Hidden in Shadows

 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...)  

 Apparently there is a shirt for sale with the logo "It started with Blackmoor - 1975".  The date indicates they are referring to Blackmoor supplement II for OD&D, which was published in late 1975, but that makes the caption a bit strange and I don't think there is a similar shirt for Greyhawk Supplement 1, also published in 1975.

However odd the shirt may be, it brings up a good occasion to point out things that fans of Blackmoor often take for granted to the point of not realizing that not everyone knows them.  So, at the risk of pointing out the obvious to some, here is a list, no doubt incomplete, of things that actually started with Blackmoor:

The Dungeon

The 1960 edition of the classic Funk & Wagnalls standard dictionary of the English language defined dungeon as "A dark underground prison." Prior to Dave Arneson sitting down with paper and pencil and sketching out 6 levels of chambers and passages descending below castle Blackmoor, a dungeon was thought of as little more than a dank hole in the ground.

The Castle

Of course, castles in a fantasy game are a given and it was only natural for Arneson to use his lovely model of castle Branzoll in his Northern Marches game, but by doing this, and placing his extensive dungeon under it, he created the Castle/dungeon trope ubiquitous in D&D. In the real world, castles do not have multi-level underground labyrinths. In D&D they all do thanks to Dave.

What Arneson envisioned was new, but not unfamiliar, drawing on the images of caverns, catacombs and secret passages in monster movies, and the labrynths of mythology to create an amazingly complex vertical and horizontal underworld peopled with monsters. 

The Home Base

Also above the dungeon, the town of Blackmoor - apparently based on the wooden model of Cuidad Rodrigo as discussed in other posts - was almost certainly not initially conceived of as a home base where players could recharge and resupply between adventures.  I suspect rather we see Arneson once again replicating his beloved classic horror films. For what is a dark castle without a nearby village - a place where the protagonists can be forewarned of the danger and from which can spring a mob of angry villagers to storm the castle?  Of course there is also the fact that when Arneson began the Northern Marches campaign it was conceived of as a development of their "Braunstien" games which were always set in a town or city.  Nevertheless, functionally the town served exactly as a "home base" in D&D terms and the players, and for that matter Arneson, naturally understood the advantages the town provided for them. 

The Tavern

"You meet at an Inn". Surely this is the most used trope in fantasy role playing games ever and of course it is a trope that starts with Blackmoor.  Inspired by a real Come Back Inn in the Melrose Park neighborhood of Chicago, Arneson used his ComeBack Inn in the town of Blackmoor as a place for his players to gather to plan activities and gain information, just as thousands of GM's have after him. 

The General Store

There is no particular reason why characters in an adventure RPG should have to go shopping, yet it is a fundamental expectation of D&D.  Early in the Northern Marches campaign, Arneson created the general store, price lists for weapons and equipment, and placed Dan Nicholson in charge as "The Merchant. This sort of "local functionary" character was typical of their previous Braunstein games and a role Nicholson would have been familiar with.  He quickly took advantage of his de-facto monopoly to set up an underground shakedown network to ensure all the profits stayed with him - but that is another story.  In D&D, merchants and store-clerks were relegated to the GM as NPC's yet the activity of going to the store to haggle with the merchant over goods and services remains a typical part of the game.

The Cleric

Blackmoor had no classes, excepting, of course, all the classes Blackmoor had. Say what now? There were no classes as we know them in Blackmoor at all.  All characters were statistically the same regardless of what they did and a person could be pretty much whatever they wanted.  Thus at various times Dave Megarry played a thief, Dan Nicholson a merchant, John Snider was an imperial Inspector, etc., etc.  These roles didn't have mechanical components associated with them the way D&D classes do now, but differences began to arise that made some roles stand apart.  In particular wizards and priests grew to be "different".  For wizards the main difference was in how they advanced in spell levels and possibly in how they gained experience points.  For priests, the differences were more distinctive.  Priests gained the ability to cast healing spells and even to resurrect the dead.  This last ability appears to be tied to the deliberate and ultimately fatal risking of Greg Svenson's character by the other players while Greg himself was away in the summer of 1972.  As this death of a beloved character was not really fair to Greg, Arneson invented the idea that "The Great Svenny" could be resurrected by the clergy.  Subsequently a lot of resurrections occurred in the Northern Marches. Later, as vampires plagued the land, Priests also gained some abilities against undead - presumably skill at turning them. These distinctions set priests apart as effectively a different class.

Non-human Player Characters

Some of the earliest Blackmoor adventures were hexcrawls wherein the characters played themselves as transportees to the magical Northern Marches.  However players began to also play local characters and some of those local were not human. John Soukup, for example played a Balrog, Phil Grant played an elf prince, Walter Oberstar played a dwarf, Mel Johnson played a hobbit and Fred Funk played an orc. While today it is simply taken for granted that fantasy RPG have all sorts of non-human player character options, in the early 1970's this was an entirely novel idea.

Gothic Horror and Dune Salad

D&D players today take it for granted that they might face a medusae and a vampire in the same adventure - that's all due to Arneson's kitchen sink approach to the game.  If you look at CHAINMAIL, the fantasy wargame booklet that provided many monsters for the Northern Marches campaign, you will find only the classic monsters of Greek and Norse mythology with Tolkien flavoring added.  Arneson once again drew on his love of monster movies to mix such disparate monster types as Greek medusae, Gothic vampires, Fremen-like desert raiders and alien blobs in the same game.  Not only did such a crazy mix work, it worked brilliantly and is the basis of every monster manual and every D&D campaign since. 

Experience points for Killing Monsters and Treasure

Lastly, let me mention something that didn't quite begin with Blackmoor but for which Arneson is often credited - gaining levels of experience.  Arneson may well have coined the term "levels" and "leveling up" for growing more competent and powerful by stages, but in truth, the concept of advancement was a core part of the Strategos N rules for units.  "Green" units of recruits who survive a certain number of battles will improve to veteran status and can even become Elite.  Similarly, in Duane Jenkins Brownstone game started a few months just prior to Arneson's Northern Marches campaign, a character could go from being a nobody to a somebody over the course of several games. Jenkins doesn't seem to have had a unified mechanic for advancing player, and some roles appeared static, but Arneson seems to have solved or at least simplified that problem by awarding experience points for killing monsters and finding magical treasure.  He also created a system for wizards to gain new spells. It thus became a goal for all characters to "level up" to become better at killing monsters and to gain a bigger role in the game.

Supplement II Blackmoor by TSR didn't really start much, but the caption of the shirt isn't wrong. It did all start with Blackmoor.

 Yet another gamer firestorm arose shortly after the passing of Janelle Jaquays when it was noted that Justin Alexander had changed a rather well known post he had made in 2010 regarding dungeon design attributes he gathered from studying the games made by Jaquays.  In late 2023, as Jaquays was breathing her last, Alexander changed the term from Jaquaying to Xandering reportedly at the request of his publisher for his book "So You Want to be a Dungeon Master." Alexander also stated that Jaquays had requested that he change the name, which is true, but the request was only to change the spelling from Jaquaying to Jaquaysing because Alexander had left off the s. Thus the kerfuffle.

Okay, this post isn't a polemic on the rights or wrongs of what Alexander did.  In fact it's an old post I dusted off and finished in light of the controversy.  Jaquays deserves all the credit in the world for innovative game design. I'm a fan. The Catacombs Sourcebook is a favorite reference of mine and The Hell Pits of Nightfang is dear to my heart.  I'm quite sure that Jaquays deserves to be recognized for pioneering creative dungeon design.

I am going to say though, that seemingly unbeknownst to everybody including Jaquays, Arneson did it first.

There's a trope in science fiction of the old master years ahead of his time.  We see it in Highlander for example in the movies iconic katana impossibly made by a legendary master sword smith, Masamune in 593 B.C., or in Star Trek TNG, with the Master of Tarquin Hill who designed ceramic objects that were three hundred years ahead of their time.  This trope doesn't often have real world equivalents, the most obvious real example being Leonardo Da Vinci.

While Da Vinci was certainly appreciated in his day, the revolutionary and prescient nature of his more creative ideas was unappreciated until more recent times. Was Arneson the Da Vinci of dungeon design?

Below I've copied all the principles Alexander cites as core to "Xandering" a dungeon and examine each one in light of Arneson's principle early dungeon's  - Blackmoor Castle Dungeon (1972), and the Temple of the Frog Dungeon (1975). For good measure I will also throw in a few mentions of Tonisborg (1973) because as creator Greg Svenson will readily tell you, he copied Arneson's methods in designing the dungeon.  Here is the list:

MULTIPLE ENTRANCES: 

Blackmoor dungeon has more entrances than any dungeon I know.  Here is a partial list from the top of my head:

The Elf Stump

The Graveyard

Basement of the Silver Dragon Inn

Basement of the Church of the Facts of Life

The Wizard's Pit

The Well in the castle courtyard near SE corner of outer wall

Main Stair in the Throne room

Western corridor that leads to the hillside west of the Castle

The Temple of Id

Dragon Isle

Etc. etc.

The temple of the Frog dungeon has more than half a dozen entrances to the first level and at least 3 that go directly to the second.  Tonisborg also has multiple entrances.

MULTIPLE LEVEL CONNECTIONS: 

I did quick and dirty count of the Stairs in Blackmoor dungeon and came up with 73.  There are also about a half dozen fireshafts, multilevel caverns and so on.  The same is true of Tonisborg to a lesser scale.  Temple of the Frog dungeon has around a dozen connections between the two levels.

DISCONTINUOUS LEVEL CONNECTIONS: (connections that skip levels)

Blackmoor dungeon may well be the most vertically complex dungeon in existence to this day.  The 73 or so interconnecting stairwells, dozens of shafts and pits, vary from connecting only one level to another, to connecting at least ten levels.  Stairs also skip levels, sometimes only one, and sometimes several.    Tonisborg dungeon mimics this on a smaller scale.  

SECRET & UNUSUAL PATHS: 

Secret and unusual paths? Yes, in abundance.  Have a look at the tunnels for instance, secret entrances through the graveyard, the well, the wizards Pit, and various hidden caverns. There is also the hidden elevator shafts in a couple of the pillars of the Main Gallery.

Here is one Unusual Path on the first level:

SUB-LEVELS: 

This is a little harder to characterize.  Blackmoor, and Tonisborg have isolated sections that could be sublevels or not, depending on how you characterize them vertically.

DIVIDED LEVELS: (a level that cannot be completely traversed without going through the levels above or below it)

There are level sections in both Blackmoor and Tonisborg that can only be entered by going down one stair and up another or by finding, in some cases, a very difficult secret passage or in other cases by digging through a cave in.  Here is a small section example from level 2 entered only be secret doors or a stair:

NESTED DUNGEONS: 

Similarly, there are what one might call nested lairs only accessible through a secret entrance, for example from level 3:

MINOR ELEVATION SHIFTS: 

There are a couple of sloping areas in both Blackmoor and Tonisborg.  Temple of the Frog dungeon has both chutes and a sloping corridor covered with slippery slime.

MIDPOINT ENTRY

Tonisborg Dungeon's main entrance puts you on level 2. The well entrance to Blackmoor dungeon ends at level 3.  If you go in through any of the Blackmoor town entrances it will put you on level 4.  If you go in through the Wizards Pit you will enter on level 4 or 5.  etc.  The temple of the Frog has exterior entrances that put you on the bottom level (2).  So yes, not simply a midpoint entry, but multiple entries to multiple levels.

NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY

No this one I have to concede, isn't found in Blackmoor.  The references is to upside down rooms and M. C. Escher like passages.

EXTRADIMENSIONAL SPACES

A final point not to be missed is that all these design elements were incorporated by Arneson in the very first dungeon ever made. I'm not sure sure I can stress the enormity of this fact.  Arneson didn't need the years of trial and error that resulted in the design principles of "Xandering" that everyone else did. He intuitively grasped what would make a fun and challenging, repeatable dungeon experience from the moment he first put pen to paper in 1972.  I really find it quite amazing.  Blackmoor dungeon is truly a wonder of the fantasy world, like finding a digital camera in a 1972 time capsule.