Hidden in Shadows: The Blackmoor Greyhawk Map, an Anniversary Gift

Ten years ago I started this 'blog. To celebrate I have a gift for all of you.

Below is a new, top quality map of Arneson's Blackmoor set within the Flanaess, continent of Oerik, world of Greyhawk, drawn by professional mapmaker Daniel Hasenbos of the Netherlands - where better to find a mapmaker for Blackmoor! For more of Daniel's Maps look here.

Last fall I began to create something I realized was sorely needed. Blackmoor, as my readers will know, and Greyhawk started out together as locations on a shared world. Blackmoor belongs to the world of "Oerth" as much as Greyhawk does, yet few Greyhawk fans know anything of Arneson's Blackmoor and those who may be interested can't be faulted for not knowing where to start the journey, being bombarded with an array of products from OD&D supplement II to current day fan works.

So I took it upon myself to write a free guidebook to Blackmoor for Greyhawk fans. To that end I commissioned this fantastic map.

Interestingly, and coincidentally Daniel finished the map in March of this year - the fiftieth anniversary of the letter Arneson sent to Rob Kuntz with his first map of "the Northern Marches" enclosed. That map formed the bases of our new map, along with some input from the "sketch map" of Blackmoor found in the FFC. All the later maps were also drawn upon for fringe areas, particularly to the south. For more see these posts:

10a/2019

10b/2019

I'm releasing the map now because I am nearly finished with the guidebook and will have that out shortly. You all may freely use this map as you please as long as you ALWAYS acknowledge where you got it.

I cannot begin to explain in this blogpost all the care and research that went into the maps production but let me reassure you all that this map is as true as I can make it. I'll even venture to say no Blackmoor map has been so exhaustively researched for accuracy and fidelity to the 1972 Blackmoor and Castle & Crusade society originals while simultaneously designed to fit directly onto the popular Greyhawk map of Anna B. Meyer as shown below.

And a better resolution version on the 2017 hexmap:

As can be seen, rivers, trails and coastlines match up directly, with the exception of the (inconsequential) Tusking strand in the north, which was a deliberate choice on my part to align with a bay shown on the Darlene map at that point. Anna deviated a bit from Darlene here and I wanted our new Blackmoor map to fit on either Anna's or Darlenes maps: