Charlie the Tramp

Charlie the Tramp (also known as Charles Lyeman or Charles E. Trampin') is a tramp who is found right next to the southern entrance to Varrock, at the end of the alleyway to the Black Arm Gang's headquarters. He tells players about the Black Arm Gang headquarters during the Shield of Arrav quest.

Charlie may be named after the silent actor, Charlie Chaplin, who often played a character known as The Tramp (and occasionally named as Charlie). He appears to be wearing villager sandals. If players choose to do so they may donate a coin or two to him, possibly being a reference to begging.

Wealth
Despite his apparent poverty, he claims to be surprisingly rich. In the Postbag 31 edition of Postbag from the Hedge (dated the 29 May 2008), a player asked him how much money he had received. Charlie's response was: "in the region of maybe... a couple of billion these days, give or take a Christmas Cracker or two."

The value of a Christmas cracker on the Grand Exchange is 725 million coins, so two of them would be worth 1450 million (i.e. ¤1,450,000,000). This means that he is claiming to own a minimum of ¤550,000,000, or 550 million, coins (two billion minus the value of two Christmas crackers).

Assuming that Charlie was present in the very first beta release of RuneScape Classic, which was in January 2001, this means that Charlie has had 8 years to accumulate his money. This works out to approximately 6.2 million coins per month, or 203k per day. To gain this purely through begging would be a tremendous accomplishment.

RuneScape had approximately 9 million registered users as of November 2007. Even if we assume that this figure had existed since the beginning of RuneScape Classic (which is certainly not true), his 550 million fortune works out to 61 coins per player.

To put this another way, this means that every single one of the 9 million registered players would have had to have donated a coin to Charlie approximately every 44 days since RuneScape Classic was released. This seems highly unlikely, especially given the gross over-allowances at every stage of this calculation.

Myths
In RuneScape Classic, there was a myth that if a player gave Charlie 200 coins, by giving him one coin at a time, he would give them the key to the bank vault in Varrock. This was never found to be true.