My favorite Blackmoor is...

[Big Mac]

On a couple threads the question has come up "which Blackmoor". So I thought I'd ask and see what our forum members like best.

Interesting question. The subject of the different Blackmoors has come up over at The Piazza. I don't think I've seen any other campaign setting that has been raided so much (by other campaign settings). But then again, I don't think I've seen many other settings* that have been "shut down" way before their time.

* = Other settings that I think also didn't get a fair chance are Pelenor (the UK TSR setting that got nerfed when they UK TSR team told their US bosses they thought they were idiots), Jakandor (the Barbarian vs Necromancer setting) and Ghostwalk (the 3.0 setting that WotC semi-converted into a 3.5 book).

I think that internal politics (between TSR and Dave Arneson) meant that Blackmoor didn't get the sort of extensive OD&D product line that Forgotten Realms has been given by Wizards of the Coast.

I think that if Blackmoor had been given its chance (way back then) the OD&D product line would have been totally different.

It might have been popular enough on its own to have displaced the Mystara campaign setting. Or Dave Arneson might have had more say with the Known World and Mystara might have been subsumed into the Blackmoor Campaign Setting. So some people might not prefer "what could have been", while others might think it was far better.

I'm not sure the Wilderlands connection would have been there if Dave Arneson had been kept busy inside TSR.

I think the abbreviations we were using (over at The Piazza) were: "G-Blackmoor" for Greyhawk's Blackmoor, "M-Blackmoor" for Mystara's Blackmoor, "W-Blackmoor" for Wilderland's Blackmoor.

I suggested "B-Blackmoor" for standalone Blackmoor, but given what you said, I'm not sure there is only one version of the standalone Blackmoor.

Although Its no secret, its only fair that I answer my own question first. My preference is for Original Blackmoor, with judicious cherry picking from later works, particularly the ZGG line. My reasons are simple, its the only one that is actually its own original world and not a Blackmoor shoehorned as an afterthought into a world imagined by someone other than Arneson.

Hmm. I was under the impression that the ZG version (i.e. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor) was supposed to be a 3e update to Dave Arneson's version. Even if there are ideas in there from other people (and some parts of Dave Arneson's core are excluded) I was under the impression that it was "Blackmoor + new stuff", rather than "something new with elements of Blackmoor".

Am I misinterpreting your use of the word "only"? Or did you not mean to include Dave Arneson's Blackmoor as a "shoehorn setting":?

I was actually thinking of doing the opposite thing to you (starting with the Zeitguist Games stuff and cherry picking from earlier Blackmoor stuff, especially First Fantasy Campaign).

But I well understand folks who love thier world, be it Greyhawk, Mystara, whatever and want Blackmoor to be a part of it.

As someone who would like to one day see a Blackmoor Wiki (or other form of online Blackmoor encyclopedia) I think you have highlighted an important point of confusion with the setting. (And as someone who is still pretty new to Blackmoor, I find this very confusing and think it is something that possibly distracts some, would be, fans from getting into Blackmoor.)

I think there are some elements (I'll call them "core") that appear in all versions of Blackmoor. But there are other ("non-core") elements that are specific to M-Blackmoor, G-Blackmoor, W-Blackmoor or whatever.

Forgotten Realms Wiki did an interesting thing, where they used a second "namespace" for the Living Forgotten Realms version of the same article. I think that sort of canon-splitting could help put the "pure" Dave Arneson stuff into the main namespace, but still show people how that fits into the other settings. (Essentially, a theoretical Blackmoor Wiki could have an "Egg of the Coot" article as well as a "Mystara:Egg of the Coot", "Wilderlands:Egg of the Coot" and/or "Greyhawk:Egg of the Coot" articles)

With Blackmoor being something that has "returned to the fans" for the moment, I think that any progress on any type of Blackmoor would be useful (to an extent) to fans of other types of Blackmoor. And progress on the core elements would be useful to everyone.

So I'm not sure that finding out the favorite Blackmoor is as important as finding out how to dispel confusion between the different iterations.

But for the record, I voted for the 3e version, because that is my preferred ruleset. And when people tell me that I can "make a setting my own" they often don't realise that I specifically do not want to do that. I personally would want to play in Dave Arneson's world.

I'm actually a Spelljammer fan (for anyone who does not know), but would want to build a Blackmoorspace that bent Spelljammer to the Blackmoor style (rather than one that bent Blackmoor away from its own style).

Because Greyspace is already in the SJ universe (and has its own Blackmoor) and because I would also like to have a Wilderlandspace and a Mystaraspace, I've thought about having all of these Blackmoors as some sort of parallel cities (rather than trying to do it the Havard way and merge them all - apart from Greyhawk - into a single world). I don't suppose I'll ever get all of that finished as the research time needed to get my "inner Dave Arneson" working would probably take me several years.

For the record the reason I didn't vote for "Blackmoor + something else" (with the something else being Spelljammer) is that I wouldn't want a Blackmoor-lite crystal sphere. I would want a fully working campaign setting surrounded by a bunch of other worlds that also had Arneson-type themes. So to me the core-stuff needs to be more important than the crossover stuff.