2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Fifty-Three

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of  Role-Playing!

Time to share some more great links with you! These links are to blog posts over at the Hidden in Shadows blog by DHBoggs. This is not a high volume blog, but it is a very high quality blog. It started in July of 2011 and has a total of 149 posts to date. The focus of the blog is RPG history especially as it applies to Dave Arneson, Blackmoor and OD&D. This is one of my favorite blogs, not only for the content, but also because the author is honest, ethical and a great guy to boot.

Here are a few representative posts to introduce you to the blog.

His first post is titled Zero Edition Dungeoneering - a beginning and he says:

This first weblog entry is something of an experiment as I've never 'blogged before.  So we shall see how it goes.  I'll begin by reposting and expanding on a post I left on the ODD74 forum...

Here is his third post titled The Game Board of OD&D which I greatly enjoyed. He starts with a couple of references to the OD&D rules:

"Off-hand adventures in the wilderness are made on the OUTDOOR SURVIVAL playing board (explained below). Exploratory journies(sic), such as expeditions to find land suitable for a castle or in search of some legendary treasure are handled in an entirely different manner.” Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, P. 15

“REFEREE'S MAP is a wilderness map unknown to the players. It should be for the territory around the dungeon location. When players venture into this area they should have a blank hexagon map, and as they move over each hex the referee will inform them as to what kind of terrain is in that hex. This form of exploring will eventually enable players to know the lay of the land in their immediate area and thus be able to select a site upon which to build their castles. (Castle building and its attendent requirements will be covered hereafter.) Exploratory adventures are likely to be the most exciting, and their incorporation into the campaign is most desirable.”
UWA, p 16  (insert UWA is Underworld and Wilderness Adventures)

After which he says some very important things here are a couple:

...but the statement that “exploratory adventures are likely to be the most exciting.” definitely encourages the hexcrawl exploration on a tabletop map and tells us that wilderness travel wasn't intended just to be hops between dungeons, but an exploratory expedition itself.

This is what we did bitd before my first dungeon made its appearance about 3 months in. He goes on to say:

The underlying assumption throughout OD&D is that the” wilderness” will be created as the game progresses, dens and lairs will be fleshed out, castles and towns will appear, distant kingdoms will be named and so on, and there will always be more to see just over the horizon. 

This is the game that I fell in love with and the game that I play to this day.

Another post from 2011 was titled Dragon Economics. This is a great post and he compares the historical cost of Fort Frederick (MD), a frontier fort at the time, to building a similar structure in OD&D a "borderlands" stronghold. I have been to Fort Frederick in Maryland back in the early 1980s so this post was of high interest to me.

That is enough to get you started. I highly encourage that if you are interested in Blackmoor, Arneson and OD&D to spend time reading this entire blog. It will be well worth your time. Also in early posts he makes some conclusion, later when more information comes to light he addresses that and adjusts his conclusion to fit the new evidence. Like I said, honest. Enjoy!