Gary Con 2025: Day 0

Gary Con XVII illustration by Chet Minton

In March, I attended Gary Con in Lake Geneva for the sixth time, and for a con report I'm going to make a short series of blog posts with highlights from each day.

The first is for Wednesday, March 19th, or "Day 0", when I traveled to Wisconsin, checked in to the hotel and picked up my badge, before the official start of the con the next day. Highlights included:

—Stopping at Renaissance Books in the Milwaukee Airport. The only used bookstore in an airport in the US, Renaissance always has a good selection of Appendix N and adjacent paperbacks in the sci-fi/fantasy section. I normally stop here on the way out, but this year I had time after arriving and before I was scheduled to get my rental car. 

Taking advantage of a "buy 3-get 1 free" for paperbacks, I picked up H. Rider Haggard's The People of the Mist (1894), ERB's Tarzan and the Leopard Men (1935), Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye (1978)(for a friend; I read this in the 90s); and Conan the Undaunted (1984), #19 in TSR's Endless Quest series and written by the late Jim Ward, a longtime Gary Con regular.

—Visiting Mars Cheese Castle, a humongous cheese shop in the shape of castle located in Kenosha, which I stopped at on the way to Lake Geneva. Coincidentally, this is not far from the University of Wisconsin Parkside, where Gen Con was held from 1978-1984, during the heyday of AD&D 1E. 

Mars has gone all-in on the medieval theme, which you can see in the photos:

The Mars brand cheese curd selection

—Having lunch at the diner inside Mars, where I had the "World's Best Fried Cheese Curd's", which did not disappoint, with Dang! butterscotch root beer, which I'd never heard of before but was excellent.

—Arriving at the Grand Geneva hotel, checking in and feeling like it was the day after last year's con. 

View from my room at the Grand

—Seeing the new D&D Pinball Machines in the lobby. There were a few units set up throughout the hotel for free play, and on another day I was able to try one for a few minutes.

—Meeting up with friends from back home also attending the con, and sharing pizza delivered from the venerable Next Door Pub, a favorite of TSR staff employees, and a pecan kringle from Mars for dessert.

The extensive Kringle stand at Mars, with a wide variety of flavors

—Super quick badge pickup. In an improvement from last year, they had many more check-in stations so that there was essentially no line by the time I arrived.

—Luke Gygax's annual Welcome Party, with free Spotted Cow on tap.

Next: Highlights from Day 1.

The Tower Card

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

The recent miniseries Agatha All Along 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.

50 Years of D&D: Forthcoming Book from MIT Press

Over the past five years, The MIT Press has curated an impressive series of Game Studies books, including several of great interest to myself and readers of this blog: Appendix N: the Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons (published by Strange Attractions and distributed by MIT Press), and several by Jon Peterson: The Elusive Shift, Game Wizards, and the forthcoming second edition of Playing at the World. The full list of books in their series can be viewed here.

The latest book in the series, out on May 14th, is Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, an anthology tied to this year's half-centennial of D&D. It contains various chapters written by the likes of Jon Peterson, Gary Alan Fine (author of Shared Fantasy), and Daniel Justice, and edited by Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter and José P. Zagal, all academics at various universities. 

Having written the above, I find myself a bit stunned to also announce that I was able to contribute to this volume...! 

Specifically, among the contents is a chapter on J. Eric Holmes that I have co-written, along with Tony Rowe of the Cryptic Archivist blog, titled "'Doctor Holmes I Presume?' How a California Neurology Professor Penned the first Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set".

I haven't seen a physical copy yet, but the book is slated to be a 392-page, 6 by 9 inch papeback with 16 black & white illustrations and the color cover posted above (I'm not sure who the artist is, but I will update this when I find out). I will share the full contents of the book in a future post (Update: the Table of Contents are now posted here).

It's currently available for pre-order on Amazon ($34.99), and with a price drop guarantee:

50 Years of Dungeons & Dragons

And there is also a Kindle version available for $25.99. Other booksellers offering it can be found through the MIT Press page.

Many thanks to Tony for asking if I wanted to work on this with him, submitting the proposal for our chapter, and generally organizing and driving things forward!

See also:

Playing at the World Revised Edition Out in July, with a cover by Erol Otus!

"The Making of OD&D: 1970-1977": Everything We Know About this Book

Update:

Tony has now also written about the book: "Book update: Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons"

50 Years of Dungeons & Dragons: Table of Contents

Gygax's Yggsburgh (2005) available once again

The front cover of Yggsburgh,
with an illustration by Jeffrey Catherine Jones

If you haven't heard, Gary Gygax's Yggsburgh sandbox campaign setting, originally released in 2005 and withdrawn from sales after he passed away in 2008, is once again available for purchase from Troll Lord Games, following an agreement with the Gygax estate. You can pre-order the hardcover from the TLG site for $65, which also includes an immediate download of the PDF, or you can buy the PDF alone from DrivethruRPG for $19.99:

Yggsburgh Print (pre-order) + PDF 

Yggsburgh PDF only

For those unfamiliar with it, Yggsburgh is a re-casting of Gygax's long-delayed City of Greyhawk project, intended as a setting for exploring the Castle Greyhawk dungeons, here re-christened Castle Zagyg.  

Back in May of 1980, shortly before the initial publication of the World of Greyhawk campaign setting, Gary Gygax discussed future releases for the setting in issue 37 of The Dragon, where in his regular column "From the Sorcerer's Scroll", under the title "Greyhawk: The Shape of the World", he estimated that "The City of Greyhawk might make a 1981 publication date, certainly 1982, and about the same time the series which will eventually represent the whole of the Dungeons of Castle Greyhawk will begin". Sadly, neither title ever appeared under Gygax's byline, and became the most infamous of TSR vaporware. 

Decades later, in the early 2000s, Gygax finally started a new project to publish this material, this time under the aegis of TLG's Castles & Crusades RPG. However, only Yggsburgh and the first portion of the Castle Zagyg, titled the Upper Works (2007), were finished and released before Gygax passed away, and the license to publish them was withdrawn.

Yggsburgh is a sprawling 256-page hardcover book, with cover art by the great Jeffrey Catherine Jones, repurposed from the 1972 Avon paperback edition of Nine Princes of Amber by Roger Zelazny. This was the first novel in the Amber series, which was included by Gygax in Appendix N in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide in 1979. Originally, the entire series of Castle Zagyg books was slated to feature covers with Jones' classic work from the 1970s.

The book itself is also accompanied by an 8-page hexmap, drafted by Darlene in a style similar to her original maps for the World of Greyhawk, which was tipped into the back cover in the 2005 publication. This depicts an area 50 hexes east-west and 34 hexes north-south, at 1 mile per hex, for a total area of 1,700 square miles:

Players Version of the Yggsburgh Hex Map by Darlene

Rather than just being a high-level gazetteer, Yggsburgh is a big sandbox, which I'd compare to Lenard Lakofka's AD&D module L1 The Secret of Bone Hill. There's a city with 93 described areas, including the famous Green Dragon Inn, and an area map with 48 described locations, and including a number of fully detailed small dungeons, which is often overlooked: 

• Thieves' Underground (13 rooms)
• River King's Tomb (19 rooms)
• The Cursed Mine (14 rooms)
• The Gnome Burrows (25 rooms)
• The Unholy Ringstones (25 encounter areas)

These could easily be extracted and run as one-shots or dropped in other settings. 

Castle Zagyg and Rob Kuntz's Dark Chateau (2005) are also two of the intended locations in the sandbox, so there is the potential for larger dungeons, although this does make the campaign setting incomplete on its own if you intend to use those.

I've had the original hardback for many years, and it's probably my favorite late-era Gygax product. While I haven't run anything from it yet, I will pick it up every now and then and read a bit. It's sort of a glorious sprawling mess like the original AD&D DMG, but in campaign setting form.

"D&D and Fantasy Fiction: Giants in the Oerth": a talk by John Rateliff

On 1/28/21 there was a online talk, open to the public, titled "D&D and Fantasy Fiction: Giants in the Oerth", given by John D. Rateliff, who is both a Tolkien scholar (author of the History of the Hobbit) & a former TSR employee (author of the Return to the Keep on the Borderlands module among others). The talk was recorded and is now available here:

https://youtu.be/b5Kynx0NZQA

I watched the talk & enjoyed it, particularly Rateliff's concluding "fantasy crossroads" image  from the last issue of the Strategic Review. Knowing that Rateliff had written his doctoral dissertation on Lord Dunsany, I asked a question about his influence on D&D, having been listed in Appendix N of the Dungeon Masters Guide.

The talk was co-hosted by the University of Glasgow Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic , which has a page for the talk here: fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/2021/01/06/dd-and-fantasy-fiction-giants-in-the-oerth/

Rateliff blogs regularly at Sacnoth's Scriptorium: sacnoths.blogspot.com/

(Updated 1/29)

Grognardia interviews Chris Holmes

If you missed it, the newly resurrected Grognardia blog posted a new interview with Chris Holmes this past Friday. Chris answers ten questions, with lots of stories about discovering D&D in the mid-'70s.

Chris also recently guested on the Save for Half podcast, Episode 26.5: North Texas RPG Con, and back in the spring was on the Appendix N Book Club podcast, Episode 67 Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan At the Earth's Core. 

Interview: Chris Holmes

Today's interview was a real treat for me. Chris Holmes, son of Dr J. Eric Holmes, kindly agreed to answer my questions about his own experiences with roleplaying, as well as the life and works of his father, whose Basic Set was the very first RPG I ever owned. 1.

Chris Holmes on the Appendix N Book Club podcast

Chris Holmes, son of J. Eric Holmes and an RPG illustrator, is the guest on the latest episode of the Appendix N Book Club podcast!

In this episode they discuss Tarzan at the Earth's Core, a crossover between Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and Pellucidar series. J. Eric Holmes wrote an authorized sequel to the latter that was published in 1976, Mahars of Pellucidar.

"Chris Holmes joins us to discuss Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan at the Earth’s Core”, contemporary fantasy fiction, the Holmes Basic set, the varying levels of dignity given to the black characters, IP crossovers, surprisingly positive depictions of Germans, “Mahars of Pellucidar”, magic dirigibles, the developmental biology of reptiles, informal vs codified ways of encouraging heroism in RPGs, the incredible speed in which pulp characters learn new languages, the future of Pellucidarian fandom, and much more!"

Here is the link to the show:

Episode 67: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan at the Earth’s Core”

Demos S. aka paleologos who writes the OSR Grimoire blog gets a shout-out from Chris for helping to facilitate the show.

And make sure you listen all of the way to end for a surprise announcement from Chris regarding his father's books!

Holmes' 1983 review of the Call of Cthulhu RPG: Rediscovered and republished in Bayt Al Azif #2

Cover art by Jensine Eckwall

A major announcement for Holmes enthusiasts: in 1983 Holmes wrote a review of the then relatively new Call of Cthulhu RPG (by Sandy Petersen), for the inaugural issue of the short-lived Gameplay Magazine (February '83 to April '84), a periodical similar to Dragon but with much more of a general gaming focus. I was completely unaware of this major piece by Holmes ⁠— one of his last in the field of writing about RPGs ⁠— until recently when the long-lost article was rediscovered by Tony A. Rowe of the Cryptic Archivist blog. The original 1986 author bio for the Maze of Peril novel mentions that Holmes had articles in several magazines including Gameplay, but after finding a computer game review he wrote in a later issue (detailed in the Holmes bibliography) I had assumed that was all he had written for that publication. Not so. The review, which is a two full pages as originally published, is written in his characteristic engaging and genre-fan style and includes anecdotes and advice based on CoC games that he himself had run, as well as providing more fodder for a Holmes "Appendix N". 

And now, with the permission of Chris Holmes, I am thrilled to announce that this article is once again in print in the second issue of the Cthulhu RPG magazine Bayt Al Azif, along with brand new illustration by Chris of a scene from one of those actual-play stories (!), and a half-page of commentary on the review by myself (bringing the total to 3 full-pages):

Bayt al Azif issue 2

(link includes my DrivethruRPG affiliate number)

Both digital and hardcopy are available through the above link. This second issue is longer ⁠— 108 pages ⁠— than the the first, and once again includes a wide variety of articles of interest to the Cthulhu RPG enthusiast, including multiple scenarios set in different eras. Here's a screenshot of the Table of Contents:

Thanks to Tony for locating and scanning the original article, to Chris for agreeing to reprint it and providing accompanying art, and to the editor Jared Smith for accepting it for his magazine and doing the layout.

See also the earlier post about my article for the first issue of Bayt al Azif.

Holmes' 1946 Letter to a Pulp

Above is "Advice", a letter from a sixteen-year-old John Eric Holmes to Famous Fantastic Mysteries, a fantasy and sci-fi pulp magazine, with many enthusiastic suggestions for older stories they might republish. The letter appeared on page 127 of the April 1946 issue.

At the time of writing this letter, Holmes attended the Punahou School in Honolulu where he lived with his parents; his father Wilfred "Jasper" Holmes taught engineering at the University of Hawaii, both before and after WWII. Wilfred had remained on the island during the war, serving as an intelligence officer in the Navy, about which he later wrote a book, Double-Edged Secrets (1979). Wilfred was himself an author of fiction, having written naval adventure stories under the pseudonym Alec Hudson since the '30s, the majority published in the Saturday Evening Post.

According to an interview with John Martin, at the age of eight Eric discovered the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and was even able to meet the author at his house in Hawaii and have a Tarzan book signed. And then around the time he turned ten, Eric found "the pulps". The author bio for his short story "Martian Twilight" (1991), states that "he read S. J. Perelman's review of the first issue of CAPTAIN FUTURE in the THE NEW YORKER's "Talk of the Town," [January 1940] and discovered the pulps. He has been a dyed in the wool fan ever since". While most of his recommendations in "Advice" are for "Weird Fiction" authors, he was also a fan of the adventure side of the pulps. His son Chris Holmes relays in "John Eric Holmes - The Books" that "[h]is favorite pulp hero, next to Captain Future, was Doc Savage. He also enjoyed the Shadow, the Spider, the Avenger and Fu Manchu."

Famous Fantastic Mysteries (FFM) was published from 1939-1953, and Fantastic Novels (FN) was a companion magazine published in 1940-1941. The stories that Holmes did not favor are "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster Wayland Smith, and "Before I Wake" by Henry Kuttner, both of which appeared in the March 1945 issue of FFM. When he refers to them as being like the fiction in Cosmopolitan, he is not referring to a fashion magazine, but an earlier incarnation that was a popular fiction magazine published by Hearst. A story he did favor, Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder", had appeared in the November 1944 issue of FFM. Presumably, Holmes was pleased that his letter appeared together in an issue that also included a reprint of Blackwood's classic "The Willows" (1907), as teased on the cover, and perhaps suggesting that the editors had listened to his advice:

Eric would graduate from Punahou the following year (1947), when his yearbook bio noted that he "keeps busy trying to crash the pulp market". Eventually he had a single story, the military sci-fi "Beachhead on the Moon", appear in the pulp Blue Book in 1951, when he was a psychology student at Stanford.

Eric Holmes remained a lifetime fan of these authors. Thirty years after this letter, he would write an authorized sequel to Burroughs' Pellucidar series, Mahars of Pellucidar (1976), as well a further unpublished continuation, Red Axe of Pellucidar. And I've described his role in bringing the Lovecraftian Mythos into D&D in the later '70s. Chris Holmes indicates that [h]e read everyone in the "Lovecraft Circle" and his favorite of Lovecraft's influences were William Hope Hodgson and Arthur Machen". In 1988, while living in the UK, Eric sent a short report describing a meeting of the Machen Society (an appreciation club) to the fanzine Crypt of Cthulhu, published in issue 57.

From this list, we can also see how from an early age Eric Holmes was "primed" to embrace D&D when it appeared in the mid-70's. While only three of the authors he suggests are are also found in Appendix N (Burroughs, Dunsany and Lovecraft, with an earlier version in Dragon also including Blackwood), the majority were strong influences on Lovecraft; all except Burroughs, Collier, Roberts and Taine are mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Literature.

Authors Recommended for the Pulps by Holmes in 1946, in "Appendix N" format

Blackwood, Algernon

Burroughs, Edgar Rice

Chambers, Robert W. — THE KING IN YELLOW (1895)

Collier, John

Dunsany, Lord (Edward Plunkett) — TIME AND THE GODS, THE BOOK OF WONDER (1912), THE BLESSING OF PAN (1927)

Hodgson, William Hope

Lovecraft, H.P. — THE DREAM QUEST OF THE UNKNOWN KADATH (composed 1927, first published by Arkham in 1943)

Machen, Arthur — THE GREAT GOD PAN (1894), THE THREE IMPOSTERS (1895, includes "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "Novel of the White Powder"), THE RED HAND (1895), THE HOUSE OF SOULS (1906 compilation, includes "The Shining Pyramid" (1895) and "The White People" (1904))

Roberts, Charles  — IN THE MORNING OF TIME (1919)

Smith, Clark Ashton 

Taine, John — THE IRON STAR (1930)

Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus (1970)

We're going to need a bigger boat, mateys...

Yesterday's used bookstore find: Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus, the sixth and last novel in Lin Carter's Thongor series. This series is Appendix N-adjacent, as Carter is called out in the list but only for his later Warrior at the World's End (1974).

Carter is probably best known for his pastiche work with L. Sprague de Camp on the Lancer/Ace editions of Conan, but he also edited seminal '70s fantasy series such as Ballantine Adult Fantasy and Flashing Swords, works that helped popularize the fantasy genre in the '60s & '70s. Years ago I read his very early (1969) book on Tolkien's work, A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings. 

Carter also helped get the Cthulhu Mythos into D&D by way of J. Eric Holmes; Holmes cited Carter's "H.P. Lovecraft: The Gods", in The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959), as one of his sources for his “Lovecraftian Mythos in D&D” article in Dragon #12 in 1978. See my post The Cthulhu Mythos in D&D in the 1970s.

Thongor is a "Clonan", with the above cover specifically calling out Howard's character: "Sorcery and seafighting - and mortal peril for the mightiest warrior-hero CONAN". The author's note situates the series on "the Lost Continent of Lemuria" (drawing from Lemuria in popular culture), which is Carter's Hyborian Age analog.

The particular paperback I found is stated as the third printing, published by Berkely Medallion in 1976, with a fantastic cover by Vincent DiFate, different than the 1970 original.

I'm not sure when I'll get to reading this, but I'll try to update this post when I do. Possibly the pirates in this book will inspire some background details for the pirates in the sea cave in the Sample Dungeon.

See also "Ochre Jelly Inspiration?" which discusses a Carter & de Camp Conan story.

Ochre Jelly Inspiration?

Illustration from Worlds of Fantasy #1 (1968)

I've just finished reading Conan of Cimmeria (1969), the second volume of the famous Lancer/Ace series of Conan paperbacks from the late 1960s (the second in internal chronology, not publication order). Nowadays one can easily find compilations of pure Howard material, but back then these slim paperbacks were the main way to encounter Conan. This particular volume is a dog's breakfast of material that includes Howard Conan stories; a non-Conan Howard story edited to be Conan; a Howard draft finished by de Camp; and pastiches written completely by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. The origin of each story is helpfully identified in the front matter of the book.

The de Camp/Carter stories are essentially filler connecting the Howard tales --- brief stories about Conan encountering some menace while traveling from one region to another. Though less exciting than the Howard stories I've found them to be competently written, and quick reads. And certainly suitable as inspiration for D&D encounters.

The first pastiche in the book is The Curse of the Monolith and was originally printed as Conan and the Cenotaph in the magazine Worlds of Fantasy #1 (1968). The illustration above shows the monster which threatens Conan in this story. It is described as a "huge lump of quivering, semi-translucent jelly", pulsing with "throbbing, bloated life" and glistening wetly as it beats "like a huge, living heart". It first extends a single "slippery pseudopod" that exudes "a digestive fluid, by means of which is consumed its prey", later joined by more pseudopods. Elsewhere it is described as a "wet jelly", "living jelly", "jelly-beast" or a "slime-monster". 

The description of course immediately brings to mind the "clean-up crew" of D&D, and in particular the Ochre Jelly. These creatures appeared fully formed in the original D&D rules, with Ochre Jelly, Black (or Gray) Pudding, Green Slime, Gray Ooze all being described in Volume 2, Monsters & Treasure. They are not, however, in Chainmail or the pre-publication "Guidon D&D" draft from 1973, which means they were added to the D&D draft at some point between "Guidon" and the first publication of D&D in Jan 1974. So the The Curse of the Monolith was available well before their first appearance.

In OD&D we learn that the Ochre Jelly "is a giant amoeba which can be killed by fire or cold, but hits by weaponry or lightening [sic] bolts will merely make them in to several smaller Ochre Jellies. Ochre Jelly does not affect stone or metal, but it does destroy wood, and it causes one die of damage per turn it is in contact with exposed flesh. It seeps through small cracks easily".

The jelly of the monolith is not specifically described as an amoeba, but has pseudopods, a term that is closely associated with amoebas. The jelly-beast is not described as being ochre in color, instead being semi-translucent and turning pink after feeding. But its abilities and vulnerabilities are similar to the Ochre Jelly. It dissolves flesh but not stone, like the Monolith on which it lives,  or metal, such as a rusty dagger of a former victim that Conan finds. And Conan finally destroys the jelly with fire, which is one of the vulnerabilities of the Ochre Jelly. Compare with the Black Pudding and Green Slime, which are also vulnerable to fire but can dissolve metal, or the Gray Ooze, which is immune to fire.

I don't want to read too much into this, because it is certainly possible that these similarities are pure coincidence. There are many stories out there about the inspiration for the oozes --- the Blob, the Green Slime movie, etc. Rob Kuntz mentions these in a 2009 blog post, Origin of the Black Pudding? Roots in CA Smith Conceptions? These stories don't generally call out the Ochre Jelly specifically, so I'm not sure whether it originated with Arneson or Gygax.

The Ochre Jelly may have just been created as an alternatively colored "goo monster" to the Black Pudding and Green Slime, and then given different characteristics to distinguish it. But the frequent use of the name "jelly" in the story coupled with its similar abilities and vulnerabilities is certainly worth noting in a list of possible inspirations.

See also ---
Holmes on Solomon's Stone by de Camp
Conan on the River of Doom (unfinished Conan novel by Holmes; de Camp was editor)
de Camp & Holmes in Dragon Magazine

Update: Re-reading the summary of the Blob, which I saw many years ago, I see that it grew redder to more victims it consumed, which is a specific detail very similar to the color change of the jelly-beast in the Conan story. This suggests that de Camp and Carter had this movie in mind for their story, ala Conan meets the Blob.

Update #2: Here on DF, Gygax credits the Black Pudding to Arneson --- 

"Dave Arneson evidentally disliked English black pudding, made up an amoeboid monster of that name which I glommed onto..figuratively of course. 

If he was thinking of Shoggoths when he envisaged the critter, only Dave knows..."

The "glommed onto" presumably refers to adding the various other members of the cleanup crew.

Here in his EnWorld Q&A, Gygax takes credit for the Ochre Jelly, but disclaims any influence other than nature ---

"Because of the large and varied ecology of the D&D dungeons and underground, it was necessary to have scavengers of all sorts, so I made up the gelatinous cube, carrion crawler, ocher jelly, etc. There was no particular inspiration save for nature--amobeas, insect larva, and imagination."

Update #3: Here's a link to Dave Arneson indicating (in 2008) that he read the Ace/Lancer Conan series. Thanks to Geoffrey McKinney for finding this (see his comment below).

Official Dave Arneson Q&A at ODD74

Part 53: "The Room Contains a Giant Snake"

Part 53 of a comparison of Holmes' manuscript with the published Basic Set rulebook. Turn to page 45 of your 'Blue Book' (page 44 for the 1st edition) and follow along...

The final part of the Sample Dungeon is the 3-part tower of the evil magic-user, who also frequents Room F where he is first described. In this part I'll cover Rooms S and S1, leaving S2 for the next post.

Room S - Spiral Staircase
  
This is the only part of this area actually shown on the map; the other two rooms (S1 and S2) are situated directly above it and are accessed by a staircase. Room S is part of the dungeon and is the only circular room in the dungeon. Does it date back to the time of Zenopus who excavated in his cellars or did the evil magic-user, who is trying "to take over the dungeons", dig it under his tower? On the published map, we can estimate that the thaumaturgist's tower is only about 300 feet from the ruins of Zenopus' tower. The roof of the room is 25 feet above, which is the same height as the entrance stairs at the start of the adventure, so this tower is either on the same hill as the ruins, or a nearby hill of similar height.

As you can see above, Room S on Holmes' original map is larger in relation to the other rooms of the dungeon. For example, Room S is larger than Room F. The published map puts it only about 40 feet across, but is should probably be more like 50 or 60 feet.

The room has four entrances/exits, including doors to the north and south, a secret door "opened by pressing a hidden catch" under the stairs and leading to a tunnel to Room F, and a trap door on the ceiling accessed by a spiral staircase going around the wall. The staircase is said to start at the north wall and make one full turn, which would place the trap door directly above the north door to the room. So the map only shows part of the staircase.

While the room can be accessed from other rooms in the dungeon, the evil wizard has a suitably hideous guardian for his tower - a giant snake. This is the only other thing in the room besides the staircase. 

Serpents of unusual size are fairly common in pulp fiction. Conan in particular encountered them on several times, including some associated with wizards. For example, in the Scarlet Citadel (1933), Conan is trapped with a giant snake in "the tunnels and dungeons wherein Tsotha [the wizard] performed horrible experiments with beings human, bestial, and, it was whispered, demoniac, tampering blasphemously with the naked basic elements of life itself".

Conan Chained by Frank Frazetta, used for the cover of Conan the Usurper (1967), a collection which includes The Scarlet Citadel

 

This being an introductory adventure, the snake here is not terribly difficult. Holmes gives it 2 HD, AC 6 (explicitly described as "leather and shield") and a move of 100 feet / turn. It would also have the default 1 attack for 1d6 damage. There are no giant snakes in the Holmes Basic Monster List, so this is another example of the "Giant Animals or Insects" from the Monster List in the manuscript, which was deleted by Gygax. 

There are no snakes in Chainmail, but OD&D Vol 2 mentions "snakes" in the description of "Insects or Small Animals", which are creatures with 1 hit point to 1 HD, AC 8. The entry for "Large Insects or Animals" covers "giant ants and prehistoric monsters" having 2 to 20 HD, so one might interpret this as covering giant snakes. OD&D Vol 3 lists Giants Snakes on Monster Level 3 (pg 10), suggesting about 3 HD, and on the Swimmer table. The extra descriptions of Aquatic Monsters on page 35 include Giant Snakes, but these have 6 HD.

The Greyhawk Supplement included Giant Snake in the list of "Attacks and Damage by Monster Type" (i.e., variable monster damage), but we don't see that information included here, of course, since Holmes didn't include that information in the Monster List - it was added by Gygax during editing.

Moldvay Basic and the AD&D Monster Manual each include a differing assortment of Giant Snakes, none of them close to the snake here. In those books, the lower HD snakes are poisonous, and the constrictors are much larger, having 5-6 HD.

As published, the only changes to this room are to add the snake's hit points (13) and change trap door to "trap doors". This seems to be a mistake since the first paragraph still refers to a single "trap door".

Rooom S1 - Ground Floor

This is the "ground floor of the magician's tower", and with S2 above, the only "rooms" that are part of a building in Portown rather than the dungeon. The description indicates there is a street to the north of the tower, which would be between this tower and the ruins of Zenopus. Another spiral staircase leads up to a trap door to the next floor. There's a brief description of the contents, all mudane: a fireplace (suggesting the tower has a chimney), cooking utensils and a few chairs. As you might guess, since it's all basically descriptive there are no changes to this room as published.

Continue on to Part 54: "An Ape in an Iron Cage" (Room S2 and the Coda)
or Go Back to Part 52: "No End to the Rats" (Room RT)
or Go Back to the Index: The Holmes Manuscript