Next year's DaveCon is still many months away, but we are already learning more details about the event. 

Vic Dorso seems to have clarified that the convention is not just about Dave Arneson, but that "Davecon isn't just about one Dave, its about all the Daves that made RPG gaming great !" 

The 2025 convention will include the following:

Original Blackmoor Players: 

David Megarry , David Wesely, Mike Carr,  Bill Hoyt, Ross Maker

Arneson Alumni: 

Ken Fletcher, Kevin McColl, 

Other Guests of Honor: 

Justin Alexander and Mark Rein-Hagen, Bob World Builder, Baron De Rupp, Grace the World Destroyer,  Heidi Gygax, Eric Garland, Greg Gillespie, Andy Thomas, David Yaeger, David "DJ" Johnson.

Furthermore, DaveCon, via their Facebook page, has offered a discount code for tickets: 

 20% Discount code is good till September 15th only is DiceBreaker.

You can buy the tickets at this site. 

Read more about DaveCon at the official website. 

If you feel like DaveCon is too far into the future, there is always ArneCon happening next month.

Are you going to DaveCon? What are your thoughts about this news? Let me know!

More about DaveCon 2025 at The Comeback Inn Forum

Disclaimers: This blog is not associated with DaveCon or any other commercial endeavour. This is a non-commercial fan site promoting and discussing anything we feel our readers might be interested in learning more about.

-Havard

 

The Minnesota Gathering is one of the smaller get togethers involving the original Blackmoor players and friends. I mentioned this event last week, but now we know a little bit more. They are referring to the event as a Micro Convetnion taking place on August 29th:

 DaveCon 2025 has been announced and tickets are already available. Organised by Victor Dorso, this will be the fourth DaveCon. Read more about the previous DaveCon here on my blog.  As last year, the convention will take place in Bloomington MN in the Crowne Plaza Suites Msp Airport - Mall of America.

Dates given for the convention are:

 

Published in 1975, the board game Dungeon! shares deep historic roots that tie it to the the origin of D&D and Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Campaign. 50 years ago today, David R. Megarry sat down and created this dungeon exploration game that would allow all the players to join in on the fun without the need for a Dungeon Master.

Megarry tells the story of how the game was created on his Facebook page:

It was 50 years ago this weekend, in a perfect storm of despair, driven by not finishing my degree; not being drafted at the last minute and thus becoming unmoored from an expected future; and breaking up with my girlfriend, I entered a 72 hour creative flow and produced Dungeon! I showed the game the following weekend to Arneson & Co. and they liked it. Dungeon! has come a long way and is now being enjoyed by yet another generation. Keep on gaming!

Back in 2011 I wrote about how David Wesely remembers Megarry showing up with the Dungeon! prototype and how Megarry and Arneson decided to go to down to Lake Geneva to demonstrate the game to Gary on a day that would change the history of gaming forever. 

 When preparing to take part in the documentary Secrets of Blackmoor, David Megarry, discovered another hidden gem among his old documents. David Megarry, creator of the Dungeon! board game is one of Dave Arneson's Original Blackmoor Players. I first wrote about Megarry and his contributions to our hobby back in 2011.

The treasure Megarry discovered among his documents were dungeon maps drawn up 35 years earlier by his friend and fellow Blackmoor Player, Greg Svenson. They detailed Greg's own Blackmoor based dungeon known as the Dungeons of Tonisborg. 

Yesterday, David Megarry, revealed on his Facebook page the story about how the maps were lost in the first place back in 1978:

"I have a role in this work as I am responsible for the "lost" part: I think it might be titled better "The (How Megarry) Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg" or something to that effect. Yes, dear readers, in 1978 in my attempt to preserve Greg's Tonisborg by making a copy at my workplace, I did not do a very good job of handling the originals. I put them in a magazine so they would not get bent and went to sleep. When I awoke and went to retrieve the magazine, it had been picked up by the cleaning lady and thrown in the garbage. I raced to the garbage bin in the alley, but, alas, it was also garbage day and the bin was empty! Tonisborg was irretrievably lost. It was one of the hardest days when I told Greg I had lost his only copy. 

 

Original art and maps for the Tonisborg book are now for sale at the Secrets of Blackmoor Website. Most interesting are perhaps the original David Megarry hand drawn maps. According to the website, "all preceeds go to the artists". Starting bids range from 150-300 USD.

See anything you fancy? Go here for the auction site. 

More discussion of this auction here.

Oh, and if you are interested in a Blackmoor map signed by Dave Arneson, this might also be of interest to you. The seller of this map is Brent Chumley who made the map for the D20 Blackmoor Softcover edition. 

-Havard

The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg is an adventure with a history going back to the Blackmoor Campaign of the 1970s. It was created by Greg Svenson, player in Dave Arneson's campaign back in 1973/1974. Greg placed the adventure in Blackmoor and the city also appeared in Dave's campaign, although when the First Fantasy Campaign was published in 1977, Dave changed the name of the city to Vestfold, which was kept in later publications of Blackmoor. The origins of Vestfold and Tonisborg are discussed in more detail in this article.

Greg's Dungeon Maps were thought lost forever untill a copy was rediscovered by another member of Dave Arneson's group, David Megarry, the designer of Dungeon! More details about the dungeon and its rediscovery can be read at Dan Bogg's blog here. A rewamped version of the dungeon is currently in the works to be published as a special stretch goal for the Secrets of Blackmoor Kickstarter. Recently many backers of the Kickstarter have joined the Comeback Inn Forum as the Secrets of Blackmoor creators have promised to share more details with Kickstarter backers there.


Recently, the Secrets of Blackmoor Facebook page shared Megarry's copies of the original dungeon maps for Dungeon Level 1 and Dungeon Level 3 of the Tonisborg Dungeon. It is interesting to see that this map shares certain features with Dave Arneson's dungeon maps that are less common in dungeon maps from later decades. We see the characteristic diagonal corridors, non-standard rooms and long corridors that seem to lead to no rooms.

David Megarry offered the following suggestion to why Dave Arneson may have used diagonal corridors in his dungeons

"My hunch is that it is a consequence of Arneson drawing the roads and streams for table top battlefield maps for the Napoleonic Campaign. Outside of urban areas, roads and streams go any which way; it is only in cities and towns you end up with grid systems (though some older east coast towns road designs may have been drawn by drunken city planners, who knows?;) He did use graph paper to draw his maps but was not bound by those grid lines. If you look at the original Blackmoor town map, you can see that a tunnel from the town to Elf home or the Freehold would follow a diagonal line." 

This theory certainly makes sense, and I do agree that Dave Arneson was probably thinking in terms of what was going on above ground much more than what later dungeon mappers would have been. From the FFC we know that his maps point towards where certain corridors would connect to other dungeons (like the Glendower dungeon connecting to the Blackmoor Dungeon) and other parts of Blackmoor.


Interestingly, this might also tell us how the designers of such maps (in this case Greg) imagined the surface world above the dungeon might have appeared. Upon Greg's suggestion, I placed Tonnisborg on the small island outside of Vestfold. Do I need to revise my city plan map now? :)

-Havard

This came up the other day when I was writing my article on David Megarry's important message about fans of Gary Gygax and fans of Dave Arneson uniting to preserve the memory of both D&D creatoLrs and also honoring the other creatives who worked to bring us this wonderful game.


"Luke is trying to keep his father's name alive with Gary Con and understands what contribution Arneson had to the collective effort. [..] maybe the Minnesota crowd needs to start an Arnecon (or whatever...don't worry, Luke, I will guarantee that it will be six months different;)"



GaryCon is indeed a great achievement and Luke and Ernie Gygax have worked hard to keep this convention going in order to keep the memory of Gary alive. So should Dave Arneson's friends and family get together and start their own convention? I don't know how serious David Megarry was about this, but it is an interesting idea. The most important thing I think is to get away from the idea that support for Dave Arneson is some kind of attack on Gary. The Dave vs. Gary concept is a distraction from the main goal which should be to unite both groups. From what I have been told, the organizers of GaryCon have been very welcoming towards David Wesely, David Megarry and the rest of the Minnesota Gamers. Creating an event which could be seen as a kind of competition would help light the flames of those who would seek to keep the fandom divided. This would be a step in the wrong direction.


 On the other hand, Megarry's comments about keeping the convention many months apart from GaryCon is probably a good idea. Also, it is not the first time Dave Arneson's legacy has been memorialized by a live event. Dave Arneson Day is spearheaded by the people of the Comeback Inn as an online event, but the Minnesota Gamers and others have also held various live meetups and game events on October 1st. See a full list of known activies since 2010 here. If an event like this could be given some kind of endorsement from the organizers of GaryCon, that would be a fantastic thing.


It should be kept in mind though, that organizing a convention at the level of GaryCon requires a lot of hard work. Are there enough people out there willing to help the Original Blackmoor Players set something like that up? It might be wise to start a bit smaller and then see where things might lead.





More discussion of this topic here.


-Havard

David Megarry, designer of Dungeon!, friend to Dave Arneson and Original Blackmoor Player adresses the recent discussions surrounding Dave Arneson's role as Co-Creator of D&D. It's not really about one side supporting Dave and another supporting Gary, Megarry says:



The "sides" are somewhat artificial. Now that ego's are out of the way, we, the living, can moderate the division and start to bring a balance, if you will, to this great creation which was started in basements and is ending up in Fortune 500 board rooms. Just as the Irish figured out The Troubles, let us also do what needs to be done to keep Gygax and Arneson from being forgotten collectively and end the division. It is already happening: their names are relegated to small type on D&D credits. It won't be long before even that goes away. Luke is trying to keep his father's name alive with Gary Con and understands what contribution Arneson had to the collective effort. The Secrets of Blackmoor documentary is our effort to keep Arneson's name alive and maybe the Minnesota crowd needs to start an Arnecon (or whatever...don't worry, Luke, I will guarantee that it will be six months different;) The Kotaku article demonstrates that corporate could take over the narrative and construe whatever makes them the most fame and fortune.



While there were times of tension between different sides, Megarry stresses that even after the publication of D&D, people Dave Arneson's group worked alongside Gary's other employees to help TSR succeed in its early stages:

You must realize that the bulk of the creative Minnesota people were working for TSR in 1976: Arneson (D&D, Adventures in Fantasy, First Fantasy Campaign...), Megarry (Guerrilla War, Dungeon!, Pentastar...)and Carr (Don't Give Up The Ship, Fight in The Skies, 24 Hours of Le Mans...); the only people not represented were the David Wesely (Strategos N, Braunstein, Source of the Nile, Valley Forge...), Ross Maker (Source of the Nile), The Snider Brothers (Richard: Adventures in Fantasy, Mutant...John: Star Probe and Star Empires) and Professor Barker (Empire of the Petal Throne). Did I forget anyone? (Duane Jenkins with his Western RPG??).

Since TSR already had a creative staff working "upstairs" when Dave Arneson and his friends arrived at the company, the Minnesota group found other ways to help the company that didn't necessarily give them credits on published books:



We embraced the downstairs work as we realized the company would flounder if it wasn't done. Terry Kuntz got the Dungeon Hobby shop in order and it was contributing to the cash flow of the operation as well. Unfortunately (or fortunately from a TSR perspective) Arneson was an excellent shipping clerk and shipping hummed. As the inflationary growth spurt started to set in, Arneson's contribution to the company as a shipping clerk became more and more important. Arneson, of course, felt this was a demotion of a sort and began to rail against the role he had slipped into. When he tried to assert his creative input, it was rejected (almost out of hand). He had been hired to be a designer; that he stormed out after being rejected as such, is not surprising.

Tim Kask, editor of Dragon Magazine, has perhaps been the most vocal critic of Dave Arneson from the time Dave worked at TSR, but Megarry says he understands Kask's frustration:


Tim's dealings with Arneson were jaded with by the experiences we had together in 1976 at TSR Headquarters. From Tim's point of view, Arneson and most of the Minnesota contingent were not very productive on the creative front. The Arneson Basement crowd ended up that year doing a lot of nuts and bolts running the "downstairs" part of the business. It was the time of the 2nd stage of a business [...] Tim was really stretching himself to create a successful magazine and, IMHO, felt that the other "creative" staff was not pulling their weight. You must realize that the bulk of the creative Minnesota people were working for TSR in 1976: Arneson, Megarry and Carr; the only people not represented were the Snider Brothers and Professor Barker. That we produced not one item (other than the Blackmoor supplement) must have seemed to him we lacked the creative spark. Tim was part of the "upstairs" and wouldn't necessarily have appreciated what was happening to the company in the late Fall 1976.


I think Megarry makes some very important points here. If the people who were present at the creation of D&D and the early days of TSR are willing to let old conflicts go, D&D fans should certainly also do the same. While we live in a time when many are attracted to tribalist ideas of us vs. them, those of us who care about the  origin of our hobby have much more to gain by working together to preserve the memories of both D&D Co-Creators as well as the others who played an important role in those early years.

This does not mean that we should turn a blind eye to facts when they present themselves. If evidence is there to suggest credit is due, then we should be honest enough to examine that. Most of the readers of this blog will know that both Dave and Gary deserve tons of credit for bringing forth the game that we all love. We can all do our part to preserve that truth for the future.




-Havard

David Megarry, player in the original Blackmoor Campaign is to host the board game Dungeon! at GaryCon this year. David Megarry created the game partly because he saw how taxing DMing was on Dave Arneson and wanted to create a Blackmoor-like experience without the need to have a DM. I wrote a bit more about this back in 2011. The game was first published in 1975. The photo and information below was just posted at the GaryCon Facebook Page.

"DUNGEON! Board game creator and Guest David Megarry (pictured here with his wife Rose Shetka) displaying his original 1971 map of his most famous creation. Dave will host several DUNGEON! events at Gary Con XI. Get your badge today and sign up! GaryCon.com. #garycon #gcxi #dungeon #DUNGEON! #davidmegarry

Megarry also posts at The Comeback Inn Forum. If any of the readers of this blog are going to GaryCon, please tell Megarry that "Havard sent you".  ;)


Discussion of this article at The Comeback Inn


-Havard

To be honest I have mixed feelings about these collectors markets, but Dungeon! was designed by Dave Megarry, one of the original Blackmoor players, which makes it part of Blackmoor history. Note that this is a published copy, not the handmade version Megarry made himself. I wrote more about David Megarry and his Dungeon! game here.



Here is what the Collector's Trove posted on Facebook:

The Collector's Trove Presents: Designer's Copy of Dungeon!
The Collector's Trove is proud to bring you David R. Megarry's own designer's copy of the Dungeon! boardgame still in its original shrinkwrap!

In addition to David's comp copies he received as the designer of Dungeon! he also purchased several lots of 50 sets at a time from TSR and either sold them to retailers or gave them away as giftss. He now only has a half-dozen or so left to give as gifts or to sell and this is one.

As you know, David was a member of the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA), a group of wargamers and friends based in St. Paul, MN, that included Dave Arneson, Mike Carr, Maj. David Wesley, and several others that would go on to design a number of popular wargames.

David took part in playing fantasy adventures in Dave Arneson’s original Blackmoor, a game that incorporated much of the Fantasy Supplement of Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren’s Chainmail Medieval miniature warfare game but innovated with concepts of roleplaying individual characters, experience gains, levels, and most importantly the fantasy dungeon adventure. David Megarry took these experiences and codified them in to a much more regular, but still dynamic, board game, Dungeon! in 1973.

Dungeon! is the fantastic board game that is an ancestor of Dungeons & Dragons and represents the roleplaying game in its purest form – the dungeon delve! Players take on the role of a Hero, Elf, Wizard, or Superhero and play their way across the dungeon-themed gameboard. In their explorations they fight monsters, avoid traps, and find fabulous treasures!

Gary Gygax was the biggest proponent of the game, playtesting, making modifications, creating variants, and shopping it around to various game publishers. At one point, Gary and David made an offering of the game, titled Dungeons of Pasha Cada, to Don Lowry of Guidon Games but it was ultimately decided that it would be too expensive to print the maps. Finally, the game was picked up by TSR who put it into production in 1975.

Since then, Dungeon! has been the most successful board game ever produced by TSR and is still being published to this day! It has gone through dozens of reprintings and new editions, has been translated into a computer game, and even had a line of miniatures marketed for use as pawns. In fact, in August 2012, the game’s current owner, Hasbro, put out a brand new edition of the game and in 2014 revised the game’s presentation to appeal to younger players in yet another release!

Quite the legacy indeed! Now you have a chance to be a curator of a portion of this legacy, care for it well and enjoy!

Item Starts Sunday, June 12th, 2016 at 7:25 p.m. CST/MEX

Item Ends Sunday, June 19th, 2016 at 7:25 p.m. CST/MEX

Here is the link to place your bids:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_odkw&_ssn=the_collectors_trove&_sop=1&_armrs=1&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2046732.m570.l1313.TR12.TRC2.A0.H0.XDesigner.TRS0&_nkw=Designer&_sacat=0

Although it should be clear from this article, I am not the seller and am in no way associated with the Collector's Trove.

More discussion of this article.




-Havard

To be released in October, WotC have announced that they are bringing back this classic board game:

Dungeon!

Board Game

Wizards RPG Team

A classic board game of dungeon exploration returns!
Dungeon! is a fast-paced game where you and your friends can decide which way to go in the hunt for bigger and better treasure. Will you stick to level 1 and clear out the Goblins and Kobolds? Or will you delve deep into level 6 and set your sights on the Purple Worm or the Red Dragon? Along the way, you’ll have to face off against such iconic monsters as the Black Pudding, the Drow, and even the Owlbear! Featuring simple, straightforward rules that are easy to learn, Dungeon! is perfect for a fantasy game night, or a warm-up before your next epic game of D&D!

Item Details
Release Date: October 12, 2012
Format: Board game
Price: $19.99
ISBN: 978-0-7869-6298-3

As has previously been mentioned on this blog, Dungeon! was designed by another of Dave Arneson's players, David R. Megarry and first published in 1975. As usual there seems to be no credit given to Megary for this latest edition. I'm not sure if this is just a trend at WotC or representative of corporate America as a whole?

Original Game Board

Original Rules booklet

More info here.

Photos borrowed from Sandra Rosenberg.


-Havard

I just learned from Paul Stromberg that two Original Blackmoor Players will be at Gary Con next month (March 22-25). Dave Megarry will be refreeing his board game Dungeon! and Mike Carr will be refreeing Dawn Patrol and Don't Give Up the Ship.

Other people who will be at the Convention include Frank Mentzer, Tim Kask, Jim Ward, Skip Williams, Tom Wham, Chris Clark, Harley Stroh, Ernie Gygax and quite a few other people that I would love to meet! Sadly I am stuck in Viking-land. If you go, make sure you send me reports and pictures!

More on this topic here.

-Havard

As Dave Arneson's group were exploring their early dungeons, the fascination of the players for these underground activities lead to new and interesting ideas being formed. I have previously discussed David Megarry's ideas for turning dungeon exploration into a commercially viable board game. In the Blackmoor games, dungeons were commonly explored more than once. This lead another player, Ross Maker, to ask about what happened to all the corpses, rusty weapons and armor left behind after a party of adventurers had waded through a dungeon. Wouldn't that become messy after a while?

So, the Dungeon Clean-Up Crew was invented. These consisted of the Black Pudding, Oche Jelly, Grey Ooze, Yellow Mold, Green Slime and others. As this older article at Sham's Grog & Blog mentions, they were even referred to as the Clean-Up Crew in the rulebooks when the monsters first appeared in 1974.


Dave Arneson was a great fan of B-Horror films, and brought many such ideas into the game. According to Gary Gygax, the Green Slime was based on the 1968 movie with the same name. As many of you will know the Black Pudding was inspired 1958 movie The Blob. Greg Svenson has previously described the time when Dave Arneson introduced this horror into the game:

"At this point Dave took us into the laundry area of the basement, telling us he wanted to see what we would do. He had us line up in our marching order. Then he turned off the lights saying a sudden wind had blown out our torches. Then we heard some screaming. We generally scattered as best we could. He turned on the lights looked at what we had done and then went back the other room, telling us that a black blob had killed one of the NPCs who ran into it. We soon found that our weapons dissolved when we struck it. Then we got some torches relit and found that we could fight it with fire. Eventually we killed it losing a couple more men in the process."

In addition to this being an example of truly experimental roleplaying technique by Dave Arneson, the seed to the idea may have been the implementation of Maker's idea that something was eating all the remains left behind in dungeons. Arneson's players were allowed alot of input into the game. A lesson worthy for generations of gamers to come.






Image Sources:
Gelatinous Cube
The Blob

-Havard

Dave R. Megarry (center) 1974

In 1964 a group of gamers in St.Paul Minnesota founded the Midwest Military Simulation Association. Dave Arneson joined this group when he was in high school. Another member of this group was David R. Megarry. When Dave Arneson  started the Blackmoor game, Megarry was one of the players. In this game Dave Arneson presented Megarry with something that fascinated the player:

"Arneson drew up the first Dungeon map for a Blackmoor adventure that was expected to run one day and then (probably) the map would be brough back out if anyone ever went there again.   We played, everyone agreed that the game had gone really smoothly, and the next day we were back out in the kingdom, escorting some merchants through the woods or whatever.  Then Dave Megarry arrived with the prototype "Dungeon" game under his arm.  He had distilled the complex, open-ended Blackmoor dungeno crawl into a simple but practical board game.  He had also identified that, by restricting the players to a limited set of options (go left, or right, or back, and not  "NbyNW for three minutes. Now can the dragons see them there or not..." the Dungeon made everything manageable.  He and Dave Arneson discussed this, and from then on, the Dungeon was where most of the action was going to take place." (-David Wesely)

In the winter of 1972 Dave Arneson and David Megarry went down to Lake Geneva to present Megarry's "Dungeon!" game to Gary Gygax. During their meeting, Arneson also ran a Blackmoor game for Megarry, Gary Gygax, Ernie Gygax, Rob Kuntz, Terry Kuntz. As most of you will know, this lead to the creation of D&D in 1974. Megarry's Dungeon! game was released by TSR in 1975. Over at the Comeback Inn forum, we have been discussing how Megarry's Dungeon and Dave Arneson's Blackmoor game may have influenced eachother.


Image source

-Havard