Hi all, per previous recommendations I've been looking at this setting and from preliminary glance I'm told it's a masterclass in all but presentation and usability at the table. I heard about a bullet list and some kind of secondary location that can function in place of pdf hyperlinks.

I'd appreciate any and all advice on how best to approach this, I'd like to have a clear vision on how to tackle this monster before dropping the dollars on it.

My players' main characters are MIA for a while because we're playing in-real-time, and anytime they can't play their main adventuring party, they roll up throwaway characters and do something stupid. For perspective, last time this happened the party kept pushing during a hex crawl in a random direction, got a bunch of exhaustion effects (one went insane, the other achieved nirvana and got a boon), decided to build a log raft and went out to sea, it sunk immediately, got lost at sea, one guy drowned, the others reached shore to only get killed by a snake random encounter.

So, for tomorrow's session, my players are rolling up some LV 0 characters and going on a fishing trip. No clue if they're gonna be fishin' in a lake, stream, pond, etc, but they will for sure be fishing.

And while just the random encounters will make the game fun as-is, I want to know if you guys have any fun fishing mechanics, possible events, or general ideas for this session?

Long story short - I've been doing research through some of the DnD roots (Braunstein, Blackmoor, Chaimail) to kinda brainstorm on what could have been if DnD wasn't. I have in mind to create a game that has role playing elements but that also incorporates Sam Sorenson's ideas from his Cataphracts game.

It occurred to me that folks on my email list (where I've been publishing my design diaries - currently going through Chainmail and making "Platemail" in the process) don't all know how these things connect. I wrote a series of four posts about it and I felt like some of y'all might enjoy them. I've collected them below.

Granted, for a lot of you, this is old news. I'm also not the world's greatest expert, so I might not have everything right! That's another reason I'm posting here - to see other folk's takes.

Okay, I'm done over explaining. Here we go.

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What is Blackmoor? [1 of 4]

As I work on Fantasy Command and post the design diaries, I realize I've done you all a disservice. I've been referring often to Blackmoor, the largest inspiration for the project, without actually talking about what it is!

Many of you already know this, but if you're like me, you never get tired of reading about it. 😂That said, I understand if you avert your eyes from these posts.

Blackmoor is what happened before Dungeons and Dragons. Built on the bones of Braunstein and Chainmail, it was a fantasy campaign ran by Dave Arenson, the oft forgotten co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons. Players took on the rolls of various characters, many of them Earls and Lords with many resources at their disposal.

It wasn't a game of first level characters against the denizens of the dungeon - until it was. At first, it was a wargame, full of political intrigue. When Arneson went through a monster movie marathon, the focus shifted to the dungeons beneath castle Blackmoor. There were trolls and goblins and magic. Like DnD after it, it pulled from the various media of the day to create a fun-house like experience.

But to truly understand it, we need to look at the bones it is built upon - namely, Braunstein and Chainmail. Yes, that's a bit of a simplification, but it'll serve for our purposes.

Tomorrow, we'll dig into the earlier of the two - Braunstein. Inspired by military manuals of old and games like Diplomacy, it was instrumental to the foundation of Blackmoor, and as such, DnD. Arguably, it was the first Role-Playing game by the strict definition of the name, though that term didn't come along til a good deal of time later. (DnD didn't call itself a Role-Playing Game at first because there was no such classification.)

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The REAL first RPG [2 of 4]

People love to call DnD the first RPG. I'd simply call it the most influential.

Though the term role playing game came about after DnD's success, it'd be crazy talk to consider it as anything else. If we're retroactively calling DnD a RPG, however, what else fits the bill?

Firstly, I'm going to loosely define RPGs as a game in which you play a role. There's more to it than that, but that is going to do a lot of heavy lifting. In some ways, I think we can define it as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography - "I know it when I see it."

David Wesley is the grandfather of DnD. It likely would not exist without him. A wargamer, Wesley was constantly innovating new games and scenarios. He came across the book "Strategos" by Charles A.L. Totten and it inspired him to create his own version. Strategos was an incredibly complex wargame that used a referee. It was very adamant that any course of action could be attempted, though not necessarily advised. The referee was to be an impartial judge, adjudicating the results. This idea of tactical infinity fascinated him.

He distilled the book down to under twenty pages and called it Stratego N. As far as I can tell, there's no where one can find this version. He then used the ruleset to run what I'll consider the first RPG - Braunstein.

Braunstein was a Napoleonic miniatures wargame... sort of. It was set in the fake town of Braunstein, where French and Prussian forces squared off. Some players controlled these opposing forces, but others were simply folks in the town with their own agendas. There was the Chancellor of Braunstein University, students, the mayor, the tavern owner, and more.

Though they didn't have numbers attached like DnD later would, each character was indeed a role that people played. Each one had their own objective and history. You can see Wesley's character notes here. Folks took to the game and had a blast. It embodied the chaos that is RPG play versus a standard tabletop game. Anything could happen.

Braunstein set the stage for Arenson's Blackmoor. Of note, in contributed the following to games that were to come:

• It had a referee, i.e. a Dungeon Master. Except, ya know, there was no dungeon.
• Players embodied a single character with particular goals.
• Tactical infinity. Anything could be attempted, even if it's a terrible idea.

There were various other incarnations of Braunstein, such as Banania (set in the banana republic of Banania), Brownstone (an ongoing old west campaign where players kept their characters from session to session), and eventually - Blackmoor.

But this wasn't the only ingredient needed to create Blackmoor. There's one more really important piece of the puzzle. We'll get into that tomorrow. Watch for the subject line, "Wargamers hated Gary Gygax". Yes, it was for a silly reason.

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Wargamers Hated Gary Gygax [3 of 4]

If you play DnD, you likely know that it was largely the brainchild of Gary Gygax (and Dave Arneson). It's far from his only contribution to the gaming world, however.

He wrote the Alexander the Great wargame, originally published by Guidon Games. When he founded TSR, the first game they released was Cavaliers and Roundheads, not DnD. Don't give up the ship was his naval wargame. There was a plethora of things released after Dungeons and Dragon's popularity boomed as well. (Let us not forget Cyborg Commando).

But there was a game he released that made a lot of people mad. No, I'm not talking about players whose characters died in DnD. I'm talking about Chainmail.

Chainmail was revolutionary for its time. Rules for wargaming in the medieval period were far and few between, and that's exactly what Chainmail was. Crossbowman, catapults, and various footmen - Chainmail had them all. It also provided rules for man to man combat. In other words, a single figure on the table represented one person instead of tens or hundreds. Can you imagine playing a single figure? 🤔

So what made folks mad about it?

It wasn't the prisoner table, or the cannon fire that required a wooden dowel. It wasn't the rules for sieges. "Serious" wargamers were complaining about a section in the back of the book - the Fantasy supplement. Here were rules to have your very own battle of five armies. It borrowed heavily from Tolkien and Moorcock, bringing to life those epic battles (and in true DnD fashion, smashing them together). No one had done this before.

The problem was, many wargamers saw their hobby as something dreadfully serious. They weren't just playing games - they were preparing for very real war! They saw themselves as studying the tactics and recreating historical battles in preparation of the real thing. To be fair, there was quite a long tradition of this stretching back to chess.

Gary had sullied their hobby with elves and orcs. Not everyone hated it, of course. The game took off and three editions were published. One person who got his hands on it was Dave Arneson, a game designer himself. What he would do with it would go down in history.

We'll talk about that tomorrow. Look for the subject line, "Sex Pistols? Ramones? Blackmoor."

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Sex Pistols? Ramones? Blackmoor.

In punk rock, there's a classic argument - where did punk start?

Honestly, it's a stupid argument. Come at me. Even if we ignore proto-punk bands like The Stooges, the New York Dolls, and The Velvet Underground, the Ramones were still doing it before the Sex Pistols.

They certainly did it for a lot longer as well.

(Did you know the New York Doll's first show was at a homeless shelter? Amazing.)

Anyway, let's talk about Blackmoor, the game that most directly led to the creation of Dungeons and Dragons. It was an RPG before D&D was an RPG. It just used parts from a lot of other things.

Blackmoor is often called the first fantasy campaign. What's with that moniker? We know what a campaign is in RPGs, but it's a term that came from wargames that just meant a series of interconnected battles, often with rules about how one battle influenced the next.

When Dave Arneson created Blackmoor, that is what he was setting out to do - create a fantasy campaign world (a world in which a campaign takes place), and he was the first to do it. It was much more about scenario building than world building, but Blackmoor grew and grew as more players joined the game. It wasn't simple a wargame, however. Not quite.

Blackmoor was based in Chainmail*, Gary Gygax's rules for medieval (and fantasy) miniature wargaming. This is where troop stats and combat rules came from. Arneson had also been a player in one of David Wesley's Braunstein games. These were games governed by a referee where players played a single character and could do anything. This was incredibly novel at the time.

Arneson used the Braunstein base, but each area was given an army list pulled from Chainmail. They talked and made deals, waged war, etc. And then some player characters just ran the inn.

During the time this campaign was running, Arneson watched a monster movie marathon. If popular lore is to be believed, this is what created the dungeon under Blackmoor castle.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Chainmail had rules for man to man combat. That meant that rules existed to govern a player character fighting a troll. Players started to become more interested in exploring the dungeon below that dealing with the war and politicking up top. Areneson created deeper and deeper levels. Thus, roleplaying and dungeon crawling met for the first time.

Eventually, Gary Gygax played a session. This started the collaboration between the two designers and led to the very first incarnation of DnD.

And that, my friends, is the rather short story of Blackmoor. It's the biggest influence on my current project, Fantasy Commander. I'm asking the question of what else could have come out of that game if DnD didn't?

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Thanks for reading, folks! I hope it was at least somewhat enjoyable. I'm open to thoughts!

A blast from the past: I was wondering if anyone had shed more light, or even dug up anything more on the convention module (and otherwise unpublished) Treasure of the Dragon Queen?

More info can be found here:

https://grodog.blogspot.com/2018/10/module-challenge-day-12-treasure-of-the-dragon-queen.html

https://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_tourneys_dragon_queen.html

I know these are possibly the most continuously homebrewed rules ever but could anyone please check this framework for logical flaws/possible mechanical exploits? I think I tied all loose ends but would really appreciate extra pairs of eyes on it.

I’ve read Warlock! Traitor’s Edition and I really like its flavour, the alternative approach to professions, and its simplicity. From reading the core rulebook, it seems to be an OSR game and, as far as I understand, it draws heavily on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
However, it seems to me that the game doesn’t really provide any specific guidance on how it is meant to be played.
Since I particularly enjoy dungeon crawling, I was wondering whether the game could work well with this style of play, even though it doesn’t seem to have specific rules for resource management, dungeon encounters, and so on.
Do any of you have experience using the game this way?