03-09-2010, 09:35 AM
Aldarron Wrote:Okay WOW! That was just priceless. Thanks Jeff for sharing. My question, do you know if Phil Barker played in Blackimoor before he wrote Empire of the Petal Throne? Some people have supposed so but nobody seems to be sure. There's alot in EPT that seems to have more in common with Arnesons gaming than with Gygax's.
To the best of my knowledge, Phil hadn't played any D&D before he wrote EPT; he had watched a few sessions run by Dave at the old University of Minnesota wargame club, as he was the faculty advisor of the club. Dave and quite a few of the original Blackmoor players were members and regularly ran games. Neither Phil or Dave ever said to me that they'd played together until the time in Phil's Tekumel sessions where we wound up in Blackmoor, which is why it was such a big event. Phil had done 'proto-role-playing' with college friends in the 1950s, so what dave was doing would have been familiar to him.
The two did have very similar gaming styles, though. Neither one was what we used to call a 'rules lawyer', and were much more interested in the flow of the game then looking up chapter and verse in the rules. Both Gary and Dave told me that Phil's rules for EPT were faster and cleaner then what they had done, and were both very impressed by them. Both Phil's and Dave's gaming styles were typical of the way we gamed here in the Twin Cities at that time, and I still game that way.
Dave and Gary were also very impressed that Phil had written EPT in six weeks in the summer of 1974; at the same time, he also created 1,000 NPC characters by rolling them up and creating color-coded 3x5 index cards for each as well as creating a huge multi-level underworld for the city of Jakalla as a venue for the players to adventure in. When Phil did his first game session, in August of 1974, he revealed a complete game 'package' that got Dave's immediate attention and which led to it being published by TSR.