The Blackmoor Blog

  We  are almost there! More than 50 years ago, Dave Arneson posted his original announcement of the first Blackmoor Game, featuring a poker game under a troll's bridge.  Our friends at the Antipodean D20 have already started celebrating, but that's because they are in Australia, and apparently that means they are living in the future! Of course, we have been doing Blackmoor Week all week this year as usual. Tomorrow, Dave Arneson would have been 74 years old. Like many other game designers and prominent gamers, we lost him much too soon.  After his passing in 2008, people started celebrating Dave Arneson Game Day. We also have Gary Gygax Game Day of course, but two days to celebrate our hobby is twice as good as having one. Since 2015 we started coordinating some of the activities for this day over at The Comeback Inn.  While you wait for the big day tomorrow, here are some of the highlights from last year's Dave Arneson Game day , including instructions on how to get the

  My friend Thorfinn Tait has become an incredible talent when it comes to fantasy game maps. Perhaps best known for his design and cartography work on Bruce Heard's Calidar Setting, Thorfinn is a long time Mystara fan whose D&D maps can be found on the Atlas of Mystara website and his patreon page .  Recently, he has also begun a series exploring the history of fan maps. The project mostly focuses on Mystara maps, but as part of this year's Blackmoor Week, today's map is an early fan map of Blackmoor created by the excellent Thibault Sarlaat. Thibault was a real pioneer in D&D fan digital map making and produced a large collection of digital maps in the early 2000s. Check out the full version of his Blackmoor map here .  Many other fan maps of Blackmoor have been created over the years. Many of them are available on my website, the Blackmoor Archives. -Havard

Today, rumours which have since been debunked , circulated that a new edition of D&D were in the works . This made me think about the edition wars. Back in the early 2000s, much of the activity in D&D forums was about young gamers trash talking early editions and older gamers bashing D&D 3E which was the new edition of the day. Looking back, this was a huge waste of time for everyone and a completely pointless activity.  Some people are still engaging in this activity, but it hardly gets the kind of reaction it got back then, so its either juts ignored or left in some echo chamber groups where people just agree with each other's grumpiness, but soon get bored even of that. If you once "fought in the edition wars", I hope that you think back to those days with embarassment and do not wear it like a badge. Its not.  I am nothing special when it comes to RPGs, but I have been playing since the 80s. I have played every edition of D&D and a wide range of other

 Why is Havard posting from a different place on the web? Read on to find out! In April, 50 Years Ago, Dave Arneson announced that he was running a Medieval Braunstein Game, which would be known as the first official Blackmoor Game. Now, there are good reasons to believe Dave Arneson when he said that he had run Blackmoor prior to this official announcement, but that is no reason not to celebrate! Every year at our Blackmoor Fan Forum, the Comeback Inn and at my blog, we celebrate Dave Arneson Game Day on Dave's birthday, October 1st. This year is no exception! Also, the week leading up to October 1st is known as Blackmoor Week.  This gives us all some time to warm up, prepare some games, or maybe some game content that we want to share for free with other fans of D&D. This is ultimately a celebration of the hobby that we all love. As the author of this blog (and that blog).  Stay tuned to find out more about what is happening for this year's celebrations! Are you doing som

 Testing out a new home for the Blackmoor Blog! The main reason for testing this opportunity is that some social media platforms have been unhappy with my original blog site.  I have been running the Blackmoor Website since 2002 and I started blogging about Blackmoor and Dave Arneson back in 2009. I am not about to stop now! Lets see if this new place is acceptable to the Powers That Be :) -Havard