Q&A w/ Greg Svenson

Moving it to the Blackmoor section. I think the boards are small enough (and there aren't that many posts per day) that most OD&D players will find it, and it has the most interest to players of the Blackmoor campaign.

Thanks for the link, Sham/Dave!

I'm glad you liked the Q&A, Finarvyn and Havard.

Greg really is a great guy from all accounts. Very personable and down to earth. It's no wonder he and Dave Arneson had such a long friendship.

Wow. Thanks for that Sham and have an exalt. You should get a dozens more. Too bad we could never seem to get Dave Arneson to write out such detailed answers, but this goes a long way to clearing away the fog that seems to surround the creation of the game and reminds us that Dave deserved a lot more credit than he often got.

Interesting questions. I don't remember more than one or two times where I did kind of a one on one with Dave and that was because I was going to be out of town for a couple of months and I wanted to explain what I would be doing while the other guys were out adventuring. Of course, Dave and I spent hours on the phone every week, but we weren't actually playing, just talking. The gaming sessions were pretty much always a group effort. Even Zvenzen's Freehold, was a group effort by four or five of us. It ended up with my name because I drew the floor plan and the other guys eventually moved on to other things. When we got our own fiefs/towns to run, which was probably in 1974 or so, we generally took turns working in each others fiefs as a group, sometimes we would be at more than one fief in a single gaming session. For those fiefs we did have our own armies, but their purpose was to guard the town.

There were times when I was the DM and there were only one or two players present. At those times we focused on random adventures, to gain experience for a lower level character, so he/they could survive in a party with the more experienced player characters and the enemies they drew...

I didn't think about army building as something to do, but after the Freehold and the town were burned down while we were off adventuring elsewhere, we always made sure that we had hired some troops to protect our bases when we were not there. The Egg of Coot was just one of a half dozen or so major enemies (with the Ran of An Foo in the Duchy of Ten, the Skandaharians, the Afridhi, the Great Kingdom and probably others that I have forgotten) that invaded Blackmoor at various times in the campaign.

As for big miniatures battles, these were really rare. I don't recall them happening more than a couple of times a year.

Thanks Greg. That was very enlightening. From reading FFC, with the long lists of taxes and costs in various provinces I had imagined a great deal of emphasis on political maneuverings, empire building and so on. So it's really interesting to know that in practice you guys were playing cooperatively, going on adventures most of the time, pretty much like any D&D group.

One of the guy's girlfriend played Tosca Rusa, but I don't remember her name or who her boyfriend was. I thought of the Afridhi as devil worshippers. At this point, I don't remember going into ther territory on any adventures. That doesn't mean we didn't adventure there, just that the adventures didn't stand out in a way that I would remember them more than 35 years later, as some other adventures have remained in my memory...