Blackmoor dungeon history

[Rafael]

Oh, I agree with that. Its just that I generally weigh the Mystara stuff higher than then WL stuff whenever there's a contradiction between those two. However for map purposes for instance, the WL is incorporated pretty much 100% on my "world map" and will be in future versions as well.

I personally tend to neglect most Mystara stuff, because I simply don't know it too well. - WL, on the other hand, is my home setting. It's where I am second best acquainted with, apart from maybe Ravenloft.

We all have our own versions and I think it is interesting to hear about yours and Aldarrons and Garolek's and everyone elses so I can steal what I like and throw away what I dont like

Definitely. I apologize again, if I sound too dogmatic in my statements. I am equally thrilled to hear about other campaigns, and by no means value my own approach higher than that of others.

Ever since I started the whole Last Fantasy Campaign idea, I feel like if good Mr Arneson had lived to see what I am doing with his setting, he would have spanked me like a stubborn donkey.

Yeah, I am a punk. This admin/leader role still doesn't fit me at all.

[aldarron]

I can see things having developed differently, but if Dave accepted it, it doesn't make sense that we don't.


Havard

Oh sure it does. What I mean is that Dave was a heck of a nice guy by all accounts and he definetely saw Blackmoor and even RPGs as a group project. I think it's very rare for him to reject anything published, so I don't have any qualms about being pickier than Arneson was about Blackmoor. Actually, I'm even pickier still because I don't care to include the sci fi elements (laser guns and robots) in the campaign I'm imagining. So I think its perfectly alright to have a narrower vision than Dave. For me, its about picking and choosing from the later material for what fits the flavour of the earliest Blackmoor world and preferably has the most Arnesonian input, but not neccessarily so, if it fleshes out a very "in character" part of the story. I realize it all sounds vague and arbitrary,well, I suppose it is.

[Rafael]

Yeah. The sci-fi elements were a problem for me as well. - A medieval world where people frequently loot spaceships for their technology is not essentially chivalric any more.

But as I said, you might want to take a look at the old JG stuff. They were able to handle that surprisingly well; in fact, the same way I handle it in PL.

[gsvenson]

But Sci-Fi and Fantasy are lumped into the same section in most bookstores.

Historically, by 1973 there was a concurrent Star Empires campaign, run by John Snider, going with an RPG element which we naturally combined with the Blackmoor campaign, making Blackmoor's world part of a star system in the Star Empires campaign (which was almost immediately quarrantined due to the loss of several scout ships from two empires, one human and one avian)...

The Star Empires RPG rules seem to have sat on a desk at TSR through the late 70's. Adventure Games (Dave Arneson's game company) got them in 1983 (I edited the rules during the summer of '83 - no I didn't keep a copy), but they were never published. Traveller was already deeply intrenched. If they had been released in the 70's they would have given Traveller a real run for the money, as they solved the 2D-3D issue of space in Traveller and they worked with the Star Probe and Star Empire rules among other things.

[aldarron]

But Sci-Fi and Fantasy are lumped into the same section in most bookstores.

Historically, by 1973 there was a concurrent Star Empires campaign, run by John Snider, going with an RPG element which we naturally combined with the Blackmoor campaign, making Blackmoor's world part of a star system in the Star Empires campaign (which was almost immediately quarrantined due to the loss of several scout ships from two empires, one human and one avian)...

The Star Empires RPG rules seem to have sat on a desk at TSR through the late 70's. Adventure Games (Dave Arneson's game company) got them in 1983 (I edited the rules during the summer of '83 - no I didn't keep a copy), but they were never published. Traveller was already deeply intrenched. If they had been released in the 70's they would have given Traveller a real run for the money, as they solved the 2D-3D issue of space in Traveller and they worked with the Star Probe and Star Empire rules among other things.

Point taken of course. I'm sure lots of people like the mix of scifi and fantasy elements, and even in the version of Blackmoor I'm putting together that stuff could all still be there, but be so rare that my players never actually encounter a laser gun or a tricorder or avian aliens (although that does sound kinda cool).

[gsvenson]

Don't worry, it was really just a couple of adventures that really had a Sci-Fi element, the vast majority was strictly fantasy. In fact, I find it kind of funny that the published adventures turned out to be the ones that had the Sci-Fi connection...

[Havard]

Don't worry, it was really just a couple of adventures that really had a Sci-Fi element, the vast majority was strictly fantasy. In fact, I find it kind of funny that the published adventures turned out to be the ones that had the Sci-Fi connection...

I think Ive seen a statement from you or Dave saying that the reason these locations were chosen is because they were so different from everything else.

If you're looking for a standard fantasy setting in 1986 (when the DA series were published), you have plenty to choose between. Locations like the Temple of the Frog and City of the Gods were things people would notice.

I write alot about the sci fi elements, not so much because I like them, but because I am struggling with them. They make the place unique, but they are hard to present to players these days.

My current theory on the matter is that its not the idea of combining sci fi and fantasy that makes it difficult, it is a question of what kind of sci fi and what kind of fantasy. DA3 made the City of the Gods like something directly out of Star Trek TOS. I'm getting a much different wibe from recounts of Arneson's City of the Gods. Our understanding of science has changed alot since then. Maybe a more exotic version of sci fi would mesh better with fantasy these days?

That said, I think ZGG/CMP made a mistake by not focusing more on these parts ot the setting. Again, people have alot of different things to choose between, why would they choose Blackmoor if its "just another fantasy setting"?

Havard

[Big Mac]

Yep, that's what I figure and what the history pretty much says, but its pretty clear that the history section must have been flehsed out by the zgg team without paying much attention to the description of the levels, especially the first ones. They should be the oldest and most Sar aigu in architecture but they are clearly typical castle dungeons in design and function. So 2+2 don't equal 4. That's basically why I was reimagining the history a bit.

Yeah it doesnt make all that much sense does it? Unless the upper levels tended to be destroyed/collapse each time a new race is driven deeper under ground, so that it needs to be excavated by a new ruler?

I know nothing about Blackmoor's dungeon (apart from a few stories of The Great Svenny, that I saw after surfing over to various things from The Piazza), but I have seen a couple of things that might help sell dungeons being build in a seemingly "wrong" way.

Firstly, I've seen stuff about Roman London. And it seems that most Roman London is fairly far below present day London. So you could either:

• Have a dungeon that gets burried and then rediscovered via new tunnels or
  
• Have entire (surface) buildings that vanish below the ground over time

Either of these options could give you an excuse to put newer things below ground.

The burried tunnels are good, because you can have a deep dungeon that comes up a shaft to the surface...and then bury that to make the top a dead end. Something like this would allow you to build a structured dungeon that is several floors high, but does not go to the bottom or the surface. Something like this could be "sold" as the activity of an empire that existed 500 or 1,000 years ago. It could be their attempt to "civilise" the tunnels below the city. And the "capped off top" could be the result of a big battle between the underground forces and the surface forces (either with the people on top blocking the tunnels as part of a fighting retreat or with the underground people raiding the surface and setting fire to a tower or fortress that guarded the surface from the people below).

The buried buildings are also good, because they allow you to take things not normally found in a dungeon and hide them underground. Imagine, for example, a church, inn or a house that gets trapped in a landslide and forgotten. It could be left there, prettymuch intact, with rubble blocking many of the windows and maybe one of the doors. People could enter an underground inn via a window on the second floor, go down two flights of badly maintined stairs and then leave via a tunnel that comes up in the basement.

Another issue, is that people talk about "a dungeon" and there is always the possiblility that there are multiple dungeons that gradually merge together.

So you could have an old dungeon under a small town and then, as the town expands to create a city, have a number of newer dungeons get built in the districts surrounding the original dungeon. At some point another group could build random tunnels trying to join one dungeon to the next.

Civil engineering would also be a good excuse to join up a number of different dungeons. If someone built sewers it would create links to the sea (which I would expect to have a structure like tree roots (or artificial rivers). People also build escape tunnels from castles* and I wonder if various eras of a city might have a lord, king or government that felt they needed a secret tunnel. And one thing about secret tunnels - they don't work when they mob you kicked out built them. So you could have some tunnels being blocked off, while others were built.

* = In London, the British Government spent a lot of tax payers money, building secret underground railways during and after the Second World War. Some of these (like the partially complete Express Northern Line) have become public knowledge, but others (like the line that links up to the station below 10 Downing Street) are complete and still in use.

Another good excuse to build new tunnels (at the wrong height) could be your giants and other creatures. If an early tunnelling race was something like dwarves, they might not make full height tunnels. Then if humans made more tunnels, they might try to dig out the ceilings of dwarven tunnels, succeed in some cases and cause the roof to collapse in other cases. (The same could happen if they dig down into the floor - it could work, but occasionally someone could dig through the roof of a lower tunnel and the lot could collapse down.)

If giants came along, they could find two nearby tunnels and dig them into one big tunnel. They could study the area carefully (or use man or dwarf size minions or employees) to help them work out what tunnels would work and what would cause a cave in. They could then make a number of routes that would allow them to get where they want to go and abandon the areas in the middle (as no-go zones).

Do all of these sort of things together and you change a dungeon from a "depth = age" thing into something that could be a lot more complex.

And this doesn't even include natural tunnels from things like underround rivers, volcanic erruptions or rock eating monsters.

I would agree that the monsters would likely have been driven down by the successive conquests and the upper levels would have been molded to conform to the desires of the most recent conquerers.

That makes a lot of sense. Although I wonder if a few groups could find a way to hide** an underground building before the enemy take over the city.

** = This sort of thing was done in the Second World War (to hide defensive positions that would have slowed down a Nazi invasion of England. But as well as that sort of thing (which is mostly gone now) we also have a few weird and wonderful things like 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens. These look like two ordinary houses, but are in fact a giant wall (the height of a five floor building) that hides an airshaft that drops down into the London Underground.

It must be possible to tear down a large entrance, box i in and then build a small "unimportant building" that has a "small cellar" that sits on the boxed in entrance and makes a would be invader uninclined to dig up the cellar. If you build wine shops and cheese storage caves into a section of a town they could have hidden walls. Or if you were really clever, you could go down two floors with the fake building and hide the secret entrance in the ceiling of the second basement.

[Big Mac]

Yeah. The sci-fi elements were a problem for me as well. - A medieval world where people frequently loot spaceships for their technology is not essentially chivalric any more.

But as I said, you might want to take a look at the old JG stuff. They were able to handle that surprisingly well; in fact, the same way I handle it in PL.

I used to really get bugged by people mixing science fiction and fantasy (despite liking both). In fact there was a time when I would have not wanted to go anywhere Blackmoor, because I would have been suspicious about the mixture.

I think that part of my own "problem" was watching TV shows where a lazy writer passed off fantasy elements as a sci-fi plot or created magic items for fantasy shows that were badly disguised sci-fi elements.

But over the years I have seen a few well made things that have made me more willing to enjoy fantasy things in my science fiction and also enjoy science fiction elements in my fantasy.

Psionics are pretty much a sci-fi reboot of magic. And some fantasy monsters (like constructs) are pretty much fantasy reboots of robots.

But I think it has actually been the way these things have been used (rather than what they are) that has sold them to me.

I had a similar issue with the horror genre, because I got fed up with stories where women walked around trancelike in see through nighties or films where a bunch of kids got stalked by a serial killer and then all went off one by one. I've been turned around on that too (by things like the Alien films, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Van Helsing). But at the time of Ravenloft, I was still avoiding horror like the plague.

I fell instantly in love with the Spelljammer concept (space without science fiction) because I've always liked the idea of taking a trip from one RPG world to another RPG world. And my initial thought was "great, I can avoid the sci-fi stuff".

But I've come around to the sci-fi stuff a bit more now. I think the way to deal with it is to realise that it is based on "industry" and that creates a flaw in sci-fi that stops it being too much of a threat for fantasy.

Take a revolver. It might be loaded with 5 bullets (and an empty chamber), but once you have fired those bullets, you can't really do much with it. Even if bullets could kill dragons, that would still only take out 5 dragons. That might seem like a lot, but if there were 10 dragons trying to kill you, the device could not stop dragon number 6 from eating you.

The same goes for a laser gun. That has a battery. In the sci-fi society, you would probably pull the battery and pop it into a charger that was hooked up to the local power station. But in a fantasy world all of that is gone.

Effectively, most sci-fi weapons are going to be no better than a wand of fireballs.

I think your real problems are going to occur if you have a sci-fi civilisation that works this out and makes advanced materials that can create more powerful versions of the sort of things that exist in a fantasy world.

Imagine a society that could combine a sci-fi thing like a monofillament whip with oriental swordmaking, to create swords that were twice as effective at cutting than the local swords in an Asian culture. That sort of thing might allow a sci-fi culture to turn out items that seem to be magical to the local population.

In a world of longbows, you could create composite bows that allow your side's archers to stand "out of range" of the enemy archers and still kill them. If you have pnemotic technology, you could possibly create a pump-action crossbow that loads faster than an enemy crossbow.

Other things like a compass, telescope or microscope could give you an advantage over a society that hasn't got that far yet.

Even history books from a sci-fi world could allow them to always be 50 years ahead of a targeted civilisation. And if you are talking about a space civilisation, they could gain access to history books from dozens of cultures and look for patterns.

But Sci-Fi and Fantasy are lumped into the same section in most bookstores.

That always used to bug me, when I was younger (and only liked science fiction novels). I like both fantasy and science fiction now, but would still prefer sections for both types of book.

Historically, by 1973 there was a concurrent Star Empires campaign, run by John Snider, going with an RPG element which we naturally combined with the Blackmoor campaign, making Blackmoor's world part of a star system in the Star Empires campaign (which was almost immediately quarrantined due to the loss of several scout ships from two empires, one human and one avian)...

Interesting. I often get the feel that a designer's personal campaign...and what actually makes it into the gamebooks, are two different things.

Do you know of any of the Star Empires elements that made it into Blackmoor products? I can imagine that it would be fairly easy to stick in somethng like a Star Empire's creature (with a modified background). I know this was done with a couple of Spelljammer monsters (that were recycled from old sci-fi games).

The Star Empires RPG rules seem to have sat on a desk at TSR through the late 70's. Adventure Games (Dave Arneson's game company) got them in 1983 (I edited the rules during the summer of '83 - no I didn't keep a copy), but they were never published. Traveller was already deeply intrenched. If they had been released in the 70's they would have given Traveller a real run for the money, as they solved the 2D-3D issue of space in Traveller and they worked with the Star Probe and Star Empire rules among other things.

It is a shame that nobody put these out. As I said elsewhere, TSR sat on these after the massive sci-fi boom caused by Star Wars. It would seem that Adventure Games had these during Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

I agree with you, that the 1970s would have been to optimum time, but I still think that the 1980s would have been a good time for this game to come out.

Does Adventure Games still own the rights to Star Empires? Or did they revert back to TSR (and therefore WotC)?

If Adventure Games still owns them, it would have been a great opportunity for some elements to have been slipped into the design bibile/notes given to ZGG and Code Monkey staff. Are you aware of any examples of this happening?

[Havard]

Yeah. The sci-fi elements were a problem for me as well. - A medieval world where people frequently loot spaceships for their technology is not essentially chivalric any more.

But as I said, you might want to take a look at the old JG stuff. They were able to handle that surprisingly well; in fact, the same way I handle it in PL.

I am still undecided on how to handle these things. I think what I will end up going for is something like the Warforged. Basically this is a robot PC race in a fantasy setting (Ebberon). However, wrapped in a layer of fantasy imagery it no longer feels like a genre crash to use it in that grantedly strange fantasy setting.

I think the same could be done to various elements in Blackmoor. If they feel like they are ripped out of Star Trek TOS, it might not mesh to well with many groups. However, presented in a different way, they might work better. Still, they shouldnt be rendered as "just magical items" either. People find things in the Valley of the Ancients and bring them back. Blackmoor University Alchemists study these items and try to replicate them using technomancy.

I guess this is what I am going for. Blackmoor is a world of knights and wizards, but also filled with many strange things.

Havard