coin’s weight is contained therein. Nor is any other of Holmes’s unique rules. [18:34 19 May 2022 GMT]

All the Difference

Every now and again life shows us a thing that changes the way we look at it. Before D&D, life appeared mundane. The future and what I would do in it was vague and distant. But after my first experience with this new kind of game, I saw another future. This one was more distinct, more tangible, and it was lit by a brilliant blue flame with tiny stars. In that future was fantasy and magic, and the path to it lay at my feet.

Like Robert Frost’s traveler pondering divergent roads, I knew that I couldn’t take the one path without leaving behind the other. Unlike the traveler, though, I didn’t long linger. I saw the way clear to the bend. The fantastic path had the better claim.

The road, I realized later, was the less well trod. In those days, it was the rare traveler who had heard of the game, fewer still who did not equate it with devil worship, and only a small number who played it.

Without knowing, I joined a small club. The club’s members, few and dispersed, made up a subculture that blended wargames with fantasy and science-fiction literature. An introverted adolescent, I found myself not always comfortable among the diverse crowd of geeks and nerds and metalheads, but always accepted into the awkward fellowship. As way led on to way, I didn’t look back.

Now, ages and ages thence, I, like Frost’s traveler, think back on the time life showed me the fantastic path, sometimes, with a sigh. How much different life would be had I never learned to play DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.

Anecdotes and Old Games - DONJON LANDS

Monsters and Magic Spells

Other than playing D&D, I don’t remember what else Garth and I might have done with those summer days. But the week ran out much too soon. My family had gone north to visit relatives for two weeks, dropping me off at Garth’s on the way. Now I was to spend the second week at my grandmother’s house.

At noon, my suitcase was packed, and the phone rang. Garth’s mom said it was my grandmother. She would be there in an hour.

While waiting, I asked Garth if I could look at the blue book. “I want to copy the important parts.”

Armed with pencil and ruled paper, I flipped through the eggshell pages. Monsters, I knew, were important, so, I started there.

Garth pursed his lips. “It’ll take you forever to copy all that.”

“I’ll just write the names.”

“Here,” Garth turned to the last page and pointed to three columns of monster names. “That’s most of the monsters. The stuff on those two pages is all you really need.”

Many of the monsters were alien to me. As I copied each name, I tried to conjure up what the creature should look like and how it might make a dangerous foe.

From fairy tales, I knew goblins were diminutive boogie men that run around all harry-scarry on dark nights. I knew bandits from Westerns, and I wondered what they were doing in medieval times. I was overly familiar with ticks from boyhood outdoor explorations, and even giant specimens seemed out of place in the fantastic world.

But orcs were unknown to me. I had seen, too young, cartoon movies with hobbits, but I failed to make the connection to the films’ frog-mouthed foot soldiers.

Then there were berserkers, bugbears, and gelatinous cubes, stirges and displacer beasts. Together the names conjured mayhem, but I wrote them down. Time pressed.

After the monsters, I turned to the magic spells. As the neutral human fighter, I witnessed Kaytar at his esoteric profession. But how magic worked in the game was a complete mystery. The names at least gave some hint to their purpose.

The hour was passing quickly, so I copied the “books” of magic-user spells without thinking. When I got to the clerical spells, I paused.

“Garth, how does light hurt you?”

“What do you mean?”

“This spell cures light wounds.”

“No, it cures a few hit points of damage. Like from a small wound.”

Then I heard a car pull into the drive outside. Time to go. I closed the pale blue book and looked one last time at the cover. A dragon’s treasure, blue flame, tiny stars.

Garth and I said our goodbyes and write-soons and maybe next summer again. I climbed into the backseat and waved out the rear window as the car pulled out of the drive. Clutching the leaf of ruled paper, I studied the lists of monsters and spells until car sickness came on.

Monster Lists from the Perforated Page - Holmes Basic D&D (1977)
Monster Lists from the Perforated Page, Holmes Basic D&D (1977).

Civilization and Diplomacy Map Boards on the Globe

Apart from Outdoor Survival, two other games have map boards that attract me as campaign world settings. I put them together to imagine the map of DONJON LANDS’ “Known World.”

I always thought Avalon Hill’s Civilization map board looked odd. I couldn’t put my finger on why it didn’t look right, but the shapes on the board didn’t match up with the Mediterranean map in my American-educated mind. I figured the map board artist was obliged to distort coastlines to fit land masses within a limited space or otherwise failed to color inside the lines.

I was surprised, when I laid a scan over a Google Earth screen projection, to see that the board artist only rotated the map a few degrees from north.

Both the geography and history of the Mediterranean and the Near East inspire adventures in ancient lands with seagoing voyages, threatened by mythological creatures from the deep, and desert treks to visit distant realms and explore forgotten temples atop stepped pyramids.

At the same time, pseudo-medieval is the “classic fantasy” I grew up with, before and after my introduction to adventure role-playing games. Northern Europe inspires adventures where vikings plunder coastal towns, armor-clad knights ride out from spired castles on quests for legendary objects, and druids chant rituals amid misty forests.

Unlike Civilization’s map, I thought the Diplomacy board was more or less correct—excepting Iceland, which I assumed was displaced to make way for the elevation legend. Not at all. I had to rotate the Diplomacy map a full 20 degrees to line up the coastlines on the globe. Thule is in its proper place.

Civilization and Diplomacy Map Boards on the Globe
Mappa Mundi.
Map boards from Advanced Civilization (Avalon Hill, 1991) and Diplomacy (Avalon Hill, 1976)—both rotated counterclockwise, 6.2° and 20.6° respectively—laid over a Google Earth image, oriented north (Google Earth imagery: Landsat/Copernicus Data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO IBCAO U.S. Geological Survey).