2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Twenty

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary! Today is the 20 20 20 post.

Continuing with Part Three of our look at Running Castle Blackmoor over at The Alexandrian Blog. Yesterday in Part Two we looked at the third post in The Alexandrian series about Running Castle Blackmoor and commented more on the series to that point, today we will look at the fourth and fifth posts in that series.

Running Castle Blackmoor – Part 4: Magic Swords

Magic Swords are a subject near and dear to me! He again discusses it, shows what he is doing and includes design notes and a whole slew of great swords.

He says:

Magic Swords are, universally, intelligent creatures. Possible explanations (some, all, or none of which might be true):

• Prisons for higher-dimensional beings.
• The matrix through which higher-dimensional beings communicate with the material world, and enact their will through mortal wielders.
• The personality storage devices which preserve the personalities of the Ancients; or perhaps the crew of some interdimensional / interplanetary vessel.
• Ancient artificial intelligence processing cores.

Arneson describes them as both the “Magic Swords of Mythology” and as “an entire family of magic swords”. The Swords comprised “most of the early magical artifacts,” with Arneson placing the statistics for each on an individual card.

I wrote about Magical Swords a short time ago on this blog at this post (https://originaldungeons-and-dragons.blogspot.com/2020/01/30-day-d-challenge-describe-magic-item.html) 30 Day D&D Challenge - Describe a Magic Item You Created - Day Seven  I give my treatment of swords there, they start with their own unique sentience and grow from their over time. Their personality is largely shaped by the first owner and/or first significant owner.

In the design notes his first comment is :

DESIGN NOTES

Simply waving away Arneson’s lengthy treatment of magical swords would have certainly been the easiest approach here. But it was also clear to me that magic swords WERE a central element of Blackmoor, particularly in its earliest days. (Where, as Arneson wrote, they were most of the magical artifacts to be found.)

Then he explains how he approached the whole thing and how he interpreted things.  He also provides a couple of tables for generating swords. The list of pregenerated swords is sweet!

The next part is the castle and its background, with a few really interesting tidbits the few people know about.

Running Castle Blackmoor – Part 5: Castle Background & Features

Excellent descriptions and history too. More as usual, useful design notes. The first half of the post covers the Castle and the second part of the post talks about the dungeon features on the map and goes into some detail. In the design note he again talks about how and what he did to understand what Arneson did and his desire to tap into that creative pallette of Arneson.

Tomorrow we get into the topic of the Dungeon Key.