Who was the First King of Blackmoor? (Split from Erwin Andah

[Havard]

To some extent how any of us resolves grey areas will depend upon the scaffolding we storybuild off of. For me, I start with the FFC and only contradict what it says if there appears to be a real mistake. Since "the king" is mentioned a fair amount of times there and in other early stuff, that is something I would hold as foundational scaffolding. The other thing I would look to is the ZG material where it goes into greater detail than the DA material or where it might contradict the DA material. This is because the ZG material is more recent, and because it was produced under the direct oversite of Arneson unlike the DA material that had largely been taken out of his hands. This is not to say that Arneson is the only voice for Blackmoor by any means, but to me it makes sense to favor his vision over others for the setting he created.

Agreed. The way I have always treated this is to distinguish between Blackmoor as a published setting and Blackmoor as the original campaign.

This is a bit like Greyhawk having very little to do with Gary and Rob Kuntz' original campaign. Published Blackmoor is probably closer to Dave Arneson's campaign, but unlike a campaign created through play that is organic, sometimes inconsistent and constantly evolving, the published campaign is prepared for others to make use of.

I consider the FFC as part of the documentation of the original campaign, while the DA modules and the 3E and 4E material are the foundations of the published campaign.

Now, the relationship between the DA modules on the one hand and the ZGG 3E and 4E books on the other is interesting. If you compare the two, the vast majority of information in the ZGG books are lifted from the DA modules. Where they differ are for the most part linked to either a) changes made to accomodate the new rulesets, MMRPG play etc and b) material lifted from a fan known as Zimriel. This might sound a bit harsh towards the ZGG desigers and freelancers and I am not saying there isn't more to their contributions than that, but I think the last part is going to help us out in this specific discussion.

For those who aren't familiar with Zimriel's work on Blackmoor, download his gazetteer here. What Zimriel did was to incorporate elements from the DA modules, the FFC and whatever other sources were available to him from the original campaign. If you compare Zimriel's timeline to the timelines inthe ZGG 3E and ZGG 4E books, you will find that there are only minor differences.

Looking at Ra-All in particular I found the following:

995-1000 First Fantasy Campaign Season.
995 Ra-All is “promoted to [Earl] of Vestfold”, succeeded in Blackmoor by a contemptible fellow known to posterity as “the Weasel”. The Weasel is, of course, no Andahar.

Now, the footnote is what is the most revealing:

Thonia was famed for its irresponsibility towards its northern frontier; but I doubt they would elevate their nobles to client-kingdom status. There is slight confusion about whether Vestfold was a Kingdom (JG p. 16, 21) or an Earldom (JG p. 4, 6, 13). JG p. 16 was written long after the fact, and does not explicitly refer to Vestfold. It could refer to the “Great King”, i.e. the Emperor. JG p. 21 was written around 1974 (after the war, but before the Wizard of the Wood died) and is probably a slip-up.

So it seems that Zimriel discovered that the FFC was inconsistent to the status of Vestfold and reconciled this as making Ra-All an Earl, but he does adress the posibility of a Vassal Kingdom as suggested by you (Aldarron and Greg) in this thread!

It is interesting though that the 3E and 4E books decided to go with Zimriel's interpretation.

Anyway, I am glad I went back to Zimriel's work on this matter. His footnotes are well worth a read for further analysis of this and other research into the pre ZGG material.

More later, I just had to get this off my chest after I found it!


-Havard