What was DA5 City of Blackmoor?

[Havard]

Forwarded from The Piazza:

Why do you think that the City of Blackmoor (which would seem to be the main area) was pushed back to DA5 in the schedule? Does DA1 give you an overview of the city that DA5 would have expanded on?

It wasn't a matter of being pushed back in the schedule, it was just the order in which they were published/conceptualized- at least to the best of my knowledge. The hook of the DA series is that the PCs are in the present-day Known World and travel to the past era of Blackmoor. DA1 contains both the time travel mechanism that allows them to accomplish that, and that same MacGuffin is what sets the plot in motion that requires the assistance of the PCs and is the major location of the adventure.

The city of Blackmoor itself was never really a big part of the setting- that was the Castle (which DA5 would have gone into) and the outlying areas. As for why DA5 wasn't the first and foremost, or at least the second module, couldn't say. At a guess, I'd hazard it's because it was a megadungeon and they weren't sure about the approach they wanted to take with it? (IIRC, the Undermountain megadungeon had already come out by this time and might have set a new bar for such things.)

Have you ever seen an outline for DA5 in a 1980s TSR catalogue? Do you know if they actually started work on this (or finished it and abandoned it just before it was due to be printed?

Havard might have better info than I on this. As far as I recall, it was only ever announced, not produced. I don't recall for sure where it was done- in a catalog or just in the "previews/coming soon" section of Dragon- but it was definitely announced.

What do you think? What was DA5 supposed to be about? Was the module completed as some have claimed?

-Havard

[Havard]

I've split of discussion of the N modules into a separate thread here. This way we can talk about both topics

-Havard