Through Dungeons Deep

by Robert Plamondon

Originally published in Dragon Magazine #135, July, 1988.

What Can You Do With Fifty Feet of Rope?

My characters have always used a lot of rope. They’ve used it to build bridges, lower people into chasms, climb mountains, hog-tie orcs, tether mules, and create traps. The creative uses of rope are nearly endless, but most game systems barely mention it. How much does it weigh? How much can it lift? Does it come in decorator colors?

Once, in a Chaosium RuneQuest® campaign that involved looking for a lost city in a big swamp, my character wanted to bring lots and lots of rope—about 1,000′ of it, in fact. RuneQuest gives the weight and breaking strength for rope (AD&D gives nothing but a price). According to the third-edition RuneQuest Gamemaster Book, a 30-meter rope that weighs 6 kg has a strength of 366 kg. Converting this to the D&D game’s standard 50′ rope, that would mean that a 50′ rope would weigh 6.7 lb. and be rated at 805 lb.

That sounds good, except that there are lots of different sizes of rope, and adventurers have uses for many of them. In addition, a quick look at a table of rope strengths would seem to contradict RuneQuest’s numbers. According to Mark’s Handbook,¹ standard fiber rope sizes start at 3/16” and go up to 4”. The weight of a 50′ manila rope varies in that range from 12 ounces to 219 pounds! And the breaking strength. varies from 450 lb. to a whopping 105,000 lb. The size closest to RuneQuest’s weight of 6.7 lb. per 50′ is 11/16″ rope, which has a breaking strength of 4,400 lb.

Fiber rope is usually made out of plant fibers; hemp, jute, and manila are the most common. These ropes are cheap, strong, and relatively durable. The biggest problems with rope are rotting and simple wear.

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by Robert Plamondon

This was my first-ever full-length paid article, in Dragon Magazine, Issue #40, August 1980.

Festus the Dwarf kicks open the wide door of the bandits’ dun­geon home and throws in two molotov cocktails, burning one of the twelve bandits to death and wounding two more. Right behind come Rangers Smith and Jones and Cleric Lucretia, who each lob two smoking oil flasks. Before the bandits can react, over half receive serious bums and several are dead. The pools of flaming oil prevent them from regrouping. With sword and bow, the invaders pick off the survivors and take the room. None of the adventurers has taken a hit.

Many players, like those mentioned above, have realized that flaming oil is the most powerful weapon available to a low-level player in AD&D. A flask of oil burning on a monster (or player character) does 3-18 points of damage in the space of two rounds and can be used by all character classes except Monks. Compare this to a “paltry” 1-10 points of damage done by each hit of a two-handed sword.

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When I and the world were young, my professional writing career got its start with a tiny piece in The Dragon, the D&D magazine from TSR Hobbies. This was my writeup of a humorous cursed magic item, The Rod of Singing, appearing in their Bazaar of the Bizarre column. They paid me money for it!

In the end, I sold them three magic items in 1980 and 1981, reproduced below. I went on to write many other articles and eventually a whole book, Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers’ Handbook (Reston Publishing, 1981, reprinted much later by me under my Norton Creek Press label).

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