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Post by Bruce The Black on Dec 6, 2020 8:45:15 GMT -6
Has anyone ever put together a Blackmoore Gazetteer? I have collected some of the blackmoore edition specific stuff for 3.5 and 4E but wondered if anyone had ever created a generic fantasy type Gazetteer for fans and friends of Blackmoor? Blackmoor is a awesome setting but a lot of the information for it is scattered around and what is known is filled with curious holes of information at least to me.
It would be great to read what Arneson meant to do or did and what others have done with it.
I hold out no hope for such a work to ever be published at this point but it would be grand to find a fan made one crafted by knowledgeable Blackmoor scholars.
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Post by Finarvyn on Dec 6, 2020 14:58:19 GMT -6
I seem to recall there being something like this out on the web a decade or so ago. I'll peek in my hard drive when I get to my home computer and see if I can find anything.
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Post by paleologos on Dec 6, 2020 15:17:16 GMT -6
Blackmoor underwent many changes as a campaign setting.
The original campaign (1971-75 or so) took place on the map of the Great Kingdom, the same "world" as Gary's original Greyhawk campaign, and Rob Kuntz's "El Raja Key".
After he left TSR, Arneson replanted Blackmoor in the Judges Guild's Wilderlands setting. New map, new setting (published in JG 37 "The First Fantasy Campaign" in 1977).
My favorite iteration (and one that I ran a campaign in) was the DA series of modules for BECMI. There's enough material in DA1-4 to produce a nice gazetteer, since setting material was included.
After that, I don't have much knowledge of the Zeitgeist games version - yet another reboot.
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Post by Finarvyn on Dec 7, 2020 5:42:34 GMT -6
The original campaign (1971-75 or so) took place on the map of the Great Kingdom, the same "world" as Gary's original Greyhawk campaign, and Rob Kuntz's "El Raja Key". I'm not sure that this is entirely correct, or at least it seems to blur some details. Blackmoor did have connections to the Great Kingdom but was it's own world long before Gary incorporated Blackmoor into the Greyhawk campaign, so I'm not sure I would associate any or Rob Kuntz's work with Blackmoor at all. Everything that Rob did was tied to Gary's Greyhawk but I don't think it retro-connected to Arneson in any way. I would place it more as a parallel thing and not a cause-effect thing. And then the published Greyhawk (folio and boxed set) had a Blackmoor inserted into it but it wasn't Gary's actual Greyhawk anyway, so most published materials don't fit with Arneson's Blackmoor, either. I would place the chronology more like this: (1) Arneson's Blackmoor, tied to the Great Kingdom but with its own maps. Some of this is shared via the Temple of the Frog contained in the OD&D Supplement II Blackmoor booklet. (1a) Gygax's Greyhawk had "a Blackmoor" not really connected to Arneson's. (1b) Published Greyhawk had "a Blackmoor" not really connected to Arneson's. (2) Judges Guild ties Blackmoor to the Wilderlands map with the First Fantasy Campaign in '77. (3) TSR creates the DA modules for B/X with some Arneson input. (4) Zeitgeist creates 3E Blackmoor (plus a 4E book, plus the MMRPG materials) with some Arneson input. I think that (1) and (2) above are the most "pure" Blackmoor, but I don't know how to reconcile the fact that the map from FFC fits into the JG Wilderlands. That would imply some degree of changing the topography. On the other hand, most of FFC seems to be pretty much "pure" Arneson (with some addons from Richard Snyder). The DA modules have Arneson input, but I've heard that much of the text was actually written by others and the style of the text appears different from FFC. Same with the d20 stuff, which has Arneson input but doesn't feel like his writing so I suspect that others did the bulk of the writing with his approval. And the more modern the material, the more the rules follow more modern versions of D&D so I'm sure that square pegs were hammered into round holes somewhere since Arneson didn't have d20 rules back in '72. At least, that's my take on it. |
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Post by paleologos on Dec 7, 2020 7:18:30 GMT -6
Finarvyn, your points are well taken - those heady days when Dave and Gary were actively collaborating were special, though. Take this classic quote:
"From the map of the "land" of the "Great Kingdom" and environs — the territory of C & C Society — Dave located a nice bog wherein to nest the weird enclave of "Blackmoor," a spot between the "Giant Kingdom" and the fearsome "Egg of Coot."
I'm also thinking of Dave's "City of the Gods" adventure, held in early 1975, through which he ran Mordenkinen and Robilar. Gary had run Mordenkinen in Rob's "El Raja Key" so that implies a shared continuity between original versions of Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and El Raja Key.
The big split occurs when Dave leaves TSR, takes Blackmoor with him to Judges Guild, and Gary includes an alternate Blackmoor in his revised "World of Greyhawk".
I totally acknowledge that much of the DA series was cooked up by Ritchie, but he had a lot of good ideas, and the end result is totally playable.
All this is with the understanding that Blackmoor is the first and longest "living campaign", rolling through multiple setting revisions. Anyways, it sure is fun to think about this stuff!
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Post by aldarron on Dec 7, 2020 21:27:32 GMT -6
Has anyone ever put together a Blackmoore Gazetteer? I have collected some of the blackmoore edition specific stuff for 3.5 and 4E but wondered if anyone had ever created a generic fantasy type Gazetteer for fans and friends of Blackmoor? Blackmoor is a awesome setting but a lot of the information for it is scattered around and what is known is filled with curious holes of information at least to me. It would be great to read what Arneson meant to do or did and what others have done with it. I hold out no hope for such a work to ever be published at this point but it would be grand to find a fan made one crafted by knowledgeable Blackmoor scholars. I'm working on something, but in the meanwhile there is this: Blackmoor Living WorldThe original campaign (1971-75 or so) took place on the map of the Great Kingdom, the same "world" as Gary's original Greyhawk campaign, and Rob Kuntz's "El Raja Key". I'm not sure that this is entirely correct, or at least it seems to blur some details. Blackmoor did have connections to the Great Kingdom but was it's own world long before Gary incorporated Blackmoor into the Greyhawk campaign, so I'm not sure I would associate any or Rob Kuntz's work with Blackmoor at all. Everything that Rob did was tied to Gary's Greyhawk but I don't think it retro-connected to Arneson in any way. I would place it more as a parallel thing and not a cause-effect thing. And then the published Greyhawk (folio and boxed set) had a Blackmoor inserted into it but it wasn't Gary's actual Greyhawk anyway, so most published materials don't fit with Arneson's Blackmoor, either. I would place the chronology more like this: (1) Arneson's Blackmoor, tied to the Great Kingdom but with its own maps. Some of this is shared via the Temple of the Frog contained in the OD&D Supplement II Blackmoor booklet. (1a) Gygax's Greyhawk had "a Blackmoor" not really connected to Arneson's. (1b) Published Greyhawk had "a Blackmoor" not really connected to Arneson's. Rare as it is for me to disagree with Fin, actually Paleo had this part correct. Arneson drew a Northern Marches map and sent that off to Gygax/Kuntz at the C&C society in March of 1971. It was a portion of the now familiar Blackmoor map. Arneson seems to have been setting up a Braunstein campaign, but doesn't seem to have gotten very far. By June, the C&C Great Kingdom map came out - the map that eventually becomes the Flanaess - and Arneson shifts his Blackmoor on to this map. He redraws Blackmoor to fit on the new map (shown inside the FFC on page 12 of the 1980 reprint). In December of 1972, Gary Gygax creates Greyhawk and places it on the Great Kingdom map too. From 1971 to 1977 both Greyhawk and Blackmoor are on the same continent in the same world and cross adventuring occur between the two. Put another way, all the famous adventures of the Great Svenny, The Blue Rider, and Bosero take place in the same place as the famous adventures of Mordenkainen, Tenser, and Robilar. Same continent, different areas. That sort of changes in 1977. From Gygax perspective, Blackmoor continues to be in Greyhawk, same as before. Arneson has split with TSR however, but finds a welcome in Judges Guild, so he dusts off his old Northern Marches map - the one he had abandoned in 1971 - and recreates Blackmoor as an attachment to the Wilderlands. |
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Post by Finarvyn on Dec 8, 2020 5:41:53 GMT -6
Rare as it is for me to disagree with Fin, actually Paleo had this part correct. I stand ... er, sit corrected.  It still seems odd to me to make the conclusion that if one wants to know more about Blackmoor then one ought to check out the original Gygax and Kuntz Greyhawk materials. Even with the cross-pollination of the two campaigns, Blackmoor should be able to be looked at as its own thing. |
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Post by scottyg on Dec 8, 2020 7:32:14 GMT -6
Fin’s probably got it right. None of the Gygax or Kuntz published material should should be considered a source. All of the shared world play occurred before anything Greyhawk was published, and the Blackmoor of the published Greyhawk is a name drop homage and not really derived from Dave’s Blackmoor. It’s called Blackmoor and it’s on the northern part of the map, but that’s about it. Even published Greyhawk and Gary’s home campaign were very different. Again, only loosely based on the old IFW Great Kingdom map.
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Post by Falconer on Dec 8, 2020 12:37:43 GMT -6
I am a huge FFC fan; since 2001, I have set all my D&D games on its map. I’ve never really gotten into the later materials, as they didn’t feel congruous. I have always been hazy as to what, if anything, Arneson contributed to them.
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Post by Finarvyn on Dec 8, 2020 16:14:51 GMT -6
I am a huge FFC fan; since 2001, I have set all my D&D games on its map. I’ve never really gotten into the later materials, as they didn’t feel congruous. I have always been hazy as to what, if anything, Arneson contributed to them. That doesn't stop me from owning all of the newer stuff, however.  For me, FFC is close to the ultimate RPG book (other than the actual OD&D books, that is). The information about armies and such is so much like the kind of games my group ran in the 1970's that I almost feel like I was a part of Dave's campaign. I know that a lot of "modern" Blackmoor fans don't find as much value in the FFC, but for me it's one of the most inspirational RPG books that I have ever found. |
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Post by paleologos on Dec 8, 2020 16:26:27 GMT -6
Hi guys, I didn't mean to imply that any of Gary or Rob's material is necessary or even desired as part of a Blackmoor campaign drawing from the 1971-77 era. Rather, that the campaign took place on the map of the Great Kingdom, that's all. I'm not sure what happened between 1977-1986 in terms of games on the Judges World map. The DA series is it's own thing, as well, although there's certainly continuity between these campaigns. I've recently taken a deep dive into each section of the FFC on my blog. You can check it out, here. It's been a blast, digging through the internet to glean insights from others, much wiser than I. |
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Post by scottyg on Dec 8, 2020 17:15:38 GMT -6
When I first read FFC I was not a big fan. I didn’t get it, but I’ve come to think of it as one of the best RPG books ever published. There’s nothing better at conveying what the guys who created the game expected the game to be like. The game running and development notes are fascinating.
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Post by Finarvyn on Dec 8, 2020 18:16:05 GMT -6
I've recently taken a deep dive into each section of the FFC on my blog. You can check it out, here. It's been a blast, digging through the internet to glean insights from others, much wiser than I. Nice blog, by the way. I don't think I've been there before, but I'm going to bookmark it. |
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Post by Piper on Dec 8, 2020 23:08:58 GMT -6
I didn't mean to imply that any of Gary or Rob's material is necessary or even desired as part of a Blackmoor campaign drawing from the 1971-77 era. You didn't ... and no reasonable person took it that way. Don't worry about it. |
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Post by Bruce The Black on Dec 9, 2020 2:51:08 GMT -6
Thanks for the replies guys. Tons of stuff to read through!
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Post by aldarron on Dec 9, 2020 8:27:32 GMT -6
Fin’s probably got it right. None of the Gygax or Kuntz published material should should be considered a source. All of the shared world play occurred before anything Greyhawk was published, and the Blackmoor of the published Greyhawk is a name drop homage and not really derived from Dave’s Blackmoor. It’s called Blackmoor and it’s on the northern part of the map, but that’s about it. Even published Greyhawk and Gary’s home campaign were very different. Again, only loosely based on the old IFW Great Kingdom map. Yeah, I both agree and disagree. I agree that published Greyhawk and Gygax's home campaign were substantially different, just as published Lendore Isles and Lakofka's original Lendore campaign (which wasn't even on an island, apparently) were different. However that does not stop, nor should it, the inclusion of characters, places, and events from those campaigns into Greyhawk lore. The fact that the map was redrawn is easily handwaived and I'm not sure I would characterize it as a "loosely based" redraw. Maybe, certainly the eastern half of the map got a big facelift, but the western half of the map is practically identical. In any case, just as Greyhawk draws on the poeple, places, and events of Gygax's campaign, there is every reason to include the 71 to 77 Blackmoor material in Greyhawk lore. To do otherwise is simply inconsistent with including material from Gygax or Lakofka or Kuntz from the same period. The oft-repeated mantra that is nothing more than an "name drop homage" is, I'm sorry, a complete fabrication. There is absolutely no reality to this claim. The Flanaess is a redrawn version of the Great Kingdom map. Arneson's Blackmoor was an integral setting of that map. The Greyhawk Folio is an expansion and development of Gygax home campaign, Arneson's Blackmoor was part of that campaign, and vice versa. Blackmoor was already published as a supplement, tied to Greyhawk in the OD&D introduction, stories Gygax had published, and magazine articles. That's why Blackmoor is in the Folio, certainly not as a kind of homage to a group of people with whom Gygax was not at all on good terms with at the time. Gygax had less than zero motivation to include Blackmoor as a homage. In fact, he rather insults the place, making the capital an anagram of "Redundant" with a population of 666. But yes I totally agree that the Folio Blackmoor is different from the original, just as Lendore is different from it's original and Maure castle is different and Greyhawk is different (or for that matter Zagig or Gaxmoor is different). But I don't think anyone is suggestion that all of Gary or Rob or Len's pre Folio material has no place in Greyhawk now. Nor should we say that of Dave's. |
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Post by geoffrey on Dec 9, 2020 13:04:09 GMT -6
I am a huge FFC fan; since 2001, I have set all my D&D games on its map. The First Fantasy Campaign hex map is the single best overland D&D map I have ever seen.  |
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Post by Finarvyn on Dec 20, 2020 9:41:44 GMT -6
Going back to Bruce the Black's original question... I seem to recall there being something like this out on the web a decade or so ago. I'll peek in my hard drive when I get to my home computer and see if I can find anything. My memory on this is decent, turns out. There WAS a Gazetteer at one point, as Havard discussed in his blog. blackmoormystara.blogspot.com/2009/10/gazetteer-of-blackmoor.htmlProblem is that the blog has links to a "Home of the Ancients" site and the links are dead, so no luck on that front. Now, as to whether I can find a copy on my old hard drive, I don't know yet. ------------ EDIT: This may help.... blackmoor.mystara.net/zimriel/ |
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Post by aldarron on Dec 29, 2020 11:59:54 GMT -6
Yep that's Zimriel's (David Ross) try this LINKThere's good stuff there but it is pre-d20 Blackmoor and so focuses on the DA series material. |
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Post by grodog on Dec 30, 2020 0:01:24 GMT -6
Going back to Bruce the Black's original question... I seem to recall there being something like this out on the web a decade or so ago. I'll peek in my hard drive when I get to my home computer and see if I can find anything. My memory on this is decent, turns out. There WAS a Gazetteer at one point, as Havard discussed in his blog. blackmoormystara.blogspot.com/2009/10/gazetteer-of-blackmoor.htmlProblem is that the blog has links to a "Home of the Ancients" site and the links are dead, so no luck on that front. The original page from 2011 is still on the Internet Archive at web.archive.org/web/20110131090103/http://pages.sbcglobal.net/zimriel/Blackmoor/ and has a few additional related links at the bottom of the page that may be of interest. Allan. |
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Post by cometaryorbit on Dec 31, 2020 2:21:34 GMT -6
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Post by aldarron on Nov 13, 2021 13:04:23 GMT -6
I finished the Gazeteer at last. He is a link to my 'Blog where you can download it if you like. Update 2022: I made a cover and interior file you can also download if you want to have files for your own POD book. Also the file itself has been updated (fixed typos etc.) a few times from the initial release. |
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Post by derv on Nov 14, 2021 11:07:25 GMT -6
I finished the Gazeteer at last. He is a link to my 'Blog where you can download it if you like. Even though I'm not one of those guys heavily invested in the old settings, I have to say kudos to you Dan for embracing the spirit of the early gamers and offering up a resource for free to the community. It looks well researched and informative to say the least. |
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Post by Bruce The Black on Nov 29, 2021 8:38:42 GMT -6
This is awesome! Thank you!
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Post by simrion on Nov 30, 2021 8:01:11 GMT -6
Here's a few I hope appropriate questions...Would the TSR DA series be applicable and, more importantly, did they have the approval of Dave Arneson? DA series being DA1 Adventures in Blackmoor, Temple of the Frog, City of the Gods & Duchy of Ten
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Post by aldarron on Feb 3, 2022 21:51:22 GMT -6
I finished the Gazeteer at last. He is a link to my 'Blog where you can download it if you like. Even though I'm not one of those guys heavily invested in the old settings, I have to say kudos to you Dan for embracing the spirit of the early gamers and offering up a resource for free to the community. It looks well researched and informative to say the least. This is awesome! Thank you! Thanks very much! |
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