The El Raja Key Archive DVD - ordered Wed and delivered Sat!!!!!

The mail was delivered later than usual on Saturday and I did not check the mailbox until this morning. So ordered it Wednesday and it was delivered Saturday, which is pretty fast for the post office these days. Now I have the El Raja Key Archive DVD and I have test driven it and then copied the contents to my hard drive and test drove it again and it performed flawlessly! When you read the descriptions (historical information and backgrounds), at the bottom of that page are the images for that description. Click on an image and then scroll down to see each image, then what I do is click on the larger image and open in a new window. (open the large image not the thumbnail)


So far I have read/skimmed through about 100 pages of material (including the original Kalibruhn Supplement V manuscript), I will be going back and looking at it in much more in detail. Well worth the investment and I highly recommend it.

I love it and I will be spending a lot of time reading through the copious notes and descriptions. 

Thank you Rob!!!

More news from Three Line Studio

More news from Three Line Studio, letting us know that Robert J. Kuntz's Memoirs are underway and they will contain:

an overall pool of life stories spanning his days in Lake Geneva, his fortuitous meeting with Gary Gygax and the Gygax family in 1968, and his many and varied personal and professional observations from his career path as a free-lance designer and author.  This major work will include details on his friendships with Gary & Mary Gygax, Donald Kaye (co-founder of TSR), Dave Arneson, and his time as an employee and stockholder of TSR Hobbies, as GENCON's chairman, and his observations and insights from other unique perspectives.

Among many other things, I am looking forward to hearing more about Donald Kaye (co-founder of TSR) of which we know almost nothing.

★ El Raja Key Archive DVD: The Collected Maps, Manuscripts & RPG Artifacts of Robert J. Kuntz ★

Here it is ★ El Raja Key Archive DVD: The Collected Maps, Manuscripts & RPG Artifacts of Robert J. Kuntz ★ the extensive collections of over 1000 files rich with the history of  

high resolution scans of adventures, maps and keys, campaign notes, character sheets, and manuscripts from the Original Greyhawk, Kalibruhn, and Blackmoor Campaigns.

 Available for purchase at TLB Games!

El Raja Key Archive Now Available - Three Line Studio/Three Little Books line Goes Live @ 11 AM CST!

The day has arrived, Rob Kuntz has just announced here that:

After some delays to bring the project up to the highest standards possible Three Line Studio will launch its first brand under the partnership of Robert J. Kuntz and Paul J. Stormberg: the Three Little Books line of products.

He also states that

At 11 a.m. CST the store will go live! http://www.tlbgames.com/ and see his blog for additional links and information.

and provides the link in the blog posts along with several screen shots. So that you can purchase the here described El Raja Key Archive DVD. There are four price points ranging from basic to collectors editions. I am getting mine right now!

Major Crash and all of my Links in my Sidebars are gone

Major Crash and all of my Links in my Sidebars are all gone. So the first step is to rebuild my blog roll - all 600+ links and figure out how to keep it from happening again.

Big Sigh! :) and get to work. 

First Edit:
OK, the first 100 blogs have been added back. (They are being added in a random order since it is being done from scratch)

Second Edit:
OK, another 201 blogs have been added back! Now up to 301 blogs.  

Third Edit:
OK, another 104 blogs have been added back! Now up to  405 blogs. 

Fourth Edit:
OK, another 49 blogs have been added back! Now up to 454 blogs.


Once the blog roll is 90% complete, I will start on some of the other link lists as well. 

UnSung Heroes of the OSR World! - Part V

Ok, here we go! Blackmoor Week 2016 is over, a wedding was attended and other things have been taken care of and it is time to resume the UnSung Heroes of the OSR World! series.

This series is to honor some of those who are out their doing stuff for the rest of us to use and will mainly be for those who are doing free items, although I do not rule out highlighting as UnSung someone doing a product that is being sold.  I may do a series down the road on products that are being sold. As I have said before, I think that both free and non-free deserve respect. Each persoln will need to decide what can be supported and that can be complicated for some.

So on to some blogs nominated by readers to assume the mantle of UnSung Heroes of the OSR World!

First up is Halfling's Luck authored by James Spahn. It runs the gamet from B/X D&D to 5E and to clones such as Labyrinth Lord. He has also done a number of reveiws. This blog has been around since 2014 and has 126 posts, here are just a few of the posts that I really enjoyed:

The Limits of the Fading Folk
Death and Purpose in Gaming
Our Bastard: Anti-Heroes in a Heroic Campaign
Keeping Items Magical
Pardon My Rant: Respect for the DM

Just to mention a few, that is a pretty good sample of the blog. It was suggested to me and I like it.

Another blog that was nominated was Planet Algol and it was highly touted by the one who nominated it. So let's take a look at it:

A MASTER INDEX OF PLANET ALGOL CAMPAIGN RESOURCES

Here is a campaign journal sample from the blog:

The Expeditionary Journal of Xarnagan Vrokk Introduction
The Man Who Fell From The Sky And Other Important Events
Out of the Forbidden Mist and into the Tower of Tazar
Out of the Forbidden Mist and into the Hive of Sages
To Bring Back the Dead

This blog has been around since 2009 and has 644 mostly concentrated in the first three years of the blog. Here are a few of the posts:

Introduction to Planet Algol, it's Satellites and ...
Planet Algol Campaign Houserules 
Musing on Magic & Technological Items

Next up is Against The Wicked City is a blog that has been around since 2015 with about 185 posts.

Here is a little sample of the resources page - roughly one twelth of it:

 Against the Wicked City: Collected Information

Since I started this blog, I've uploaded a lot of material about the setting and system of ATWC. Like, well over a book's worth. So much that it's starting to get a bit tricky to keep track of it all.
I'm thus going to use this page as a handy way to keep it all in one place. I'll update it as I add more.
General Setting Information and Game Rules

• Against The Wicked City: An Explanation
• Random PC motivation table
• Rules for exceptional and magical mounts
• Rules for Mongolian wrestling

Here are a few represenative posts, pretty sweet stuff:

Why central Asia is a perfect RPG setting (and why... 
D&D Monsters from improbable sources 1: Poems by e... 
Gaming in fantasy Central Asia: the Silk Road 
More Talking Animals: Wolves and Birds (playable c... 

The person who nominated this blog really loved this post:

 The lost colours of D&D

Just What Is The OSR? And Is There A Renaissance - A Cultural Re-Birth OR Is It Yet to Happen?

I have been thinking a bit about the OSR. My usage of OSR (current usage) is Old School Roleplaying. Why is that, you may ask? I will tell you, I use the term Roleplaying instead of Renaissance or Revival, because for me, there is no Revival, I am just doing what I have been doing for the last 41 years. What I do is (to the best of my ability) is what Dave Arneson did. I build my campaign directly from the original sources (fiction and non-fiction). Now unlike Dave I have access to the internet and hundreds, if not thousands of secondary and tertiary sources and resources and I read a lot, so I am exposed to a ton of things that Arneson did not have access to bitd.

Renaissance carries the meaning of a Cultural Re-Birth and IMO that has not yet happened in the OSR/Old School Gaming niche. There are a lot of people that are creating a lot of new materials for use with the original games and their clones and there are new things being created and going off in a lot of directions. Meaning there is a lot of new fun for everyone. Some of these things are free and some are not. I am a fan of both free and not-free items, although products I have to pay for have a higher bar to pass to get me to invest. I would point out that there are many free products that would have been worth buying if they were being sold.

Likely we will all have different opinions on what would constitute a Cultural Re-Birth when it comes to Old School Gaming. Some will even claim it has already happened. I do not believe that it has, I think it is going to happen, but is not yet here. I am not sure what would bring it about, but I feel that it is imminent - it could be a few months or it might take a few years - nevertheless I think it is coming and when it does it will breathe life back into the game beyond our niche of those DMs and players (the tiny minority that frequent blogs and forums) and extend itself to those who rarely or never check the internet in regard to their gaming.

I think that a real Cultural Re-Birth would mean a return to Original School Gaming - going all the way back to what Dave Arneson did back in 1970, 1971 and following when he took ideas from David Wesely and the Braunstein game scenario (which started in 1967) and

Though Wesely thought the results were chaotic and the experiment a failure, the other players enjoyed the role playing aspect and asked him to run another game.

Wesely continued to run these Braunstein's because his players loved them, including a player by the name of Dave Arneson. When David Wesely went into the Army in 1970, Dave Arneson took over as the referee and continued to develop things and add things until Blackmoor was born. Dave Arneson went where Wesely (reportedly by his own admission) was not interested in going. 

I think when people take a closer look at what Dave Arneson did and recognize his contributions that have been obscured and denigrated, there will be some light-bulbs coming on and some serious new stuff will result when that happens.

Blackmoor Week 2016 - part 7 "Dave Arneson Game Day 2016"

Here are a few more links and information to celebrate the birthday on October 1st of David "Dave" Lance Arneson.

In Celebration Of Dave Arneson's Birthday & Blackmoor The First Fantasy Campaign 

This is a lengthy (great) post with a lot of interesting links and the story of how the writer was introduced to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor.

The Weekly Update - Sunday, October 2nd, 2016 - Dave Arneson Day, and I have now played D&D!!!

Our friends at The Source Comics and Games here in the Twin Cities all knew Dave, so it was no surprise when they announced that they were going to have a 'Dave Arneson Day" at the store. A whole bunch of people pitched in to make this event both a success and lots of fun, and I was delighted to be asked to do a sort of 'information booth' along with some of the old Blackmoor crowd to answer questions about Dave and gaming back in 'ye olden days'. We did, and we had am immense amount of fun!

Yeah! That is right - the writer Chirine was one of Dave's players back in the day. Thank you for a great post!

Secrets of Blackmoor a Dave Arneson documentary

Yeah! The word about the documentary is getting around and I hope it is a good accurate one and I would love to see it.

The First Magic Swords

A  great informative post by DHBoggs and it opens with this:

"Several of us were injured trying to pick up the magic sword. One of the guys was eventually successful in picking it up, though. We collectively decided that we were in way over our heads and to return to the castle."   The First Dungeon Adventure,  Greg Svenson.

Magic swords have been a major prize in Blackmoor, perhaps even from the very first game.

The entire post is a great read and I recommend it.

The Piazza Reach 1K Likes on Dave Arneson Day

That is 1000 Facebook likes for Dave Arneson Day. Next year, let's double that!!


 Posted on 10/3/16:
Dave Arneson Day 2016 - What did you miss?