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

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

As we talk about, "Who in the World is Dave Arneson?” let us jump back into the essay titled "Learning from Dave Arneson’s Published Works":


After 2008 and the passing of Gygax, the writer started to look into the history of D&D again and the hobby itself. He started reading as much early RPG stuff as he could and ran across The First Fantasy Campaign, published by Judges Guild in 1980 and the Adventures in Fantasy, an edition of which was published in 1979 by Adventures Unlimited.

Of the two, The First Fantasy Campaign is the more interesting, though also the less polished. In his forward [sic], Bob Bledsaw states: 

“Dave has attempted to show the development and growth of his campaign as it was originally conceived. I’m sure that he was tempted to update the work to match pace with new trends but he presented the unpolished gem while preserving the feel and wonder of its unveiling much to our benefit as Fantasy Game Judges.”

He goes on to say: 

Essentially, The First Fantasy Campaign is a collection of notes on the Blackmoor campaign but without any clear organizing principle – much like Supplement II. 

• army lists
• NPC descriptions
• castle construction costs
• snippets of history
• Gypsy sayings
• wilderness encounter tables
• an alternate magic system
• a very rough outline of the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor

to name but some of its contents.

He says, "without any clear organizing principle" making the same common mistake most people make with The First Fantasy Campaign. They want to evaluate it as and compare it to a highly polished splatbook, but that is not what it is nor was it ever intended to be. As Bob Bledsaw rightly observed "he [Arneson] presented the unpolished gem while preserving the feel and wonder of its unveiling much to our benefit as Fantasy Game Judges." This was Arneson's campaign journal not a splatbook. I only wish it were a few hundred pages thicker. If only Arneson had kept a daily journal, but if you read about how stretched he was with the number of games he was running you know that was not possible.

We can only give Bob Bledsaw and Judges Guild the greatest thanks for not editing The First Fantasy Campaign. If you had polished it you would have destroyed it.

The writer goes on,

Reading it, I was immediately struck by the scope of the Blackmoor campaign, as well as Arneson’s wild, even chaotic, inventiveness. 

Even though he expected polish and wanted polish, this unpolished gem was working its magic.

He was clearly a referee with a lot of ideas and he wanted to try them all, which is only fitting given how new the very idea of roleplaying games was at the time. 

The light dawns!

Bob Bledsaw was right to use the phrase “unpolished gem” in describing the contents of this book, as it was a seemingly random jumble of descriptions and rules with no central theme.

Well partially dawns, I am not yet sure that he really gets it.

Next time we look at Adventures in Fantasy.