Yeah that's just silly. If anything, Blackmoor has too many arch enemies out too rule the world. There's also Skandiharrians, the Ran, Sir Fang, certain elements of the Peshwah, and Marfeldt. (heh).

The truth is, I never quite understood why the d20 version pushed so much into that direction; from all we know, the Cabal was never, at least not in the way that ZGG presented it, the center of Arneson's own games. Now, that BM is much richer, is absolutely clear, but, yeah, got to say, the d20 books very much give that impression, IIRC.

Sure, still... I don't want to make it sound as if I was bashing ZGG (not for *that* :wink: ), but the first few books kind of overloaded the setting with unnecessary fluff. Granted, the material was pretty much instantly playable, but in hindsight, a focus on BM's core themes would have been way better.

My personal beef with the entire ZGG run was more than some additions seemed kind of random. The WC stuff, in contrast to some other d20 additions, fits in pretty well.

There's prolly a lot of reasons for the prominance of the WC in the d20 line, and some of it may have to do with meta theme of the 21st century of shadowy government control. But I think at heart it is Arneson's old school response to 3e's sorceror class. The OD&D wizard (and sage, and assassin) are expected to be members of a guild or cabal. The idea that "hey, here is this whole new class that uses wild magic..." is going to seem inimical to that traditional order.

I can see that, though I have to say, while the overall concept of the WC as per the DAs is acceptable, almost nothing from the ZGG material on the subject stayed in my games. Might be that it's simply my mistake, but very little of the actual crunch of the whole WC arc remains in my game, nine years after the publication of the book. In contrast, other stuff from other BM books keeps a much more prominent role, like the prehistory to CBM, and so on.