For those Holmes fans living under a rock (hey, it’s cosy and dry down here!), Zenopus has been blogging his way through his copy of what appears to be Eric Holmes’s final manuscript of his Dungeons and Dragons for Beginners.
Understandably this has got me rather excited. A little too excited, in fact, insofar as I began considering all sorts of changes and revisions to BLUEHOLME™ in light of the revelations. For example – shocker! – there was no witch class mentioned in the manuscript! Of course, that means no witch in BLUEHOLME™ Compleat! Perfection is our goal, more Holmes than Holmes is our motto!
Well, hold it right there. Now that the initial shock has worn off, I have settled on a less radical course of action. The manuscript as so expertly analysed by Zenopus serves as an excellent source of errata and insight into what was intended in cases where the printed book is somewhat less than clear. As you can imagine, I am eagerly awaiting the bit with the dagger rule …
So, the long and short of it is, there will be some changes to the BLUEHOLME™ Compleat manuscript as a result of this, but nothing major. Except that there will be no witch class, after all. Fear not! Much soul-searching and the paragraph from the Holmes manuscript listing all the other sub-classes, into which some bright spark at TSR inserted the witch, has made up my mind. There will be a companion volume to the Compleat Rules for those who would like to introduce the classic sub-classes of paladin, ranger, druid, illusionist and assassin to their BLUEHOLME™ game.
And the witch. 😉
Dreamscape Design 
Why not adding those “sub-classes” as an appendix, juste like Gygax did in old-fashioned AD&D ?
Appendix are cool, they add optional rules to the core rulebook, making it more “compleat”. A “companion book” sounds a bit too commercial to me…
😦
Rest assured that there is no commercialism involved. The key consideration is page count, especially when considering a print version. If the additional page count is not too excessive the sub-classes would go in the main text of the book, because the appendices will really be reserved for add-ons, character sheets, reference tables and the like.
I am writing up the sub-class text at the moment, and the good news is that so far it doesn’t look as if it would bloat the book too much.