Tell me about the Iron Duke

[Rafael]

Rissa however, is the daughter of Baron Han Aleford who seems to be a contemporary of the Original Players. Not sure if he is based on a player though. I always assumed that the town of Hanford was named after Han Aleford.

I think you and I talked about this during the LFC days. It was always my impression like there was an implied time jump, as in that the old characters settled down and had offsprings that took over as their primary PCs. This makes sense both in terms of the Arnesonian level cap, and in terms of the choices the players had taken during their more active time in the game: A character gets married, there's some likelihood they're going to have children; a caracter becomes a knight, chances are he might send his squire to a minor errand.

As mentioned earlier, the Uther storyline also reads much like an analogy of Dave's relationship with TSR (Uther breaking with the Great Kingdom).

I think you're making a remarkably astute observation, there. So, don't take it the wrong way, please, if I say that I'm not sure if I personally would read all too much into this specific detail: The narrative options for a setting like Blackmoor just aren't that many, in terms of where a global storyline can go. Especially the presence of Bram Tagus as a PC in the campaign, IIRC, might suggest that the Thonia storyline just evolved organically. If the Egg of Coot was the enemy to the North, and Ran/the Afridhi were the enemy to the West, building up Thonia as the enemy to the South simply made sense.

The disappearance of Oberstar meant that the 6th Orc-Dwarf War had just started at the onset of DA1, but in the ZGG books, it has dragged on for 5 years, yet has no bearing on the setting.

...Which is also why I stayed away from the "Dwarf" topic during the LFC, IIRC, even though it's a topic I generally like. It looked to me as if there was supposed to be, well, more to it, and think I expected ZGG to do something with it. Like, one of the reasons why "The Grim Winter" took place almost entirely outside of the known territories was that I didn't want to intercept with any possible existing narrative. Out of the same reason, our game never went into the Dwarven realms, even during the later timetravel episodes.

My sense is that Arneson was developing new plotlines for the Blackmoor Chronicles that may well have featured a Rissa Aleford kidnapping plot as a hook to explore TotF. I don't think the TotF and CoG plots were campaign replays but I don't know. Part of the reason I don't think so is because of Lortz.

This is why I think that the in-game action stopped a bit earlier: Arneson's (and mostly, Ritchie's) treatments of established characters seem largely written as a tribute: The NPCs are not supposed to evolve. - So, my guess is, the campaign stopped around the time those characters were established, but still on their heroic journey - which again, in-game-wise, would put us somewhere between 1020 and 1025 for Arneson's face-to-face tabletop game.

Lortz took over as Dwarf king and was presumably involved in the dwarf/orc wars so that implies that they were adventuring in the Black Hills, Crystal Peaks and so on. GPoD is also set in the Dragon hills - all of which seems pretty removed from the events of the DA series and also seems like the sort of plot lines TSR would be less interested in.

I think you are onto something there. The whole Thonian Rand area had some in-campaign use that I don't think has been detailed anywhere, as of yet. Do we happen to know whether Marban and Mohacs were actual in-use, detailed campaign locations? - I frankly don't remember from back in the day, but I think I saw a map, at some point. Might have been one of Havard's, though.