08-29-2012, 04:25 PM
Hi, and thanks for the kind reception for my book.
It was in stealth mode, I suppose, though a few people in the collecting community (folks like Frank Mentzer) knew that I was doing it. Obviously I interviewed a lot of folks in the Blackmoor Bunch, including Dave, on a couple of occasions, so they certainly knew the project was underway. I shared a lot of info about the materials I was gathering early on in the project, on places like Tome of Treasures, but as time went on I guess I found it harder to talk about tiny components of history because I had a very different big picture than other people did. I also don't want to be that guy who says "I'm writing a cool book about this" when that book is still a ways off and you have no way of knowing whether it will be awesome or awful when it arrives. Five years is a long time to be talking about how awesome something is when it won't be out for five years.
As far as I can tell, the most important system concepts that Dave brought to D&D through Blackmoor were experience points, equipment/economics and dungeoneering. One fact I really try to stress, one that may be counterintuitive from where we sit today, is that early Blackmoor was a wargame, and that to understand it, the real thing you need to understand is not D&D, but instead Arneson's prior Napoleonic Simulation campaign, which was the clear prototype for Blackmoor. Dave moans in contemporary documents that all of this dungeon delving was getting in the way of having the good guys fight the bad guys. Even in late 1972, when we hear about events in the campaign, there are as many about large-scale battles as there are about individual activities. Both the management of economics and the management of experience in Blackmoor build on their precedents in the Napoleonic Simulation campaign (yes, you did "level up" in the NapSim campaign as you won more battles). I don't see anything about Napoleonic dungeons, but, well, dungeons seems to have been a struck-by-lightning sort of inspiration, which I suggest in my book owes its setting to Conan tropes and its system to various secret information management techniques in prior wargames, like the submarine management from Fletcher Pratt, a game Arneson really loved.
I don't think 1071 is a typo. In contemporary notices, Arneson frequently referred to the early incarnations of Black Moor as taking place in the Middle Ages.
Anyway, always glad to see that people find the work valuable. It's a large and complex book, and I'm sure I didn't get everything right, but I hope it does move the needle towards more serious, evidence-based analysis of the origins of gaming.
It was in stealth mode, I suppose, though a few people in the collecting community (folks like Frank Mentzer) knew that I was doing it. Obviously I interviewed a lot of folks in the Blackmoor Bunch, including Dave, on a couple of occasions, so they certainly knew the project was underway. I shared a lot of info about the materials I was gathering early on in the project, on places like Tome of Treasures, but as time went on I guess I found it harder to talk about tiny components of history because I had a very different big picture than other people did. I also don't want to be that guy who says "I'm writing a cool book about this" when that book is still a ways off and you have no way of knowing whether it will be awesome or awful when it arrives. Five years is a long time to be talking about how awesome something is when it won't be out for five years.
As far as I can tell, the most important system concepts that Dave brought to D&D through Blackmoor were experience points, equipment/economics and dungeoneering. One fact I really try to stress, one that may be counterintuitive from where we sit today, is that early Blackmoor was a wargame, and that to understand it, the real thing you need to understand is not D&D, but instead Arneson's prior Napoleonic Simulation campaign, which was the clear prototype for Blackmoor. Dave moans in contemporary documents that all of this dungeon delving was getting in the way of having the good guys fight the bad guys. Even in late 1972, when we hear about events in the campaign, there are as many about large-scale battles as there are about individual activities. Both the management of economics and the management of experience in Blackmoor build on their precedents in the Napoleonic Simulation campaign (yes, you did "level up" in the NapSim campaign as you won more battles). I don't see anything about Napoleonic dungeons, but, well, dungeons seems to have been a struck-by-lightning sort of inspiration, which I suggest in my book owes its setting to Conan tropes and its system to various secret information management techniques in prior wargames, like the submarine management from Fletcher Pratt, a game Arneson really loved.
I don't think 1071 is a typo. In contemporary notices, Arneson frequently referred to the early incarnations of Black Moor as taking place in the Middle Ages.
Anyway, always glad to see that people find the work valuable. It's a large and complex book, and I'm sure I didn't get everything right, but I hope it does move the needle towards more serious, evidence-based analysis of the origins of gaming.