Hidden in Shadows

 Today detailed reports from game sessions are common. Until recently, some of the oldest I knew of were to be found in Alarums & Excursions, but only rarely do these go into the sort of detail we might like.

Often I had wished someone, anyone, had written down a Blackmoor "after action report", but that seemed too much to hope for, or nearly so. We did have a couple of accounts by Greg Svenson, created from memory decades after he played the game, but nothing from the time of play. And then came along Ken Fletcher with his little trove of documents... 

The "THE DUNGEONS OF BLACK MOORE CASTLE" document typed apparently by Arneson as a detailed session report, probably with the intention of publishing in CoTT, is from the FIRST EVER multi-player adventure party dungeon crawl in RPG history - more or less. 

The significance of this discovery cannot be overstated.

The "more or less" above comes from the introduction to the adventure story. We are told of a Wizard who lives in the dungeon, and of an apprentice and a minstrel who disappeared. It is possible the apprentice and minstrel were player characters, who's expeditions was a previous adventure - or it is just back story. The latter seems more likely still given that the minstrel and apprentice latter show up while no player is playing them (NPCs). 

We are also told that Duane Jenkins too has been in the dungeon on a solo adventure. That could be another back story, but we do have a second hand account from Bill Hoyt, that Dwayne told him about a "test" solo adventure Arneson ran with him after a Napoleonics game one night, prior to the evening where he introduced the dungeon to the rest of the group.

Thus in all likelyhood, the typed account represents the second actual dungeon crawl and the first with a group of players participating. 

So for everyone but Dwayne Jenkins this is the account of their very first foray into the dungeon. Looking at the list, these players make up the core of the Blackmoor Bunch minus two key figures: David Megarry and Greg Svenson.

Megarry's absence can be explained by Megarry himself. While he says he was at the first dungeon adventure, he explained that he came in late, apparently well after the game was underway and likely just observed or took on a limited role.

But where is that stalwart of the game, Greg Svenson, one wonders. His apparent absence cast doubt on the idea that this might be a record of the first group dungeon adventure.

However, as I read and re-read the narrative, I noticed something odd, something I'm sure that has jumped out to everyone. The narrative, as typed by Arneson, is in the first person. This is weird, since Arneson is clearly the person running the game. Did he somehow participate as a player too?

 Actually, he does the same thing in Return to Black Moors, again oddly, both when talking about himself and when telling the story from Dan Nicholson's point of view. In other words, he pretends to be Dan Nicholson at one point in the narrative.

Is Arneson pretending to be one of the players again? If so, who? There are several clues in the text - he says, for example he is a mercenary soldier.

The biggest clue however comes from elsewhere. If you have read much Blackmoor material, some of the events in Dungeons might jog a few memories. Here I would encourage you to pause a moment and go read this: The First Dungeon Adventure

Greg recalls some of the details differently (a couple of the players, some events, the presence of a balrog) but it is close enough for there to be little doubt he recalls the same adventure as that recounted in The Dungeons of Castle Black Moore.

Here is a quick breakdown of things that line up:

• Begins with a wizard doing something
• "Among the 30 men-at-arms there were six players"
• "we picked a door leading northwest"
• "We were carrying torches for light"
• "We ...found a staircase going down"
• "a sudden wind had blown out our torches"
• "a black blob ...killed one of the NPCs who ran into it"
• They found a statue
• "We found a magic sword on the ground"
• Bill Heaton takes the magic sword and becomes the leader (Heaton did become the leader for a bit, but it was Johnson who took the sword)
• On the 4th level they find "a fountain with a small statue of a devil in it."
• "...we were all getting tired, so we stopped and set up camp in a large room and bedded down for the "night"
• "During the night a beautiful woman came to our camp. She successfully seduced Bill. While they were embracing she turned into a serpent and killed him. We fought and eventually killed it..." (It was actually Mel Johnson who was killed)
• "The balrog's body became a flaming torch as he tore into us." (actually an unknown monster with a floating jewel)
• "We fought valiantly; ...After a while I realized that I was the last man standing"
• Ends with Svenson, the sole survivor, reporting to Baron Fant.

Honestly, its fairly remarkable how well Greg's memory fits the events of the play report given the time gap and the scores of Blackmoor dungeon dives he's been on. Other things found in Greg's story, like fighting the spiders or Soukup's balrog can be assumed to be "bleed" from later adventures.

Greg has repeatedly claimed that this adventure was the first dungeon adventure they all experienced and the introduction for himself and most of the others to the Blackmoor setting. The story itself as found in Arneson's original account has numerous unmistakable clues supporting this conclusion. Here is a short, non-exhaustive list:

• Aside from Jenkins, the player characters are all low rank soldiers. For example, Krey is still one of the good guys and only a sergeant - not yet promoted to captain, and certainly not yet turned traitor - an event that happened in the Second Coot invasion Circa April 1972. Krey stopped playing altogether later that year.
• Aside from Jenkins, none of the characters has been in the dungeon and clearly have no idea what to expect.
• After finding treasure,  The players want to "find a way back up, so that we could tell of all the gold that could be found in the dungeons. Then we could lead a large expedition down on a treasure hunt." 

These players are total noobs to the dungeon, not the seasoned adventurers of later years.

There is one other area that also points to The Dungeons of Black Moore Castle as a record of the very first dungeon adventure - the maps.

Its possible, as we will see when I complete the post on the subsequent "May 25th" adventure, to map the path the adventurers follow, because both these reports contain detailed descriptions of the rooms and passages. For example, we are told at one point: "We walked twenty feet to a point where the corridor continued north, another corridor went off to the northwest..." These sort of instructions can be mapped onto the existing Blackmoor maps. Here the path taken on level 1 is indicated in red stars:

And here is the path taken on the second level:

We can be sure this is correct and you can follow along with the maps as you read the account if you like. However, even on the first level, certain details don't match. For example, where the party turns north and heads to the stairs, the east-west passage is supposed to end there, not continue west.  However, there is supposed to be a west passage across from the corridor where room 3 is instead.

Further, once the characters go to level 3, the maps change radically. The chapel of the undead and Mels room (4) are more or less as they should be, but other passages and rooms are described in ways that don't match anything on our current maps, at all.

This is in direct contrast to the May 25th adventure "INTO THE DEPTHS OF BLACKMOOR DUNGEON AND BACK", which seems to be a follow on adventure report from not too long after the first one, but which describes the dungeon layout as we know it today and presents no mapping challenges.

The most likely explanation for this discrepancy is that at the time of the first group dungeon adventure the maps were still a work in progress, and the deeper the adventurers got the less finalized they were.

Take Mels room for example. In the adventure, the room sinks, elevator like - at least one level down, but on our current maps, there are tunnels and rooms directly below that would prevent a sinking room. Another example is the room "shaped like a devils-head" reported in the adventure. There is no such room on our current dungeon maps that comes close to the description and passages around this room.

"THE DUNGEONS OF BLACK MOORE CASTLE" is a time capsule, providing a glimpse at the first dungeon crawler as it was still developing. The details found therein are a revelation of Arneson's gaming ideas and much more remains to be said about this and the other documents in the Blackmoor Foundations book.