Hidden in Shadows

In a sense Blackmoor "grew like Topsy", that is to say wild and on its own.

Perhaps the first iteration of anything we might call Blackmoor is the well-discussed medieval game designed by Dave Arneson wherein Baron Hoyt of "Keston" defends his lands from Viking raiders.

1a) Nascent Blackmoor (1970) - So if we count it, the medieval wargame Dave Arneson created and ran in the fall of 1970 sets the tone of a medieval-esque land where Vikings mix it up with knights and monks in a place called "Keston". 

1b) Pre-Blackmoor Dutch Map (1970) - for this we only have the map Arneson drew, apparently from a tracing based on Holland. It has no names, but it does show the locations of all the major cities, forests, roads and swamps. Blackmoor foundations shows the eastern half of this map on page 32.

1c) Planned Blackmoor (1971) - For this earliest phase of Blackmoor we primarily have the March '71 letter to Rob Kuntz briefly describing the setting and a couple maps from the Fletcher collection shown on pages 12 and 14 of Blackmoor Foundations.

Altogether this gives us the following places:

 - Region of Keston/Keiston

- Region of Williamsfort (centered on the town we now know as Blackmoor - the name is re-located later)

- Region of Jenkinsland

- Region of Swampland/Swampwood 

- Land/City of the Red Coven (northwest)

 - Land of the Skandaharians (north off map) 

- Region/Forest of the Eraks (east)

- Region of the Picts (west)

- Region of the Palatinate (Great Kingdom?) (southeast)

2) Played Blackmoor (1972 - 1976)

After Arneson sent in the initial letter describing Blackmoor, Gary Gygax became the first person to monkey with Arneson's vision for the setting. He made a single change that greatly impacted the geography and development.

Arneson intended Blackmoor to reflect the geopositioning of the Netherlands, with oceans to the west. As such he located Blackmoor on the Far Ocean (Dramidje) in or near to the area that would become Ekbir on the map of the world of Greyhawk.  However, Gygax decided to move it eastward, closer to the Great Kingdom in an area known as the Great Bay. 

This change flipped the coastline so that the ocean was now in the east. To accommodate this change Arneson drew a new map, frequently known as "the sketch map" of which we now have several similar versions (Foundations: pp 8 - 10).

It was also at this time that the isometric map seems to have been produced, probably to accompany the Return to Black Moors story. (Foundations 24 - 29)

From these sources we can add the following places and features.

- City of Maus

- Town of Blackmoor

- Town of Glendower

- Great Swamp of Mil

- Black Marsh

- Loch Gloomen/Lake Gloomey

-  Frog town/island

- Forest of the Elves (formerly Eraks)

- Bramwald

- Regent of the Mines 

- Wizard Mountains

- Witchwood Mountains

- Glomma River

- Arafasta gorge

- Lake of the Heavens

- Peshwan

- Region of Hyth

- North Watch Tower

- Wizards Wood

- Temple of Id

- Tower of Tears/Booh

- City of Tonisborg

- Sage's Tower

- Black Hills

- Dragon Hills

- Town of Tillburgh

- Duchy of Ten Heroes

- Duchy of the Peaks

- City of the Gods

- City of Father Dragon

- Desert (southwest)

3) Wilderlands Blackmoor (1977)

When Arneson left TSR he struck a deal with Bob Bledsaw to pull Blackmoor into Beldsaw's Wilderlands setting.

For this Arneson scrapped the "Sketch Map" version of Blackmoor and went back to his original, Holland based map, with one exception: he kept the orientation of the ocean to the east. Bledsaw then produced a new version of the map which formed the basis of every map since.

Only a few geographic features were added at this point. These are:

- Barrier Swamp

- The Stormkiller Mountains (as yet un-named however)

- The Peaks of Booh (as yet un-named however)

- The Haven Peaks (as yet un-named however)

- The Valley of the Ancients 

This last place is a location on the Wilderlands Map, not a Blackmoor place per se, but it is where Blackmoor was tacked on to the Wilderlands map and served as a replacement for the "Desert" area of Blackmoor where the City of the Gods was located.

4) Blackmoor Chronicles Blackmoor

The Blackmoor Chronicles materials refers to the maps and manuscript prepared by Arneson and his Adventure Games Inc. staff for planned publication initially, then later for publication by Mayfair games, then later again for TSR. This also includes Garbage Pits of Despair  published in Different worlds magazine.

Unfortunately, our resources from this era have serious gaps. For example we have a writeup Arneson prepared for the character of Robert the Bald which formed the basis - much altered - of what is seen in DA1. Arneson wrote an unknown number of these, but I have only seen this one, because Robert Meyer saved the letter Arneson sent him with the write-up in it. Anyway from the Blackmoor Chronicles material we have:

- Powers Pass

- Keep of Robert the Bald

- Desert of the Gods

- Stonebrook

- Feinstein

- Dinsbury

I'd also bet that Kenville was in some of this material, but I haven't seen any proof. I'm betting it was because it shows up as a location on earlier maps but has no name, and I presume it to have been named for artist Ken Fletcher. The same might be true of the city of Eraks, and a few other places like Starmorgan and Starport - maybe.

5) TSR Blackmoor (1986 - 1989)

Now we come to the shocker. Notice that up until this point I have provided a few short lists, but I'm not even going to try to make a list for this iteration of Blackmoor. That's because it would consist of a hundred or more entries. David Ritchie was given the job of fleshing out the setting and that is exactly what he did. It is not an exaggeration to say the Ritchie added hundreds of names. Not only did he provide names for every and any geographic feature, but many places were given new "improved" names too.

These arn't just little villages or mountains either.  Many of the familiar and iconic places in Blackmoor show up in TSR material for the first time ever and appear to have been invented by Ritchie, including Jackport, Octagern, Kerman Peaks, Thonia, Karsh, Misauga river, Boggy Bottom, the Redwood Forest, Ringlo Hall, etc. 

In fact by far the majority of places on the map were named and added during this era. Truthfully the TSR version of Blackmoor was its own setting, quite distinct from the Twin Cities Blackmoor. 

6) Zeitgeist Blackmoor

Arneson certainly had the opportunity to make changes to the setting when He and Dustin Klingman published Blackmoor setting books again under Zeitgeist. However the decision was made to not throw out the established TSR material, but rather to tweak it at the edges so as not to divide the fan base. As such Zeitgeist added nothing of consequence to the map. A few new locations, such as Croc's Nest, do show up, but these are generally minor towns, etc. A dozen or so more places are also mentioned in the semi-canon MMRPG material, but again, these are not mapped locations.

So there you have it. Geographically and politically as it is known by most people today, Blackmoor is largely a creation of TSR, but several others have had their hand in it too, over the years and eras.

 In this POST from a few years ago, I was concerned with the issue of scale and distance in Blackmoor in the course of which I attempted to determine the intended scale of the "original Northern Marches" - the March 1971 map of Blackmoor - by fitting it onto a map of the Netherlands. For those unaware, the reason for doing so is that in the FFC, Arneson said his Blackmoor map was modeled on a map of Holland. Of course, there have been several attempts by different folks over the years, trying to figure out how Blackmoor might fit on a map of the Netherlands. For the most part it was assumed, by me certainly and I think others, that Arneson's "old Dutch map" on which he based his map of Blackmoor was a 19th or 18th century one.

It was purely on a whim, mostly because I wanted an accurate scalebar, that I choose to look for an older 20th century example to use instead, and so I settled on a colorful Rand McNally Atlas map of the Netherlands from the 1930's.

I now think this map I had more or less stumbled on is the very map that Arneson actually used, and I have come to this conclusion in the light of new material from the Fletcher collection.

There were several outstanding maps among the material Ken Fletcher had collected and handed over to Griff Morgan at last years Arnecon, now published in the Blackmoor Foundations book.

Two of these in particular caught my eye, as being truly Foundational.  I wasn't sure if these two maps on separate sheets, one vertical and one landscape in orientation, were part of the same drawing or would go together but shortly after I mentioned they might be related (and that one of the maps had been scanned upside down, the other sideways) Michael Calleia   http://chanceand.com/  demonstrated not only were they related but they fit together seamlessly, like this:

What you are looking at is, almost certainly, the original "proto Blackmoor" map. For the rest of this post I will refer to this map as the "Ur" map for convenience. Of course, this isn't a Blackmoor map at all, but a map of central Holland, drawn by Arneson, most likely on a light table or using a projector or some such.  You would be forgiven if you don't see an immediate resemblance to Blackmoor as you know it, especially considering how "busy" the Arneson map is.  However if you look closely you can clearly see Glendower peninsula with it's funny little finger of land at the northern tip, and that curving western coastline noticeable in Arneson's March of 1971 Blackmoor map but turned to dry land in all later versions. To show you what I mean, here is the same map superimposed on the Rand McNally Netherlands map.

And here it is again ghosted:

And here it is with the March 1971 "Northern Marches" map of Blackmoor, that heretofore was our oldest know map (note I colored in the water on this version to add clarity):

I don't know why the "Ur" map was created. Arneson's Corner of the Table Top newsletter does mention a planned Napoleonics campaign in the Netherlands and it seems quite possible that is what the map was originally made for, before becoming repurposed as a basis for Blackmoor, but at this point I'm only speculating. If that were the case it seems a bit odd to use a twentieth century map for an early nineteenth century campaign, but maybe that was all Arneson had access to and perhaps the inaccuracies seen here and there, the occasional odd line, and the non-matching settlements are a result of imperfect tracing conditions compensated for with creative license. In any case, what this series of map images hopefully demonstrates is that the "Ur map" was traced off of the Rand McNally map, and the 1971 Northern Marches map was then traced off of a portion of that. The Rand McNally map is sure to be the model as can be seen most clearly in the Markermeer/Ljssemeer / Blackmoor Bay region of the Ur map.

Note in particular the red outlined areas with red diagonal lines marked NE, and NW in what is now the Ljssemeer lake region of the Netherlands. These lined areas only appear on Rand McNally maps and I have only found it on maps in atlases with print dates ranging from 1936 to 1941. The one I used was dated 1937.  The red slashed areas represent a land reclamation project begun in 1932, never fully completed and later changed, so you won't see these areas marked on earlier maps at all or in the same shape on later maps of the Netherlands.

However, looking at the Ur map, we see that Arneson traced the red diagonal area marked NE nearly exactly as if it were land:

Identifying these maps is a breakthrough, but only a start.  I notice for example, that many of the roads, rivers and borders in the Rand McNally map line up with lines on the Ur map that could be roads or rivers, but many of the other features such as lakes, forests, mountains and swamp seem to be filled in by Arneson without much regard for the real topography of the Netherlands. Settlements also seem to have been placed by Arneson without regard to the location of actual Ducth towns.

One humorous exception I noted is that there is a city marked on Blackmoor maps at the corresponding location of Amsterdam on the Netherlands map, and that city is none other than the Coots Nest of the Egg of Coot! 

We are only scratching the surface here, but for this post I want to bring in one more observation of particular interest to Greyhawk fans. One the many fascinating bits of information Jon Peterson related in the Dungeons & Dragons - the Making of Original D&D 1970-1977 book sprang to mind as I looked at this map of Blackmoor on Holland. On page 18 Jon offhandedly mentioned that "Arneson was allocated the Northern Marches; he originally planned for this realm to occupy the northwest corner of the map below the Far Ocean, but Gygax placed it at the innermost cove of the Great Bay instead." 

According to Rob Kuntz, who was in charge of the newsletter at the time, Arneson was involved with preparing the images due to Gary Gygax having lost access to the necessary equipment. In this case he would have had the opportunity to pick his spot before the map was published. If one looks at the Great Kingdom map and at the Blackmoor map it is easy to see what Arneson was thinking.  Here is the "official" map as it appeared in the Domesday book Newsletter in 1971:

In fact, we can drop the Netherlands map right into that section like so.

 ARNECON 2  - Tickets are now live!

Arnecon is the game convention promoted by the Arneson Estate held in the Twin Cities, now going into its second year, featuring many of the original Blackmoor players and other known personalities, like me, (I guess?).

To be honest, there are so many great gaming opportunities I found myself struggling to pick a schedule and wishing I didn't sign up to run two sessions myself so I could attend some of the other great events going on!

Saturday morning I'm going to be running a dungeon dive into Greg Svenson's Tonisborg dungeon using characters created by Dave Arneson and original Blackmoor characters.  This will be a high level OD&D adventure building on events that transpired in last years session.

Saturday evening I will be holding a tell-all seminar on Blackmoor dungeon.  I'll talk about the meta history of the dungeon, but also reveal many of the dungeons deepest secrets. If you are at all interested in Blackmoor you are not going to want to miss it.

See you there.

 Tickets for the Schenectady Wargamers Association annual game convention are now live on Tabletop Events

The convention is now called "Council Con 2024" in part because the group has lost track of exactly how many conventions previously known as Council of Five Nations, have taken place since it began in the mid 1970's due to a few off years including a couple in the recent pandemic.

I'll be running two RPG games:

"The Map" Friday at 2, involving sea battles and a treasure hunt.

"The Land of Black Ice" Blackmoor adventure Sunday at 9.

Come out and play if you can!

 So often it happens that I'm working on one thing, and in the process get pulled down a rabbit hole that leads to a treasure all its own.

In this case, a paragraph in the First Fantasy Campaign's section on INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS (pages 10-14, '77 print) on Ship Building leads to this post and will form the basis of some ship combat rules I'm preparing to playtest at the COUNCIL CON 2024. 

Arneson's entry contains interesting but incomplete information, intended to be used in conjunction with the Naval Combat rules in OD&D.  One wonders however, if Arneson has in mind the rules as he submitted them instead of the rules as Gygax edited them for publication.

Be that as it may, the paragraph tells us that a shipbuilding port must build at least 24 hull points a year and cannot build more than 80 hull points worth of ship(s) in one year.  That's an interesting range, but lets move on.

He then gives rates of construction based on green, seasoned, and aged wood and how long ships built of these will last. 

Next, a crucial bit of information, "1 hull point is about 600 logs."  

Later in the price list we are given a list of ship types and what each costs. We are NOT told the hull point value of these ship.

One might think you could go to OD&D and look that up, but you'd be wrong. Firstly most of the ships (not all) listed in OD&D are different from those in the FFC, but worse, the OD&D rules don't give hull point values either.  

In the 3lbb's, almost as an afterthought under the Missiles heading of the Naval section (Vol III:28-30) is this:

"Large ships have from 18-24 points of possible damage before sinking, small ships have from 9-15, and a boat but 3 points. "

 So if we wanted to use the other ships in the FFC in a game, or you really just wanted to get more specific with the OD&D ship types, or you are adding a new type of your own, what hull points should a given ship have?

Initially I thought this would be an obvious calculation. In the price list, Arneson tells us that ten logs cost 1 gold piece.  Knowing the costs of the ships already and that 600 logs = 1 hull point should allow us to calculate the hull points, right?

Nope.  Not at all.  To begin, it is unclear if that log cost is for green, aged, or seasoned logs, which will affect how long it takes to build the ship and how many can be built in a year, which must exceed at least 24 points. Regardless of that problem the math doesn't work out for the Hull Point ranges we were expecting from OD&D.

In the FFC ship prices range from 5000gp to 40000 gp. For example, in the FFC a Longboat cost 24,000 gp.  Theoretically then at a cost of 1gp per ten logs it should take 2400 logs.  At 1 hull point per 600 logs that is a measly 4 hull points!  Cheaper ships, like a small Galley have even less.

Okay we have to assume the log price was for cheap lumber and firewood - not the quality logs needed for ships.

Luckily, Arneson gave us another clue.  In the pricelist a simple boat only costs 400 gp and in parentheses "(120 logs)".  Bingo. That gives us the cost conversion figure we need.  If 120 logs = 400gp expense, then 600 logs = 2000 gp worth of ship cost. (600/120 = 5; 5 x 400 = 2000).

Going back to our Longship at a cost of 24,000 gp, it will have a hull point value of 12 and that makes way more sense.  The most expensive ship in the FFC, a large galley at 40000 gp has 20 hull points.

Now, this system does require an awful lot of logs to build a ship, way more than is historically accurate, but we can assume that "log cost" is also factoring in other construction expenses and isn't a true log count.  I'm not sure many Gamemasters are going to be tracking logs and forests etc. anyway, but if you were to do that, I'd recommend dividing by a factor of 10 ("600 logs" equals 60 actual logs). 

In any case it is now possible to calculate the cost of any given ship by its hull points, or conversely to calculate the OD&D hull points of a ship by its cost.

1 Hull Point = 2000 gp. 

Released as part of Wizards of the Coast's promotion of the 50th anniversary of the publishing of D&D, The Making of Original Dungeons and Dragons 1970 - 1977 has hit the shelves and begun arriving in pre-ordered copies.

 Now that the "Fletcher Collection" folder as it is known by us in the Northern Marches Historical Society - our informal little research circle - has been published as Blackmoor Foundations, I will be providing some historical analysis of the content.

The most interesting of these documents can be firmly dated to 1971 and early 1972. In the circa May 1971 Corner of the Table, Vol III No. 6 is the Following:

"The June issue will feature an article by Ross Maker on the Boer War as well as the start of the Napoleonic War simulation battle reports. There will also be the continuing saga of El Pauncho and the start of the "Black Moors" battle reports, a series dealing with the perils of living in Medevil Europe, (or at least as much as is possible when a wargamer cum fantasy nut creates a parallel world that includes perils from a dozen Fantasy plots plus a few of his own)."

That's what it says, but that's not what happened.  No more el Pauncho or Brownstone stories were published, and perhaps more importantly, there were no "Black Moors battle reports" published in CotT either.  

None.

The closest thing is the Nov 71 Blackmoor Gazette & Rumormonger #1, which was published as a separate little newspaper kind of thing with no battle reports or narratives like the el Pauncho reports.  BG&R #2 is arguably a battle report, but that doesn't come until over a year after this announcement and covers then-recent events (2nd Coot invasion), skipping past nearly a year of play.

Yet, among the Blackmoor Foundation papers and articles we find "Return to Black Moors", a detailed and unfinished battle report clearly and firmly a very early document which details the heretofore barely detailed "Icelandic Cave Adventure".   The Icelandic Cave adventure was among the first, if not the first Blackmoor adventure.  

I will dive deeper into the dating and related details in future posts, but here I want to set the tone of what to expect in these documents.

The documents confirm much of what has been said in this blog for many years, yet somehow I think some will be shocked to learn that early Blackmoor was as much about overland adventures as dungeons, that it was not primarily a wargame, that the earliest battles did not utilize the CHAINMAIL rules nor was Blackmoor born as a variant CHAINMAIL campaign, oh and yes, the land of the Red Coven was the same as the Land of the Egg of Coot.

In short they challenge many of the oft repeated detractions directed at early Blackmoor as being somehow merely derivative of CHAINMAIL or that play in Blackmoor was not "real" adventuring as it was and is in D&D.

Next post I will breakdown the 2nd dungeon report  (because I already have the maps prepared, and because the original scans for this section were easier to read...)