Hey, all!

Long time, no see! While it's looking like I'm running Midnight next year, I've been looking into some of my older gaming notes, lately, and I find myself curious: Did the Iron Duke, of DA 1 fame, receive any significant treatment in later sources, and in the MMRPG?

I know a certain viking dedicated a lot of space to him in a recent treatment of the Thonian Rand. :) But outside of that? My later ZGG books are in the antic, right now. Which one do I need to pull out from the ocean of boxes? :)

Thank you, and happy to see this place thriving!

- R

I'm 99% certain the Iron Duke is not mentioned at all in the d20 books. I don't recall ever seeing him mentioned. That may be because he was apparently not a Blackmoor character, but something TSR came up with.

It is worth considering what happened with Blackmoor between the release of the FFC and the time when Dave submitted his documents for the DA series to TSR.

We know that prior to this, Dave Arneson was working on a manuscript called The Blackmoor Chronicles that he was hoping to have released from Mayfair Games, . This is something Dave talked about in 1985, but in 1986 Dave revealed that he was working with TSR. The plan had now changed to 8 modules and a novel, according to an interview in Space Gamer.

Most likely TSR hired Dave Ritchie to coordinate with Arneson and work as a co-writer for what became 4 modules.

It seems to me that already before talking to Ritchie, Dave was developing Blackmoor's post FFC timeline. During the FFC Blackmoor is still a part of the Great Kingdom/Thonia and this realm functions as a supporter of "the Good Guys". In the Post-FFC setting on the other hand, Thonia is an adversary. In this context, the Iron Duke, becomes a much more meaningful NPC than he would have been during the FFC era.

One question is how closely this post FFC setting is connected to events in Dave's later campaign. Based on Dave's earlier works, it seems likely that this is a combination of actual play experiences, unused ideas etc. TSR/Ritchie's influence is clear on the first couple of pages of each module where the connection to The Known World/Mystara and how to bring Known World PCs back to Blackmoor, but it is not apparent to me that TSR excerted a strong influence on the main parts of the adventures. It is a shame that we never got to interview Ritchie about this before he passed away. Regarding The Rand and the Iron Duke, we do know that that material was presented in modules DA1 and DA3 which were fully approved by Arneson.

Comparing the d20 material and the DA modules, I also don't see a lot of disparity. Indeed, without a handful of specific exceptions, the d20 material seems to follow the DA modules very closely. The d20 line does add to and expand on this material, but rarely omits or changes that material except when done to accomidate the d20 rules.

When writing the Thonia Sourcebooks, I have become more and more aware of the fact that Thonia in the post FFC era is a realm that is a contrast to Blackmoor and while PCs in Blackmoor can be allies of the King and The Regency Council, heroic PCs adventuring in Thonia ought to be freedom fighters working in opposition to the ruling class. This is especially true in The Rand where you have the Iron Duke as the main antagonist.

-Havard

Isn't "Markovia" a part of Thonia as per Blackmoor's extended canon?

I recall David Ross mentioning it somewhere, but I think it was on one of the mailing lists, not in the Blackmoor Notebook that he put together.

It would perhaps be interesting to shed some light on the later-day Blackmoor campaign (post-publication FFC until Arneson's move out of Minnesota, some time in the 1980s), at some point, if you haven't done it yet. So, in-game, the campaign timeline reached around the early 910s until the games simply became fewer, and the different core players started gaming increasingly independently from one another: What had happened until then? Did we see Uther's coronation in-game? Because, if the Afridhi where in Arneson's later games, then that would imply that - Uther was already king, as per DA 1, when they first appeared. - That could give us an idea whether the Iron Duke was part of the original game, or not. (Standard TSR trope character that he seems to be.)

Now, in terms of in-game utilities, this will likely do nothing: So, the Iron Duke, publication-wise, a one-off, a stereotypical pseudo-KGB officer, and probably even a placeholder villain, right? No substantial sources on the character beyond DA 1, right? - Okay, let's see what I can perhaps do with it, then. :)