Dave Arneson, Blackmoor and Me! (1 Viewer)

[havard]

Wow, that sounds like great fun Spinachcat! Thanks for sharing this with us.

I'd love to hear more about these two points in particular:

3) SciFi / Fantasy blending was the genre. As one player put it, it was D&D meets Naked Lunch.

4) It was SO not Tolkein and not the pseudo-medieval Greyhawk. The world was odd and tweaked where magic was used to emulate technology in many aspects, but unlike the "logic" of steampunk science, this was a world were you could just cast spells to do stuff where nobody really understands the magic they wield.

Håvard

 

[KenHR]

I've just gotta throw in with everyone else and say that is teh awesome.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Rhuvein]

Two weeks ago was the ConQuest San Francisco convention and this is an email I sent a buddy on Saturday night. I was planning on posting something more coherent on RPG.net, but tough shit, you get this instead.

Hey that's very cool. Thanks for sharing.

 

[novastar]

I wandered by on break from Pulp Hero to get dinner at the stand, and took a photo because I knew my friend would want one. Lemme guess... You're the guy where we can only see the back of your head, but your hair is less than an inch long?

My guess is the guy in the blue shirt, hand to face, next to Dave...

 

[Ahnirades]

Very cool indeed.

 

[Pierce Inverarity]

"Dave tells us he was gaming with "a certain well known game designer" for the first time in his Blackmoor campaign and this guy backstabbed his own son's character for no reason. Dave says that in retrospect he should have paid more attention to that event."

Comedy Gold!

Was that documentary film on Arneson and the origins of D&D ever completed?

 

[Sprue Rubbles]

Money well spent for sure. I love that bit about saving throws too.

 

[Spinachcat]

I'd love to hear more about these two points in particular:

WARNING: I cannot speak for Dave's writing or published Blackmoor books, just the game as he ran it that night and the discussions we had about Blackmoor during and after the game. With that agreed, read on.

>3) SciFi / Fantasy blending was the genre. As one player put it, it was D&D meets Naked Lunch.

We encountered goblins weilding mind-control wands to use a purple worm as a digging machine to create tunnels for a mass transit system. The scifi/fantasy blending was very much in the mood and feel - I don't mean steampunk devices or obvious spaceships, but traveling was much more going to an alien place with alien creatures than going into a fantasy forest full of goblins.

We were ALL veteran D&D players and the dungeon felt wrong. You know those crazy architectual weirdness of the old modules. Yeah, some of those are there to make the character's scratch their heads and enhance the "this isn't Kansas" atmosphere. You get the message that dungeons are not treasure troves, they are murder holes and we are fools for coming here.

The further we got from town and the deeper we went, the vestiges of civilization as we knew it were getting less and less. We were not just adventurers, we were explorers and invaders to a different world. I felt much more like the crew of the Nostromo than the Fellowship.

>4) It was SO not Tolkein and not the pseudo-medieval Greyhawk. The world was odd and tweaked where magic was used to emulate technology in many aspects, but unlike the "logic" of steampunk science, this was a world were you could just cast spells to do stuff where nobody really understands the magic they wield.

I see Tolkein as more than elves, dwarves and orcs, but a feel and a texture of a flowing high fantasy where good vs. evil is the dominant paradigm. The pseudo-medieval feel of Greyhawk is the sense that there is a class structure and technology transposed from the Dark Ages of Europe. This is not the case in the Blackmoor as it was presented by Dave on that night.

Magic was a tool, but our magic items were presented to us the way artifacts show up in Gamma World: you learn by trying and sometimes it doesn't work the way you hoped. You know that stat block in the book, toss it. My Staff of Power could do more and it could do less, so could potions. We didn't have 100% trust in our magical items "just cuz the book says" and they had a mystical appeal to them.

Dave told us more about this out of game with his home campaign. You know the coolness of Earthdawn's magic items in that you gain more powers as you learn about them? Yeah, Dave explained that every magic item should have a story behind its creation and creator. So I asked him point blank why the HELL wasn't all this cool shit in my freaking books? He smiled and said that back then they figured all people needed was the basic framework and they would add in and discover the rest as they played. Dave said the rules were never meant as the end point....only the beginning.

My response: Dave, you gotta write this stuff down!!!

PS: That's me in my blue Russian Orthodox Hawaiian shirt. On the back, it's got a huge Sword Saint stepping on the devil's head while he explodes in flame. I chose it for its subtlety.

 

[Pete Whalley]

Colour me green with envy.

Also, that sounds like a hell of a game, and a hell of a DM...I wonder what D&D would look like now if Gary & Dave's roles had been reversed? For that matter, what would gaming itself have looked like?

 

[komradebob]

Magic was a tool, but our magic items were presented to us the way artifacts show up in Gamma World: you learn by trying and sometimes it doesn't work the way you hoped. You know that stat block in the book, toss it. My Staff of Power could do more and it could do less, so could potions. We didn't have 100% trust in our magical items "just cuz the book says" and they had a mystical appeal to them.

Dave told us more about this out of game with his home campaign. You know the coolness of Earthdawn's magic items in that you gain more powers as you learn about them? Yeah, Dave explained that every magic item should have a story behind its creation and creator. So I asked him point blank why the HELL wasn't all this cool shit in my freaking books? He smiled and said that back then they figured all people needed was the basic framework and they would add in and discover the rest as they played. Dave said the rules were never meant as the end point....only the beginning.

My response: Dave, you gotta write this stuff down!!!

You know, that Erol Otus art makes sooo much more sense to me now, even if that wasn't Dave's edition.