As mentioned yesterday, this is Blackmoor Week 2016.

Every day this week I will be posting stuff about Blackmoor, leading up to Dave Arneson Day on Saturday.

Dave Arneson Day  2016 Planning: The Source

Already, people are telling me they plan on running games this weekend. One big gaming event is the annual Dave Arneson Day celebration at The Source. The Source was Dave Arneson's local gaming store and many of Dave Arneson's friends will be present. This year's events at The Source include:

• Braunstein #4 run by Dave Wesely himself. 
•  Chirine ba kal will answer questions about Dave Arneson 
• D20 Blackmoor run by Burl Zorn 
• FATE for Tekumel run by John Till 
• "Daleks in the Dungeon" run by Gerald Gagel
• And more!

Blackmoor Week Retrospective at The Piazza

Blackmoor Week Planning at The Comeback Inn

Now its Your Turn!

While Dave Arneson may have been the first Dungeon Master, he also enjoyed being on the other side of the DM's screen. As with most roleplayers, he started out as a player.

A formative moment in the life of young Dave Arneson was when his parents got him Avalon Hill's Gettysburg War Game, in the early 1960s. A few years later (1965?), he joined the Midwest Military Simulation Association which used to meet at Greg Scott's house. When the group became too big, the younger and more war game interested of the group, Including David A. Wesely, Dan Nicholson and Pete Gaylord split from the rest and began meeting at Arneson's house instead. 

So what was Arneson like as a player? Michael Mornard describes him like this:

"And yeah, Dave is a SUPER bad-ass player. You'd never know it talking to him out of context. Sweetest guy in the world. And then at the gaming table, he suddenly eats your spleen."

One of the more epic moments in Dave's career as a player was in David Wesely's Braunstein 4: Banana Republic, as Wesely recalls:

"He lied, swindled, improvised, and played his character to the hilt. He came to the game with fake CIA ID he’d mocked up, so when another player “captured” and searched him he could whip them out. Other players were still moving pieces around the board and issuing orders like a wargame while Dave Arneson was running circles around them and changing the whole scenario. He was winning the game entirely by roleplaying.

You may think of Dave Arneson as one of the godfathers of GMing, but even before that he was the godfather of players. He was, literally, the proto-player."

Over at the Comeback Inn Forum, Jeff Berry fondly remembers Dave playing Captain Harchar in Professor Phil Barker's Tekumel games:

"He was just one heck of a lot of fun; like a lot of his friends, he was very fast on his feet and very, very smart. He threw himself into any role that he took... Dave's showing up out at Phil's was always a good indicator that it was going to be a good night; we'd just hang on to the roller coaster, and watch the fun unfold."

If you have been asking yourself where Dave Arneson got all his ideas and creativity from then perhaps this is could be the answer. Creativty comes from passion, and we know that one of Dave's true passions was games, whether running them as a judge or DM, or enjoying them as a player.





Image source.

-Havard

Last weekend was the time of the 3rd Annual David L. Arneson Maritime Miniatures Event. As I mentioned when I first announced this about a month ago, the event took place at the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center in Roseville, Minnesota. The miniatures game was announced to take place on Saturday, but as things developed, it ended up taking the entire weekend, featuring among other things Dave Arneson's character, Captain Harchar. At the Comeback Inn, Chirine Ba Kal reported the following from the event:

"We had eight players for the first game and six for the second, and lots of people who stopped by to have a look and talk about Dave and Harchar. Things ended about ten pm, and we loaded out by eleven pm.

I had a business breakfast meeting on Sunday, after which we did the load-in back into the game room, and then had another RPG session from two pm to six pm to resolve the Dire Peril from Friday's game. Dinner after that, and then back into the game room to tell gaming stories.

Clean-up this morning from six am to now (11:30 am), and that was that.

Everyone seemed to be having a great time, or that's what they told me; I'm way too close to the thing to be objective. The players, the people who dropped by, and the Event Center staff were all very impressed by the tables and the games, so I think we can call this one a success. We handed out a lot of flyers and took a lot of pictures, and I'll get those sorted out as soon as I can.

The planning for the next event is already started, and I'm both startled and delighted with the way that people here and outside the Twin Cities want to make this a bigger and better event; Dave had both a lot of friends and a lot of influence on our shared hobby and I'm touched at the happiness that we managed to generate this weekend. It was a lot of work, and I'm exhausted; next year, though, more people want to help out on the organization side of the event and I'll be able to concentrate on the game side of things."

More about this years event and future events will be revealed here. 






-Havard

 Last year, I was pleased to learn of the Dave Arneson Maritime Event in Minnesota. I am happy to hear that this tradition is continuing:

"Yarrrrgh, me buckos! It be the time o' the year when we sets sail once again on the High Seas of Tekumelyani Adventure, and celebrates the life and times of our dear old Captain Harchar of the Blazoned Sail Clan, that devilishly handsome seafaring rogue and Honest Merchant Seaman!"

In short, it's time once again for the annual David L. Arneson Memorial Maritime Miniatures Mayhem Event; Dave played the infamous sea captain Harchar in Prof. M. A. R. Barker’s Tekumel games for many years, and we like to remember him with an annual Tekumel miniatures game. This year, our third annual outing will be held on Saturday, April 9th, 2011, at the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center in Roseville, Minnesota. The event starts at noon, and goes until everyone is too tired to laugh any more.

The address is 1975 Oakcrest Avenue, Suite 10; for more information on the center, have a look at their website:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_npm.asp?eidm=13

We have booked the upper Mezzanine level for the event, as befits the high standards of gaming that Dave set. (That's our story, anyway, and we're sticking to it.) We'll bring all the needful, and all you need to do is show up and have fun.

The basic plot of the game will be the same as the infamous "Saving Serqu's Sisters", or "Romp In The Swamp" we played at our Annual New Year’s Day game event; the idea is to save General Serqu's two sisters from A Horrible Fate at the hands of the terrible Hlutrgu. The last time around, these little rubbery nasties had it all their own way against the heavy infantry of the Legion of Serqu, Sword of the Empire, but this time around they'll have to contend with the intrepid Captain Harchar, his equally intrepid daughter Malia the Pirate Princess, and a couple of their friends like Carolyn, the Pirate Queen of Butrus. (If ye thinks ye detects A Theme, matey, ye'd be right on course, belike!)

There will be more boats, more swamp, more mayhem, more swamp, and a lot more fun for all and sundry as the Aethervox Gamers and their guests take on the best that Howard Fielding and the Tekumel Project can throw at them. We’re going to run this game several times in the course of the day so as to let everybody play different roles, too. Pictures from the last two years of this event are available at:

http://s277.photobucket.com/albums/kk72/Chirine_ba_Kal/

And further information will be available on my blog:

http://chirinesworkbench.blogspot.com/

Please feel free to post this announcement anywhere you think people might be interested!

Yours, Chirine - chirine@aethervox.net

The above was taken from the announcement at the Comeback Inn.

Image Source

-Havard

Also known as Chirine Ba Kal, Jeff Berry (1956-) was one of the members of MAR Barker's Tékumel group in St. Paul Minnesota around the time when Dave Arneson was running his early Blackmoor games in the same area.

Jeff Berry in Tékumel Outfit

Jeff started gaming in the Twin City area in 1975 and first met Dave Arneson at the University of Minnesota wargame club. When Dave Arneson started his own company, Adventure Games, in the early 1980s, he hired Berry to be his "Tékumel guy." I have previously mentioned how another member of Professor Barker's group, Debora Naffziger also influenced the Blackmoor Setting. 

Yesterday, at the Hill Cantons blog, ckutalik has posted an interesting interview with Jeff, where he among other things talks about his gaming experiences with Dave Arneson:

"Dave was really one of the most creative people I'd ever met, and genuinely the most fun to play with. He was very nice, very genial, and would do his very best to rip your liver out and feed it to you with Tabasco sauce on it. "

Read the entire interview here. Jeff Berry also has his own Q&A thread over at the Comeback Inn Forum where he talks about Tékumel, Dave Arneson, Blackmoor and many other things. He has been a fantastic source of information about the early days of gaming.

Jeff Berry i 2009

Image source: Der Spiegel


-Havard

The players still remember the day when Dave Arneson placed a large ceramic frog from his mother's garden on the gaming table. This was their first meeting with the Temple of the Frog, an adventure location which would be the focus of four different published modules for three different editions of D&D spanning three decades. Something dark stirred that day, and the players grew nervous.... 




The order of the Frog, the religious group who used the infamous temple as their base of operations had been organized by St. Stephen, played by Stephen Rocheford. Last month, I described how Arneson and Rocheford came up with this idea back in the spring of 1973. At the time, the Blackmoor players had relocated to the swampy environs of Lake Gloomy and the Temple was located just a few days travel to the south.

St. Stephen himself may have been a cynical manipulator, his religion a trick to be able to control the followers of the cult. Imagine his surprise when the monks of the temple began channeling divine magic. Who had been manipulating who here, the alien may have wondered. Was the idea for the cult really his, or had the idea come from those strange whispers in his head? Who was the true master of the Temple of the Frog?

In Dungeons of Castle Blackmoor it is described how a now lost race called the Sar Aigu once lived in the area where the Temple of the Frog later was constructed. In the 2008 version of the Temple of the Frog, it is revealed that a strange god whom the Frogmen simply call Brr'brrt in their croaking language is the patron of the Frogman priests.

Over at the Comeback Inn Forum, Jeff Berry explains where the Frogmen came from:

"...all three of the 'first three' (Dave, Gary, and Phil [Prof. Barker]) all affected each other; you have to remember just how small the gaming world was back then. I'd be willing to say that this forum has more members then were around in the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva *combined*. Both Dave and Gary were hugely impressed at Phil's work on Tekumel dating back to the 1950's, and he in turn was impressed by their ability to run games and write the rules needed for those games. The D&D world-settings became a lot more detailed and 'culturally aware' after Phil's work became familiar to Gary and Dave. Likewise. Phil elaborated on elements of Tekumel that he'd largely neglected until he'd had a chance to work with Dave and Gary. [...] All three had frogmen because all three read a lot of H. P. Lovecraft, and you just had to have frogmen and other servants of the Old Ones infesting the place; it gave the players something to do when they weren't exploring the dungeons."

Frogmen need not be the only thing that wandered off out from the Cthulhu Mythos and into the Blackmoor Campaign. The Mythos also has a Frog-like deity; Tsathoggua created by Clark Ashton Smith:


Tsathoggua also has a counterpart in Stodos of the Icy Wates in the Mystara Setting, a setting which incidentally is also linked to Asthon Smith's universe through Tom Moldvay's classic module X2: Castle Amber (Chateaû d'Ambreville).

One thing is certain. There is a great power lurking behind the Temple of the Frog. There is a reason why the Temple keeps resurfacing. And that power is nowhere near being defeated.




Image Source



-Havard

The Afridhi are described as a race of hillmen from a frozen land. The Afridhi depended on fire to survive and fire became their god. They are a conquering race of humans with unnaturally black skin and red hair. They are violent fanatics lead by their high priestess, the terrible Toska Rusa (Rosy Dawn). Gradually the Empire of the Afridhi has expanded and is now threatening Blackmoor itself. In my campaign I describe the Afridhi as having their bodies decorated with glowing tattoos like the Dark Prince from the Prince of Persia games shown below:



The Afridhi were revealed to the general public in DA4 Duchy of Ten. Because DA4 was the one module of the DA series on which only Dave Ritchie's name appeared, some have speculated that the Afridhi were an invention by Ritchie. However this is not the case. I have previously discussed the nature of the working relationship between Ritchie and Arneson.

The Afridhi were actually introduced in Dave Arneson's Campaign around 1975 (Date yet to be confirmed). Dave created an image of the Afridhi as a kind of devil worshippers to his players. As was normal in Dave's campaign, other players would take on the role of the bad guys, and the Afridhi were no exception. Toska Rusa was most likely played by a Deborah Naffziger as Jeff Berry explains:

[Naffziger was]one of Prof. Barker's original EPT players and one of the early players in Dave's Blackmoor. (She also played in Greyhawk with Gary) She was the only girl in local Twin Cities gaming for many years, and the description of the character sounds pretty much like the one she had out at Prof. Barker's.

 Toska Rusa and the Afridhi were at one point available as Miniatures, as part of the Blackmoor Miniatures Line. The Afridhi remain one of Blackmoor's most dangerouns enemies.






Thanks to Greg Svenson and Jeff Berry for providing much of the information above.

-Havard

In 1979, Dave Arneson and Richard Snider created an RPG called Adventures in Fantasy. Two versions of the game were published that year, one by Excalibur Games and the second by Arneson's company, Adventure Games. The game consists of three books -- Book of Adventure, Book of Faerry and Magic, and Book of Creatures and Treasure. A good review of the game appeared on Grognardia earlier this year. DH Bogg's "arnesonian" RPG , Dragons at Dawn, is said to have drawn heavily on Adventures in Fantasy.

Jeff Berry worked for Dave Arneson in 1979 and could reveal the following about the life at Adventure Games (AGI):

I was working for Dave at the time at Adventure Games, as the chief 'Tekumel Boat Person' (as he described us); the staff at AGI was made up of Dave's friends from the First Minnesota ACW reenactment group, and none of them were fantasy gamers of any type. Ken Fletcher and I were the only people there with any fantasy gaming experience; Richard was a free-lance author, and rarely in the shop.

Why didn't the game do better? At this time, D&D was still a young game and it would seem that the market was hungry for fantasy RPGs. If RuneQuest could coexist with D&D, why not AiF? Was it simply not good enough? Jeff Berry has the following explanation:

The problem with AiF wasn't that is was a bad game or anything, it was simply one of no marketing. Dave had bought it back from Excalibur with the money that the first of his settlements with TSR, and like many other of the AGI product line was more or less just there because Dave or one of his friends had done the game. There was no real 'in-house' support for this game like there was for, say, "Compleat Brigadier", and it has to be said that there wasn't much support for fantasy gaming of any kind in house. AGI's Tekumel line existed because of Dave's personal friendship with Phil, and my presence at AGI was a direct consequence of that. It always amazed the AGI staff that we 'boat people', so-called because we lived on pallets in AGI's basement under tarps (it was a very wet basement!) could sell our rather recondite products and the main AGI line never seemed to sell at all; I kept pointing out that one needed to run games at conventions and advertise the heck out of a game, otherwise it'd never sell to anyone.

Recently there has been speculations to whether it would be possible to get ahold of the lisence to the game so it could be published again. Unfortunately, Rafael just shared the following on Dragonsfoot today:

The news back then were, as the admin staff over at the CI discussed in various threads, that with Dave Arneson's death, apparently all of his rpg-related IP reverted to WotC. INCLUDING AiF. - This was apparently part of the agreement that allowed the licensing of the BM d20 line through several companies associated with Arneson. A dead end, it seems.Though IANAL, as to the Comeback Inn crew, things so far look far more like we will go on an produce our own setting some day instead of continuing DA's work.

So, the chances of seeing Adventures in Fantasy back in print seem very low indeed. Thankfully there are other things happening in the Old School community and many out there who are interested in honoring Dave's legacy in any way they can.









-Havard

Some people get a statue in their honor. How should we best commemorate Dave Arneson? At the Maritime Mayhem event back in April, some of the attendees were discussing the matter with Dave's Daughter, Malia Arneson Weinhagen .

The idea of erecting a statue in Dave's memory might not have been something this modest man would have been comfortable with, Jeff Berry stated afterwards:

"we all agreed that if somebody had suggested this idea to Dave, he would have laughed his head off and very kindly told you that you needed to go soak your head in a bucket of water as your brain was obviously overheating; statues in the town square seemed silly to him. "

If not a statue, then what kind of a token could be made so that Arneson's many fans could remember him? Jeff continues:

I thought that running games for people to have fun with and at would be a more fitting tribute, and Malia [Arneson Weinhagen] agreed with me as she watched the mayhem and happiness unfold around the game table. We also talked about a Dave Arneson figure for people to have for games, and I'm going to see what I can do about that. Glasses, beard, and that Cheshire Cat grin; what more do you want in a wandering monster, eh?

 A miniature then, in the shape of the game designer himself to be used on every gaming table? This is something I would love to get my hands on.


(The fake miniature illustration was made using the software on this site) 



-Havard 

As I mentioned earlier this month, there will be a memorial event held in St. Paul, Minnesota on April 10th. Thanks to Jeff Berry, I can present you with the poster for the event:


I like the illustration. I wonder if that is Arneson's character, Captain Harchar right there, swinging from the mast?






-Havard

While I had heard rumours of this in the past, Jeff Berry was kind enough to confirm the origins of Castle Blackmoor:

Seriously; let's never lose sight of the fact that the original 'rust monster' was a plastic toy that Dave got in a set of equally cheap plastic dinosaurs, and it's lasted for how long? You can still buy a copy of Dave's original Blackmoor Castle, too; it's an N scale model kit made by Kibri in Germany, their "Branzoll Castle" catalog number 7304. He used it for years to show people what the place looked like. 

The real Branzoll Castle is located near the town of Chiusa (Klausen) in a formerly Austrian part of Northern Italy. The Castle was built around 1250. In 1671 it was left in ruins after a fire, but was rebuilt in 1895 by a castle-enthusiast by the name of Dr. Otto Piper. You can read more about the Castle here.


Below is a picture of the model from Kibri. Guess what I want for Christmas this year?









More discussion of this article here.









-Havard