Blackmoor

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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. 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 the other writers at TSR took Blackmoor and incorporated it into their stopgap setting, Mystara (where Blackmoor serves as the obligatory high-tech ancient civilization). Arneson ended up releasing a Blackmoor setting book anyway, along with a series of adventure modules.

Then Lorraine, in her infinite wisdom, decided to axe Blackmoor and Mystara despite Blackmoor being a big moneymaker. 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 is now continuing to publish Blackmoor books in Arneson's absence.

For information on the setting itself, it's suggested that you go here.