09-11-2015, 08:18 AM
Cedgewick Wrote:Did Dave's Blackmoor campaign have a cleric prior to when they started playing D&D?
Im a little fuzzy on what classes were around pre-D&D. I was told that the original Dungeon! was a snapshot of Dave's campaign in Oct 72, before Dave and David M. met Gygax in November 72. In Dungeon!, I believe there was an elf, hero, superhero, and wizard-- although maybe those were the common classes and only once in a while a cleric was played (for example by the occasional appearance of Mike Carr). Anyone know if the Blackmoor cleric preceded D&D?
Well, yes, of course Clerics predate D&D, although in Blackmoor they were simply called Priests. (Sorry I missed this post last time).
So Dungeon is its own thing, not a sanpshot of Blackmoor, except to say that Megarry modeled Dungeon on his experience as a regular player in Blackmoor, so there are a number of parallels, but little exact correlation.
It is important to understand that there was, and there was not, classes in Blackmoor. Classes as tightly defined in D&D did not exist, but players did play types (like fighters, wizards, merchants, and priests) who did each have some distinguishing features/restrictions.
The earliest date I'm aware of for the Cleric class is a reference in Arneson's Corner of the Table newsletter to the effect that in the fall of 1972 Mike Carr was a level 3 priest. At this point the priest is already associated with fighting vampires by supplying holy water to the elves and with spell casting, as he is trying to convert "magicians" to the "true religion".
As a side note, Blackmoor continues to blur the lines between wizards and priests in Temple of the Frog, where there are M-U priests, and in the 1976 blackmoor dungeon where there is a scroll with both Cleric and M-U spells.