From: http://gamecryer.com/2009/08/23/dave-ar ... -campaign/

Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor: The First Campaign

Posted by Gerald Cameron on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor: The First Campaign is the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition incarnation of the very first RPG setting. It features the same setting material as the Dungeons & Dragon 3.5 setting book Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor Core Campaign Book published by Zeitgeist Games, plus 4th Edition write-ups of one race, six classes and numerous magic items, NPCs and heroic and paragon tier monsters.

I found reading Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor like settling into a warm bath. Blackmoor carved the mold for Dungeons & Dragons settings, and it shows in this book. There is nothing that will make the jaded gamer sit up and go “wow, I’ve never seen that before!” but all of the iconic notes are hit – there is even a little pulpy weirdness in the mix. Unfortunately, the crunch is not as enjoyable as the fluff, and I would gladly trade most of it for more information on the eponymous city and castle. Nevertheless, Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor: The First Campaign is a strong setting that is lifted by its place in D&D history. I would even recommend it to players of other fantasy games, like Burning Wheel or Savage Worlds fantasy, in look for a solid fantasy setting.

I am dismissive of the crunch because it is unremarkable, not because it is bad. The race is a gritty offshoot of halflings, and the classes are all well-tread tropes which have appeared in different forms in Wizard’s of the Coast‘s Players Handbook 2, or even sooner. The Wokan is a Druid variant, designed here as a mix of controller and leader; the Noble is a rework of the Warlord, with a unique but awkward leadership mechanic and the Elderkin is an almost direct analogue to the Invoker. Even the most interesting class, the Arcane Warrior, is a conscious re-skin of the Paladin as an arcane class, right down to it suffering from Multiple Attribute Disease.

The one truly original class, the Idolater, is also the most troublesome, even though some groups will hail its arrival. As a class feature, it may use a prepared ritual as a standard action. Since rituals are not balanced for combat use (in fact, removing them from combat is part of the point), this has to be ripe for abuse. A lot of Fourth Edition critics point to rituals as a big flaw in the game, though, and they will welcome this chance to use them in “creative” ways in combat.

Otherwise, the classes are typical third party fare. They exhibit solid, post-PHB1 design, featuring a few red flags like encounter – rather than daily – powers that have save ends effects (offset by a decrease in base damage). They’re nothing to stress out about, unless you are really strict, but it may be worth taking a look before allowing them in your campaign. To the designer’s credit, they avoided the temptation to add yet another striker to the pool.

The magic items and monsters are much the same. Solid heroic tier monsters are always welcome, though, and you can never have too many types of frogfolk and lizardfolk, either. I also welcome the handful of new monster templates, with accompanying examples of their application. The humanoid monsters are also written up as NPC races. The racial abilities for the humans and humanoids are interesting, though the Ash Goblin’s encounter ability to react to being hit with a +5 bonus to the targeted defense is troubling. Having a Daily power nullified like that would be extremely frustrating.

The highlight of the book is the setting itself and how it is presented. The writers focus on story hooks and conflicts that PCs can get in the middle of. Most geographical features offer 1-3 possibilities, plus a bit of color that brings the location to life. Nearby areas like the Duchy of Ten and the independent elf and dwarf kingdoms receive similar treatment. There is even a mysterious, weird megavillan, the Egg of Coot. In all, there is plenty of inspiration to fill out a complete heroic+paragon tier campaign or two, even without the megadungeon beneath Castle Blackmoor. The history of Blackmoor is dealt with quickly in a timeline of major events that takes up a page and a half before moving on to the present. Many settings are buried under the weight of their pasts, but the focus of this book is clearly on the present, and the adventures of your group, where it belongs.

The one area that may receive more attention than it deserves are the Hak horsetribes. Each of the dozen clans is given a paragraph or two, and the writers go to great lengths to give each one a distinctive identity, to the point of using niches like the “negotiator” clan and the “civilized” clan. As much as I applaud the injection of diversity into a culture that could easily be painted with a broad brush, I think a rich, unified culture would be better.

The Hak notwithstanding, I found myself wishing more room had been devoted to these chapters. I would happily give up half of the new character classes and the NPC statblocks (rendered as full PCs, rather than as monster statblocks, which may present balance issues and passes up a great chance to give them distinctive touches) if it meant a full chapter each on Blackmoor city and castle or even the internal politics of the nation, which is dealt with obliquely throughout the setting presentation. A detailed write-up of the environs and first level of Castle Blackmoor’s dungeons, plus some hints about what, besides wealth and glory, might draw adventurers in would also be a good introductory tool. Another useful addition would be a couple of pages about the Thonian Empire beyond its outposts near Blackmoor.

There is a small hiccough in organization. The lead developer (or editor) decided that all of the information on magic in Blackmoor, including magical societies, should be presented in a single chapter. That chapter comes right after the Characters chapter, since it includes stats for new magic items, which, by convention, are part of the player section in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition products. As a result, the treatment of magical societies gets thrown at readers before they have the context of the region at large. It’s not completely bewildering, but it does feel sloppy.

There are also a few spots where the text’s history as a Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 supplement peeks through as well. There are explanations for the emergence of eladrin and dragonborn that do not shatter disbelief, but occasional bits of 3.5-ese linger when rulesspeak intrudes into the fluff sections. The editors tried to catch these places and update them, but it’s not as convincing as a complete rewrite would be.

Like most third party 4e supplements, the layout of Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor: The First Campaign emulates that used by Wizards of the Coast in their 4th Edition line. Because Blackmoor is a black-and-white book, this leads to some problems distinguishing statblocks at a glance. They lack their identifying colors, and relying on text alone to distinguish them, especially at-will, encounter and daily powers, can make it hard to look things up quickly. Otherwise the presentation is professional, featuring clean typography broken up with competent line illustrations, plus page and a half black-and-white spreads making the start of each chapter easy to identify. The only major exception is the iconic illustrations for the character classes, which are more stylized than most of the art. I don’t hate them, but they don’t fit in as well with the rest of the presentation.

The solid, focused presentation makes this a very useful product, suitable for first-time DMs, or for gamers looking for that ’70s and ’80s D&D feel. Even fantasy roleplayers who want to capture the D&D atmosphere with other systems could do worse than picking up the PDF and ignoring the crunch. For that matter, Dungeons & Dragons players could do the same. You could drop In Search of the Unknown or the Caves of Chaos nearby and they would be right at home. Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor: The First Campaign is exactly what it says it is on the cover: an iconic Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, with all of the familiar tropes, plus the pulpy extras that you expect from such a place. The thing is, Arneson did it all first, and that gives Blackmoor a certain resonance.

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Comments
D.C. GM Says:
August 23rd, 2009 at 07:05

Nice encapsulated review, though it’s factually inaccurate in a couple places. (The NPCs, for example, *are* presented as “monster stat blocks,” and not as full PCs, as you say.) It’s also worth noting that the classes in First Campaign were designed even before the PHB 1 came out, so it’s nonsensical to mention PHB 2 and the like — in particular, the elderkin is the *predecessor* (and vastly superior) offering to the invoker, which is perhaps the biggest letdown of any first party class to date.

Some of the criticisms are valid, though “MAD disease” (as it’s called) isn’t a disease in the builds offered here, if one looks close. It simply presents options for builds, and if one chooses not to take those builds, one suffers the “consequences.” Either way, it’s balanced in each case.

Also, asking for a couple pages about the Thonian empire is similarly illogical, as nobody but WotC has the *right* to explicate Thonia in any substantive way. Stuff like that. Otherwise, good little review. Thanks for posting!

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Gerald Cameron Says:
August 23rd, 2009 at 17:05

I struggled a bit with my phrasing on the NPCs. They *are* presented as monster stat blocks, but they are also fairly obviously straight or nearly straight conversions from PC writeups. Nearly all of their powers are standard class powers or magic items.

As for asking for more on the Thonian empire, asking for more is not illogical. The reason why that information is not available has nothing to do with the quality of the actual product. Understandable, perhaps, but not actually relevant to how useful the book is, or the logic of wanting that information.

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EN World RPG News Says:
August 31st, 2009 at 18:23

[...] Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor: A Primeira Análise da Campanha [...]

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-Havard