Hidden in Shadows

 Today detailed reports from game sessions are common. Until recently, some of the oldest I knew of were to be found in Alarums & Excursions, but only rarely do these go into the sort of detail we might like.

Often I had wished someone, anyone, had written down a Blackmoor "after action report", but that seemed too much to hope for, or nearly so. We did have a couple of accounts by Greg Svenson, created from memory decades after he played the game, but nothing from the time of play. And then came along Ken Fletcher with his little trove of documents... 

The "THE DUNGEONS OF BLACK MOORE CASTLE" document typed apparently by Arneson as a detailed session report, probably with the intention of publishing in CoTT, is from the FIRST EVER multi-player adventure party dungeon crawl in RPG history - more or less. 

The significance of this discovery cannot be overstated.

The "more or less" above comes from two details given in the introduction to the adventure story itself. First, we are told of a Wizard who lives in the dungeon, and of an apprentice and a minstrel who disappeared. This backstory could possibly have been a played adventure if the apprentice and minstrel were player characters, but it is more likely to just be back story given that the minstrel and apprentice later show up while no player is playing them (NPCs). 

The second reason to hedge with "more of less" is because the account also tells us that lord Jenkins, the PC played by Duane Jenkins, too has been in the dungeon on a solo adventure. It could be another back story, but this is a "real" player and we do have a second hand account from Bill Hoyt, that Dwayne told him about a "test" solo adventure Arneson ran with him after a Napoleonics game one night, prior to the evening where Arneson introduced the dungeon to the rest of the group.

Thus in all likelihood, the typed account represents the second actual dungeon crawl and the first with a group of players participating. 

So for everyone but Dwayne Jenkins this is the account of their very first foray into the dungeon. Looking at the list, these players make up the core of the Blackmoor Bunch minus two key figures: David Megarry and Greg Svenson.

Megarry's absence can be explained by Megarry himself. While he says he was at the first dungeon adventure, he explained that he came in late, apparently well after the game was underway and likely just observed or took on a limited role.

But where is that stalwart of the game, Greg Svenson, one wonders. His apparent absence cast doubt on the idea that this might be a record of the first group dungeon adventure.

However, as I read and re-read the narrative, I noticed something odd, something I'm sure that has jumped out to everyone. The narrative, as typed by Arneson, is in the first person. This is weird, since Arneson is clearly the person running the game. Did he somehow participate as a player too?

 Actually, he does the same thing in Return to Black Moors, again oddly, both when talking about himself and when telling the story from Dan Nicholson's point of view. In other words, he pretends to be Dan Nicholson at one point in the narrative.

Is Arneson pretending to be one of the players again? If so, who? There are several clues in the text - he says, for example he is a mercenary soldier.

The biggest clue however comes from elsewhere. If you have read much Blackmoor material, some of the events in Dungeons might jog a few memories. Here I would encourage you to pause a moment and go read this: The First Dungeon Adventure

Greg recalls some of the details differently (a couple of the players, some events, the presence of a balrog) but it is close enough for there to be little doubt he recalls the same adventure as that recounted in The Dungeons of Castle Black Moore.

Here is a quick breakdown of things that line up:

• Begins with a wizard doing something
• "Among the 30 men-at-arms there were six players"
• "we picked a door leading northwest"
• "We were carrying torches for light"
• "We ...found a staircase going down"
• "a sudden wind had blown out our torches"
• "a black blob ...killed one of the NPCs who ran into it"
• They found a statue
• "We found a magic sword on the ground"
• Bill Heaton takes the magic sword and becomes the leader (Heaton did become the leader for a bit, but it was Johnson who took the sword)
• On the 4th level they find "a fountain with a small statue of a devil in it."
• "...we were all getting tired, so we stopped and set up camp in a large room and bedded down for the "night"
• Guards were posted at the entrances to the room.
• "During the night a beautiful woman came to our camp. She successfully seduced Bill. While they were embracing she turned into a serpent and killed him. We fought and eventually killed it..." (It was actually Mel Johnson who was killed)
• "The balrog's body became a flaming torch as he tore into us." (actually an unknown monster with a floating jewel)
• "We fought valiantly; ...After a while I realized that I was the last man standing"
• Ends with Svenson, the sole survivor, reporting to Baron Fant.

Honestly, its fairly remarkable how well Greg's memory fits the events of the play report given the time gap and the scores of Blackmoor dungeon dives he's been on. Other things found in Greg's story, like fighting the spiders or Soukup's balrog can be assumed to be "bleed" from later adventures.

Greg has repeatedly claimed that this adventure was the first dungeon adventure they all experienced and the introduction for himself and most of the others to the Blackmoor setting. The story itself as found in Arneson's original account has numerous unmistakable clues supporting this conclusion. Here is a short, non-exhaustive list:

• Aside from Jenkins, the player characters are all low rank soldiers. For example, Krey is still one of the good guys and only a sergeant - not yet promoted to captain, and certainly not yet turned traitor - an event that happened in the Second Coot invasion Circa April 1972. Krey stopped playing altogether later that year.
• Aside from Jenkins, none of the characters has been in the dungeon and clearly have no idea what to expect.
• After finding treasure,  The players want to "find a way back up, so that we could tell of all the gold that could be found in the dungeons. Then we could lead a large expedition down on a treasure hunt." 

These players are total noobs to the dungeon, not the seasoned adventurers of later years.

There is one other area that also points to The Dungeons of Black Moore Castle as a record of the very first dungeon adventure - the maps.

Its possible, as we will see when I complete the post on the subsequent "May 25th" adventure, to map the path the adventurers follow, because both these reports contain detailed descriptions of the rooms and passages. For example, we are told at one point: "We walked twenty feet to a point where the corridor continued north, another corridor went off to the northwest..." These sort of instructions can be mapped onto the existing Blackmoor maps. Here the path taken on level 1 is indicated in red stars:

And here is the path taken on the second level:

We can be sure this is correct and you can follow along with the maps as you read the account if you like. However, even on the first level, certain details don't match. For example, where the party turns north and heads to the stairs, the east-west passage is supposed to end there, not continue west.  However, there is supposed to be a west passage across from the corridor where room 3 is instead.

Further, once the characters go to level 3, the maps change radically. The chapel of the undead and Mels room (4) are more or less as they should be, but other passages and rooms are described in ways that don't match anything on our current maps, at all.

This is in direct contrast to the May 25th adventure "INTO THE DEPTHS OF BLACKMOOR DUNGEON AND BACK", which seems to be a follow on adventure report from not too long after the first one, but which describes the dungeon layout as we know it today and presents no mapping challenges.

The most likely explanation for this discrepancy is that at the time of the first group dungeon adventure the maps were still a work in progress, and the deeper the adventurers got the less finalized they were.

Take Mels room for example. In the adventure, the room sinks, elevator like - at least one level down, but on our current maps, there are tunnels and rooms directly below that would prevent a sinking room. There is also an up stairwell leading to a circular room, neither of these features are on any map we have.

"THE DUNGEONS OF BLACK MOORE CASTLE" is a time capsule, providing a glimpse at the first dungeon crawler as it was still developing. The details found therein are a revelation of Arneson's gaming ideas and much more remains to be said about this and the other documents in the Blackmoor Foundations book.

 Arneson's works, like his life, is largely obscure to the D&D community. His best known writing credit is no doubt the TSR DA series starting with Adventures in Blackmoor a series so heavily re-worked from the Blackmoor Chronicles adventures Arneson wrote that his voice is largely lost and replaced by that of Ritchie. No shade on Ritchie, of course, as TSR had their plans and Ritchie's job was to conform the Blackmoor setting to that vision.

I imagine that folks who know a little about Arneson or are familiar with the DA series might expect any other adventures he released to be weird dungeon crawls or perhaps an epic MacGuffin quest.

The Garbage Pits of Despair is neither of these things. It represents a sort of side quest, written during approximately the same period as Blackmoor Chronicles before the Chronicles drafts (or at least the first 3/4 adventures) was reworked by TSR into the DA series. Thus GPoD is a fascinating and unvarnished but all too brief look at Blackmoor as Arneson intended it to be.

The adventure was published in Different Worlds magazine in 2 installments in 1985. Arneson wrote a semi-regular column for DW under the pen name Gigi D'Arn, and served as an editor. GPoD likely was intended as a teaser for Blackmoor Chronicles.

I wont spoil all the details, but the adventure breaks as follows, The PC's randomly come across a caravan under attack by slavers, which leads to a request from a Blackmoor official to chase down the raiders. The PCs end up in a dragon den in the Dragon Hills, and agents of the Temple of the Frog are involved.

It is a bit railroady although allowances are made for differing outcomes of encounters and more than half takes place out-of-doors (or out-of-dungeons, if you prefer).

There is a lot more to say about the content of the adventure, but for this post I want to concentrate on some of its quirks.

Monsters

Arneson introduces three (or more?) new monsters in this adventure.

Watchwings: basically spy birds

Maggotmen: think the Michelin tire guy as an ant colony. It gets weirder though since there is also a zombie form!

Carcass Critter: this is Arneson's version of the Carrion Crawler, basically. That makes me wonder if the carrion crawler was a monster he invented and didn't care for how TSR presented it, or if he just thought it needed some changes. Who knows?

More: so there are known monsters that have some different qualities (more on that below), but the most outstanding to me was the Black Pudding, because it occupies a huge space and gives off a toxic gas.

Unknown Place Names

Walworth (Gary Gygax played the Earl of Walworth in the Castles and Crusades Society)

Stone Brook 

Dinsbury 

Fenstien

Weapons

Although Arneson seems to have been following the BECMI rules, some of the magic weapons have non-standard effects. 

War Hammer +1 against all opponents, additional plus one against undead; permanent spell effect: Deceive.

Pole Axe +3 strength against all non-magical opponents;  permanent spell effect: Defend.

2-handed flaming sword (sword of legend) 25% bonus, 8 Ego, 9 Intelligence. Primary powers – Detect Metal, Find Secret Doors, and Find Traps; Extraordinary power – Teleportation.

Magic Weapons seem to come in three stripes

1) Common with only a normal bonus

2) Rare with a bonus to strength in one case and an extra bonus against specific creatures and one “permanent spell effect”  These seem to come from the Marsh/Cook Expert rules.

3) Extraordinary swords – these swords are the standard swords generated with the D&D sword creation rules except the terminology is a little different.   The one listed is also interesting and unorthodox because it gives an unspecified (?) 25% bonus.

Magic Items

These have custom effects not in the BECMI or B/X rules, including an interesting failure rule I've long used now in my own games.

Staff of Lightning Bolts – effects an area 60 feet long, starting at 0 to 300 feet from user.  Victims must make a saving throw or take 6d6 points of damage.  There is a 5% chance per use of malfunction.  User must roll successfully against intelligence to repair.

Wand of Fireballs – Contains 6 charges.  Recharges in three minutes provided the owner is at rest.  The wand will recharge 5 times total.  The fireballs range 0-100 feet and do 2d6 damage.  Victims who make their saving throws take no damage.  There is a 15% chance per use the wand will malfunction.  The user must forsake all other activity and must roll successfully against intelligence to repair.  

Rules

Peppered throughout GPoD are what one might call general house rules.

Arrow counts for Archers are always noted (10-30), same with slingers (20 stones), and crossbowmen (40 bolts).

Percentile based tracking skill noted for one of the fighters (Long Bill Jordan).

NPC’s always have their ability scores listed.

Armor is described and helmets are noted, including whether or not they have cowls.

The Dragon, like AiF Dragons, has a mixture of animal like features.

Fatigue rule: movement reduced by 1/3, -1 on Strength and Dexterity.

The lead Orc isn’t given stats.  Instead he is described as a level 2 fighter.

Its interesting that Arneson seems to be tracking ammo for shooters, using percentile based skills, rolling against ability scores, and making variant magic items, based on his old standby’s of fireball and lightning bolts. 

Setting Details

Lastly, and perhaps most intriguing of all, are the hints regarding the Blackmoor setting as Arneson saw it. I mentioned placenames above, and we have hardly a clue about them since they are associated with a person, such as Monica of Dinsbury. 

There are some other interesting place clues however, such as the reference to the rulers of Ten as "Sartraps" and the fact that the leadership of Blackmoor is under a King and a council of Co-regents. The wild west of the north vibe also comes through in the prominent role of marshals, appointed by the council to provide some measure of law and protection across Blackmoor. The people from the Temple of the Frog too, reveal something of their organization, from Fins of the Frog to Teeth of the Frog.

Further fascinating details can be gleaned from the random encounter tables and the potential wilderness encounters. Garbage Pits of Despair gives us a glimpse of the Arnesonian Blackmoor we almost had, before TSR put their stamp on the setting in the DA series.

 If you want to find the details for one of the characters that Gary Gygax made and played as a PC, perhaps to use as an NPC in your own game, it isn't terribly difficult. Likewise for the characters of Rob Kuntz, David Megarry Greg Svenson  and others among the early developers and players of D&D.

Perhaps surprisingly though, finding a player character sheet by D&D's co-creator Dave Arneson is not an easy exercise. Sure you can find NPC's and pre-gens Mr Arneson rolled up, but that's about it.

I'm not saying there aren't any which have yet to see the light of day, but at present none are publicly available or even privately circulated to my knowledge. Except maybe one.

 Boot Hill has a list of Fictional Non-Player Characters and their stats. In the second edition (1979) the character creators are anonymous, but by the third edition player names had been attributed to each, and the character of Ben Cartwheel, Rancher is attributed to Arneson.

 Here are the stats:

  Ben Cartwheel (Dave Arneson)

Now I want to point out that we have no way of knowing, as far as I know, if Arneson actually rolled up this character or if someone else did. We also don't know if he actually played the character. I asked David Megarry, who also has a character attributed to him in Boot Hill, and he said that, at least in his case, he didn't remember making the character and thought maybe Brian Blume had made it for him.

All I can say for certain is that this Ben Cartwheel character was attributed to Arneson and may or may not have been made by him. The name is certainly right in Arneson's wheelhouse, so I think the odds are good that it really was Arneson's player character. In any case, unless you are familiar with Boot Hill the stats probably don't mean much to you, but if you are like me, you immediately wonder if they will convert to D&D. Luckily there is a conversion guide published in the 1e AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. 

Most of the stats don't in fact convert to anythin in D&D because they are derived from Speed (spd) and Bravery. Per the AD&D conversion guide we are told the Strength score stays the same and a method is given for converting Speed (spd) into Dexterity. We also are told to determine the character level by adding 2 to the EXP score and that Rancher would translate to a Fighter. The DMG suggests the Bravery scores can be derived from the wisdom score when converting an AD&D character to Boot Hill but not the reverse - there is no D&D Bravery equivalent. However Arneson's Bravery score is quite high in Boot Hill - the near equivalent of rolling a 17 on 3d6 - and I think we should convert the Bravery score to something, but Wisdom is probably not the best choice - perhaps Constitution or maybe Charisma. Lets go with Constitution for now and see what we have so far for Ben Cartwheel D&D Fighter:

That leaves Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. AD&D suggests the player simply roll for these. That’s a bit of a problem now, but we could potentially steal these score from an NPC Arneson had already created, preferably of similar class and level. Such an NPC can be found in the Pregens he rolled up for the Origins convention in 1977. In fact there is a character that lines up well  - #5, a tenth level lord with the following Stats: Str: 14 Int: 12 Wis: 13 Con: 16  Dex: 12 Chr: 17

Conveniently, this character matches exactly Ben Cartwheel's Strength and Dexterity scores, so this is a good match to fill in the blanks. We could translate the Bravery score of 17 to Charisma, but I like the idea of swapping the stats and giving Ben a 16 Charisma and 17 Constitution so Ben is a little less of a clone of character #5. Also, one of the roles of Bravery in Boot Hill is giving the character a "steady hand" in a gunfight, and that seems more in line with Constitution to me. Here is the result:

Ben Cartwheel                                                                       Level  12 Fighter, Hit Points 60                                                    Str: 14 Int: 12 Wis: 13 Con: 17  Dex: 12 Chr: 16                   

In a sense Blackmoor "grew like Topsy", that is to say wild and on its own.

Perhaps the first iteration of anything we might call Blackmoor is the well-discussed medieval game designed by Dave Arneson wherein Baron Hoyt of "Keston" defends his lands from Viking raiders.

1a) Nascent Blackmoor (1970) - So if we count it, the medieval wargame Dave Arneson created and ran in the fall of 1970 sets the tone of a medieval-esque land where Vikings mix it up with knights and monks in a place called "Keston". 

1b) Pre-Blackmoor Dutch Map (1970) - for this we only have the map Arneson drew, apparently from a tracing based on Holland. It has no names, but it does show the locations of all the major cities, forests, roads and swamps. Blackmoor foundations shows the eastern half of this map on page 32.

1c) Planned Blackmoor (1971) - For this earliest phase of Blackmoor we primarily have the March '71 letter to Rob Kuntz briefly describing the setting and a couple maps from the Fletcher collection shown on pages 12 and 14 of Blackmoor Foundations.

Altogether this gives us the following places:

 - Region of Keston/Keiston

- Region of Williamsfort (centered on the town we now know as Blackmoor - the name is re-located later)

- Region of Jenkinsland

- Region of Swampland/Swampwood 

- Land/City of the Red Coven (northwest)

 - Land of the Skandaharians (north off map) 

- Region/Forest of the Eraks (east)

- Region of the Picts (west)

- Region of the Palatinate (Great Kingdom?) (southeast)

2) Played Blackmoor (1972 - 1976)

After Arneson sent in the initial letter describing Blackmoor, Gary Gygax altered, perhaps unknowingly, Arneson's initial vision for the setting. He made a single change that greatly impacted the geography and development.

Arneson intended Blackmoor to reflect the geopositioning of the Netherlands, with oceans to the west. As such he located Blackmoor on the Far Ocean (Dramidje) in or near to the area that would become Ekbir on the map of the world of Greyhawk.  However, Gygax placed it eastward, closer to the Great Kingdom in an area known as the Great Bay. 

This change flipped the coastline so that the ocean was now in the east. To accommodate this change Arneson drew a new map, frequently known as "the sketch map" of which we now have several similar versions (Foundations: pp 8 - 10).

It was also at this time that the isometric map seems to have been produced, probably to accompany the Return to Black Moors story. (Foundations 24 - 29)

From these sources we can add the following places and features.

- City of Maus

- Town of Blackmoor

- Town of Glendower

- Great Swamp of Mil

- Black Marsh

- Loch Gloomen/Lake Gloomey

-  Frog town/island

- Forest of the Elves (formerly Eraks)

- Bramwald

- Regent of the Mines 

- Wizard Mountains

- Witchwood Mountains

- Glomma River

- Arafasta gorge

- Lake of the Heavens

- Peshwan

- Region of Hyth

- North Watch Tower

- Wizards Wood

- Temple of Id

- Tower of Tears/Booh

- City of Tonisborg

- Sage's Tower

- Black Hills

- Dragon Hills

- Town of Tillburgh

- Duchy of Ten Heroes

- Duchy of the Peaks

- City of the Gods

- City of Father Dragon

- Desert (southwest)

3) Wilderlands Blackmoor (1977)

When Arneson left TSR he struck a deal with Bob Bledsaw to pull Blackmoor into Beldsaw's Wilderlands setting.

Arneson off course gave copies of maps to Bledsaw to work from - but it is not entirely clear which. What is clear is that the decision was made to scrape the "Sketch Map" version of Blackmoor and use the original, Holland based map, with one exception: the orientation of the ocean to the east. Likely, this was simply because the "sketch maps" we have are pretty crude affairs. Bledsaw then produced a new version of the map which formed the basis of every map since.

Only a few geographic features were added at this point. These are:

- Barrier Swamp

- The Stormkiller Mountains (as yet un-named however)

- The Peaks of Booh (as yet un-named however)

- The Haven Peaks (as yet un-named however)

- The Valley of the Ancients 

This last place is a location on the Wilderlands Map, not a Blackmoor place per se, but it is where Blackmoor was tacked on to the Wilderlands map and served as a replacement for the "Desert" area of Blackmoor where the City of the Gods was located.

4) Blackmoor Chronicles Blackmoor

The Blackmoor Chronicles materials refers to the maps and manuscript prepared by Arneson and his Adventure Games Inc. staff for planned publication initially, then later for publication by Mayfair games, then later again for TSR. This also includes Garbage Pits of Despair  published in Different worlds magazine.

Unfortunately, our resources from this era have serious gaps. For example we have a writeup Arneson prepared for the character of Robert the Bald which formed the basis - much altered - of what is seen in DA1. Arneson wrote an unknown number of these, but I have only seen this one, because Robert Meyer saved the letter Arneson sent him with the write-up in it. Anyway from the Blackmoor Chronicles material we have:

- Powers Pass

- Keep of Robert the Bald

- Desert of the Gods

- Stonebrook

- Feinstein

- Dinsbury

I'd also bet that Kenville was in some of this material, but I haven't seen any proof. I'm betting it was because it shows up as a location on earlier maps but has no name, and I presume it to have been named for artist Ken Fletcher. The same might be true of the city of Eraks, and a few other places like Starmorgan and Starport - maybe.

5) TSR Blackmoor (1986 - 1989)

Now we come to the shocker. Notice that up until this point I have provided a few short lists, but I'm not even going to try to make a list for this iteration of Blackmoor. That's because it would consist of a hundred or more entries. David Ritchie was given the job of fleshing out the setting and that is exactly what he did. It is not an exaggeration to say the Ritchie added hundreds of names. Not only did he provide names for every and any geographic feature, but many places were given new "improved" names too.

These aren't just little villages or mountains either.  Many of the familiar and iconic places in Blackmoor show up in TSR material for the first time ever and appear to have been invented by Ritchie, including Jackport, Octagern, Kerman Peaks, Thonia, Karsh, Misauga river, the Redwood Forest, Ringlo Hall, etc. 

In fact by far the majority of places on the map were named and added during this era. Truthfully the TSR version of Blackmoor was its own setting, quite distinct from the Twin Cities Blackmoor. 

6) Zeitgeist Blackmoor

Arneson certainly had the opportunity to make changes to the setting when He and Dustin Klingman published Blackmoor setting books again under Zeitgeist. However the decision was made to not throw out the established TSR material, but rather to tweak it at the edges so as not to divide the fan base. As such Zeitgeist added nothing of consequence to the map. A few new locations, such as Croc's Nest, do show up, but these are generally minor towns, etc. A dozen or so more places are also mentioned in the semi-canon MMRPG material, but again, these are not mapped locations.

So there you have it. Geographically and politically as it is known by most people today, Blackmoor is largely a creation of TSR, but several others have had their hand in it too, over the years and eras.

 Here we go.  For fun, take a look at the map below.

What you are looking at is one of the best medieval maps of the world, produced in 1154 by geographer al–Idrisi.

Observe how it is recognizable, yet "wrong".  Some places - like Spain or Arabia, are almost correct, while others like Britain and India are very wrong and in some cases there are places that are likely not even real.

That "similar but wrongness" is one way to look at the Great Kingdom map below.   

This map, as we've talked about before, was published in the Castles & Crusades societies Domesday Book #9 newsletter around June of 1971.  Details are still being researched, but the map was drawn by some artistic hand, apparently based on a map by Gary Gygax.

Technically, it is the first published map of what we now call the Flanaess.

Originally it was intended to be the shared map Castles & Crusades society members would use for campaigns - using whatever rules - involving their various holdings in and out of the Great Kingdom.

Few labels were put on this map by the cartographer, but using other hand-drawn copies, such as Dave Megarry's below, we are able to fill a lot of those blanks in.

Some of those names are familiar to Greyhawkers - like Nyr Div and Urnst - some, like Catmelun, not so much.

Nevertheless, it was on this map that the earliest Greyhawk adventures took place, and early Blackmoor adventures too, but like the al–Idrisi medieval map above, it was a crude representative of the world.

When TSR decided to publish Greyhawk in the late 70's it was decided a new and better map was needed - a modern map.  "For certain the WoG product as published by TSR came into being about two or three months before the date of its printing and sale.  Brian said that a campaign setting was needed, so after ascertaining the maximum size map sheet we could have printed, I free-handed the land outlines on... two sheets of paper, used colored pencils to put in terrain features, located the cities, and made up the names for everything. That took me about 1 week. Then I went to work on the text while Darlene made prettier maps."  Gary Gygax DF Forum

The end result of this process was the Darlene map of the Flanaess.  Did Gygax create one or more intermediary Flanaess maps between the 1971 C&C map and Gygax's new map of the Flanesse used by Darlene?  It doesn't appear that there was, but I don't presume to know all the steps it took to get to the final Darlene version, except that it all starts with the C&C Great Kingdom map.  

So I thought it would be fun to map the parts of the C&C map onto the corresponding locations on an official Greyhawk map, along with location labels, to see what may result.

The first thing you will notice is that I have cut the C&C map into 8 pieces where it seemed logical.  In two cases (Nyr Div and Catmelun) sections have been rotated, and in all cases the sections have been resized, bigger or smaller for best fit.

Now I don't for a second think somebody at TSR did something like that.  I expect the process was a lot more free form.  Gygax probably, sat down to sketch the new map with a copy of the C&C map close to hand and drew as he said in the quote above.  Certain areas, like the sea of dust and the Nyr Div, he copied pretty closely, while others, especially in the east, were more loosely inspired, and a whole lot of new geography was added, or redefined in between places - again especially on the eastern side of the new map.

Even so, there is much in the C&C map that is recognizable on the new Greyhawk maps we have now.

Here is the same map again, but this time I've ghosted the image so you can see what lies beneath and perhaps why the sections are where they are.

You can readily see, if you look closely, how mountains and coastlines follow together, and sometimes even rivers and forest.  The eastern three sections were the most difficult to place, but I think even there you can readily see how someone eyeballing a new map on a sketchpad is being guided by the C&C map outlines, at least in some places.  

Perhaps the NE section is most interesting.  That squiggly peninsula on the C&C map for all the world looks to have been followed on the Greyhawk map to form the line of The Frozen River, leaving the islands of Botulia and Maritz to be paved over by new land.

Here is another look.  This map has all the C&C sections removed but the place names left behind.  Placement for a lot of these labels was straightforward, but there were also a few that are more of a best guess, because they fall on the edge of a section that is separated from it's neighbors by a lot of space.  

There's some very interesting alignments and some possibilities for place names where our current Greyhawk map lacks detail.

Of the places listed, many have direct corollaries on the world of Greyhawk map.  Places like Urnst, Perrenland, Keoland, and Geoff have retained their names and the same general locations.  Some others seem to have simply changed names, while a few seem to be altogether novel.  For these new and usual names we have limited source information, the best source being Andre Norton's Quag Keep novel.  Norton was invited by Gygax to play D&D in his early Greyhawk campaign.  Her 1978 novel mentions several of the unusual place names seen on the various C&C maps, indicating she either had a copy of a similar Greyhawk map or, perhaps more likely given her unusual spellings, had jotted down some notes after having looked over Gygax' map.

Given that there are names in the list that we can identify in Quag Keep, but have been changed - for example Faraz/Furyondy - and that many of these can also be found in the older form in the pages of Andre Norton's Quag Keep, I would suggest that they are simply "old fashioned" or antique regional names, dating from the same period as the Quag Keep events.  Erik Mona, pegs this to CY 498, and I see no reason to argue otherwise.  That would of course also suggest that our "antique" C&C map represents some scholar's knowledge of the world at that time, much as al–Idrisi's world map reflected his knowledge of his time.

Leaving aside the familiar place names that are the same on both maps, we get the following list of new or changed places:

The Hold of Iron Hand - the location of the Hold of The Iron Hand on the coast north of the Paynims places this territory in the Greyhawk realms of Ekbir,  We can take Hold of the Iron Hand to be a nickname or older name for this collection of sheikdoms.  It is possible "Iron Hand" inspired "Stone Fists" but the Stone fists are nowhere near this location, so there's no good reason to take them as being the same, at least in game terms. 

March Slove  - Slove appears to be a small, otherwise unnamed area just north of the Yatil Mountains in an area dominated by lakes.

County of Hither Hills - The Hither Hills are mentioned in Quag Keep (p22) where it is described as a land of "Half Bloods", perhaps some kind of half elves or something else.  These Hills are one of the border areas on the map that are harder to place, but must fall between the Burneal Forest and the Land of Black Ice and appear to abut the Hold of the Iron Hand.

County of Celate - Celate appears in a mountain chain just NW of Blackmoor and west of the Egg of Coot.  While otherwise unknown in Greyhawk lore to my knowledge, Celate falls squarely on a place known only as "The Duchy of the Peaks" in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign.  This is fortunate, because it allows us to give a "real" name to a place otherwise known by an unimaginative nick-name.   

County of Stabilny - Stabilny is another location seemingly in between C&C map sections.  Best fit seems to be the NW shore of Quag lake. 

Neron March - The Neron March on the old maps falls very near to the "Gran March" on the Greyhawk, map and we can safely assume these are one and the same.  As a name, Neron March is preferable to me.  One of the quirks of both Greyhawk and Blackmoor is the ready use of English words for names (The Cold Marsh or the Firefrost channel for example), so it is nice to have a non-English alternative.

Kingdom of Faraz - Faraz or Faraaz in Quag Keep, is undoubtedly Furyonody.  In Andre Norton's 1978 novel, Quag Keep Faraaz gets mentioned a fair few times.  We learn a for example that it appears to be some kind of theocracy under the control of Holy Lords.

Yerocunby - Yerocunby covers several territories on the Greyhawk map, including Dyvers, Narwell, Verbobonc and possibly Devarnish and Greyhawk itself.  We can imagine this name may have covered a temporary alliance of nations or may represent an old name for the geographic area. Zach Howard of Zenopus Archives made the suggestion that the Kingdom of Furyondy derives from a combination of Faraz and Yeroconby.  That seems very likely to me, and so we can imagine that Faraaz expanded at some point after 500 CY to merge or absorb Yerocunby temporarily - perhaps through a royal wedding, resulting in the merged name Furyondy.  For some reason the area of Yerocunby later Balkanized, but Furyondy retained the name (and perhaps the territorial claim).   Interestingly, as the protagonists travel away from Greyhawk toward the Sea of Dust, Quag Keep also mentions Yerocunby in the same relation we see on the C&C map. "We shall have Yerocunby and Faraaz facing us at the border. But the river then will lead us straight into the mountains." p32

Duchy of Maritz - The island duchy of Maritz or Maritiz as it is spelled in Quag Keep, seems to have been entirely swallowed up by the new NE peninsula drawn on the World of Greyhawk map, possibly falling about where the Atmanship of Kelten lies.  We know nothing of these islands except the useless but colorful fact from Norton that they use half-moon coins with sea-serpents on them.

Botulia - another island paved over in Greyhawk by the added NW peninsula, falling about where the Atmanship of Amaran is now.  Other than being given a name and kingdom status on the old maps, this island was not mentioned anywhere else that I have found. 

Walworth - Walworth derives from the county of the same name in Wisconsin where Gygax lived, and in fact, Earl of Walworth was a title Gygax used in the C&C Society.  It's useful to remember that Gygax envisioned the C&C map as an alternate North America in a parallel  dimension.  Of course the map doesn't look like North America, but it does have the same climactic regions (cold to the north, tropics to the SW and mountains running up the mid west.)  In an article sent to Alarums & Excursions #15 (October, 1976), Gary tells us, "The game world is a parallel earth, but the continents are somewhat different.  Most of our campaign activity takes place on what corresponds to North America, on the eastern half of the continent.  The "Blackmoor" lands lie far up on the northeast coast.  "Greyhawk" is in the central portion."  Elsewhere Gygax specifies that he imagined the Free City of Greyhawk to be positioned similarly to Chicago.  On the Greyhawk map, Walworth falls directly on the Shield Lands.  This may be another case where a real name (Walworth) may be a preferable substitute for an English Language nick-name (Shield Lands).   

Kingdom of Catmelun - The last mystery name we have is the Kingdom of Catmelun, and it is another example of having a name on a map with no other details.  If my guess is right, Catmelun is none other than Sunndi.  Perhaps Catmelun was the name of a royal house who ruled the area around 498, or perhaps the name can be ignored altogether in your Greyhawk campaign. 

For more on Quag Keep people and places, have a look at This Post by Eric Mona.

Above is the map Blackmoor Village accompanying Arneson's article in the Castle & Crusade societies' Domesday Book #13 circa Jul 1972.  We have a couple versions of this map, but they are all much the same in principal detail.  All of them show Svenson's Freehold toward the upper right corner of the map, and that detail let's us know that the map as it appears could not have been drawn much more than a few months before being printed in the Domesday book.

1971-1972 was Greg Svenson's senior year of High School.  In the fall semester, he took advantage of an opportunity to take a class in architecture taught by his assistant football coach, Mr. Pike.  Greg was inspired by what he learned in that class to draw the plans for Freehold.

In Arneson's Blackmoor Gazette & Rumormonger #2, from circa May of 1972, we can see that Freehold has already been built. The newsletter mentions "...some weeks ago when Swenson's Freehold was wiped out..."  and further along it says "... until Swenson's Freehold is rebuilt and restocked..."  

So it is likely the Domesday book village map dates to the winter of 1971-2 and certainly not before Greg's architecture class in the fall months of 1971.

Given that the first recorded games set in Blackmoor took place in March and April of 1971, one of which involved the infamous Troll Bridge of Blackmoor Village, we can safely presume there was some sort of an earlier version with no Freehold.

It's entirely possible this earlier map was nothing more than a sketch Arneson made on the butcher-block paper he spread on his gaming table, and maybe the only difference was the absence of Freehold.  Whatever the case, the point to note here is that some other map of some kind existed before the one we now know of.

We do have another map of at least a part of the village of Blackmoor, as shown on the Level 4 tunnel map in the FFC.