02-20-2010, 04:23 PM
Aldarron Wrote:I suppose it won't hurt to ask a couple more while we wait for you to get back to us.
I really enjoyed Wizards Cabal. I think the magic systems and classes in there are some of the best ever put together for D&D and I can see the similarities between them and Arneson's earlier stuff like Adventures in Fantasy.The spell focus seemed like a new idea and a very cool one too. who's idea was the spell focus? Was that yours or did DA come up with that?
Did Arneson have any outlines or plans or anything written for ZGG that never made it to the publishers?
Ok, several questions in this one.
Thanks for the compliments on WC. Blackmoor was a very rich environment before I ever came around. That being said, we wanted to include as much *new* into the world. We knew at the beginning that any license was only temporary and we had hoped to be able to use some of that new material on future projects outside of Blackmoor.
Dave was also very keen on the idea of there being many permutations of Blackmoor. Consider that the guys time traveled to fight Nazis and then into prehistory to combat dinosaurs. Blackmoor really could mean alot of things depending on the night or the DMs mood.
With this in mind, I made two modest contributions to Blackmoor. One was the Docrae race. Patterned after my first D&D3.0 Character (a halfling barbarian that Dave abhorred..), I gave them some permanency by extending the core races to include them alongside the traditional "hobbitish" halflings. This made more sense to Dave because of the fact that the slender Greyhawk halflings were not akin to his image.
The other contribution I made was the Spell system and focus. I gave Jeff Quinn a design that he extended and made awesome. I'm a big fan of Rolemaster and always disliked that D&D spells always seemed to go off (excluding concentration checks of course). I also wanted a more "run and gun" magic style that could distinguish Blackmoor from the rest of the other settings (aside from it's already dark tones).
Dave was quick to mention that this magic system and other differences were really an expression of the many facets of Blackmoor and that canon was always controlled by the DM.