Noble Houses of Ten

[Havard]

There are hints that the other Barons of Ten were the descendants of pirates and bandits (for example in the d20 timeline) - that stuff in the DA series about the "unwanted" seems to have been made up by Ritchie. Arneson never endorsed that storyline.

Zeitgeist campaign goes along DA4 approach on this point... Arneson never endorsed that, too?

I don't believe so. ZG followed some of the DA 4 material for very practical (and understandable) reasons, which of course Arneson agreed with, but when asked about the D&D DA product line he took credit for contributing to DA 1-3, but basically disavowed DA 4 Duchy of Ten. (can find the interviews if you need but feeling lazy at the moment). I'm paraphrasing here, but at one point he said the ZG group planned to handle it "much better". In the end they decided not to change it much for practical reasons, but it does show what Arneson would rather have done.

And, in fact, if you look at the ZG material, while they do generally follow the DA4 storyline, there is a bit of nudging in a direction closer to Arneson's original vision while not making it totally unpalatable to DA4 fans. They recast the unwanted as pirates/rebels and call their fight against Thonia "The Pirates Rebellion"

If you go back and consider only Ten references in the FFC or in Garbage Pits, it's a very different world from the DA 4 Ten, and frankly the unwnated story line doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me - if there were such escapees, how could they possibly settle down as renegade farmers in a monster infested northern wilderness already home to bandits, Pictish wildmen, pirates and nomads who are themselves active slavers. Kinda like going from the frying pan into the fire. Further, the storyline seems to ignore the fact that Ten lies between the Duchy of Blackmoor and the Duchy of the Peeks. It also seems to totally ignore the existence of the Southlands - which would have been both closer and much more attractive as an area for these "unwanted" escapees from Thonia to go to. So I cry foul on the whole storyline.

Well this is all speculation, so your theories are as good as mine. However, personally I would not be so quick to dismiss everything in DA4 as exclusively Ritchie's.

A few things to consider.

At one point after leaving TSR, Dave Arneson shopped around for the idea of publishing as many as 12 modules set in Blackmoor. Mayfair Games was considered as a publisher. I'm assuming that copyright issues was the real reason why he ended up publishing them through TSR since so many elements of Blackmoor IP had been tied to them since the publication of Supplement II.

We know that Frank Mentzer auctioned away a huge document called the "Chronicles of Thonia" a few years ago. The author of the document was most likely David Ritchie. I assume this was based on Dave Arneson's draft for the '12 modules' he had shown the people at Mayfair Games earlier. I also think The Chronicles of Thonia were the basis for the 4 DA modules as well as the never published DA5.

I don't think Arneson sent Ritchie drafts for 3 modules. I think he sent him a huge single document that Ritchie reworked into 5 planned modules. Because of this I am fairly certain that some of the material in DA4 is from Dave's notes.


Now, the DA modules share a basic structure:
1) Introduction about how to send characters back in time from the Known World (Mystara) to Blackmoor.
2) Setting info, adventure hooks etc (This is typically scattered around in each booklet)
3) The main adventure
4) NPC Section (I think DA2 omits this one)

Item 1 is likely always by Ritchie possibly with some input from Arneson (Great Rain of Fire could be his?).

In DA4 specifically, I think the majority of the module is from Ritchie, but I still think setting information in the module (item 2) comes from Arneson. The module credits Deborah Ritchie for fleshing out the Afridhi, but we know they were created by Arneson, including the Toska Rusa character. Dave Arneson did probably not intend for the Afridhi to have occupied Ten, but probably other information about the families (Baron Hubal?) and towns (Starmorgan, Port Dacoit, Robinsport) as well as the Barrier Swamp comes from Arneson. The Well of Souls etc could come from either author really.


Again this is speculation, but I think Arneson's disappointment with DA4 has to do with:
1) The fact that TSR did not send him a draft for approval before publishing
2) Afridhi occupying Ten
3) DA4 completely leaving out Ran of Ah' Foo



Another question is whether this matters. While I like talking about what Dave's vision for Blackmoor was, I am perfectly happy to include all published material for Blackmoor when developing my campaign


-Havard