Today detailed reports from game sessions are common. Until recently, some of the oldest I knew of were to be found in Alarums & Excursion...| boggswood.blogspot.com
The Dungeons of Black Moore Castle (reprinted on pages 63-67 of the Blackmoor Foundations book), is the oldest tabletop RPG fantasy game n...| boggswood.blogspot.com
Arneson's works, like his life, is largely obscure to the D&D community. His best known writing credit is no doubt the TSR DA series starting with Adventures in Blackmoor a series so heavily re-worked from the Blackmoor Chronicles adventures Arneson wrote that his voice is largely lost and replaced by that of Ritchie. No shade on Ritchie, of course, as TSR had their plans and Ritchie's job was to conform the Blackmoor setting to that vision.| Hidden in Shadows
Back in July of 2022 I made a frivilous post on my thought regarding how many editions of D&D there really were. I came up with 8.| Hidden in Shadows
If you want to find the details for one of the characters that Gary Gygax made and played as a PC, perhaps to use as an NPC in your own game, it isn't terribly difficult. Likewise for the characters of Rob Kuntz, David Megarry Greg Svenson and others among the early developers and players of D&D.| Hidden in Shadows
In a sense Blackmoor "grew like Topsy", that is to say wild and on its own.| Hidden in Shadows
In this POST from a few years ago, I was concerned with the issue of scale and distance in Blackmoor in the course of which I attempted to determine the intended scale of the "original Northern Marches" - the March 1971 map of Blackmoor - by fitting it onto a map of the Netherlands. For those unaware, the reason for doing so is that in the FFC, Arneson said his Blackmoor map was modeled on a map of Holland. Of course, there have been several attempts by different folks over the years, tryin...| Hidden in Shadows
ARNECON 2 - Tickets are now live!| Hidden in Shadows
Tickets for the Schenectady Wargamers Association annual game convention are now live on Tabletop Events| Hidden in Shadows
So often it happens that I'm working on one thing, and in the process get pulled down a rabbit hole that leads to a treasure all its own.| Hidden in Shadows
Released as part of Wizards of the Coast's promotion of the 50th anniversary of the publishing of D&D, The Making of Original Dungeons and Dragons 1970 - 1977 has hit the shelves and begun arriving in pre-ordered copies.| Hidden in Shadows
Now that the "Fletcher Collection" folder as it is known by us in the Northern Marches Historical Society - our informal little research circle - has been published as Blackmoor Foundations, I will be providing some historical analysis of the content.| Hidden in Shadows
Apparently there is a shirt for sale with the logo "It started with Blackmoor - 1975". The date indicates they are referring to Blackmoor supplement II for OD&D, which was published in late 1975, but that makes the caption a bit strange and I don't think there is a similar shirt for Greyhawk Supplement 1, also published in 1975.| Hidden in Shadows
Yet another gamer firestorm arose shortly after the passing of Janelle Jaquays when it was noted that Justin Alexander had changed a rather well known post he had made in 2010 regarding dungeon design attributes he gathered from studying the games made by Jaquays. In late 2023, as Jaquays was breathing her last, Alexander changed the term from Jaquaying to Xandering reportedly at the request of his publisher for his book "So You Want to be a Dungeon Master." Alexander also stated that Jaqua...| Hidden in Shadows
I had the pleasure of running Greg Svensons Tonisborg dungeon using the ZED rules at two conventions this year, and the results were interesting.| Hidden in Shadows
I've got a busy gaming schedule coming up. I'm playing in Virtual Greyhawk con and running 2 games (Lakofka's Devils Dung and Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg) at SWA's Council 42 and thinking of also going to PAGE in January, but the highlight is ARNECON in October.| Hidden in Shadows
Related to my last post, and a fun topic in itself, it is something of an open secret that the recent and ongoing "Chentoufi" series of adventures co-authored by Luke Gygax take place in a setting not unlike that his father Gary created in the western Flanaess. Like the Arabian flavored Baklunish Empire of Greyhawk, the Arabian flavored empire of Luke Gygax's World of Okkorim was decimated centuries previously by a great magical devastation.| Hidden in Shadows
Sometimes I find myself moving along and minding my business when suddenly appears a rabbit hole and down I go. Heh. Some of you will remember I did a couple of posts discussing and mapping the idea that Izmer, the realm setting of the first D&D movie, belongs to western Oerik and Greyhawk - the last post on the topic was HERE. | Hidden in Shadows
The Sahuagin are perhaps one of the most intriguing entries in Blackmoor Supplement II. The creature was created by Steve Marsh, but here I want to explore the idea I proposed years ago that the Sahuagin story is more complicated.| Hidden in Shadows
Things Better Left Alone| Hidden in Shadows
Having spent most of my life working as an archaeologist and now as a public historian, I suppose it is not surprising that I would be drawn to puzzles involving the ancient past - even when that past is entirely fictional.| Hidden in Shadows
The original Blackmoor game as Dave Arneson ran it between 1971 and 1975 may be described as a living world campaign. - meaning that the world moves through time regardless of play. | Hidden in Shadows
This month marks the 49th anniversary of a debut demonstration game of the newly published Dungeons & Dragons that Arneson ran at the University of Minnesota. He and his friends were clearly eager to showcase "their" newly published game, but as is often the case when more than one person creates a product, there were some things in the booklets Arneson would rather have handled differently. | Hidden in Shadows
When I looked previously at the Lake Gloomy material (HERE) from early summer 1972, I focused on organizing the material in a user friendly manner. The presentation of Arneson's Loch Gloomin material in the FFC seems as if it was typed directly from his notes with little thought of clarity for the reader.| Hidden in Shadows
A thread on the Piazza HERE inspired me to whip out this post. The complaint that there isn't much game information on the Egg of Coot stems less from the lack of information and more, I think from its scattered character. | Hidden in Shadows