10/31/2024
Captain Slinky Presents: Oddmall Emporium of the Weird Creepsmas 4! is coming up the weekend after next (11/9-10/2024), so I'm making a daily post of some of the hobby gaming and gaming-adjacent stuff I'm bringing to the show.
For a lot people in my generation (tweens and teens at the end of the 70s) these two books were our first entry to Dungeons & Dragons. The original D&D rules were notoriously hard for non-wargamers to make any sense of, so while Gary Gygax was busy working on the "Advanced" rulebooks for D&D, neurology professor J. Eric Holmes offered to digest the basics of the Gygax/Arneson rules into something comprehensible by a general audience. Holmes was uniquely suited for this role: not only was he an educator with an interest in how the brain works, but he also had over 20 years of experience writing science fact and science fiction for magazines like Analog.
Holmes's Basic D&D did exactly what it was intended to do--pull readers, young and not so young, into a hobby of imagination and fun. Near as I can figure, it's been 44 or 45 years since I opened the cover of that book and had my mind blown wide open. The module next to it is one that was packaged with the Holmes rulebook in the first version of the Basic D&D box set, and was itself designed to teach game masters how to put together a dungeon for their players to enjoy. And while I've spent my share of gaming sessions behind the GM's screen, I was lucky enough to have Wizard's Toy Box running most of the games I played in as a youngster... and occasionally as an adult!
Know a middle aged gamer that needs a shot of D&D nostalgia? Or maybe you'd like to try D&D as we played it back in the days we were walking to school barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways? Come visit us at Captain Slinky Presents: Oddmall Emporium of the Weird Creepsmas 4! in Monroe on 11/9-10!
