Dave Arneson - Blackmoor

Blackmoor

Following the departure of David Wesely to armed service duty in October 1970, Arneson began to imagine a medieval fantasy style Braunstien wherein the players explored the dungeons of a castle inhabited by fantastic monsters. Originally Arneson played his own mix of rules and used rock, paper, scissors to resolve combat, but later adapted elements from his naval wargame rules which had an armor class system like that later used in D&D. "I had spent the previous two days watching about five monster movies on channel 5’s 'Creature Feature' weekend, reading several Conan books (I cannot recall which ones, but I always thought they were all pretty much the same), and stuffing myself with popcorn, doodling on a piece of graph paper. At the time, I was quite tired of my Nappy (Napoleonic) campaign with all its rigid rules and was rebelling against it." The Fantasy combat system appearing in the Chainmail rules, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren and published in the spring of 1971, were also applied for a short time. Finding those lacking, Arneson wrote modified rules to apply to his role-playing game scenarios. The game that evolved from those modifications to Chainmail was the game Blackmoor, which modern players of D&D would describe as a campaign setting rather than a "complete game." The gameplay would be recognizable to modern D&D players, featuring the use of fixed hit points, armor class, character development, and dungeon crawls. This setting was fleshed out over time and continues to be played to the present day. Arneson described Blackmoor as "roleplaying in a non-traditional medieval setting. I have such things as steam power, gunpowder, and submarines in limited numbers. There was even a tank running around for a while. The emphasis is on the story and the roleplaying." Details of Blackmoor and the original campaign, which was by then established on the map of the Castle & Crusade Society's "Great Kingdom", were first brought to print briefly in issue #13 of the Domesday Book, the newsletter of the Castle & Crusade Society in July 1972, and later in much-expanded form as The First Fantasy Campaign, published by Judges Guild in 1977.

Although much of what was later deemed to be "Tolkien-influenced" in D&D and the concept of adventuring in "dungeons" originated with Blackmoor, as a setting it was not purely fantasy-oriented, as it incorporated recent history and science fiction elements. These are visible much later in the DA module series published by TSR (particularly City of the Gods), but were also present from the early to mid 1970s in the original campaign and parallel and intertwined games run by John Snider, whose ruleset developed from these adventures and was intended for publication by TSR from 1974 as the first science fiction RPG.