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

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary!

Continuing with Part Seven of our look at Running Castle Blackmoor over at The Alexandrian Blog. Today we will look at Part 10 of that series "Blackmoor Village Map."

Running Castle Blackmoor – Part 10: Blackmoor Village Map

He leads off with a map of Blackmoor Village and Vicinity, saying: 

In running my remixed version of Castle Blackmoor, I knew that the village of Blackmoor at the foot of the castle would become quite important. I printed out copies of some of the earliest maps of Blackmoor created by Arneson, but quickly discovered in actual play that they had not been made available at legible resolutions. With a little bit of research you could sort of figure things out, but the map ultimately proved more confusing than illuminating to most of my players.

He goes on to talk not wanting to "radically depart from Arneson's original material." He redrew the map based on the map published in Domesday Book #13. He links to that map and an older map over at Havard's Blackmoor blog.

IMO his redraw is extremely faithful to the originals, although he says he was tempted to make some alterations, but ended up on making one and says it should be easy to spot.

He closes with this:

For the version given to my players, however, I did decide to roll the clock back: Jenkins Hill is not yet (and may never be) Jenkins Hill in this version of Blackmoor, nor has the Great Svenny built his freehold. So this will be the version of the map I give to my players:

He posts a second map that is the rolled back version and indicates that you can download high resolution copies of both.

Before I close out this post I want to link to another post that was made by Mr. Alexander titled The Blackmoor Cruxes.

He talks about the problem of trying to date when the first session of Blackmoor was played. There is evidence that points to 1971 and also to 1970. He says:

However, in their earliest accounts virtually all of the Blackmoor players cited 1970 as the date of inception. Although several people, including Arneson, later decided that their memories must be faulty after looking at the documentary evidence (further muddying the waters), the most significant testimony is that of David Fant: He was the original Baron of Blackmoor and infamously became the first vampire. As such, he definitively played in the earliest sessions of Blackmoor, and yet he stopped playing when he got a job at KSTP at the end of 1970 and definitely was not playing with Arneson in 1971. (The fact he can definitively date the event which caused him to stop playing with Arneson lends his account substantial credibility.)

IMO that Dave Fant dating with a real world event is telling.