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

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

"Who in the World is Dave Arneson?” what do you think? Let us look a little further into the essay titled "Learning from Dave Arneson’s Published Works":

Adventures in Fantasy, meanwhile, is a complete RPG, which Arneson co-wrote with Richard Snider, one of the original players in the Blackmoor campaign ... ... Though intended as something wholly new, Adventures in Fantasy reads more like someone’s heavily house-ruled version of D&D, which “fixes” or emphasizes certain elements according to its creators’ interests – magic, for example, which is quite different than it is in Dungeons & Dragons. ... ...I suspect that many of the game’s differences from D&D don’t so much fix D&D as precede them... ...they’re reflective of the idiosyncrasies of Arneson’s own approach, much of which either didn’t make it into OD&D or were instead filtered through Gygax’s own ideas.

I would have to agree that Adventures in Fantasy contains a lot of things that would have made it into D&D, but were replaced by Gygax's ideas, some of it did make it into D&D at least partially, dragons and magic swords come immediately to mind.

Previously, I had taken issue with the presence of science fiction elements in a fantasy setting, seeing this as an inappropriate “intrusion” rather than simply being reflective of a more expansive notion of what constitutes the fantasy genre. I began to wonder if this was one of the reasons why Dave Arneson was not as well known to me as he ought to have been: his approach both to gaming and to fantasy more generally ran counter to prevailing tastes, tastes that were, to a great degree, formed as a result of D&D‘s success.

Prior to the publishing of D&D Fantasy and Science Fiction occupied the same area on the book shelf or the book racks of the day; however, in the early 70's the number of books being published increased and with the success of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, the two were separated into now two separate genres and authors started being labeled as being one or the other. So the publishing world started sending the message that fantasy and science fiction were different things not to be mixed. It is not that tastes changed first, changes in taste followed the change in marketing.

I think there is some truth to this. Prior to the success of Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy was a very broad genre, encompassing everything from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to A Princess of Mars to Howard’s Conan stories and more. The earliest players and designers of fantasy roleplaying games understood and accepted this, but, as these games gained popularity and moved beyond their original audience, they became much more self-referential and self-contained – a genre unto themselves – rather than drawing on the anarchic literature that inspired them. Based on the books he wrote or to which he contributed, it seems to me that Dave Arneson never fully adopted this new paradigm, preferring to stick to the older, broader “anything goes” conception of fantasy that no longer held as much sway in the market for RPGs.

By the mid seventies, the reading habits of youth changed as a mix of less influence and involvement by parents in storytelling and reading to children, marketing, social movements and the reading of older classic fiction in our American culture begin a decline that continues. People like Arneson and Gygax, people like me almost a generation younger than Gygax and older brother/younger brother younger than Arneson were omnivorous readers.When I was in my late 20's I started meeting people 7-10 years younger that had never heard fairy tales. It boggled my mind that you could grow up here in this country in a cultural desert, deprived of your birthright.

No fairy tales, no uncles with the tall tales, no storytelling by your parents, no fantasy reading, especially older fantasy, that created the market for endless modules and the need for modules.Once D&D spread beyond the older better read wargamers to younger less experienced, less well read folks without the board based knowledge that lead to world building, things changed rapidly away from Arnesonian Style Gaming(see below). Please do not misunderstand, I am not saying other styles are wrong and I am not saying that anyone is having bad wrong fun. Let us put that to rest, it is not the case and it is not the point I am trying to make, this is just history, no more and no less.

I haunted the library and once I was in the work force, I haunted the used book stories which used to be plentiful. When I lived in Cleveland and later when I lived in Indianapolis I had between 20-30 used bookstores that I visited usually all of them within every six month period. By the mid 90's used bookstores were dying and the larger new book chains were starting to go under. 

Now book sales are mostly online and you cannot go browse and read a page or two to see if you want to buy it. This funny, I do not remember ever buying a book with Frazetta art on the front that I did not love the story. I always wondered if Frazetta read it before he approved his art to go on the outside.

The early days of Blackmoor, a campaign that began play in 1971, was wild and improvisational, as Arneson drew on many different sources to create the core of what would later be disseminated to the world as Dungeons & Dragons. 

The great homebrew campaign that are still being run, are run the same way, wild and improvisational. That is Arnesonian Style Gaming. I would say old school gaming, but that term has been misused for so many things that are not remotely old school anymore that it has lost its meaning. So do not tell me you are old school, tell me you are Arnesonian and I will know that your game is the original wild and improvisational game with a broad expansive range of influences and inspiration.

In the end, Dave Arneson succeeded more wildly than I suspect he ever imagined. The fact that, more than forty years later, we continue to play roleplaying games is proof of that.

I would say yes and no to this, the yes has already been said, the no is because the original Arnesonian style has few adherents, we are a tiny minority of those who call themselves old school and all we can do is keep talking about it, keep running our games and hope that what Arneson did survives through our efforts to make it known. Sadly, every year there are more gatekeepers that oppose Arnesonian Style Gaming and those of us who proclaim it. 

That is why the SECRETS of BLACKMOOR: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons DVD interview documentary series is so important. 

Now, though, there is no excuse not to celebrate Dave Arneson as the foundational figure in the history of roleplaying games that he truly was. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for his imagination and creativity. May he be long remembered!

To which I say he gets it, the writer I have been referencing gets it. Huzzah!! Huzzah!! Huzzah!!