I got a tip from my friend Cory that  80sTees are selling these awesome looking Blackmoor T-Shirts with the image from the cover of D&D Supplement II. The website offers this description of Blackmoor: 

Blackmoor is a campaign setting for the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. It originally evolved in 1975 as the personal setting of Dave Arneson, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, first as a setting for Arneson's miniature wargames, then as an early testing ground for what would become D&D. Blackmoor is the longest continuously played fantasy role-playing campaign in existence. It is a mysterious land of sword and sorcery mixed with relics of highly advanced technology. Everyone will immediately know you are a fan of the classic role-playing game when you wear this 80sTees.com exclusive Blackmoor Dungeons & Dragons T-Shirt!

These T-shirts come in black or natural color and are officially lisenced Dungeons & Dragons T-shirts from Wizards of the Coast. 

I previously wrote about a cool looking Blackmoor long sleeve product which as I was looking more into it only claimed to be lisenced when it was in fact not. 

Do you have any Blackmoor branded clothing yet? :)

-Havard

The MMRPG Forum over at ZGG's Website is gone and has been so, it seems since mid October. I have yet to get confirmation that this is a permanent removal of the forum, but at this point I would be very surprised if we ever get to see it back up. So what, you ask? The forum has not seen much activity for years, true. Unfortunately, many of the threads at that forum were pure gold. They had loads of setting ideas and tales from the original campaign. Many posts were made by the original Blackmoor players and contained unique information. Fortunately, most of this information has been saved at the Wood of the Revenant over at our Comeback Inn Forum. Still it is sad to see the Forum disappear. This is was a worry that I discussed with a few hard core Blackmoor fans, already when we first learned that the lisence would come to an end, and this was one of the reasons why we set up our own Blackmoor Forum.



Second Time Around
Sadly, this is not the first time for the ZGG forum to be removed. When the original ZGG Forum was "merged" with the MMRPG Forum, the original threads from the ZGG forum were lost. The lessons learned then allowed us to make the backups I mentioned above. I particularly miss the discussions with poster Ecthelion at the original Forum back in 2004. Unfortunately forum threads are not archived through the Wayback Machine, reminding us that Internet information is indeed temporary in nature.

Get Your Downloads While You Can
While I don't want to sound too alarming, I would not be surprised if we will see a complete removal of Blackmoor Content from the ZGG site in the near future. ZGG have not had the lisence to use Blackmoor since the beginning of this year, so there is no reason why they should keep all the freebies occupying their hard drives. Better safe than sorry. Download what you can now.

-Havard

Last year, we learned that the Blackmoor lisence agreement between WotC and ZG was ending by the end of 2009. There were hints of possibilties of negotiating a continuation of the agreement, though given WotC's changed attitude towards lisencing out its property and the fact that Arneson was no longer in the picture made the chances seem slim.

Other speculations included the possibilities of ZG's partner, Code Monkey Publishing launching a new, but related setting, sometimes referred to as the New Lands. However, this hope was reduced when ZG announced that their relationship with CMP would also come to an end in early 2010. An announcement at CMP's website of coming changes to their site was announced in early january, but as of now, the site can still be considered Out of Order.

A few days ago, the president of ZG (now IMI labs) made the following statement at the Comeback Inn:

"Age of the Wolf is a CMP project, but both Dave [Arneson] and I were involved in the early framing of the effort. CMP handled the oversight for the development.  AoW is not planned for release at this time in any format. IMI has no business relationship with CMP at this time nor are there any immediate plans."

 I interpret this as the closest thing we are going to get as an official statement that ZG and CMP's involvement with Blackmoor have come to an end. Barring a dramatic change in attitude from WotC towards lisencing out their property, any chance of seeing published Blackmoor material in the future would have to come from WotC themselves. Given the wide range of trademarks owned by WotC, that might not be too likely either, but who knows?





-Havard

Well, they are still here! In the beginning of December I suggested there might only be one month left to buy Blackmoor products. I guess I was wrong! Code Monkey Publishing (CMP) did say the lisence would end early 2010 which is a fairly vague phrase.

Having hear no word on the matter from either ZGG or CMP this year, I figured checking the online stores would be a good way of finding out if anything is happening to the situation.

 RPGNow/Drivethru have the best offers for pdfs that I have seen so far. If you have some money left after Christmas, I guess you still have a chance to complete your collection.

Edit: Paizo offers print copies of the Blackmoor: First Campaign (4E) sourcebook.






-Havard

According to the recent press releases from CMP/ZGG, the lisence agreement with WotC expires at the end of the year or early next years. This could mean there's less than a month left for those of you who are interested in getting legal Blackmoor pdfs and havent done so yet. Code Monkey's Website has been problematic for ages and today I couldnt even access their store. You can get most of the pdfs in stores like drivethru.com, rpgnow.com or paizo.com. Drivethru/RPGnow seems to have lower prices than paizo does for this line of products. Robert Reed mentioned that there would be a 20% discount at some of the stores.




Havard