Blackmoor

Blackmoor is a fantasy role-playing game campaign setting created by Dave Arneson in the early 1970s, generally regarded as the first such setting and an early testing ground for what became Dungeons & Dragons.¹⁵¹⁷ It originated as Arneson’s personal home campaign, run for his gaming group near the Twin Cities of Minnesota for some three years before the publication of the first D&D rules in 1974.⁷¹⁷ The setting takes its name from a land Arneson called the Black Moors, recorded in his May 1971 Corner of the Table Newsletter, and is generally said to have been created over the Christmas of 1970–1971.⁹¹⁰

Origins

Arneson developed Blackmoor out of the wargaming culture of the Twin Cities, having joined the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA) after 1963, where David Wesely introduced him to the group while he was still in grade school.⁶ Within that circle Wesely had introduced the role of the game master or referee in 1965 — devised to combat the “game lawyers” who had previously made games drag on for years — and, a year or two later, a form of role-playing built on his “Braunstein“ games that dropped wargaming and combat entirely.⁶ Arneson, by one account, forced Wesely to improvise combat rules on the spot during a duel; when Wesely was deployed for military service, Arneson and a collaborator named Megarry carried his ideas forward with Wesely’s permission.⁶

The earliest datable record connected directly to Blackmoor is the so-called Northern Marches map and an accompanying letter Arneson mailed in March 1971 to Rob Kuntz as king of the Castle & Crusade society.⁹ The origins of the setting have also been traced to the Castle & Crusade Society, a subgroup of the International Federation of Wargaming.²⁰ A one-page campaign newsletter, the Blackmoor Gazette and Rumormonger, circulated late in 1971, predating the part of Arneson’s “Points of Interest about Black Moor” article that ran in Domesday Book #13.⁵

By Arneson’s own account, given in Wargaming #4 of January–February 1978, Blackmoor Dungeon was first conceived after he watched old monster movies on a local television station while eating popcorn and reading Conan novels, beginning with a few sheets of graph paper for the upper levels and then laying out his wargaming table to represent the castle and countryside.⁹ Commentators have noted the influence of both Robert E. Howard’s Conan and the Hyborian Age — evident in the cunning Eraks, the sea-raiding Skandanarians, the Red Wizards Coven, and the barbarian Picts of the Northern Marches map — and the later Tolkienesque material of Chainmail, the medieval miniatures wargame whose rules Arneson used to adjudicate combat in early Blackmoor sessions.⁹⁷ One blogger has speculated that the Boris Karloff film The Black Room, which aired twice on the Twin Cities’ Horror Incorporated in January and February 1971, may lie behind the pun-loving Arneson’s choice of name.⁹

Play in the original campaign

The first Blackmoor game, according to Arneson and player Greg Svenson, was a dungeon adventure in which an evil wizard and a companion balrog stole something precious from the baron and hid in the dungeons below Blackmoor Castle, with the “Blackmoor Bunch” of players hired by the baron — likely Arneson’s own character — to retrieve it.¹⁸ Arneson ran the session as a split party with players opposing one another, the wizard played by Kurt Krey and the balrog by John Soukup, and conducted it entirely verbally without miniatures, much as one would tell a story or play a game of make-believe.¹⁸ The same session is credited with several firsts of the hobby: a total party kill, an early form of live-action play in which Arneson lined players up in his parents’ basement laundry room and screamed in the dark to simulate a “grey pudding” attack drawn from the 1950s film The Blob, and character advancement, when Bill Heaton’s character was promoted to “superhero” after taking up a magical sword that shocked and threw the other players who tried to lift it.¹⁸

Arneson’s Blackmoor was notably oriented toward overland and wilderness adventure rather than dungeon-crawling, distinguishing it from the more dungeon-focused direction of Greyhawk and TSR’s later published adventures; Arneson is credited with inventing wilderness encounter tables.⁵ At the height of the campaign Arneson described coordinating six dungeons and over 100 detailed player characters, with players themselves setting up new areas while his own role evolved from dungeonmaster into that of chief coordinator.¹⁸ The setting featured locations such as Blackmoor Castle and village, the home of Mello the Halfling, Svenson’s Freehold, the Temple of the Frog in the Lake Gloomey area, and the distant Egg of Coot.³¹⁸⁷ Internal lore extended to such details as an “Inspector General” Snider holding tax authority over the baron of Blackmoor on behalf of the king, and dragons that did not breed true but produced offspring of varying colors.⁵

Publication

When Arneson took the game to Lake Geneva and ran it for Gary Gygax, the Blackmoor dungeons became the rooms through which Gygax’s character first played, helping spur the development of D&D.¹⁷ After the first D&D rules appeared in 1974, two supplements were rushed out: Greyhawk, drawn from material cut from the original booklets, and Blackmoor, drawn from Arneson’s house rules and home campaign.⁷ Reviewers have described the Blackmoor supplement as an uneasy fit with the D&D rules, since its material had to be adapted to the published system.⁷

Dungeons & Dragons Supplement II: Blackmoor was published by TSR, Inc. in 1975 as a sixty-page digest-sized book.¹⁵⁷ Following the structure of the original rules — divided into men and magic, monsters and treasure, and underworld and wilderness adventures — it introduced the monk and assassin character classes and a hit-location system, 36 new and mostly nautical monsters such as the sahuagin and locathah, a list of magic items, and the “Temple of the Frog” scenario — the first published adventure for D&D — along with the first non-player-character class, the sage, and rules for diseases and underwater campaigns.⁷ The monk class drew on the kung fu movie craze of the 1970s, while reviewers judged both the monk and the assassin poor mechanical fits to the rest of D&D, the assassin’s percentage-based killing rules circumventing the hit-point attrition central to the game.⁷

In 1977, Judges Guild published Arneson’s The First Fantasy Campaign, a 96-page book with two 17-by-22-inch maps, priced at $7.98, edited by Richard Snider.³¹⁷ It detailed the baronies, citadels, leaders, and history of the campaign, with maps of the twelve levels of Blackmoor Dungeon beneath the five levels of Blackmoor Castle, along with guidelines for lair generation, character vocations such as hunting, farming, fishing, and trapping, and an experience system based on “special interests” by which characters advanced through spending money on their pursuits.³¹⁷ Deliberately incomplete because Arneson wished to keep secrets from active players, and assembled from notes drawn from multiple periods with little indication of their context, the book nonetheless preserves a unique and irreplaceable record of the earliest days of the hobby.¹⁷ Later commentators running the maps as written have found that Arneson’s stocking procedures generated too little treasure and that his special-interest experience system, as printed, contains missing and contradictory information.¹⁷

Later incarnations

Blackmoor was subsequently incorporated as a distant element of the pre-history of the Mystara campaign world, long extinct in that setting’s timeline as a nod to Arneson.¹² In the Greyhawk world it appears as an unruly barony on the world of Oerth, a wild land of sporadic tribes.¹¹ In the 2000s the setting was revived as Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, including a d20-system line published by Zeitgeist Games and a “massively multiplayer” living campaign run at conventions across the United States.⁸¹⁰ Arneson died on April 7, 2009; fan and community efforts, including dedicated websites and Minnesota conventions such as ArneCON and DaveCON held in his honor, have continued to document and play in the setting.¹⁰⁶