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

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

I took a couple of days off (those who read my 1/28 post know why) and now I will continue on the topic of "Who in the World is Dave Arneson?” In my last post on this topic I closed saying this:

Ponder these things for I will come back to them as I talk about the Blackmoor Supplement and the writing and editing of it, and as time permits I will also talk about The First Fantasy Campaign as it was published.  I want to look deeper into this question of "Who in the World is Dave Arneson?” I also will address as part of that, the common mistake that is made when people talk about Arneson's notes and the incorrect assumptions that lead to that mistake.

These are things that I will be going into during the month of February, right now back to the essay that I was jumping off from.

In the second of the two essays titled "Learning from Dave Arneson’s Published Works" we read concerning the Blackmoor Supplement:

Supplement II is a bit of a mess, in my opinion: a mishmash of topics without much cohesion, especially when compared to Gygax’s own Supplement I. When I first read it, however, there was one portion of the book that nevertheless caught my attention. Located about halfway through the supplement was a 20-page section entitled “The Temple of the Frog.” Here is presented one of the earliest published adventure scenarios for Dungeons & Dragons, including five maps. In addition, the scenario provides several paragraphs of background information about the temple, its founding and purpose, and its current state of affairs.

There are a lot of reasons that the Blackmoor Supplement was "a bit of a mess", which by the way being a "bit of a mess" is not a bad thing, and if it had been the proper mess it would have been a great thing, but more on that at a later date. The main thing here is the “The Temple of the Frog.” This was an example of how it is done, it was never meant to imply that you should let others provide you with scripted adventures as standard practice, it was meant to inspire you to create your own stuff.

Then the writer goes on to talk about being familiar with Gary Gygax’s Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and with the guidelines for mixing science fiction and fantasy present in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, but Supplement II was published in 1975, before any of this, which suggested to me that perhaps Arneson was perhaps the originator of this kind of “mixed genre” gaming.

And he was correct Arneson did invent "mixed genre" i.e. gonzo gaming. This is the correct defintiion of gonzo gaming - "mixed genre" typically fantasy and science fiction, but not slapstick. (We will talk more about this later on)  Dave Hargrave and Arduin are the best example of someone inspired by Arneson and “The Temple of the Frog.” [IMO] Then the writer sees Adventures in Blackmoor and the expanded version of The Temple of the Frog and City of the Gods. After which he says:

Unfortunately, what I’d seen in both versions of the Temple of the Frog, never mind City of the Gods, didn’t sit well with me. I was still very much of the opinion that the peanut butter of science fiction should rarely be allowed near the chocolate of fantasy. That Arneson seemed to gleefully blend the two struck me, in those days, as somehow wrong, or at least something I didn’t much care for.

While I did not see those modules myself until after 2010, I would have loved to have seen them shortly after the Blackmoor Supplement, but I did see the Arduin Grimoire which filled in the gap for me. But for the writer back in the pre-internet days he left things there, but still felt something was missing.

In my next essay we will talk some about that.