The fantasy campaign that created DnD

last week we discussed Brownstein a kind of early Napoleonic lar and how that became known as the first roleplaying game today we're going to talk about how that evolved further into what we now think of as a fantasy roleplaying game this was called Blackmore created by Dave arneson now most the information in this video is going to be taken from the book uh playing at the World by John Peterson as well as the documentary secrets of Blackmore I'll put links to both of those down below strongly recommend them if you want to learn more about this time period now as I mentioned last time Dave arneson was a pretty prominent player in the early Brownstein games both in number one and number four and after Brownstein's Creator David Wesley went off to the military then Dave arnson began kind of taking over and running more games like this in his basement this concept of a Brownstein had really caught on among Twin Cities Gamers and now really any kind of campaign or even just a session that involved a bunch of players all with distinct roles and objectives presided over by a referee was referred to as a Brownstein although sometimes the name was tweaked a little bit depending on the genre it was in for example another gamer ran a Brownstein called brown stone that was set in the wild west but Dave arnison was clearly dreaming of something bigger in 1971 in an issue of corner of the table which was a gaming fan scene at the time this note from Dave arnison appears there will be a medieval Brownstein April 17th 1971 at the home of David arneson from 1300 hours to 2400 hours with Refreshments being available on the usual basis players may come at any time and any number are welcome to attend what should be an exciting time it will feature mythical creatures and a poker game under the trolls bridge between sunup and Sundown arnison was drawing upon his love of Mythology and folklore and even things like Conan the Barbarian to craft an expansive fantasy world where anything would be possible Bob Meyer was one of the players in this initial game and he recalls actually fighting the troll under the Bridge he simply pulled out his sword and tried to kill it and the troll crushed him in one hit making Bob the first player to die in a fantasy role playing game there weren't a lot of combat mechanics at this point in the game's development there weren't any hit points for example this is something that arnison had to fix over time as the game's systems continue to refine initially the Blackmore campaign didn't look a whole lot like what we would expect a role playing game to look like today it was much more war game focused the players played things that were more like generals where you would control armies and forces and the main goal was to defend Blackmore a town with a castle inside against the invading forces of the evil people from the far north this often involved a mysterious villain called the Egg of coot no one really knew what it looked like the system itself for resolving combat was actually chain mail which was a war game designed by Gary gak probably the most revolutionary thing though that Dave Arnis added to this world that he was creating was a progression system characters could actually advance in power as they gained experience and usually you would gain experience by doing the kind of thing that your character was good at so if you wanted to become a better fighter you had to kill a lot of things a lot of monsters usually and then you'd be a better fighter you also had actual statistics for different types of abilities that you had like strength or brains that was really revolutionary at the time the second most important change was likely when the players began venturing into the dungeons underneath Blackmore castle without their armies as the players delved deeper and deeper arnison was forced to come up with more rooms and more levels and fill them with treasure and monsters and obstacles for the players to dig out the players were hooked by this system it became a huge problem for the campaign actually over the long term because the Egg of cooch would be sending down its evil forces to take over Blackmore and the players would simply ignore the whole wargaming aspect of the game instead they wanted to go back to the dungeon they wanted more treasure they wanted to go deeper they wanted to see what was down there and get that experience arnison had in ently stumbled into a killer app for his campaign the concept of a dungeon dungeons were much easier to referee than an open world war game because it was more constrained in terms of what players could do it also offered players very clear and specific choices that they had to make what direction you want to go do you want to open this door and things like that and also it had an addictive gameplay Loop that players wanted to repeat over and over before too long Gary gagak heard about this strange group up in the Twin Cities that was running a fantasy Brownstein using his chain mail rules he was intrigued by this idea and asked Dave arnison to come down to Lake Geneva to demo it for him he got the potential of it immediately and wanted to start collaborating with Dave arnison in terms of writing rules and formulating the whole thing so it could be packaged and sold that of course became Dungeons and Dragons I've always wondered what it would be like to actually play in a Blackmore session these games from the very dawn of fantasy role playing what was Blackmore castle like what were the rules like well I finally got to find out the most recent garycon where I managed to get into a game of Blackmore being run by Bob Meer the very guy who is killed by that troll under the bridge before we get to that though a quick shout out to today's sponsor into the am into the am sends me tons of awesome sci-fi and fantasy themed t-shirts one of my favorite things to do is just browse their website and try and find cool shirts that fit the themes of the campaign that I'm running at the time they have so many different designs on there that you're guaranteed to find something that works for you this is one of their latest ones right here which I think would work pretty well for any sci-fi or fantasy campaign I think this little guy forgot to check for traps if you want to grab a bunch of them you can get three for $65 and even if graphic te's aren't your thing they also have things like polo shirts and button-ups and lots of other great stuff check them out using the link in the description below okay back to my Blackmore game at garycon now our game master Bob Meyer did not want us to do any recording which I completely respect but I'll give you the basic rundown our characters were super simple you could put them on a index card easily they didn't actually have any stats you basically a name you had a list of equipment and you were often had a special ability in my case that was telepathy which turned out to be really useful because the session was run in a very interesting way where there was not one but two groups my group was exploring Blackmore Castle itself and the other group was exploring the dungeon underneath the castle my telepathy allowed me to send messages written on note cards to the other group and get messages back again so we could coordinate the system itself was 2d6 based you would make a 2d6 rule the game master would make a 2d6 rule and he would compare the results and tell you what happened I don't know if there was more detailed Rules running in his head but I it was mostly I think the difference between your roles that made the most impact modifiers weren't really a thing it was just up to chance however if you play your cards really carefully you might not have to roll at all which is probably the best strategy in terms of actual combat well I think the game master was keeping track of how much damage things took in his head but it wasn't written on your character sheet you would simply get a result that narrated in world what was happening to you or to the monster over the course of the adventure we barged into Blackmore Castle we found a group of Orcs we chased them around we killed them all except for one which we captured and one of the other players used one of the special abilities to extract the information we needed where a Wizard's Apprentice was hiding that we were supposed to try and retrieve or at least make sure was okay we also had to find a magic well the orc led us down to the basement not quite the same thing as the dungeon which we had to explore for a bit we killed a troll by setting it on fire and stabbing it to death it turns out we did a really good job with this the troll was supposed to kill a couple of us or that was the more likely result but we ganged up on it and we slaughtered that guy eventually we found a magic well leading even deeper into the dungeon where we made contact with the other team which was being run by a separate game master this group had befriended a tiny little balrog who wanted to fight us and gain experience because the monsters I guess gained experience and could level up as well and any case that bog was sent on his way we found the Wizards Apprentice we found the well and everything was good we had completed our mission we didn't even take any casualties which is pretty astonishing given how lethal this game could be one of the things I really noticed about it was the element of mapping and keeping track of your surroundings early DND or early Blackmore I suppose a better way to refer to it was very much a mapping game you had to keep track of your environment you had to be very precise about that or you could get lost quite easily the environments were also quite I guess dry by modern standards rooms were either empty sometimes they had some treasure in it sometimes there were some monsters in it and that was about it in a modern old school or osr game you would expect a lot more variety and a lot more I guess juiciness per room but these rooms were much more straightforward the excitement came from the way that you interacted with the monsters and the whole challenge of mapping and getting around this was surprising to me at first until I realized how exciting this would be to players who had never played a dungeon game before the concept of kicking down a door and seeing an orch there and then you can talk to the orc and the orc can talk to you and what's going to happen depends on what you do would have been thrilling enough on its own it was a fascinating experience and I am so glad I got to have it especially with Bob as the dungeon master he was great at running the game and it was just an absolute joy to talk to he even signed my dungeon Masters Guide adding his name to my roster of TSR veterans that I'm trying to collect now the last thing I want to talk about is actually this thing right here this is the first fantasy campaign by Dave arnison this is the only real publication that he put out that explains in any real detail what the world of Blackmore looked like he did put out a Blackmore expansion for original DND but that's mostly stats for the DND system and doesn't get into his setting and his campaign too much by sheer luck I ran into this copy at my local Half Price Books which was very surprising so let's take a look inside so here it is the first fantasy campaign playing Aid by Dave arneson this was published by the judges Guild back in the late 70s this is the third printing from 1980 and it says down here in red very difficult to read let's see 88 Pages it's not actually 88 pages so that's a misprint I guess book and two campaign Maps there's some maps at the back uh revealing the history and details of the original Fantasy roleplaying game visit the dread egg of coot lock gloan and the underworld below Blackmore Castle here are our two Maps they're exactly the same except this one has all of the details and this one does not so this one's good for giving to your players here's the whole campaign map including the sinking land uh sea Raiders of the northern Lords are to the Northeast scale is 10 mil per hex or 22 mil per inch got your Elven Forest Tower of Buu vestfold there's Blackmore itself right there we have a lake gloomy the duche of 10 down here there's the nomads of 10 looks like actually a a great campaign map I love how it's kind of swampy over here you have the land mass broken up by different areas of water you have different types of environments you got grasslands you got Forest you got Hills you have mountains lots of different areas to have adventures in the map is hundreds of miles tall so you could easily run years and years of campaigns without ever leaving this thing ah there it is the Egg of coot itself here's our title page we have some beautiful artwork right here it's funny how much the artwork varies from page to page from extremely amateurish to very detailed and beautiful I love that cont it shows you that there's actual human beings making this who had different visions of things he says that in general a fairly loose procedure was set up for the establishment of each of these new areas with a great deal of emphasis being placed on players themselves setting up new dungeons so players can make new dungeons with my original dungeon master role evolving more into the job of coordinating the various operations that were underway at any given moment at the height of my participation as Chief coordinator there were six Dungeons and over 100 detailed player characters to be kept track of at any any one time so Blackmore was a living breathing world with lots of different parties lots of dungeon Masters it was the world that was the focus rather than a particular story says that the dungeon of Blackmore began with only the basic monsters from chain mail with six levels deep six was chosen since it allowed the random placement within six-sided dice no funny dice back then combat was quite simple at first and then got progressively complicated with the addition of hit locations Etc as the player's first rool for characteristics the number of hits a body uh could take ran from one to 100 as a player progressed he did not receive additional hit points but rather became harder to hit by the end of the fourth year of continuous play Blackmore covered hundreds of square miles had a dozen castles three separate judges as my own involvement decreased due to other commitments this was really a massive labor of love and a real collaboration among tons of people one of the things that you come to understand pretty early in reading this book is that it isn't really a coherent Vision or a gazeteer of the whole world of Blackmore it's really just a collection of pieces of data and interesting notes that Dave arnison has put together there's lots and bits and pieces of really cool and fun stuff little pieces of trivia but if you wanted to run a complete campaign here especially a modern style one you're probably going to have to put in a lot of work we can see from these early pages that Blackmore was really conceived of originally at least as a war game campaign a lot of information about uh different types of armies uh what their income was and we can see that there's like peasants levies Lightfoot heavy foot all of the stuff that would be linked pretty closely to chain mail there's a number of different types of castles here as we saw in the introduction castles were being built by players pretty frequently internal Investments that you can made as you build up your kingdom and expand it there's rules for hunting and religion exploration farming fishing trapping all of that stuff to have a a deep World simulation which I think was more what Dave Arison was going for here's an early map of the world I love how Dave arnison laments that the actual war game campaign that he had been running has now kind of at a standstill because when he has new people join the game all they're interested is exploring the dungeon under Blackmore castle that's all people want to see here we have Blackmore's more Infamous characters a lot of the main villains and heroes what's funny is that these weren't all characters that were played by uh the game master a lot of the villains were played by other characters which is make sense when you come from a wargaming background here's the big Archen enemy the Egg of coot which is just such a weird name I love it Theory say that he is now a huge mass of jointly operating cells a huge mass of jelly a giant thickly hided egg Pure Energy a man a mass of living Rock Etc it is generally acknowledged that the physique of this creature is too horrible for any mortal to behold there was a rumor going around for a long time that the IG ofoot was supposed to represent Gary gak himself because he's the villain and of course arnison had a big falling out with Gary later on and egg uh matches up with the initials of e Gary gak however that is not the case the EG of cou existed long before for any animosity built up between them other characters include ran of AFU we have the jyn of celik and then we have marfel the Barbarian who is just hilarious he is a kind of a parody of Conan the Barbarian a Wanderer from the waist who makes his way into different kingdoms somehow keeps rising in the ranks towards being a general and causing absolute Havoc wherever he goes we start getting into Blackmore itself right here with this population area and resources description of the Ye Old come back in and classic in you could go and gain uh information and rumors probably the first one that all of the ins and d and d spring from this one has a weird Quirk where once you enter the comeback in you can't leave again any attempt to exit brings you back to where you started again the only way to get out is if someone on the outside sees you trying to exit and pulls you out here's the town of Blackmore itself with the castle up here on this little Cliff there's an elf barricade right here because basically there's so much Undead stuff in the castle the elves have built a magical holy barricade to prent vampires from getting into the town some of the floors of Blackmore Castle this is the actual map that we were exploring at the game at garycon I think we entered over here ran down this Corridor down this hallway over into this room fought some Orcs went up to the second level eventually came down to the basement and explored all these rooms where we fought a troll maybe in there I forget exactly we got encounter matrixes for exploring the Great Outdoors if you want to wander that massive hex crawl and take your chances trying to get to some of those other notable locations very detailed information including patterns of human habitation in a 10 m hex where a hex can be broken down into 88 smaller pieces there really is a sense that arnison was focusing on simulating an entire world it's the kind of impulse that today you would uh use computers to try and simulate but that wasn't really available back then you had to do everything by hand here we go Blackmore dungeons I love how he points out here that there is a famous passageway down to the dungeon or down to the bottom of the dungeons called the orchan way and there's actually a plaque there that labels it orc Public Works erected by Funk the first king of all the Orcs that's just that's awesome if you take that orcin way down to the bottom you are in for a rude surprise because you'll be in ambushed by the entire horde of all the Orcs plus probably bogs and trolls and everything Sur Fang is a great character originally a ninth level fighter Dave Fant right because all of these were real people in his campaign that fell prey to a vampire and didn't get away he's treated as a vampire times five in value he is today much stronger than that regarding the elves there are now turn Styles leading into the dungeon one gold piece admission as well as taking an Elven tour since canceled when the two dwarves let Fang out of his box you can also sign the adventurers book which gets you a genuine I visited Blackmore dungeon button when you come out to the main entrance no winners yet the dungeon levels all have very minimalist Keys showing what is in each room it's mostly just gold or some monsters and that's about it not even traps were a really big thing one thing that I think is fast fascinating about the layout is of course they're deeply interconnected but also they're very diagonal things don't stick with the grid very much I wonder if this is just to help confuse players make things harder to map and make it more likely for them to get lost there's some pretty extensive information at the back on making your own magic swords seems to be a kind of a preoccupation of uh Dave arnison some Gypsy says and chance cars you can use a section on the original Blackmore magic system which unfortunately doesn't tell you much about the magic system at all it says that it follows the formula pattern for most magic what exactly that is is unclear I guess that's maybe vyan magic where you kind of imprint the pattern into your brain and you use components to uh cast spells because it does talk about how important it is to launch expeditions to certain levels to get the ingredients that you need there is a kind of carousing system here that include a wine women song wealth uh Fame religion or a hobby and uh as you are leveling up you are kind of required to spend a certain amount of gold on these things I like this note in zenon's Freehold where it says that there have been two other players Bob Meyer that was my dungeon master and Richard Snyder that have reached 20th level getting him a free dinner a pat on the back and a retired character but they are gone to a higher plane interesting to see how 20th level was the kind of a Capstone for leveling in Blackmore which I hadn't expected that it kind of matches up with you know Third Edition and fifth edition D and D some more tables here for zent since freeold and a bunch of tables for Dragons as just the thing you put at the back of the book how do dragons work the last section of the book goes into different monsters not so much in terms of giving them all stats but just the differences in creatures from Blackmore games the implication being different to Dungeons and Dragons I would assume I like how creatures in this game have three major motivations hate greed and egotism more information about a few areas around round Blackmore section on Orcs right here I like how there's a type of orc called Eisen gers they just steal stuff directly from Lord of the Rings there's also Hobbits in here too I think this was after original D and D got in trouble for using things like Hobbits and ants but Dave Hors doesn't care and there is the back of the book so that is our run through of the first fantasy campaign by Dave arnison hope you guys found this entertaining or educational as I mentioned before if you want to learn more about early DND and early role playing games I'll put links to some resources in the description of this video thanks for watching everybody and I'll see you next time

Channel: Questing Beast

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Keywords: questing beast, d&d, d&d 5e, d&d book review, d&d books, dnd, dnd 5e, dnd adventure, dnd book review, dnd module, dungeons & dragons, dungeons and dragons, old school d&d, old school dnd, osr, osr book review, osr book reviews, osr d&d, osr d&d review, osr dnd, osr dnd review, osr review, osr rpg, old school rennaissance, old school revival, old school rules

Id: B0Z03LI4ZgQ

Length: 20min 35sec (1235 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024