Xizallian's Place

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Coming in 2024 the 50th Anniversary of OD&D, the Challenge Continues

Continuing with the challenge of posting a reminder about the 50th Anniversary of OD&D, coming in 2024.

Well we have seen Wizards practically die on the hill of taking away the OGL and shutting down all 3rd party creators. They have backed off (mostly) for the moment, but don't trust them, they are not done and they will try to sneak something threw when they think we are not looking.

Remember, don't trust Wizards or Hasbro, they have proved that we should not.

So regardless of what they do, let's keep gaming, keep creating and let's make them obsolete.

And regardless of what they do, we can celebrate the 50th birthday of OD&D in January of 2024.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Coming in 2024 the 50th Anniversary of OD&D - taking up the challenge

In response to this recent post (A Few Planned Posts for 2023) I will be joining the bloggers that are taking up this challenge to post each month of 2023 leading up to posting each month of 2024 to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of OD&D.

WotC has proven themselves in the past to be woefully lax in honoring the legacy of OD&D and people like Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and others who were part of bringing OD&D to the world and creating the TTRPG hobby. We have every reason to expect that WotC will not step up this time anymore than they have in the past.

So all OD&D fans can come together to celebrate this anniversary whether WotC does or not. If they get it together and celebrate the 50th Anniversary of OD&D and honor the people responsible for bringing it forth back in1974, then we can be pleasantly surprised.

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Blackmoor Week Day One and Dave Arneson Game Day

It is that time of year again, soon the leaves will be turning a multitude of beautiful colors (Temperate Zone Northern Hemisphere). :) It is fitting that Dave Arneson was born on October 1st, since he superseded all the staid gray scale world of games with a new type of game that has limitless variations. Namely Blackmoor, from which came Dungeons & Dragons.

This week we celebrate Blackmoor Week and Dave Arneson Game Day to recognize the man that changed the face of gaming forever, a man who had not forgotten the childhood games of make believe that children automatically are able to play without even thinking about it, but that by and large adults forget and lose and with it goes something vital that makes children seem so much more alive than adults.

David "Dave" L. Arneson David Wesely

You cannot talk about the beginning of role playing and Dave Arneson without also talking about David Wesely. These two men became friends playing wargames and many other games. Wesely invented a game he called a Braunstein. The whole story is told other places, but the gist of the story is that Wesely created an opportunity that, at the time, he was not aware of what he had done, but Dave Arneson, as a player intuitively grasped the concept and ran with it, but he was only able to do that because Wesely when during an unexpected (by Wesely) bit of character creation by Arneson, stifled his first impulse and said "Yes." And that "Yes" was in answer to the player question "Here is what I want to do."

This was the break through moment in gaming when Arneson made the intuitive leap that went way beyond what Wesely had intended, but fortunately Wesely in trying to find his way with these games he had been experimenting with decided to say "Yes!"Now Arneson said Wesely created role playing, but in my opinion it was more a 50/50 thing that was the result of synergy between these two men led to a serendipitous event that changed the gaming world forever.

(There is no point arguing about who contributed more to this event. Even if we could determine the answer[we can't], it is irrelevant since it was the synergy between them that lead to the event. That is both were required. Just as later on getting Dungeons & Dragons into print required both Arneson and Gygax.)

Wesely went off to the military, but Arneson continued to run the Braunsteins and eventually created Blackmoor and fantasy role playing games. All role playing games owe their existence to this moment between these two friends and Arneson hard work (with his gaming group) in turning it all into a game that not only he, but his friends could also run. A multi-genre game engine of which underlies all role playing games and of which Dungeons & Dragons is one branch of a very large tree.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

Happy 45th Anniversary Original Dungeons & Dragons!

Today (January 26th) is International Dungeons & Dragons Day when we celebrate the publication of the original D&D adventure game. I wasn't born yet and I learned the game from my parents. It wasn't until I played "Dungeons & Dragons" with other people that I learned that not everyone and not even most people create their own unique campaign world with original monsters and magic items.

I gradually learned there is the original game and a few people who play it the original way and there is everyone else. Most do not create their own world, but play in a world created by someone else with set limits on what the players can do, the decisions they can make and the places they can go. So called adventure modules that specify everything with a script that the players must follow.

Be a rebel, break away from the status quo and play D&D the way it was intended in an open ended exploration of a living world.

Don't get me wrong! If you enjoy playing in a railroaded limited choice game, that is perfectly acceptable. It is NOT by any means "bad wrong fun". I just happen to think that you will have even more fun, if you get a chance to play the original game the original way! Give it a try!

Thursday, January 3, 2019

Anna B Meyer - Fantasy Map Maker

Have you seen this map of the Flanaess by Anna B Meyer?

Anna B Meyer - Cartography

See https://www.patreon.com/annabmeyer

Right now support at $1 a month would get you access to 129 patron-only posts, please go check it out.

Friday, October 5, 2018

Complete List of BlackMoor Week and Dave Arneson Game Day 2018 Posting

Reposted with Permission from The Ruins of Murkhill Forum

Compiled Complete List (of everything we can locate)

Pre-Announcement of Dave Arneson Game Day October 1, 2018 posted on 9/22/2018

Dave Arneson Game Day 2018 Coming Up!

(Eight Days a Week)(Google if you don't get the reference

Monday, October 1, 2018

Dave Arneson Game Day (October 1st 2018)

I had in mind something to post today and then I saw the first and second parts of this essay by James Maliszewski over at Goodman Games and I decided to comment on it instead. I also see both parts one and two have been reposted in their entirety over on The Comeback Inn, apparently without permission or if permission to post the whole thing was obtained it is not noted. So I am not going to post the whole thing, but I do have some quotes to make of it.

Who in the World is Dave Arneson?

David Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, was born on October 1, 1947 and passed away in 2009. This year would mark his 71st birthday. In honor of his contributions to the hobby, we present this two-part essay. Here is the first part, and the second part will appear on October 1.

I think most of us have found ourselves in this boat trying to learn about Dave Arneson as he notes below.

My quest to learn more about David L. Arneson was, in those days, only a limited success. I still had a lot of questions about his involvement in the creation of both Dungeons & Dragons and, more broadly, roleplaying games. I also remained intensely curious about why he had been, for so many years, a figure whose profile was so comparatively low. As I had learned, Arneson was, in a very real sense, one of the “founding fathers” of roleplaying games. Given that, why was he not more well known?

Learning from Dave Arneson’s Published Works

While this background provides no real details about the Blackmoor setting itself, it does explain that the high priest of the Temple of the Frog, an individual known as Stephen the Rock, is “an intelligent humanoid from another world/dimension.” Furthermore, Stephen possesses several mysterious devices, such as an anti-gravity unit and an interstellar communicator. I found this information intriguing. I was of course already familiar with Gary Gygax’s Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, as well as the “Mutants & Magic” section of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, which provide guidelines for mixing science fiction and fantasy. But Supplement II was published in 1975, before any of this, which suggested to me that perhaps Arneson was perhaps the originator of this kind of “mixed genre” gaming.

I think he is correct that Arneson was the originator of "mixed genre" gaming and to a greater extent than almost anyone else, although as several people have pointed out to me, Dave Hargrave of Arduin fame certainly gave him a run for his money. These two Dave's represent the two most creative people in old school gaming by a country mile or two.

Essentially, The First Fantasy Campaign is a collection of notes on the Blackmoor campaign but without any clear organizing principle – much like Supplement II. Thus, there are army lists, NPC descriptions, castle construction costs, snippets of history, Gypsy sayings, wilderness encounter tables, an alternate magic system, and a very rough outline of the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor – to name but some of its contents. Reading it, I was immediately struck by the scope of the Blackmoor campaign, as well as Arneson’s wild, even chaotic, inventiveness. He was clearly a referee with a lot of ideas and he wanted to try them all, which is only fitting given how new the very idea of roleplaying games was at the time. Bob Bledsaw was right to use the phrase “unpolished gem” in describing the contents of this book, as it was a seemingly random jumble of descriptions and rules with no central theme.

The First Fantasy Campaign has been rightly called by many people as the single best gaming resource ever published.

Adventures in Fantasy, meanwhile, is a complete RPG, which Arneson co-wrote with Richard Snider, one of the original players in the Blackmoor campaign (whose primary character was a cleric known as the Flying Monk). Though intended as something wholly new, Adventures in Fantasy reads more like someone’s heavily house-ruled version of D&D, which “fixes” or emphasizes certain elements according to its creators’ interests – magic, for example, which is quite different than it is in Dungeons & Dragons. On some level, I don’t think that’s an inaccurate feeling, although I suspect that many of the game’s differences from D&D don’t so much fix D&D as precede them, which is to say, they’re reflective of the idiosyncrasies of Arneson’s own approach, much of which either didn’t make it into OD&D or were instead filtered through Gygax’s own ideas.

I think James is correct here that many, maybe even most, of the ideas in Adventures in Fantasy predate D&D.

Taken together, though, these two writings served as a useful corrective to the impression of Dave Arneson I had formed from reading Supplement II and the TSR modules of the late 1980s. Previously, I had taken issue with the presence of science fiction elements in a fantasy setting, seeing this as an inappropriate “intrusion” rather than simply being reflective of a more expansive notion of what constitutes the fantasy genre. I began to wonder if this was one of the reasons why Dave Arneson was not as well known to me as he ought to have been: his approach both to gaming and to fantasy more generally ran counter to prevailing tastes, tastes that were, to a great degree, formed as a result of D&D‘s success.

Many of us have the same taste as Dave Arneson and have been poorly served by TSR/WotC and pretty much everyone else.

Based on the books he wrote or to which he contributed, it seems to me that Dave Arneson never fully adopted this new paradigm, preferring to stick to the older, broader “anything goes” conception of fantasy that no longer held as much sway in the market for RPGs.

Yeah, Dave surely did march to his own drummer and never did sell out to the main stream market for garbage.

There are many reasons for this relative obscurity, some of them understandable in retrospect, some of them not. Now, though, there is no excuse not to celebrate Dave Arneson as the foundational figure in the history of roleplaying games that he truly was. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for his imagination and creativity. May he be long remembered!

'Nuff Said!!

Sunday, September 30, 2018

Blackmoor Week Day Seven and Dave Arneson Game Day

When it comes to Blackmoor and The First Fantasy Campaign, most are hard put to find much information about it. I am lucky enough to have gotten a copy a long time ago (well not that long ago) and so I don't have to worry about the high prices that it and other items fetch these days.

One of the ways to find out about it are of course to read a review of it and I am going to link to one here. This review ( First Fantasy Campaign Review) is by Michael Falconer and it is mostly good. I just take exception to some things when he introduces the review.

This product is nothing like what you would expect. I love FFC, but I am still amazed that it was considered ready for publication, even by the standards of the day. When Gary Gygax published The World of Greyhawk in 1980, he essentially published a huge map and an accompanying booklet which systematically described the lands on the map; it was not a "journal" of his home campaign!

I would take issue with his implication that it was not ready to publish and that it is a problem that it is not like The World of Greyhawk. Personally I am so glad that it was not like The World of Greyhawk in 1980. Here is why,

One, what has everyone wanted all these years? The answer to that is easy, the real Greyhawk, a "journal" of the Gygax home campaign. That was promised many, many times over the years, but it never happened. I am not going to speculate on the reasons why, although many of them are known.

Two, the First Fantasy Campaign is something that the published World of Greyhawk never was for Gary Gygax, the FFC provided a real look into the creative mind of Dave Arneson and his players.

Three, the FFC is and was an idea grab bag of inspiration and that it is, just as much today as it was 41 years ago.

Four, you could have taken FFC and have heavily edited it and organized it and in the process removed the life and charm from it too. I am really glad that did not happen.

I could go on, but that is enough. The only thing you could do to make The First Fantasy Campaign book better is to provide additional volumes containing all of the experiments that Arneson did along the way between Christmas 1970 and his passing.

Let's hope that Arneson's heirs and Bob Bledsoe's heirs will bring The First Fantasy Campaign and other items back to print and to pdf. This has been hidden long enough!

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Blackmoor Week Day Six and Dave Arneson Game Day

Only a brief post this morning but I just wanted to comment on a few things that Dave Arneson created and was using in Blackmoor before he traveled to Lake Geneva to introduce the game to Gygax, Kuntz and a few others.

The dungeon crawl and the whole dungeon trope.

The sandbox style of play (old school play) where the decisions and actions of the players interacting with the campaign world define and shape the campaign.

Dave's pre-Gygax games included all the basics, things like experience, levels, hit points, dice and tables and many other things.

A unique way of running magic was used and a spell point system was used (yeah spell points can be old school, who knew)

Magic swords got a very complete treatment back in those pre-Gygax days.

Briefly used Chainmail and then abandoned it to create his own combat system based on an unpublished American Civil War Naval game, because Chainmail was inadequate and inappropriate to the task, all in the pre-Gygax days.

Invented and used the character attributes (Str, Dex, Con, etc.)

Unique dragons that were significant in the campaign.

Players also played things like balrogs and vampires.

Interaction and travel between different worlds and time periods.

Aliens and the presence of some high tech.

The Egg of Coot and other iconic highly unique BBEG;s.

The Temple of the Frog, the first written adventure, and no the idea was not to sell an endless series of modules, it was written as one an example and two to show some of the flavor of Blackmoor.

That is just barely scratching the surface with a little very fast stream of consciousness post.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Blackmoor Week Day Five and Dave Arneson Game Day

It has been interesting this year to see that aside from a few of us posting about Blackmoor Week and Dave Arneson Game Day, from the rest of the old school community there has been only a deafening silence.

Here are the things that are not blog posts, aside from the blog posts I linked to yesterday there are only the below things that I have found.

There is a facebook event

Dave Arneson Game Day 2018 event as part of the single post at the Blackmoor Campaign Setting Facebook Group for which 4 people have committed so far. Many of us don't have access to this group.

At the Facebook The.Ruins.of.Murkhill Group there is an announcement that leads back to the blog posts saying

https://musingofamavericreferee.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/lets-celebrate-blackmoor-week-2018/ At the bottom of the blog are links to other Ruins of Murkhill member's blog posts as part of our Ruins of Murkhill Blackmoor Week 2018 blogging campaign celebration.

The blog post at Havard's Blackmoor Blog.

Dave Arneson Game Day 2018 Coming Up!

An announcement at the Comeback Inn

Dave Arneson Game Day 2018 - October 1st

An announcement at The Piazza

Dave Arneson Game Day 2018 - Coming soon!

Then there is also the

The Ruins of Murkhill Google+ Group

Yeah, that's it, nothing at all on most of the so-called old school forums and blogs. Most of the links shown above have been mostly ignored. If anything shows up for the first time by the end of the day on the 1st, I will post those links on the 2nd.