Ever since images of the campaign map from the Castle and Crusades society began floating about the world wide web, folks have taken an interest in locating the area where Blackmoor was supposed to be.
One of the best attempts came, of course, from Zenopus, seen HERE on his blog.
For some time now, my running campaign has been set in a version of Blackmoor that is part of the C&C world, and even though my players have thus far not ventured beyond the Northern Marches, I thought it high time I make a map.
The idea is pretty simple - what could a C&C world look like if it took into account the lore and geography of Arneson's Blackmoor. In other words, a Blackmoor world version of the C&C map. Or I should say "maps", because as we have talked about HERE, there is more than one version which I took into account.
Anyway, below is my somewhat crude (hey, I'm no Raphael) but eminently functional world map of Blackmoor. Feel free to use or improve as you please.
Nice map! Some other areas mentioned, sort of in-passing, in various Blackmoor materials are: Snyder (Facts About Blackmoor - Inspector General John of Snyder), Dinsbury (Garbage Pits of Despair - Monaca of Dinsbury), Stone Brook (GPoD - Robert of Stone Brook), Fenstien (GPoD - Lare of Fenstien), Geneva (Robert I, King of All Geneva - FFC), and Dives (Robert the Bald, a.k.a. Robert of Dives - DA1). I wonder where they would be located?
ReplyDeleteDives I never noticed before and it never occurred to me that Snyder could be a place - perhaps it is the locale of Bozero's tower. Interesting. Dinsbury and Stonebrook I assume are towns, but where is a good question. I've put Fenstein on the east coast IMC and Rhun (Marfeldt, FFC, Archives of Rhun) as the penisula jutting up in the NE. Geneva is the name I give to the central province of the Great Kingdom. :) What do you think?
ReplyDeleteI suppose many of these could be towns, although in another example from Garbage Pits of Despair, "Terrance of Walworth", I believe Walworth refers to either a country or a province of the Great Kingdom, as shown in David Megarry's copy of an old C&C Great Kingdom map. (Walworth, incidentally, would later be subsumed into the Shield Lands in the version of Greyhawk that was released commercially.)
ReplyDeleteThat same Megarry C&C GK map shows many unnamed "provinces" of the Great Kingdom - 17 from what I can see from the numbering. I think I would make many of these Blackmoor name-dropped areas like Dives, Snyder, and Dinsbury into these provinces. But Stone Brook sounds too much like a town name, so I would definitely use that as a settlement, not a province.
I like your idea of placing Rhun on that peninsula to the northeast. I'd always thought of Rhun as being an island, but since Maritz and Botulia already claim the only two islands on the C&C map, that peninsula is the next best thing.
Yeah, using them for province names makes sense - although someone will likely turn up something with the actual province names at some point. Also agree with you about Walworth - Earl of Walworth was a title Gary Gygax used in the Castle & Crusade Society newsletter. Geographically, Rhun doesn't seem to be an island in the write-up and there are kingdoms to the east of it.
ReplyDelete