The Comeback Inn now has a new section! The Twin Cities Campaigns forum is a place to talk about John Snider's Egg of Coot Campaign, Wesely's Braunstein Games, Fred's World, the Star Empires Campaign, Mike Carr's Fight in the Skies Games and everything else played by Dave Arneson and his friends when they were not playing in Dave's Blackmoor Campaign.

(registry required).


-Havard

If anyone is really interested in the other gaming that we did in the old days (before and during the time of Blackmoor), then I will keep an eye on this, and reply to the best of my abilities.

The Twin Cities had an incredibly large number of gamers, even back in the 60's and 70's. I am sitting here looking at a poster made by Kevin McColl that lists fifty names of people involved with Blackmoor. I personally know more people from back then that are not on that list. The MMSA proved to be a magnet for gamers and ended up being the largest group at that time. The group that I started with was in the Minnetonka School system through high school. They included myself, my brother Mike, Fred Funk, Greg Svenson, the Belfry brothers, and a couple other kids who went on to other things after graduation. We played a lot of board games (Avalon Hill mostly, but also Parker Bros, Milton Bradley, and really just about any game we could find). A local game shop called La Belle Alliance was a big draw for those of us in the western suburbs. We found Korns rules there, along with some of the miniatures game rules like Fletcher Pratt and some of the tank battle rules.
When we discovered the MMSA they were playing a Napoleonic campaign with rules adapted from an United States army officer that were meant to teach army officers. The gamers were enthusiastic about running the countries and fighting the battles. It did not take long for them to start adopting the personalities of the rulers and the generals involved. The Braunstein games were a natural extension of this, just on an even more personal level. We were very primed for this when Arneson came up with Blackmoor.
These were not the only campaigns that we ran. Off the top of my head, I remember: WW II, WW I naval, North Africa WW II, John Snider's Space Campaign, American Revolution naval, American Revolution, Civil War (army miniatures and naval miniatures), and others I do not remember right now.
In addition, we played several monster games that covered ping pong size tables and would take days or weeks to play. These included Drang Each Osten, La Bataille de la Moscowa, and Terrible Swift Sword.
All this is just in the 60's, 70's, and 80's.

Bob mentions the Star probe/Star Empires campaign. Arneson had dubbed it stellar 7 in Corner of the Tabletop.

During the making of Secrets of Blackmoor the Star Empires RPG, as John himself called it, was spoken of frequently. Bob Meyer, David Megarry, Ross Maker, and John Snider all spoke at length and it sounds like something that goes way beyond what one might experience while playing a game such as Traveller. It followed in the Twin Cities tradition of living world game play; with players acting as rulers of empires, as well as individual RPG play.

While interviewing John he revealed that his hand typed draft was damaged in a basement flood and all that remains are some fragments which he gave to us. Since then we've been on the lookout for any other indicators of what this game may have been like, to no avail.

Jump to this past year and something astounding was revealed. In a series of email with David Megarry, he began showing us information about a manuscript he had as a set of computer print outs. One page had a history section which included a future space timeline of events. It was easy enough to match this up with what had already been published in Star Probe and Star Empire for us to realize that what Megarry had uncovered is the last remaining draft of what has come to be known as Star Master.

Right now, we are working on getting an accurate OCR (optical character recognition) of the entire text. After that we will explore exactly how much of the game is in these print outs that David Megarry saved when Adventure Games was clearing the building after going out of business.

John has already agreed to letting us publish the manuscript. Interestingly, while archiving the Arneson family archive, we discovered full color artwork that was meant to be used for Star Master thus we also have a head start on the cover.

Griff