Recently, what is believed to be the oldest map of the land of Blackmoor has drawn some comment in a few different places, including the Secrets of Blackmoor 'blog, the Wandering DM's livestream and the OSR Grimoire 'blog. We have this map courtesy of original Blackmoor player Bill Hoyt (Baron of Williamsfort), along with an accompanying letter dated to March of 1971.
This map is not as complete as some later maps in terms of bordering areas, which made me a bit curious as to how well it would fit inside later maps.
It took a bit of monkeyshines with re-scaling but it was the dead of winter last January when I did this so I had a bit of time to fool with it. In the end I think I got it all to fit together pretty well.
For this project I used 4 additional Blackmoor maps. The primary map is that drawn by Clayton Bunce for the Zeitgeist games line of products. Grafted onto the south end of that is the TSR map from DA3, City of the Gods. Also for a small portion of the south and for the east coast Islands, the best fit was actually Dave Arnesons sketch map from the FFC (using the colorized version made by Snorri) Lastly, there is a tiny piece of the Zeitgeist games hex map version of Blackmoor in the firefrost channel - simply because it fit better and it was a bit of fun to toss that map in too.
Here is the end result:
A few posts back, I posted an Apocalypse map of Blackmoor showing what Greyhawks' Blackmoor should look like with the towns and rivers properly placed.
The map you see here is the one I used to site those locations.
2 comments:
Do you have a higher-resolution version of your map that you can share, Dan? It's hard to see/appreciate the alignments with it being so small!
Allan.
Very cool - it's amazing how well it all fits together.
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