Greetings.

I am new to Blackmoor. I just registered here and also requested membership over at the thepiazza.org board.

A little intro:
I have been playing D&D since high school. I graduated in 1991 but I started a few years before that. I started with the 1st edition rule-set. I believe that 2E was actually brand new at the time but our local hobby store was stocked up on 1E. After playing a year or so we started mixing 2E into the mix but largely played 1E for several years. Player at first but quickly became a Greyhawk DM. I ran a Greyhawk campaign for several years throughout all of high school and some time after as well. I played Forgotten Realms 2E on the convention circuit from about 1993 to the end of second edition while DMing mostly Greyhawk at home. I was an early convert to Third Edition and actually started playing it during the play test phase. Played tons of 3E both at conventions and at home. Continued to mostly DM Greyhawk but also did a small Forgotten Realms campaign and a short lived Aereth campaign (the Goodman Games world). Before 4E came out I quit going to conventions because they were becoming very expensive. My home gamers is a group of about 10 people with six of them being very active and the other four people a lot less active as we get older. Two of us DM. The other DM runs Eberron campaigns or his own self-crafted game world. We continued to play v3.5 when 4E came out. Our play experience was largely Greyhawk, Eberron, and some Forgotten Realms. We eventually tried Fourth Edition after the Player's Handbook II came out and we enjoyed it. I personally was very happy to be rid of all the prestige classes, extraneous rules, and ungodly amount of feats from 3E. Don't get me wrong I do love 3E but was happy to try something with only 5 or 6 books (at the time). We started with a Greyhawk campaign and eventually switched the Eberron game over the 4E as well. So no we are doing 4E exclusively for some time. I decided to try something different so I started a 4E Darksun campaign with the new books and some ESD's from yesteryear. It has turned out OK but it is winding down and was largely a lot of combats. I am ready for something different.

New campaign time:
So that's why I am here. I suggested to the other DM (one of my players as well) that we should run a nostalgia type campaign. Something old school. At first I was thinking of resurrecting first edition and running a Greyhawk campaign set during 576 CY (that's the folio/original boxed set time line). He didn't seem too keen on it. I then suggested that I had never played Basic D&D and maybe we could try that. He had actually played BECMI before and was somewhat interested but still didn't seem too keen on it. He then suggested we play Blackmoor. He knew I had bought a copy of the d20 hardcover Blackmoor book from GenCon 2004. I actually bought it directly from Dave Arneson at the Goodman Games booth and he signed it (mostly why I grabbed it). I looked through it before but had never really read it. I also just this week purchased a copy of the 4E book for five dollars.

So I am considering running a campaign set in Blackmoor with not much knowledge of the game world. I own the d20 hard cover book and the 4E softcover book. I also have access to the DA series ESD modules. Been trying to find information on Blackmoor but all the websites are coming up Error 404 or in Japanese. I see that they had a Living campaign too. I would love to get those modules to use a source materials but searches bring up more 404's.

Any tips, information pointers, and help is appreciated. My investigations so far pretty much tell me that I can choose to run Blackmoor as its own setting, part of the BECMI world, or perhaps even part of Greyhawk. I haven't decided which is the best approach on this. Do the Blackmoor Living scenarios touch the Known World at all? Is any of that still available?

Thanks.

Hello, welcome to the site.

We have a few Blackmoor trivia nutters here, so any questions you have are sure to get answers. :)

My thing is maps. Feel free to check out the Blackmoor section of my flickr page - you'll find reproductions of the DA module maps as well as Dave Arneson's 1977 FFC map.

If you can use them in your campaign, feel free.

TLDR :wink:

Welcome to true nerddom, n00bie! :)


In short, my suggestions for you:

Check out Dave Ross' Blackmoor Gazetteer, and my own "Maiden Timeline":

http://blackmoormystara.blogspot.com/20 ... kmoor.html

http://blackmoormystara.blogspot.com/20 ... k-inn.html


Both should provide readable and easy-to-overview in-edpth information on the setting,
and, more importantly, and written on the background of actual games - so you see where the setting gets tweaked to fit
the meeds of everyday DMs better.


Also, if you're looking for event-based starting adventures (as opposed to site-based adventures, aka dungeon crawls),
I strongly recommend you run "Ties That Bind", from the Blackmoor 2004 Campaign Setting. While the plot itself is probably not as exciting as other stuff, it nicely handles the introduction of the players into a new world.

Alternatively, I recommend you take a look at the non-Blackmoor supplements "Libris Mortis", or "Lords of Madness".
Those feature generic scenarios for all levels that should be very easy to adapt to the very specific BLackmoor setting.

Also of note in that respect is the "Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary", by Atlas Games, if you can still find it.


Hope that helps. :)