[Video] The Worlds First Wizard

[Secrets of Blackmoor]

When Duane Jenkins passed, we felt that we needed to do something to honor him. We posted a rather quickly done video about his game night songs. To us it seems like maybe we should have spent more time on it as it was literally done in a day; in order to get it out by Friday. When we next spoke to Wesely, Megarry, and Bill Hoyt; they all said how touching it was to have us do that video. We were also told that Duane's wife Barbara really liked it. You can't ask for more than knowing you've touched someone deeply in this way.

David Megarry asked if we could do a video about Pete Gaylord as well, and we agreed.

We lost Pete this past summer. I say We, because we have gotten to know all of these guys and they are special to us; in a way that goes beyond just being the subjects of our research. These are our friends and we care about them. There is more about Pete on the facebook post, as well as the youtube video description, so we won't repeat it here. All we can say is that we were sad to find out that we had lost him.

On a lighter note, we told the guys that we don't want to make any more of these kind of videos for a Loooooong Time!

The clip we chose for Peter's video is just one long clip where he describes his part in creating Blackmoor. He is seated with his wife Gail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnY_2qC1L34

[Havard]

Wow, that is a really nice video!

A nice tribute to Mr. Gaylord. I really like Gaylord's comments about how Dave Arneson would respond to suggestions from players.

Seems like Pete was a really nice guy.

Here's a blog article I did on the Wizard of the Wood ages ago: http://blackmoormystara.blogspot.no/201 ... -wood.html

-Havard

[Secrets of Blackmoor]

Nice write up Havard. Some good background on the Wizard.

It's interesting that the wizard had so many dragon friends. In our searching we came upon an odd similarity. Gertie may be derived from the first key frame cartoon ever made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGXC8gXOPoU

We can't prove this, but it seems likely. There were also plastic models of Gertie; Dave was known to use plastic dinosaurs and sculpt wings onto them for dragons before there were any dragon minis.

The story we got about the Wizard of the Wood's demise is that Pete was a very aggressive player. He would charge into combat even though he was an unarmored wizard. In one of the interviews we have from Dave, he criticizes Pete for not being a very good wizard because of this tendency. Perhaps Pete was just being true to how he saw his characters personality, or Pete's training as a marine came through and he couldn't just sit back while everyone else got to duke it out with the bad guys.

Bob Meyer told us that after getting killed and having to be revived several times, the wizard eventually got clobbered one too many times and Dave refused to let him revive.

Some thoughts on gaming:
You mentioned the creation of characters or NPC's based on Gaylord's Wizard. You describe how one could perhaps model it on a druid. From everything we've gotten in our interviews, it is more likely that someone in Dave's campaign would actually model a character, either from imagination, or from literature; rules be damned! It would be a much more truthful to play style approach to work from an idea of what a character should be, rather than from what any rules allow a character to be.

Everyone who played in Dave's campaign will tell you that the concept of play balance was always secondary to the idea of play enjoyment within their group. It is perhaps a problem within the modern gaming community that as consumers, gamers are not willing to step outside the rules box and explore their own definition of the rules and their world creation. It can also be seen in how players react to monsters they come across. Until the release of Call of Cthulhu most people play RPG's as if the fantastical places they explore are not scary, and they march around killing things and grabbing treasure. So in a sense, people do not even consider being afraid until they get a rule for fear via CoC. Yet in all our player interviews, we get a lot of descriptions of fear and terror in Blackmoor. Dave would keep his players on edge the entire time they were in the dungeon.

Rob Kuntz speaks a lot about Dave as a master of the quiet game. The quiet game usually happens when things get dicey, or when the DM wants to make players think that things have gotten dicey. The DM stops describing things and starts to ask players to describe what they are doing in minute detail. Where are you standing? What are you holding in your hands? Our group has been exploring all kinds of games and rules since we began our film project, most of them war games, and we've finally moved onto playing OD&D. The DM has been exploiting this technique that rob talks about to great effect. It's pretty funny to see players get freaked out when the DM asks someone to make a random die roll without explaining a thing about why the die roll is being made.

We have also heard of a dwarven wizard in Blackmoor, who's spells were mostly related to stone shaping and other rock and gem detection and manipulation. (Ross Maker)

Most of what we've been able to find out about the Blackmoor history comes from these oral histories, but Dave also published his Blackmoor Gazette as an insert inside of Corner of the Tabletop. A lot of what is written in the Blackmoor gazette has to do with Pete.

Ok, reality calls. Maybe one of the guys will pop in and add to this discussion about gaming in blackmoor.