Zenopus Archives - Year Two

 

Candlelit Treasure, by Tom Wham from M&TA Set Two, 1977

Another year has passed here at the Archives!

Some notable events from the second year of the blog:

Thanks to Playing at the World, we now have evidence of when the Basic Set was first publicly available (July 1977, at Origins). See:  When Was the Basic Set first available?

Last Fall, Wizards started selling retro D&D T-shirts, several with Holmes Basic art, including the box set cover. These are still available for $20 + shipping at dndmerch.com.
See: New Holmes Basic T-shirt and Holmes Basic T-Shirts

In December I started a Holmes Basic Community on G+ which now has 161 members.

In January, Wizards began selling D&D pdfs again at dndclassics.com. No Holmes yet, but plenty of highly compatible B/X and BECMI material, with new additions weekly. 

In February Steve Winter reported that David Sutherland's original artwork for the Holmes Basic Set had been re-discovered in a crate at the Wizards headquarters.
 
The manuscript for the Basic rulebook surfaced as part of the J. Eric Holmes collection. Still waiting for more information on this amazing find.

In August, my short article, Lesser Magic Items, was published in Dungeon Crawl #3.

My work on the "Perilous Mazes" project for Delving Deeper morphed into Holmes Ref, which remains in progress. My free time has limited the amount of completed work for this. The reference sheets I've finished so far can be found here. Next up is a set of Wandering Monster tables for dungeon levels 1-9.