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

d12 Years of the Zenopus Archives!

This month marks twelve years since I started this blog, with today being the anniversary of when I first announced I would be posting here. 

In celebration of this anniversary, below you will see an autogenerated table of random posts from the past twelve years of this blog. Grab a d12 and roll for one to read. And then refresh your browser to see twelve different posts. 

Random Zenopus Archives Post (Roll d12)

And for a list of the highlights of the first ten years, see my earlier post Ten Years of the Zenopus Archives.

Blue Flame, Tiny Stars by Stephen Wendell

 

Arriving in the mail the day before yesterday was my comp copy of Blue Flame, Tiny Stars, a memoir of experiencing D&D for the first time by Stephen Wendell, who blogs over at Donjon Lands. In fact, this book started life as a series of posts over on that blog.

Get your copy here in PDF or POD:

Blue Flame, Tiny Stars at DrivethruRPG

Before publication, Stephen provided me with a copy of the compiled text for review, and here is the blurb that I provided him with after reading it:

“I greatly enjoyed Blue Flame, Tiny Stars, Stephen Wendell’s charming memoir of his discovery of Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1980s. It holds a particular fascination for me, as Stephen starts with the same version of the D&D Basic Set in the same year as myself. I recommend this book not just to fans of ‘Holmes Basic’ but to anyone who enjoys playing Dungeons & Dragons. The author’s clear prose captures the excitement of those early, half-remembered adventures when everything about the game was new and awe-inspiring.”

Now that I have the final product in hand, I can see that the document that I read has been turned into a beautiful book featuring a homage cover to Sutherland's original cover art, and other illustrations within by Stephen. It is about 30 pages long and zine-sized, and I am looking forward to reading again in this format.

Blogroll Updated

On the right sidebar of this blog, I've long had an extensive blogroll, named Helm of Telepathy after the magic item included in the Holmes Basic magic item list. It's as much for myself as others, and where I often looks for new posts on other blogs. 

Recently I had to recreate this blogroll, as the previous widget used by Blogger was no longer functioning correctly. I took the opportunity to split it into several categories: the aforementioned Helm of Telepathy, which remains the main one for RPG blogs; Miniatures Gaming; Fiction & Tolkienana; Text Adventures, for both text-based computer games and printed gamebooks; and Misc (these links will only work in desktop mode, as the sidebar is not visible in mobile mode). My total "Reading List", which I believe can only be seen in the Blogger controls, currently includes 113 blogs.

Below those, I also include the feed for Old School RPG Planet, the blog aggregator managed by Alex Schroeder, who blogs here.

In recreating the blogroll, I eliminated a number of blogs that had not been updated in a year or more, or for which I couldn't get the RSS feed to work correctly. 

If you are reading this and have a blog that you think I would like, and would like me to add it, please leave the link or name in a comment below.

Ten Years of the Zenopus Archives

Ten years ago today, I made the first post to this blog, "What lies in the (undiscovered) deeper levels where Zenopus met his doom?", which was titled after Holmes' question in the coda to the Sample Dungeon. It was essentially just a teaser post, with just two links, both still active: one to the Zenopus Archives site, which was already under construction, and one to the Holmes Basic subforum on ODD74. But soon after that I started to post regularly, which ballooned to 65 posts in the last four months of 2011, and then 130 the next year, a pace that I have not kept up with since. But I have kept at it, and now it's ten years later, which is almost three times as long as the original era of Holmes Basic, and I have no plans for stopping.

 Source

TSR celebrated their 10th Anniversary with a Collector's Set, so I'm doing the same with 10 years of highlights, a sort of "Collector's Set" for the Zenopus Archives:

2011

Holmes on Tolkien

Caves of Chaos Revealed

2012

Warlock or How to Play D&D without playing D&D?

How Zenopus Met His Doom 

2013

The Cthulhu Mythos in D&D in the 1970s

Holmes Manuscript Series

2014

20 Backgrounds for OD&D

Fearsome Monsters

2015

Visualizing Castle Greyhawk

Beyond the Door to Monster Mountain

2016

Con Report for NTRPGCon 2016

Gygaxian Orc Tribes

2017

Holmes Ref 2.0

Tales of Peril Book Club

2018

Gygax's "Dungeon Delving" Playtest Reports

The J. Eric Holmes Photo Gallery

2019

The Holmes Basic G+ Community Archive

In Search of the Brazen Head of Zenopus at Gary Con

The Master's Lair, A Play Report

2020 

Release of The Ruined Tower of Zenopus 

In Search of the Brazen Head of Zenopus at Scrum Con

2021

d20 Unexpectedly Intelligent Monsters in the Monster Manual

Holmes Basic Cover Art: Exhibited!

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.

Fen Orc on the Ruined Tower of Zenopus

Fen Orc is relatively newish but very productive blog I'd recommend to any fans of this one. Per the sidebar, like many of us of a certain age, the author "got into D&D back in the '70s with Eric Holmes' 'Blue Book' set". Early on Fen Orc got my attention with a review (perhaps the first!) of my mini-dungeon, Beyond the Door to Monster Mountain and a look at the Legacy of Zenopus. 

Fen Orc has also been hard at work on material for you to use at the table, including a compilation of scenarios, the Fen Orc Almanac, which are compatible with Holmes Basic/Blueholme, and also a 2nd level for the Zenopus dungeon, Beneath the Ruined Wizards' Tower, which is pay-what-you-want on Drive Thru RPG.

I meant to highlight this earlier, but back in March, Fen Orc wrote an almost poetic review of The Ruined Tower of Zenopus. Here is a lovely excerpt:

"Two bucks buys you 18 pages, faultlessly formatted and a beautiful cover painting (Thomas Cole’s 1838 Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower) that seems to symbolise the whole project: the crumbling tower is the monument of Holmes’ Basic D&D; the idyllic shepherd tending his flock in the shadow of the tower, that is Zach; the little boat out among the islets, that’s us, wondering if we should put ashore: in a moment the shepherd will stand up and wave to us to drop anchor. There’s treasure here, you see, that Zach knows about, in a place long neglected."

Read the full review here:

The Ruined Tower of Zenopus by Zach Howard

We are entering the post-modernity of roleplaying games. The author is dead. How quaint it is to look back on the modern era (the 1970s and '80s) with its assumptions about authorship and ownership, of texts with single discourses, of official 'canons'. It's not like that now, what with retro-clones and open gaming licences and Old School Revivals.

Click on the "RTOZ review" label below to find more reviews of the Ruined Tower of Zenopus

The Ruined Tower of Zenopus is available on DMs Guild

Fen Orc on "The Master of Dungeons"

Awesome post alert!

The Master of Dungeons

In this post the Fen Orc (formerly known as RPG Forge; I featured two of their posts previously) sets forth a new concept, "The Master of Dungeons", that could be added to any D&D dungeon near a city/town/domain setting. It will create more interactivity between the surface and dungeon elements, and interject all kinds of fun conflict and chaos. The post does an great job laying out the concept and then illustrating with a specific example designed for the Zenopus sample dungeon; I was enthralled as I read it.

The Master of Dungeons

I was reflecting the other day about what a valuable resource 'dungeons' are and how odd it is that, in most campaigns, they don't seem to be owned by anybody. Which is peculiar, really, because dungeons are a powerful economic resource. Not only are they full of treasure, but magic items too.

The Holmes Basic G+ Community Archive

...or how I created another blog with over 2000 posts:

The Holmes Basic G+ Community Archive

What is this Archive?

The top post explains what the archive is, and I've copied the intro over from there:

This archive [which is a new Blogger blog] preserves most of the posts made to the Holmes Basic D&D Community on the late G+. I created this Community in late 2012, not long after Communities were added, and it existed through April 2nd 2019, when G+ was shutdown for non-commercial users. By the end there were over 600 members. While most were not active, there was always a core group of commenters to keep things interesting.

There are over 2100 posts included, made by myself and various members of the community, each accompanied by its original comments. While a number of posts (~500?) are shares and thus duplicative of posts on the Zenopus Archives blog, these have been saved because they include different comments. The other ~1600 posts fall into two broad categories. I often used G+ for quick shares of images and links of interest to the community, material often not posted to the ZA blog. And then there are the many posts by other members of the community. A big thank you to everyone who participated!

Some highlights include (to be updated):

Michael Thomas providing updates on the progress of his retroclone Blueholme

Jon Wilson organizing contributions for two issues of the Holmes-art inspired zine, FEI

Chris Holmes joining in 2016 and becoming an active commentator

Tony Rowe with scans of Holmes' & other D&D magazine articles

Tristan Tanner with a fun series of new monsters (cryptids, movie monsters and later edition conversions) for Holmes Basic throughout the later half 2018

Weresharks and Skull Mountains

[The post continues with some technical information about the posts, labels and images]

Fantastic Exciting Imaginative zine

A different perspective...

Fantastic Exciting Imaginative is a new zine of content for Holmes Basic or any old-D&D, compiled by Jon Wilson (aka bygrinstow) of the Appendix M blog. Contributors were drawn from G+ and include Jon, Paul Wolfe, JV West, Robert Fairbanks, Shane Ward, Tony A. Rowe, James George, Robyn George, Grandpa Chet, and myself. Jon is the primary artist, with one piece each by Denis McCarthy and Chris Holmes (!)

The name comes from Holmes' first line in the Introduction to the Basic Rulebook: "Dungeons & Dragons is a fantastic, exciting and imaginative game of role playing for adults 12 years and up".

For the theme, Jon's brilliant idea was to compile material inspired by each piece of art in the Basic rulebook (2nd/3rd edition) by the artists David C. Sutherland III, Dave Trampier and Tom Wham. Multiple contributions per artwork were accepted. For instance, my main contribution is the Regal Lizard Man*, a write-up of the lizardman in Sutherland's artwork accompanying the Foreword (shown in the header of this blog). But the same art also inspired the Iguanadyte by Robert Fairbanks. My other minor contribution is the Harpy Axe, a magic item inspired by the Harpy battle scene, which appeared previously as part of a list of "Lesser Magic Items" in the zine Dungeon Crawl.

Click here to download the free zine from DTRPG**
(It's only available in pdf, but the pdf does include a version optimized for printing at home).

*Inspired by the Regal Horned Lizard of the American Southwest
**link includes my Drivethrurpg affiliate # that gives me 5% credit if you do buy something while you are 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!

Chris Holmes Website

Chris Holmes, son of J. Eric Holmes, now has his own website at holmeswest.com.

There's a lot of fun stuff over there: 

-An article by Chris about his father's favorite authors, accompanied by a previously unpublished photo (an alternate of the one appearing in Holmes' 1981 FRPG book)

-A list of 100+ his father's hardcover sci-fi, fantasy and horror books that Chris has for sale; if interested you can contact him through the site

-Samples of Chris' own artwork

-A section where you can ask questions of the great Cthulhu 

Update:
For the uninitiated, J Eric Holmes' earliest D&D games were played with Chris, his brother Jeff and other friends. Two of Chris' earliest characters were none other than Boinger the Halfling and Zereth the Elf, and Murray the Mage was run by his friend Eric. These characters and others were part of Holmes' campaign prior to editing the Basic D&D rulebook. Chris provided illustrations for some of the Boinger and Zereth stories, including Trollshead in The Dragon #31.

Crystal Ball - July

I use the Holmes G+ Community to quickly post links to articles & discussions related to Holmes Basic, generally only with a brief comment by myself. I'm going to start periodically rounding up these links for a blog post. Here are some from the last month, roughly in the order I posted them. I've only included material not featured in a separate post here.

* * * * * * * * * *

Does D&D play better when the players don't know the rules? 
Daztur on The RPG site writes: "Since last year I've run 1 hour-ish D&D (roughly Holmes Basic) mini-sessions with eight different classes of Korean 5-6 graders. They're great lab rats for testing rules and GMing styles since they have no idea what tabletop role playing is and are very enthusiastic (beats doing grammar lessons)."

The Acknowledgements in the Rules Cyclopedia include John Eric Holmes among others

Rules Cyclopedia pdf available on dndclassics.com 
The product history by Shannon Appelcline mentions Holmes Basic twice, including this interesting observation: "The Rules Cyclopedia was the result - and it also offered somewhere for the Black Box players to go when they finished with fifth level. Ironically, this was reportedly the exact same setup that Gygax had planned for the J. Eric Holmes Basic Set and also for AD&D, way back in 1977."

Mentzer Basic pdfs (DM and Players) also added
Two pdfs, one for Players book and one for DMs. I'd imagine the rest of BECMI will follow in the coming weeks. So we've got the revisions (Moldvay and Mentzer) but are still waiting for the original Basic! DrowningMan on DF reports: "Pdf quality is much better than the previous one, but some illustrations got too dark (i.e. pages 22 and 23 from PHB)" 

In response to a question, I added:

"There's some neat content by Mentzer: a solo introductory adventure in the Player's book, and an introductory DM adventure in the DM book. Only if you are partial to that kind of stuff. You can see the first few pages of each in the sample files" and "if you want just the Menzter introductory DM adventure, Wizards still has it up on the site as a free download (albeit a poor scan). It's generally called Mistamere Castle. Bargle appears for the first time in these adventures."

Most influential game book ever (and why)

An rpg.net thread that begins, "Most influential gaming book ever published; one volume only; one vote only. I personally think there are only two credible candidates: Holmes Basic D&D (the obvious choice, based on units sold and 'gateway drug' status for a generation) and the 1st Edition AD&D Monster Manual, which is my pick for the top dog..."

Characters Sheets in 1975
From the Playing at the World blog (Jon Peterson), a survey of early character sheets for OD&D. These predate Holmes Basic but are all suitable for use with it...

Two Different Takes on B1 on blogs:
B1 Hack - Into Cytheron Background
Adios, Caverns of Quasqueton

On Role-Playing (Part 2 of 11)
Part 2 of an 11 (!) part series on the B/X Blackrazor blog. This one focuses on the guidance (or lack thereof) on how to role-play in OD&D and Holmes.  

Holmes Blue Book

New Dragonsfoot thread with lots of guidance for someone new to Holmes Basic.

Basic D&D, Holmes Edition - a review

A new thread, five pages currently, in response to a critical review of Holmes Basic. Much of it consists of nice folks correcting misconceptions of the original poster.

Blue Book D&D

From Wayne at the Semper Initiativus Unum blog. A thoughtful essay on combining Holmes Basic with Cook Expert, with a focus on preserving features of Holmes: "At the table, Holmes is simpler and cleaner in many ways, but it requires some expansion past 3rd level. The easiest way to do this is what I call "Blue Book" D&D - Holmes Basic plus the Cook/Marsh Expert rulebook" 

[Holmes] Elf Classes & Hit Dice

Reboot of a 2007 thread on DF. The eternal question regarding Elf HD in Holmes Basic.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Feel free to add anything that I have missed.

Edit: Renamed the post "Crystal Ball"

Bruno's Demise: new blog

Bruno's Demise is a new blog with a Holmes/B/X/LL/1E focus. Bruno, of course, is the fighter from the Blue Book who defeats a goblin but then dies a horrible death from spider poison. The blog header illustrates this scene (I believe the art is by the blogger).

The author is 3d6 (aka The Landlord), also a member at OD&D Discussion forums. His website, The Golden Ball Inn, has three adventures available for 1st level LL characters, and he put together a set of rules for Holmes-like Labyrinth Lord.

 A few days ago in a post titled Centipede Taxonomy he explored the implications of the description of Giant Centipedes in Holmes and Moldvay, complete with a wonderful mini-dungeon. Check it out.

Wizards.com blog post

Today I spotted this recent (3/15) blog post on Wizards.com featuring the Holmes Basic Set:

Basic Damage by alphastream1

Warning: only read if you can tolerate some Holmes criticism mixed with 4E praise.

"Our group's first reaction was one of confusion. We really were not prepared for a book that was more poorly worded than OD&D, but this actually may be. It is actually hard to tell whether elf and dwarf are a race or a distinct class, and the class features are never in one place."

This is a new one to me; I haven't really heard anyone say Holmes is less clear than OD&D. Holmes says that dwarves and halflings are "members of the fighter class" and elves are both fighters and M-Us. Perhaps they were bringing Moldvay-baggage to the table and were confused that Holmes didn't go that far with race=class.

"At the end of character generation we were pretty sure we had a few things wrong. Thankfully, the game is very simple. 9 pages contain the information for players. The rest is spells, monsters, items, and a smattering of info about running a campaign."

This is a good observation. Nine pages (~17 single sided sheets) for the players. In fact if you have the pdf that RPGnow used to sell, you could print off these pages and voilà! instant Holmes Players Handbook for your players.

The last part of the post has some real howlers from an OSR point-of-view. Basically how we can never go back to "Basic" since we've evolved into higher lifeforms that must have story elements that interact with our characters' ponderous backstories. He agonizes over the trap that the more recent versions of D&D have fallen into: the players spend so much time crafting their characters that they can't stand to have them die, so there's no real sense of danger. Luckily, a few of the commenters, including llenlleawg (who has been posting recently at OD&D Discussion), take him to task.

Blue Boxer Rebellion: What's in the Blue Box?

Blue Boxer Rebellion, another blogger who started with Holmes Basic (but who I wasn't aware of when I last updated the list), has a cool graphic breaking down the sections of the Blue Book by %:

http://blueboxerrebellion.blogspot.com/2012/01/infographic-whats-in-blue-box.html

Monsters come in at #1 with 26%, with magic items at #2 with 12%. Magic together (spells plus magic items) totals 20%.

Blog Roundup of Holmes-Related Posts

I've had this list on the ZA site (here) for a while but hadn't posted it on the blog. I revised it a few days ago to add some new blogs and posts.

The blogs are ordered chronologically starting with the blog with the oldest post at top, and then for each blog the posts are ordered by date to the right. The subject matter includes anything related to Holmes Basic (including the Zenopus Dungeon, Skull Mountain, B1, B2, etc) or the other writings of Dr. Holmes.

An asterisk by the name of the blog indicates that the blogger started playing D&D with Holmes Basic. This is based on whether the blogger indicated this somewhere on their blog. 

Feel free to update me with any posts/blogs that I've missed, or let me know if you started with Holmes Basic.

Jeff's Gameblog: Mightiest Monsters - The Wonderful Scrolls of Doctor Holmes - Expanding Holmes Parts I & II

Grognardia*: Retrospective - RIP J. Eric Holmes - Maze of Peril - Blue Book, Cover to Cover, Parts I to XVII - Other Posts with a Holmes Label 

Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Holmes DnD: An Overview

The Troll Ate My Homework*: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in B1 - The Holmes Delusion

Robert Fisher: The generic unified RPG unsystem 

Aeons & Augauries*: D&D Characters I've Played - My Old D&D Boxed Set - Gargoyles

The Lands of Ara*: Auto-Ethnography - Stairs Up and Stairs Down 

Warlocks's Homebrew*: Where It All Began? - Beneath the Tower of Zenopus - Sessions I to XIV - B1 illustrated - Can D&D Ever Be Played Wrong? - Pod-Play Drama 

Oaths & Fates*: In the Beginning - Holmes Roots - Holmes: A Palimpsest

A Paladin in Citadel: Crappy Dice and Artwork - Experience Points - Um, I was promised Witches?

Cyclopeatron: J. Eric Holmes (1930-2010) - B2 for Newbie DMs: Easy Intro or Mind Shredding Trial by Fire?

World of Onn: Dr. J. E. Holmes (RIP)

Havard's Blackmoor Blog - RIP John Eric Holmes - Holmes' Obituary - Complete Classic 

Tower of Zenopus: Sample Dungeon with new players - Z is for Zenopus

Bat in the Attic*: Memories of Holmes' Blue Book - Generations of Gamers

Unfrozen Caveman Dice-Chucker*: Primordial D&D: Eric Holmes and the 11 year old's dungeon

Rolls, Rules and Rolls: Blue Book Brief Encounter 

SAVE OR DIE!: Holmes Basic Set, Parts 1 to 19 - On Alignment Changes from OD&D to Holmes

ChicagoWiz's RPG Blog*: [gone]

Xeveninti: Holmes Basic Box Set cover with logos removed

A Wizard in a bottle: B2 series: Hexmap - Geography - Bugbears & Catnip - Agriculture - Archaeology - Burials - Congregations - Eight Variants of Caves of Chaos - Inspirational Painting

The Contemptible Cube of Quazar: How to Make Your Own Skull Mountain

Tenkar's Tavern: First Look at Holmes - Second - Third - Fourth

Hill Cantons*: Holmes Expert Boxed Set: What If? - More on the Holmes Expert Set - Split Classes - How to Play D&D Like It's 1980 

Carjacked Seraphim*: Maze of Peril - In Memoriam - J Eric Holmes

Delta's D&D Hotspot: Basic D&D: Chainmail Conversions - B2 Used d6 Hit Dice - Giant Throwing - Maze of Peril Review

Coasters Castles Combustion: Ruins of Zenopus Session 1 - 2 - 3

Reviews from R'lyeh: This Skull Needs Flesh 

Fire in the Jungle: Tales of the Pronomir - Gygax, Holmes and Wesley in the Jungle (Source of the Nile)

There's Dungeons Down Under*: A Website for Holmes Basic

The Forbidden Mazes of the Jennerak: Maze of Nuromen (for 1st lvl) - Avamere Outdoor Campaign Map - Castle Totenkopf (for 3rd lvl)

Quag Keep: Basic Rulebook - Holmes - Dragon #52

Sandbox Empire: Two Old, One New

Super Galactic Dreadnought*: Wandering Monsters (Expanded Table) - My Own Dungeon - New Monsters

What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse: Dungeon Design: Holmes D&D 

Ten Foot Pole: Skull Mountain