Memories: Blackmoor (Dave Arneson Day)

My Blackmoor collection.
First Fantasy Campaign, 2nd Printing
Supplement II: Blackmoor, 9th Printing 

I've seen a few posts online regarding how today, October 1st, is the anniversary of Dave Arneson, who was born on this day in 1947. We sadly lost Dave back in 2009, but over the past few years, his legacy seems to be generating more interest and study, particularly with regard to his involvement in the creation of role-playing games.

Back when Arneson died, I didn't have the same reaction I did after Gary Gygax died, for a variety of reasons, but primarily because by the time I had become involved in Dungeons & Dragons, around 1982, Dave had already left TSR (D&D's publisher) and due to legal issues arising between him and the company regarding his status as a co-creator of the game, he was not mentioned much, if at all, in Dragon magazine, my primary source of information about the game at the time. None of the names of the creators were on the box cover nor the front cover of the Basic Set (Moldvay version) that I started with. While Dave Arneson's name is listed next to Gary Gygax's on the first page of the rule book, that was one of the only places I saw it listed. Gary had a regular column in Dragon magazine, and the few news story about the game at the time almost always only mentioned Gygax. 

Interestingly, when I first began to learn a bit more about Arneson was upon discovering Supplement II: Blackmoor, at a local toy store in Sandy, Utah, where I was living at the time. I had come across a beat-up copy of Supplement I: Greyhawk at my friend's house, but the copy of Blackmoor at the store was in pristine condition, other than a small area in the lower right-hand corner where a price sticker had been peeled off. At the time, I was still very confused by the rules differences between the Basic version of D&D that I knew, the more Advanced rules that I was just getting exposed to from frequent borrowings of my friend's Player's Handbook, and this weird version of what, at the time, I called "proto-D&D" stuff from Greyhawk and Blackmoor.

It was in the incorrectly named "Foreward" to Blackmoor, written by none other than Gary Gygax, that I learned more about Dave Arneson than just his name. Gygax actually compliments Dave and credits him as "...the innovator of the 'dungeon adventure' concept, creator of ghastly monsters, and inscrutable dungeonmaster par excellence." This level of praise by Gygax toward Dave was seldom seen again, at least in written form, but this was, for me, a little peak into the man who I had begun to learn was the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons. 

However, what really interested me about the Blackmoor supplement was of course the new rules being added to the game, and for me, I was viewing these through the lens of someone who had already seen many of the later versions of these rough concepts, polished into the Gygaxian versions that would appear in 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The first published version of the assassin and monk classes appear in Blackmoor, as they were taken from Arneson's home campaign. Many new monsters were introduced in the supplement as well, including such now-famous creatures as the umber hulk, sahaugin, and locathahs. Dave also introduces a hit location table, something that's been kept out of every officially published version of D&D to date, but which finds use in many homebrew versions, and also rules for sages (another important part of Dave's Blackmoor campaign). Most intriguingly, the Blackmoor supplement includes what I believe is the first official published D&D adventure, "The Temple of the Frog." 

As a youngster, just discovering D&D and without access to the scholarly research available today through the Internet and from such books as Playing at the World, piecing all of these disparate parts of D&D history together to understand how they related to, and inspired, each other, was a bit of a chore, but one that I actually enjoyed. I felt a bit like a gamer archaeologist, sifting through layers of D&D history to find kernels of forgotten knowledge. 

My investigation into Arneson stopped for the most part after my discovery of the Blackmoor supplement; although I recall seeing ads for a series of four Blackmoor-inspired modules by Dave Arneson (the "DA" series) being released by TSR in the mid-late 1980's. But, they were created for the Basic version of the game, and at this point I had moved on to the more "adult" version of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, so while the modules somewhat interested me, I never picked them up. Part of this was also due to the fact that, where I was living at the time, finding new D&D products was difficult. 

Flash forward to around 2009 or 2010 when I discovered the Old School Blogosphere and I found several people, most notably James Maliszewski, writing about Arneson and his contributions to the hobby. I began to do more research into Arneson, which was becoming easier now that the Internet was more pervasive. And a few years ago, I stumbled across a kickstarter for "The Secrets of Blackmoor," a documentary claiming to tell the story of "The True History of Dungeons & Dragons." I received my Blu-Ray copy of the disc sometime last year, but only somewhat recently finally got around to watching it. For people interested in the history of the role-playing game hobby and seeing how it connects back to miniatures war games and other pre-D&D pseudo-role-playing games such as Braunstein, I highly recommend it. The team who put this together produced a very well-crafted documentary that was frankly of a higher quality than I was expecting from something funded via kickstarter. The interviews with the surviving members of Dave's old Blackmoor group, as well as with Dave's father, and the photographs from games back in the day, combined with great narration and professional transitions, titles, and music, are all worth the 131 minute running time. I learned so much about the influences that went into creating the hobby that we all love, and found it immensely educational. 

Recently during quarantine, being able to save my money by not making trips to the local pub or eating out as often, I went on a short Ebay bidding binge to acquire some older game products I've always wanted. One of these was the original first printing of the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Deities and Demigods, with the Cthulhu and Melnibonéan pantheons. I'd always wanted a copy of that ever since I discovered that the version I had was "missing" these pages, being one of the later printings. 

The other thing I picked up was a near-mint copy of Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign, published by Judges Guild in 1977. In doing my research into the history of the hobby, I'd learned that this product was created by Arneson after he left TSR as a way to show what his original setting was really like. I had read a few reviews of the product, but other than that, had not seen any pages before. It is definitely a product of its time, with limited production values, almost no editing (it seems as though Arneson wrote stream-of-consciousness and neither he nor an editor went back to correct his spelling  or grammatical errors, nor provide any sense of structure), and lacks any kind of organizational sense to help find and use the information presented therein. While it's fun to own this piece of history and read some of Arneson's quirky writing and compare it to "High Gygaxian" writing from the same era, I can honestly say that I learned more about Blackmoor and the type of game it was from watching the "Secrets of Blackmoor" documentary than I did by digging through the poorly organized and written First Fantasy Campaign. Clearly my age is catching up with me, as I no longer enjoyed the archaeological effort to dig through Arneson's early publications as much as I probably would have as a teenager just discovering the game for the first time. 

These three products, all published, and (more importantly) read/watched/acquired by me at completely different times, are interesting and educational glimpses into the "other" co-creator of D&D and, by extension, the hobby of fantasy role-playing. They reveal a different approach to the game that is, at times, much less serious and structured into traditional high fantasy tropes, but that also deals with minutiae such as troop types and domain economics. 

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on Arneson and his playstyle, writing, and his creations. I'm particularly interested to hear from people who have the "DA" series of modules to hear their thoughts on them, but also to hear peoples' thoughts on the different Arneson media I wrote about. I look forward to your comments. 

Hanging: Home office (laptop)
Drinking: I met up with my dad tonight and made a "Corpse Reviver #2" with him and his friend for a video show he makes for YouTube about cocktails. 
Listening: "Can I Kick It?" by a Tribe Called Quest, from the album "People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm"