07-21-2013, 10:21 AM
Freedom92 Wrote:I know the majority of Blackmoors human inhabitants are of Thonian blood....
Are they? Most of the settlers do seem to be originating in the Great kingdom, so I guess that could be true.
The original human inhabitants of the Northern Marches were the picts, no doubt identical to the picts of Howard's Conan tales. As "bad guys" in Arnesons game they were replaced by orcs; and orcs do seem to have acquired some details that probably were originally written for picts like the description of their villages and wagon trains in the FFC.
However, picts themselves never disappeared from blackmoor, being described as inhabiting islands in the waterway and similarly hidden places and to have figured prominantly in one of Ross Makers adventures. (I think of it as being somewhat similar to the situation of the seminol indians in Florida Everglades.)
Picts and the pictish people again seem to appear in the d20 series of Dave Arneson's Blackmoor, though for obvious reasons they are not specifically named and referred to anonymously in The Wizards Cabal (page 3) as "primitive nations" and tribal people "similar" to the peshwa and afridhi. They are said to worship nature and to have originated the Wokan Class. The Wokan Class itself, (4e, DAB The First Campaign) is another potential source of information on picts, though the wokan are probably much more nature focused than the average pict would be. Lastly, in the rather dubious history found in Zeitgeists Dungeon's of castle Blackmoor, the first human settlers of Blackmoor are said to be literate, armed with bronze weapons and to be lead by "bearded priests", which I take to be another reference to picts.
As I play it, the average peasant born in Blackmoor has some, usually a lot, of pictish ancestry, just as in real life, the populations of colonial societies are dominated by native genetic heritage even though culturally they are more akin to the colonizers.