Does "Palace of the Vampire Queen" have any connection to...

[Rafael]

...Blackmoor?

Just wondering, as I dabb into some ancient history.

- R

[aldarron]

Nope

[Rafael]

Not even with a sledgehammer?

(Seriously: No Wee Warriors associated with the St. Pauls community?)

[finarvyn]

You could certainly create a connection, but the folks at Wee Warriors had no overlap (that I'm aware of, anyway) with any of the OD&D authors. Except for the fact that they must have had some conversation when TSR agreed to let them publish D&D stuff...

[Rafael]

For anybody interested into this more than myself, Pete and Judi Kerestan are real estate managers today, and easily accessed via the web.

(Assuming this is not a very singular coincidence in two couples sharing the same names.)

[Havard]

I am curious, was there something in particular that raised this question? Palace of the Vampire Queen was published in 1976. Dave Arneson left TSR at the end of that year, but while he was still with the company, he did handle TSR's dealings with Judges Guild, another third party publisher. Still, I have never seen any evidence that he handled the contact with Wee Warriors. Their deal with TSR seems to have been different from that with JG too since the Wee Warriors modules were actually distributed by TSR. Is there anything linking Pete and Judy Kerestan to Minnesota?




-Havard

[Rafael]

Well, there was no direct question about BM lore, but rather an indirect one:

In my ongoing operation to cap off all my BM operations with the release of the "Age of Theodore" booklets later this year,
I also wrote a short treatise dubbed "The Last PBP Ever", set some time after the Demon Wars.
(My continuity, the Demon Wars roughly equal the "Crusades era", which IIRC is also a term from fan continuity.)

(Another bracket, to give you an idea:
LFC - 1040 NC; AoT - 1400 NC; "The Last PBP Ever" - 1900 NC; The Mordred/Blackmoor Crossover from 2013 - 3500 NC,
if we postulate that Mordred and BM are indeed set in the same universe.)

Looking at BM as a functioning world, my approach was to look at the major plotlines, again, and, more importantly, at monster ecologies.
And one of the more prominent ones is the existence of vampires, and comparable critters in the Northern Marches.

So, this is where I would go back in "The Last PBP Ever" - and "The Palace of the Vampire Queen" being not just the first D&D adventure after BM and the White Box Dungeon,
but also from the same era and by people related to the old group (in a very distant kind) might be a interesting thematic connection.


That said, "The Last PBP Ever" is really just a conceptual piece - as you all might know, if only because I've repeated it over and over and over and over since 2012 ,
as soon as the AoT booklets are done - or rather, I've handed the final manuscripts in to the good people at DF,
I'll become an even less frequent guest at our usual ventures than I am now.



However, I can perfectly see myself returning to the setting for a short game at some point, like, say, for the Blackmoor group's 50th anniversary in 2020.
The main function of writing such a treatise now is that I am NOW into the matter; once the booklets are written, I am perfectly positive that I'll soon forget most details.
This way, I have always something to go back to if I ever pick it up again.

[Havard]

Okay,
from the way you phrased the question, it seemed like you were asking about official connections between the two properties.

But if you are asking about whether Palace of the Vampire Queen can be adapted to Blackmoor, that is a different story. For Blackmoor Vampires though, I would start with Sir Fang, Lord Jenkins and their minions, since these are the official Blackmoor Vampire characters, unless you could the Succubus character from the Blackmoor Dungeon.

-Havard

[Rafael]

Nono, I am really looking for both.

First, for the out-of-game connection, out of some mild curiousity, and then, of course, for a place to set the Palace.


Now, in my own interpretation, I'd obviously differ from most canonic approaches, but for canonic BM,
a spot for the Palace in the Malfera Forest might be worth a look.