Captain Harchar and Chirine ba Kal's Adventures in Blackmoor

[chirine ba kal]

I was just listening to Chirine's video podcast where he was talking about the session(s) Dave Arneson ran for the Tekumel group:

Captain Harchar's ship landed us in Blackmoor Bay. We took a long look and said. We are not going down in that dungeon because Dave Arneson had a reputation as a Killer GM. Arneson felt that he was not doing his job as a Game Master unless he killed half the party in the first half an hour. No way were we going to take our player characters, that we had been working on for ten years, keeping them alive in Tekumel and go down and meet Sir Fang and all the other people. We looted Blackmoor. I bought all the iron and steel I could.

We gave that to Prince ...? *edit* "Prince Mirusiya hi Tlakotani" and I became an Imperial Governor.

See also: http://qik.com/video/60108899

Apparently Chirine goes into more detail on this in his upcoming book "To serve the Petal Throne".


I am fascinated by this unknown part of the history of the Blackmoor campaign. Where would this adventure fit into the FFC timeline? Would the visit by the Tekumel group have any significant impact on Blackmoor itself?

-Havard

I do indeed go into a lot more detail in my book, as this was a pretty major story arc in both Dave and Phil's campaigns. Blackmoor was one of the 772 worlds cast into pocket dimensions along with Tekumel, and we visited regularly - when Phil got tired of running Tekumel, he switched chairs with Dave and we'd be off to Blackmoor for a month or so. Our initial visit took something like eight to ten game sessions. I don't know where we'd fit into the timeline - Gertie was still very active, when we were there, and the Elves had really gotten going on their 'magic Elvish bang-sticks' and sold me some for my guards to use on people who tried to kill me. (Gosh, those things are noisy!) I'll see if I can't narrow this down for you; Dave was a little vague on the whole 'timeline thing', most of the time.

Dave was just writhing in his chair with delight at the prospect of getting our characters down into the Blackmoor dungeon, and we were just as delighted at the idea of NOT going in there. We played our characters for many years, keeping them alive in Tekumel's hostile environment and politics - humans are NOT at the top of the food chain in Phil's world setting - and we had to step pretty lively to keep from being sent in there as Dave had a reputation as a 'killer referee'.

I did inject three million gold pieces - the Tsolyani "Kaitar" into the local Blackmoor economy; I noticed that some small child was playing with his mother's iron pot, and had a conniption fit. Iron and steel are very scarce on Tekumel, due to the mining and exploitation of the planet by the Lords of Humanspace during Tekumel's star-faring past, and seeing some kid with a iron pot that his mom sold me for a whole five GP was just too much for me; I bought up everything I could lay my hands on, and filled our ship's hold with the stuff. When we got back to Tekumel, using Harchar's 'dimension shifter', I gave the lot to the Seal Imperium and got made a very high level official in return.

All of this will be in "To Serve The Petal Throne", of course, along with ship plans, drawings, and photos...

yours, chirine

We did have heaps of fun; having dave and Phil feeding each other ideas was wonderful, if dangerous.