Havard Wrote:Aldarron Wrote:Yeah, Arneson's original map from '71 is unlabeled but the town that gets called Bramwald on later maps is on it, and the letter to Kuntz that accompanied the map mentions (oddly) the "land of the Eraks" to the east.
I just wrote a bit on Bramwald here.
The term Land of the Eraks is very curious. I recall Greg (or Bob?) talking about how they used to launch raids into Erak in the original campaign. This would have been before Blackmoor breaks with the Empire. This always lead me to believe Erak to be a rogue state of bandits and raiders. Perhaps Erak claimed a larger part of that region in the past? It doesn't really make sense to have it have been too large though given its location.
-Havard
Yeah - prolly should be its own thread?
That's interesting if you've got some other references somewhere (can you find a quote maybe?)
My sense from the letter is that the original Blackmoor as Arneson invisioned it in the Kuntz letter of march '71, was very conan-esque. There's the "Red Wizards Coven", SkandaNarian "savage band of sea raiders" and Picts. We know that the Picts later morphed into orcs, with their palisaded villages and such. What you don't see is any reference to high fantasy races like elves and dwarves.
I think what happened with the Picts, is they got Tolkenized when Arneson got CHAINMAIL a few weeks after he wrote to Kuntz. In other words, when Arneson saw that Gygax "plan" for fantasy wargaming on his Great Kingdom map involved a lot of Tolkien monsters and not so much the Hyperboran mythos, his Picts became Orcs, more or less.
So what about the "Eraks"? All the letter says about them is this:
"To the south is our own great empire while to the East lay the forested domains of the ERAK'S, a breed noted for there cunning and banditry."
If Arneson meant the eastern edge of the map, which seems somewhat likely given that Erak was later applied to a town in the east of Blackmoor, then the land of the Eraks can be none other than the Redwood forest of the Elves. So the forest of the Eraks vanishes and the forest of the Elves appears and the Eraks go from being a savage people to a bunch of townies.
The other possibility is that the land of the Eraks was supposed to be somewhere off the map, and the territory lines might seem to support that because while there is a dashed line separating the territory around Blackmoor castle from the territory around Willaimsfort, there is no dashed line seprating Williamsfort from the Redwood Forest. So that's a question mark, except to say that the dashed lines that are on the map seem to kind of fade away and so aren't really complete. The other issue with this interpretation is that the eastern edge of the map is an ocean shoreline, so that makes a land to the east a bit hard to explain.
That's where Bleakwood would be located.
