The Tower Card

"The Tower" card from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck

The recent miniseries Agatha All Along prominently features the famous Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, originally published by Rider in 1908, with sublime illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith and instructions by poet-mystic A. E. Waite, both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society devoted to occultism.

Pamela Colman Smith

A pivotal scene in one episode of the series employs the Major Arcana card The Tower (pictured above), which per Waite's instructions in the Pictoral Key to the Tarot represents: 

"Misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe. Reversed: Negligence, absence, distribution, carelessness, distraction, apathy, nullity, vanity"

Note the emphasis on "unforeseen catastrophe", which is illustrated on the card by the lightning strike that knocks the crown and "wizards" from the tower and sets it afire. Per the Wikipedia page, Smith's design for this card is drawn from the card in the Tarot of Marseilles, which in turn had merged earlier concepts.

Rider-Waite-Smith cards at the Whitney

I've been a fan of Smith's illustrations since seeing the Rider deck on display in an exhibit of modernist art at the Whitney in NYC, where the Tower card jumped out at me, obviously, given my interest in the Tower of Zenopus. Seeing it again in the Agatha show reminded me of how well it resonates with the backstory of Holmes' sample dungeon, where the wizard and his tower are destroyed by unknown forces and a consuming fire, although here from beneath rather than above:

"Fifty years ago, on a cold wintry night, the wizard's tower was suddenly engulfed in green flame. Several of his human servants escaped the holocaust, saying their master had been destroyed by some powerful force he had unleashed in the depths of the tower"

I'm not suggesting that the Tower Card had any particular influence on Holmes' story, only that it has a similar theme, which also recalls ancient legends like the Tower of Babel or Zeus smiting the legendary doctor Asclepius with a bolt-from-the-blue for advancing his medical knowledge so far that he brought the dead back to life.

Holmes was a doctor and a scientist, but being a life-long fan of pulp and weird fiction, would have been familiar with the occultism as practiced around the turn of the 20th century. For example, he was a member of the Machen Society, devoted to the author Arthur Machen, who was friends with A. E. Waite and even briefly joined the Golden Dawn. In writing his own fantasy, Holmes occasionally employed the trappings of the occult. One Boinger and Zereth story, The Sorcerer's Jewel, features a medium, Misteera, who conducts seances, and another, In the Bag, even has the wizard Murray employ a tarot deck, albeit for solitaire rather than fortune telling; Boinger suggests that he "Play the knave on the Queen of Cups". 

However, in crafting the tale of Zenopus, Holmes was more likely directly inspired by the various doomed wizards in the Weird Fiction. In the Holmes Manuscript series, part 46, I went through the introduction to the Sample Dungeon and examined where Holmes may have taken inspiration from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard.

The Making of OD&D: Half-Price Sale on Amazon

The Making of Orginal D&D is currently on sale for $49.99 on Amazon, which is 50% off the cover price ($99). This is the lowest price I've seen for the book so far, which came out back in July. It says "Limited Time Deal", but there's no date indicated, so I don't when it ends. If you've been on the fence due to the price here's your chance. Find the table of contents  below.

Find it here: 

The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977

See also these earlier posts:

Early Greyhawk Lore in the 1973 D&D Draft

"The Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977": Out Today! 

"The Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977": Table of Contents

"The Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977": What Might the Precursors Be?

"How Dungeons & Dragons Started" (video about the book)

"The Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977": Everything we know about this upcoming WOTC book

Playing at the World revised edition out in July 

The Return of the Sample Dungeon

Cover of the 2024 DMG featuring Warduke, Skylla and Venger

Out this week is the latest version of the Dungeon Master's Guide, and in addition to bringing back Greyhawk as a sample setting, it also features the return of the Sample Dungeon. In this case, I don't mean the Tower of Zenopus, which goes only by the title "Sample Dungeon" in the Holmes Basic rulebook, but rather the general concept: an example of an adventure for new DMs to both run and base their own designs on.

This was a common feature in the DM section of D&D rulebooks throughout the 1970s and 80s, with OD&D, AD&D 1E and every version of Basic including one, and the dungeons while brief were strongly remembered due to their evocative details and because they were often the first adventure for new players. And decades later, these memories and shared experiences would promote a sense of community among the fan base for each rule set.

The idea started with the original D&D rules in 1974, which included a "Sample Map of Underworld Level" in Vol 3. This dungeon level by Gary Gygax lacked any real theme other providing examples, mostly of tricks and traps that could be used in designing a level. For the first Basic Set in 1977, J. Eric Holmes overhauled the example, creating a coherent first level for beginners complete with a brief backstory to provide a hook for exploring it, and concluding by inviting the DM to create additional levels.

Two years later, in the AD&D 1E DMG, Gygax followed Holmes' example with another dungeon level with a strong story behind it, colloquially known as the Ruined Monastery or the Dungeon of the Fire Opal. Unlike the Zenopus dungeon, only a few rooms of this level were fully detailed, presumably so the DM could complete the keying of the map, along with designing the unshown second level. It also advanced the use of this as a teaching tool by including an integrated Example of Play; i.e., it's set in the described dungeon rooms.

The next two iterations of Basic D&D continued the tradition of including a short dungeon written by the editor. Moldvay Basic (1981) had Tom Moldvay's Haunted Keep, which more tightly integrated the exemplary level into the dungeon design concepts presented in the DM section. The accompanying Cook-Marsh Expert rules from the same year also provided a Sample Wilderness which mentioned that a town, Luln, was a base for exploring the Haunted Keep, although the town was only briefly described. 

In Mentzer Basic (1983), Frank Mentzer expanded the introductory material by adding a solo adventure teaching the basics of play in the Players book, which was followed by a starting group adventure, Castle Mistamere, in the DMs book. One idea common to each of the above was that the dungeon was not complete, giving the new DM a base on which to practice adding their own ideas. The Mentzer Expert rules included the same Sample Wilderness from the previous set, but revised to include a new "Home Town", Threshold, along with a series of eighteen briefly described (single paragraphs) adventures for the DM to use with this setting.

In 1989, however, there was a big change: the revised DMG for AD&D 2E had no sample dungeon at all. The 1991 Rules Cyclopedia similarly lacked an adventure, although the complementary "Black Box" Basic Set from this time did include one, Escape from Zanzer Tem's Dungeon.

The DMGs from 3E (2000) and 3.5E (2003) brought back the sample dungeon by including a revised version of the Ruined Monastery dungeon from the original DMG. These include an updated map, partial level description (first three areas only) and an integrated Example of Play, but the background from the original is severely curtailed.

The 4E D&D DMG (2008) included a sample town (Fallcrest) and setting (Nentir Value) with an integrated sample dungeon called "Kobold Hall", which with 5 encounter areas literally follows the 5 Room Dungeon design model. (Thanks to Karla Adder on Twitter for the heads up on this.)

Jumping ahead to 5E, while the 2014 DMG included material on generating random dungeons (Appendix A), and a number of sample maps (Appendix C), including an updated version of the Fire Opal dungeon map from the 1979 DMG, as with 2E it lacked a true introductory adventure. 

But now with the new DMG, the concept is back in full force and with new innovations. Rather than just a single dungeon level, there are five (!) short adventures, each for a different level of characters, and with the suggestion that they can be run sequentially, particularly the first three. There is also a mix of adventure settings: towns, wilderness, small dungeons that rely on the maps by Dyson Logos found in an appendix, nautical, and other planes. In addition, the first four adventures are given locations in Greyhawk that are found in the setting material and maps elsewhere in the book. 

In my next post, I will look a little closer at these adventures and their locations in Greyhawk.

The new DMG is available for order on Amazon