I stand corrected. My comments were based upon second hand information.

<shrug> depends on what material Dave had in mind/submitted for the project in the first place. Changes could refer to all kinds of things including added material.

Good question. Could it mean "manuscritps" or drafts? Hadn't really thought about it, but "books" really does sound like a reference to Supp II and FFC. Well, that would leave only "some notes" and a couple (presumably in depth) conversations as Arneson's contribution to the DA series. Which would fit with what I was saying before but I would have hoped he had more say than that.

Some deeper analysis:

DA1 - Adventures in Blackmoor.
The section describing Mystara's history is Ritchie's work. Large parts of the rest can be derived from the FFC. However, the large NPC section includes characters based on original players, like Mello, Debelfry, Robert the Bald etc who were not included in the FFC. These must have come from somewhere. The NPC section is also a source of alot of setting info, actually.

DA2 - Temple of the Frog.
This module is based heavily on Supp II.

DA3 - City of the Gods.
Originally, I thought this was mainly Ritchie, deriving ideas from Temple of the Frog. However, it shows more similarities to RJK's descriptions of Arneson's original CotG to simply have been based on that. Some of the creatures, robots etc could also be from Arneson.

DA4 - Duchy of Ten
Much of this book focuses on the Afridhi, which we now know comes from Arneson's original campaign. Ritchie would have had to have manuscripts from Dave on this.

DA5 - City of Blackmoor
This book was never published, but from it is easy to imagin that this book would have been based on information in the FFC, such as the Dungeons, Blackmoor Town and Blackmoor Castle.


I think Arneson's statement that Ritchie had access to his books and some notes could be a sign of Arneson's humble nature. Some notes must have been more extensive than that. Also, it is interesting that large parts of the FFC were not replicated in any of the DA modules. Why were characters like Ran, the Egg of Coot, the Gin of Salik etc not included? Could it be that Ritchie had such a large number of NPCs to choose between that he simply did not have the space to include all?

-Havard

Nice Havard. It wouldn't surprise me if youferret out some more details along these lines.

I did finally buy DA1 a few months back, and read through it (mostly). My sense of it is about what you said. The characters, at least the ones based on Blackmoor PC's, really struck me most as coming from Arneson. I thought the Blackmoor comeback inn was probably mostly his too. I suspect that Ran of an Foo and some of the other FFC Characters didn't get featured because the people behind them didn't play with Dave anymore (or very long?) and his campaign had long since moved past them. Just guessing.

Haven't read duchy of Ten (I think I have the pdf) but Ritchie wouldn't necessarily have had to have vrey extensive notes on the Afridhi. I'm sure he could have expanded from a couple paragraphs. I don't know either way of course, just don't want to draw too strong a conclusion until we have more to go on.