Throwback Thursday: Holmes Basic G+ Community

 

Ten years ago today I posted on the Zenopus Archives about creating a Holmes Basic D&D community on the late, great G+:

Holmes Basic Community on G+

This community eventually grew to over 600 members, and thrived through April 2019, when G+ was abruptly shut down.

I was, however, able to export over 2,000 of the posts that were made to the group, including the comments, and archive them as a blog called the Holmes Basic G+ Community Archive, which you can find here: 

Holmes Basic G+ Community Archive

After I posted about this on Twitter earlier today, I learned that Twitter actually now has communities, and although they are so under-publicized that they are almost Cryptic Alliances, I ended up creating one for Holmes Basic, which if interested, you can find here:

Holmes Basic Twitter Community

Holmes Portrait by David Crawford

A fantastic portrait of Dr. Holmes in an imagined study drawn by fan David Crawford! 

David posted it to the Holmes Basic Facebook group last week and gave me permission to share it here. He wrote: "A little sketch in tribute to J. Eric Holmes, depicted here as a wizard (Zenopus himself?!?) in study."

Holmes studies a tome on his desk, while before him "is the ruined tower of ZENOPUS in the crystal ball". Behind him, a skull sits on one shelf of a large bookcase filled with books.

It really captures his likeness, and the black ink line art is reminiscent of David Sutherland's work in the late '70s. I can imagine this piece appearing with Holmes bio in the Basic rulebook.

Thank you, David, for making this.

Dicebreaker Article About OD&D Players

Meet the Original Dungeons & Dragons diehards still playing by '70s rules

Refusing to roll with the times. Most tabletop fans have thrown a rolled a d20 or two in their time - especially now, thanks to the unprecedented popularity of Dungeons & Dragons 5E - but we all have our own opinions about what edition of the RPG rules them all.

Today Matt Finch (of Uncle Matt's Blog) posted a link to this Dicebreaker article on OD&D:

Meet the Original Dungeons & Dragons diehards still playing by '70s rules

I'm not familiar with Dicebreaker or the author Steven T. Wright, but the article is a decent primer/intro to OD&D for a modern D&D audience. Smartly, the author talked to Matt and Delta (of Delta's D&D Hotspot) and much of the article reads as a conversation with them. 

Nice to see general interest attention on OD&D, though sadly the article mentions Dragonsfoot but not the OD&D Discussion forum. I left a comment thanking the author and providing a link there. 

500

The adventuring party forms ... artwork by David C. Sutherland III for the module B1 In Search of the Unknown

Raise your flagons: the Holmes Basic G+ community just hit 500 members for the first time!

If you like this blog, you might consider joining the G+ group. Over there I often post links to articles (other blogs, discussion group threads, news articles, etc) of interest to the members. It's not strictly limited to discussion Holmes Basic; rather, anything of interest to fans of the era is fine. If you set notifications "on", you can get an email sent to your gmail "Social" tab when anyone makes a post (generally only one or two a day at most). Plus Chris Holmes has been hanging out there lately!

I created the community in Dec 2012 when G+ added communities. At the time I had privacy concerns so I set it to private (and can't change this now), so you will need to request to join, but I approve all requests that appear to be from real people interested in the community. 

Right now is great time to join because there's a fun collaborative project going on, organized by Jon of the Appendix M blog, which you can still participate in. Essentially, he's getting everyone to submit their stats/descriptions for anything shown in the art of the Holmes Basic rulebook. It will be assembled into a zine. If the art of the rulebook ever inspired you to create anything new, it would be perfect for this. Multiple submissions for each piece are being accepted. I've submitted my version of the lizardman riding the lizard art at the top of this blog!