Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary of Blackmoor and of Role-Playing!
Now as Dave Arneson begins with Blackmoor and describes how it grew and refers to other areas on the map that were the various wargames at the time. We find out that he is going to summarize Part A, Scenario III, the write up of the first two having been lost. At this time he is writing about 7 years after the beginning had first happened.
This is the Great Invasion a war between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. So he lays out the disposition of the various factions. Each group has Army Points, an Alignment for each of the four seasons, their quarterly income and the Special Characters that each group had.
The Evil Forces are comprised of the Egg of Coot, the Duchy of Ten, the Nomads of Ten, the Men of Maus and Monk's Vikings.
The Neutral Forces are comprised of Loch Gloomen, Sage's Tower, Tower of Booh, Blackmoor, Wizard of Mi-Karr and Regent of the Mines.
The Good Forces are comprised of Earl of Vestfold, Northern Lands, Horsemen of Peshwah, Bramwald, Glendower, Boggy Bottom, Wizard of the Wood, Monks of the Swamp and the Great Kingdom.
I hope I am not the only one that was really surprised that Blackmoor was part of the Neutral Forces instead of the Good Forces.
So following the notes you can see how these forces interacted over the course of the year in each of the four seasons. Of course the invader had a concentration of fources initially and as the year progressed the defender where able to bring forces to bear in relief of those units initially attacked. He summarizes it this way.
Then he lays it out thusly:
Next he uses a series of tables to explain how each individual force contained within each of the three large groupings above were arrived at. Each individual force had a certain amount of funds available and so he determined how those funds would or could be spent and the armies were created. A few examples out of a larger number follow:
Remember this is only a little of the whole that is on several pages here in our document. So virtually all of the "domain" game stuff was created and spelled out by Arneson in Blackmoor. I would hazard a guess that a lot of this was derived from the wargames that were widely played in the Twin Cities in the time leading up to Blackmoor and then tweaked and revised for the various scenarios that we played out in early Blackmoor. Once you get a copy of The First Fantasy Campaign you can really flesh out the domain part of OD&D if your players are interested in that part of the of the game.
Remember that all parts of the game, were present in Blackmoor simultaneously from the beginning. The domain part did not wait till the players were high level, but were part of the game at low level. That is all very appealing to me.
So we will continue on tomorrow. Again as I previously mentioned, I really wish I had known about and obtained this document back in 1977 instead of over 30 years later.
While I was off in the Army when Dave started Blackmoor, I think I can identify some of the players in this from their "titles": Earl of Vestfold would be Greg Svenson. Horsemen of Peshwah would be Ken Shepro. I was running the India branch of Dave's Napoleonic campaign, at Johns Hopkins. JH is close to Aberdeen Proving Ground, where I was stationed, and on my weekends I was driving down there for gaming. Ken Shepro, one of the JH students was the Peshwa of Poona in that campaign. That connection implies that this Blackmoor campaign was being run sometime in 1972 as I started the India campaign at JH in Fall 71 and was sent to Alaska in Dec 72]. Bramwald would be Duane Jenkins who was a Dark Shadows/Dracula fan. Wizard of the Wood was Peter Gaylord. Monks of the Swamp may have been Steve Rocheford who I remember as the High Priest of the Temple of the Frog. This brings back such memories...
ReplyDelete@David A. Wesely Thank you so much for sharing those memories. This is fascinating stuff to see your memories in print.
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