John Snider -Egg of Coot Campaign

[Secrets of Blackmoor]

The other thing about his campaign is that he really was using his sci fi rules...

Did you ask for more details about the rules, or was your focus on the actual setting and adventure plotlines?

There is so much to cover when we do interviews. Even though we sat with John for two sessions, it still felt like we just didn't get enough of his stories.

It wasn't until after we had wrapped everything, and most of the gear was packed, that he revealed he had his old campaign. He gave it to us along with his entire games collection.

We didn't even really look at what he gave to us much, just no time. We had been working hard for two days and just wanted to pack it up and ship it.

So to answer your question: we did not think his campaign was significant at the time because our research focus is the twin cities gamers between 1964 and 1974. The Egg of Coot campaign happens much later in the 90's. That still makes it over 20 years old and a collaborative endeavor between John and Arneson, so in retrospect it is significant.

We knew about his sci fi campaign because the other guys spoke very highly of it. There is one story about how John's ship building system was very open ended. Dave Arneson built a a very large dreadnaught that would be best described as a death star; and just as the death star, it got taken out by another player's swarm of small sub light ships that were dropped from a carrier. Megarry had something freaky happen to him that caused his character to merge with an AI and also created a split in his body making him into a thirty headed creature - The Meggariath, or Meggarian. It was like 30 characters in one body. This is from memory, it was a crazy story. And Bob Meyer was the only one to discover the worm holes between everyone's home space. He proceeded to make contact with everyone, while freaking them out with his ability to appear from nowhere. The whole thing just sounded like so much fun.

What is most interesting about the big campaigns that the twin cities gamers ran, is that most of the players do not know to this day, all the details of whom was doing what to whom. So when you hear the stories from the players, they all tell it from a different perspective. It's a real kick to see the differences.

We have enough material on John's Sci Fi campaign, that we are considering doing some kind of short documentary on just that.

Back to John's Egg of Coot campaign, tomorrow you can see some of it for yourself, we just sent some of the maps for Havard to post on here. We also emailed john to see if he can give us some info on what can be found on those maps. The plan is to release a couple maps and get some notes from John for anyone who plans to DM a game on those maps.

The big question is how to reveal the arc story details on this forum, but only to actual DM's. That way his campaign can be played by other people around the world without any spoilers for the players.

One thing about his Egg of Coot campaign, is that John refers to it as the Blackmoor Alternate Universe. We need to pick his brain on that. Is Blackmoor a parallel to his spec game, or is this Egg of Coot campaign an alternate to Blackmoor itself.