Zenopus Archives 🧙‍♂️

Gary Con 2025: Day 1 - Chainmail & Balrogs

📝 A very tardy report on my first day at Gary Con last year, when I ran my Party of Balrogs OD&D game and played Chainmail twice ⤵️
zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2026/02/gary...

The very first D&D rulebook I had was actually a photocopy of the Holmes Basic rules, which a kid on the schoolbus gave me when he was about to "graduate" to AD&D. I still have that wonderful bootleg, though much the worse for 40 years of wear.

Great line-up! I will try to get into one of them.

Nice find. Reminds me of the heraldic shields in the World of Greyhawk boxed set. Could you provide more details on the source (year, book name)?

D20 HERALDIC SHIELDS: Easy Options for Your Campaign Kingdom Depiction of 20 heraldic shields I find it easier to be creative when I have a prompt or some starting point rather than a blank slate. Its ...

Quick post about some cool and very convenient public domain heraldic shields I found. Perfect for kingdom making using some very iconic imagery that is easy for players to remember, yet similar enough to draw connections. icastlight.blogspot.com/2025/12/d20-...

Michael Pondsmith wrote a "d20" version of Buck Rogers, and TSR basically didn't tell people that they could mine this D&D-compatible game for their D&D campaigns. TSR's owner was the Buick Roger heiress, and she acted as though she didn't like gamers. I guess she earned royalties on this game.

My friend and I spent quite some time studying this picture for hints of the hidden cat.

In the originally published version of the module, written for Holmes Basic, this wand is a Wand of Fireballs with 9 charges!

And don't miss the polished mirror in the guest chamber, it could be useful against, say, a medusa...

And don't miss the polished mirror in the guest chamber, it could be useful against, say, a medusa...

🚨 Epic thread alert! ⤵️

Sample Dungeon Redux II At its heart, the Old School Renaissance is about emulating the style of play of Dungeons & Dragons from forty and more years ago, and abou...

Sample Dungeon Redux II

A review of Beneath the Ruined Wizard’s Tower, an expansion by Fen Orc of The Ruined Tower of Zenopus using BLUEHOME: Fantasy Roleplaying Game.

rlyehreviews.blogspot.com/2025/04/samp...

#reviewsfromrlyeh #rpgreview #rpgreviews #rpg #DnD #OSR

That's similar to how I found my OD&D Whitebox on the shelf of a game store around 1988 or so. A smaller store but in a high traffic downtown shopping center so was surprised they still had it.

I bought a stand-alone Holmes Basic rulebook new at a Toys R Us store in 1986 or 87. It must have been gathering dust in a warehouse for years - no idea why it wasn’t returned to TSR or pulped but I was thrilled to find it. I’d never even seen that version before (I started with the 1983 Basic set)

a can of jellied cranberry sauce is on a table ALT: a can of jellied cranberry sauce is on a table

Roll for initiative, it's a Cranberry Gelatinous Cylinder!

This is the way

Infocom computer game ad in the back of the book:

New arrival today, via Paperback Swap. This the first in a short series of Zork gamebooks published by Infocom in the early 80s. It's not Choose Your Own Adventure, it's not Pick A Path, it's What Do I Do Now.

Yes, though I can't look at it again until we have finished exploring, and with our irregular play schedule it could be months!

Had a fun time today starting to explore the ruins of Xak Tsaroth (DL1 Dragons of Despair) in our periodic Dragonlance game. Draconians and gully dwarves! I'm running the power couple Goldmoon and Riverwind.

"Before I left the NYC Conflicts of Interest Board back in 2022, I created (along with Dan Iwrey and Rob Casimir) what might be the greatest municipal ethics-law-based D&D one-shot module ever conceived… or at the very least the ONLY municipal ethics-law-based D&D one-shot module ever conceived."

True. Most of the TSR catalogs and price lists from the era list the Holmes Basic rulebook as available separately for $5.

True. Most of the TSR catalogs and price lists from the era list the Holmes Basic rulebook as available separately for $5.

The Arnesonian model. Even more difficult to map, as everything is on an angle! TSR didn't publish any modules in this style, but you can also see it the Blackmoor Dungeons in the First Fantasy Campaign published by JG in 1977.

The Arnesonian model. Even more difficult to map, as everything is on an angle! TSR didn't publish any modules in this style, but you can also see it the Blackmoor Dungeons in the First Fantasy Campaign published by JG in 1977.

It's the closest published module map to the style that Gygax, Kuntz and other were using for their home dungeons like Castle Greyhawk. Where almost every square of the graph paper is filled with corridors and rooms.

The Roman numerals are just an oddity from the early days. Probably something Mike Carr used while writing it; perhaps he thought it gave an ancient vibe. When the module was revised for B/X the numbers were updated to standard numbers.

It's the closest published module map to the style that Gygax, Kuntz and other were using for their home dungeons like Castle Greyhawk. Where almost every square of the graph paper is filled with corridors and rooms.

I'm starting a little readthrough of Dungeon Module B1: In Search of the Unknown! Not a terribly original idea, but I'm interested in finally digging into some of these classic TSR modules to see for myself what they have to offer. I'd really like to pick one of these up to run in a low-effort game.

🔥 Awesome blog post alert. My favorite kind of historical analysis of old D&D books ⤵️