Blackmoor

Recreation of the map of Blackmoor. Some details added by the artist.

Before Greyhawk, there was Blackmoor.

Blackmoor was created by Dave Arneson in 1970 as a setting for Chainmail campaigns amongst his local wargaming club (which happened to include a fellow by the name of Gary Gygax). The setting was nothing special, being little more than an empty map with a handful of points of interest to go fight at. What really makes it noteworthy is that Arneson used the Blackmoor campaign as a testbed for his new dungeon-crawling mechanics, which turned Chainmail into something resembling a crude, highly lethal prototype of D&D. The first pre-made published adventure was set in the context of Blackmoor: "Temple of the Frog". This turned out to be an immediate hit, so Arneson began to flesh out Blackmoor for use in D&D while Gygax started building a new setting (Greyhawk) from the ground up. Unfortunately, Blackmoor and Greyhawk were too far behind schedule to make the D&D launch, so they were published later as "supplements" to the Dungeons & Dragons white box.

The Original Setting

Arneson went to Judges Guild to publish the Blackmoor notes he had. Editing was near-nonexistent but we did get a map, and a summary of some of the major factions:

• the Egg of Coot, a round peninsula connected to the north via a causeway or isthmus, full of demons
• the Duchy of Ten, sometimes antagonists sometimes trading partners
• vikings, from further north of the Egg
• various baronies: Maus, Vestfold, Glendower
• the horsemen of Peshwah
• a Great Kingdom, presumably the liege lord of all this; taken from the Castle & Crusade Society

Arneson's gamers played out a war, which may or may not be canon. In it Blackmoor proper started out neutral and Maus sided with the Egg... until the baddies attacked Blackmoor, being stupid. The good guys kicked ass and were in the process of total victory when the game was abandoned.

The JG version was mixed in with Chainmail references down to the last balrog. One can also see here how much Greyhawk took from the same C&C source: not just the Great Kingdom, but also Ten(h) and Blackmoor itself.

Also published during these dark ages was a second adventure, "The Garbage Pits of Despair".

The DA Series

Years later when BECMI D&D was being published, Blackmoor popped up again to be integrated into the default setting "Mystara" as an antediluvian or precursor civilization. Three modules were writen by David J. Ritchie and Dave Arneson:

• DA1 Adventures in Blackmoor; unites the Mystaran present with Blackmoor in the past
• DA2 Temple of the Frog
• DA3 City of the Gods

Then they parted ways and Ritchie hustled this one out, against Arneson's will:

• DA4 The Duchy of Ten

The DA series sold well. Ritchie was about to do a DA5, for Blackmoor Castle proper. Also planned, or perhaps coterminous with that, was a present-day Mystara boxed set that would have incorporated Blackmoor - as had DA1. But Lorraine, in her infinite wisdom, decided to axe Blackmoor and Mystara both. While Bruce Heard has told everyone to move on, he is supposedly still upset over this.

As to the character of the DA series, this was more Ritchie's input than Arneson's - much as From The Ashes was Sargent's, not Gygax's. This may explain why Arneson stormed out between 3 and 4.

In the Ritchie vision, Blackmoor is an outpost of sanity surrounded by enemies. The Great Kingdom is here identified with the Mystaran nation Thonia, but far in the past. Thonia aren't the good guys anymore; they're another Rome knockoff, like the collapsing Great Kingdom in the Flanaess.

Most of all - this is clearest in DA4, which is entirely Ritchie - something's happened to the west of the map. A new nation, the Afridhi, have overrun the Peshwah and annexed the Ten. Squeezed from the west, Blackmoor leads the surrounding baronies to secede from Thonia to the southeast. That is the war in the DA series' past; not the war which Arneson's group played out. The Afridhi serve a paraZoroastrian creature from the Sphere of Energy, Zugzul, who has a thing for fire.

(As for what's up with all the Iranian references, Ritchie had a throbbing hard-on for Northwest Frontier / Flashman stories. It shows.)

As matters stand at the start of DA1, one Taha Marcovic has rallied the northern marches of the Empire, like Bel Riose in Foundation. Taha proposes to restore Blackmoor to the Empire. Blackmoor wouldn't normally mind, since Taha is more competent BY FAR than the losers whom Thonia has posted up here in the past. But - reasonably - the northerners suspect that Taha doesn't want the place for its own sake; he wants to drain it of its wealth and soldiery for a new adventure: taking the Imperial Purple. That would leave Blackmoor wide open to the Afridhi, the Vikings - "Skandaharians", here - and oh yeah DID SOMEONE MENTION DEMONS.

One obsessive compiled a "Blackmoor Gazetteer" over the 1990s to attempt a harmony between all this material. It was no such thing, more of a collection of documents... in the full spirit of Judges Guild's efforts before him. Whether you call it "canon", is up to the reader - after all, to what extent is even DA4 canon?

The Zeitgeist Era

Fortunately, Arneson himself still held the rights to Blackmoor, so in 2004 he formed Zeitgeist Games and started publishing a bunch of Blackmoor books for 3.5e and 4e. Zeitgeist continued to publish Blackmoor books in Arneson's absence.

But then Arneson passed away, and the partnership fizzled out. New Blackmoor content ceased. Proposed supplements like "Age of the Wolf" became nothing more than myth and vaporware. The legal status of the setting is said to be a jumbled mess, furthering the setting's fate in limbo. It is likely that ownership has reverted back to Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast, but few people seem to be talking. For the time being, any and all support has been left up to the fans. This has lead to all sorts of fan creations, like filling in the timeline blanks, creating new enemies for Blackmoor and even bringing it back to Mystara through several improbable incarnations (including one where it's evil for some reason). Many of these can be found on The Vaults of Pandius.

For information on the setting itself, it's suggested that you go to the Mystara fansite's section on Blackmoor.