John Snider made a great deal of material available to us from his Egg of Coot Campaign.

We're talking with Havard about having him deal with the majority of this material, so that gamers can have access to it for use in their games.

It will likely go in stages:

1. We assess what is in the masses of papers. We scan the most significant items for our own use.

2. We ship everything else to Havard for him to read through and archive.

3. We make a public archive of this material that covers new lands in Blackmoor.

This will likely be a slow process. We will also be in contact with John Snider, in order to get his input on how to interpret all of his notes.

We posted a map and some comments here:
https://www.facebook.com/blackmoorsecre ... 7248726121

"Time for another Friday Treat!
For a Blackmoor fan this is an easy question to answer:
You are given an unpublished set of campaign notebooks, complete with maps, for an Egg of Coot campaign; that connects off the upper west edge of Arneson's original Blackmoor map, is this official canon?
It is if the dungeon master is John Snider - the illustrious drunken warrior Boozero.
When we visited with John Snider he let us have what was left of his Blackmoor game from the 90's.
There is a lot of other material from his campaign: Around 8 to 10 notebooks of papers and 2 world maps that extend the known lands of Blackmoor. Fragments from old hand typed rules for combat with energy weapons, and a Sci Fi gamers equivalent to the Monster Manual; both dating from the 70's, or 80's.
This "Players's Map" comes from around 1991.
The Egg of Coot campaign used home rules that were derived from John's unpublished Sci Fi RPG game. It was to be the third installment of the Star Probe/ Star Empire trilogy and would have been useable in conjunction with his other games. Although the third section is unpublished, it could possibly be the first Sci Fi RPG in history - what do you think?
It is perhaps because John was one of the early dungeon masters in the Twin Cities that Arneson trusted him with adding to his gaming world's legacy: Blackmoor officially began in 1971, the Star Empire campaign setting began in 1972, so we are told.
John says that he and Dave worked over the phone to make sure that their Blackmoor campaigns would have continuity. Although Dave collaborated on the story concepts, in many ways, it sounds like Dave let John take the lead on developing this part of Blackmoor.
One thing we learned a lot about from John, is the true nature of The Egg of Coot. (And no, the Egg of Coot is not named after Gary Gygax either.) This is a deeply guarded secret that we cannot share publicly. All DM's need their secrets so that they don't give away the story to the players; even John and Dave. :)
What is most interesting is that the game is being played with a set of Sci Fi RPG rules, but the setting is Blackmoor. This wouldn't come as a surprise to any of the old gang, since there is a crashed spaceship on Blackmoor that comes from John's Sci Fi campaign, and there is a planet in John's Star Empire campaign, that is were Blackmoor is located.
It is said that Planet Blackmoor is quarantined due to some "Weird Science", or magic, that corrodes technological devices rendering them useless; at least that's what Robert the Bald told us. ;)
We've left these images fairly high resolution so you can copy/paste them for personal use. We'll also be sending a set to Havard, so he can post them on his Comeback Inn forum.
Hope you have a good gaming weekend!"

Most of you are familiar with this background. It is written for a general gamer audience. Facebook has a very bad GUI. It fails constantly. We can't edit our posts without losing the Image data. There is a citation from Bob Meyer that might actually be Greg Svenson. We were working from memory and we have hours upon hours of footage. Please pardon our sloppiness.

Thanks!

A game set in Blackmoor using a Sci FI game for the engine? Not so strange, these days ;)

If you right click and download those maps, you can use a graphics program to stitch them together.

We scanned them at a fairly high DPI of 400. So you can zoom into it and really see the texture and details of these maps.

Our interest lies in the time period when blackmoor is in it's original stages. We have not examined any of the later products past FFC/JG/'77. We don't know how it ties in with later maps. It will be interesting to see if anyone uses this map for a game of their own.

This is really awesome! Thanks for posting and giving up updates on the progress of getting this material processed. I can't wait to see more! 8)

The "is it canon" question could inspire quite a debate. Not Dave's, clearly, but pretty darned close. Also, I love the fact that it was based in part on John's unpublished scifi RPG. I own Star Probe and Star Empires and have wanted a peek into the third "Star" product (the RPG) for a long time now.

We asked John about the campaign via email, and he spoke a bit about it in a recorded interview.

The one big takeaway from both is that he wants to get the campaign info out there, so that people can use it. He is very open to people elaborating on what he has created. He spends time playing online games and is very involved with skinning 3d models and making maps for the games he plays. His attitude is that everything should be open source and freely shared.

We've asked about details on his campaign and he seems to have done a lot of the story in his head, much like Arneson did. There aren't any really descriptive module style write ups on anything. It is more like a series of personal notes and memory triggers that only he would be able to recall. He says he never bothered to make up dungeons; he had one of those pencil puzzle maze books in with his gaming material, and would simply choose a pencil maze randomly when he needed a dungeon.

The other thing about his campaign is that he really was using his sci fi rules and he says the game would have eventually ended up in space. After around ten years it hadn't gotten that far yet. Most of the plot lines seem to relate to the players being manipulated by the Egg of Coot into doing it's bidding. The Egg isn't happy with being in the Blackmoor reality anymore. It knows there are bigger fish to fry and it wants to break out into the sci fi universe via a rip in the reality that exists between the two places. The players likely did not know they were helping an evil force expand its influence as they were happy going around and gathering artifacts for the Egg.

Ok, time to get scanning, so Havard can share some things. ;)

:D

Now that we have a half-dozen threads (or more if there are some old ones floating around) on John's campaign, any chance that we could have a section of the boards where his stuff can all be moved? I'm afraid that there might be some stuff I miss somehow.