Jon Peterson's Book and Scans

[finarvyn]

I'm about 200 pages into the book and really am loving it, except for the fact that as a textbook I get tired of reading after a while and need to go off to do other things for a while, then come back to read more. Amazing book.

Curious how he seems to have come out of nowhere. Maybe he has a presence on the Acaeum. I don't hang out there, so I wouldn't know, but it will be interesting to see how much of his research extends at all beyond the printed/collected material. In any case it is damn satisfying to see so much material finally being brought to light.

I was thinking the same thing earlier today. If you or one of the guys I know lurk on these boards had started such a project I'm sure I would have heard of it long before publication. This book was in such stealth-mode that it seems to have caught all of us by surprise, and it must have taken Jon a long time to research and write the thing. How could we all have missed hearing about it sooner? :?

[Rafael]

You guys might also enjoy the talks from Michael D. C. Drout on fantasy literature, then.
Google him, if you like. He's a bit Tolkien-centric, but still pretty good.


Raaaaaaaaaaaaah. I got the book on Kindle now, but I want it on print.

[Havard]

Mentioned this on my comment on Jon's blog, but also noticed that Jenkins is married to Fants homely sister, not cousin as later reported in the FFC.

Very observant!

(You know, jenkins character really needs fleshed out).

Definitely. I'd like to see more development on both him and Glendower. Baron Ungulian seems to have taken over Jenkins' lands after the latter became a Vampire, but there is certainly much to be explored here!

The baron of blackmoor is beholden to inspecter general Snider. So presumably his position is Thonian.

Interesting! Obviously this is a different person from "the Sniders" referred to elsewhere in the FFC (Brother Richard and Bozero).

There's also the reported earthquake, which would explain allthe collapsed passages/rubble on the 1st level of blackmoor dungeon.

Wonder if it caused other troubles as well? :twisted:

The date is interesting since it presumably indicates the date of the founding of the Great Kingdom.

Well, of course the date is really just a fun twist on 1971, but yeah calendars usually start at some significant event. Dave Ross' fan timeline uses the founding of the Empire as its starting point, basing it on the DA1 reference that "the Empire was founded ca 1000 years ago". Of course, one may wonder if that sentence from DA1 was indeed taken from Arneson's notes?

Anyway, the Ross timeline was appropriated by ZGG and I am way too lazy to recalculate all of the dates.

Edit: BTW, my latest blog articlehas some more comments on Jon Peterson's book.

-Havard

[Rafael]

Book arrived today.

My first impression is...


This is awesome. A milestone. The single best book about actual fantasy roleplaying tradition ever written. (And I have read quite a few.)

One cannot measure this enough. Peterson just single-handledly academicized (sic) a branch of investigation in fantasy literature that had had no expression before.



My heart is green from envy. :wink:


Now, I will surely nitpick on a few details sooner or later, but regardless of this, I think it's safe to say, this might just be the most important book ABOUT rpgs written since the 80s.







(Gentlemen, this is the rare moment when I am really enthusiastic about something. Just so you know how it feels, now.)

[Havard]

Congrats!

My book just arrived too! :mrgreen: 8)

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it!

-Havard

[Havard]

More tidbits:
John Soukup played a levek IX Wizard. Presumably this is a different character than his Balrog character? There were wizards up to level XII in the campaign at that time.

I am also fascinated by the fact that Peterson attributes economics; ie buying equipment etc was something that had not existed in pre-Arneson Chainmail campaigns...

-Havard

[aldarron]

More tidbits:
John Soukup played a levek IX Wizard. Presumably this is a different character than his Balrog character? There were wizards up to level XII in the campaign at that time.

I am also fascinated by the fact that Peterson attributes economics; ie buying equipment etc was something that had not existed in pre-Arneson Chainmail campaigns...

-Havard

Yeah, was gratifying to me to see that because of the web post I wrote about levels being evident in the infamous characters write up.

[increment]

Hi, and thanks for the kind reception for my book.

It was in stealth mode, I suppose, though a few people in the collecting community (folks like Frank Mentzer) knew that I was doing it. Obviously I interviewed a lot of folks in the Blackmoor Bunch, including Dave, on a couple of occasions, so they certainly knew the project was underway. I shared a lot of info about the materials I was gathering early on in the project, on places like Tome of Treasures, but as time went on I guess I found it harder to talk about tiny components of history because I had a very different big picture than other people did. I also don't want to be that guy who says "I'm writing a cool book about this" when that book is still a ways off and you have no way of knowing whether it will be awesome or awful when it arrives. Five years is a long time to be talking about how awesome something is when it won't be out for five years.

As far as I can tell, the most important system concepts that Dave brought to D&D through Blackmoor were experience points, equipment/economics and dungeoneering. One fact I really try to stress, one that may be counterintuitive from where we sit today, is that early Blackmoor was a wargame, and that to understand it, the real thing you need to understand is not D&D, but instead Arneson's prior Napoleonic Simulation campaign, which was the clear prototype for Blackmoor. Dave moans in contemporary documents that all of this dungeon delving was getting in the way of having the good guys fight the bad guys. Even in late 1972, when we hear about events in the campaign, there are as many about large-scale battles as there are about individual activities. Both the management of economics and the management of experience in Blackmoor build on their precedents in the Napoleonic Simulation campaign (yes, you did "level up" in the NapSim campaign as you won more battles). I don't see anything about Napoleonic dungeons, but, well, dungeons seems to have been a struck-by-lightning sort of inspiration, which I suggest in my book owes its setting to Conan tropes and its system to various secret information management techniques in prior wargames, like the submarine management from Fletcher Pratt, a game Arneson really loved.

I don't think 1071 is a typo. In contemporary notices, Arneson frequently referred to the early incarnations of Black Moor as taking place in the Middle Ages.

Anyway, always glad to see that people find the work valuable. It's a large and complex book, and I'm sure I didn't get everything right, but I hope it does move the needle towards more serious, evidence-based analysis of the origins of gaming.

[Havard]

Great having you here Jon!

I am reading your book with great interest. Would you consider making more information from the interviews you made available? Some things that may not have been deemed relevant for the book could be of great interest for us Blackmoor enthusiasts.

Its interesting to hear your theories on where Arneson may have gotten the experience idea from. Of course the idea of "levelling up" would have become somewhat different once you introduce the Braunstein type character rather than the NapSim General would it not?

I agree that 1071 probably isn't a typo. And I would not be surprised if the DA1 author may have had copies of the CoT to fill out the details for the modules.

Anyway, looking forward to hearing more from you!

-Havard

[increment]

Great having you here Jon!

I am reading your book with great interest. Would you consider making more information from the interviews you made available? Some things that may not have been deemed relevant for the book could be of great interest for us Blackmoor enthusiasts.

Its interesting to hear your theories on where Arneson may have gotten the experience idea from. Of course the idea of "levelling up" would have become somewhat different once you introduce the Braunstein type character rather than the NapSim General would it not?

I agree that 1071 probably isn't a typo. And I would not be surprised if the DA1 author may have had copies of the CoT to fill out the details for the modules.

Anyway, looking forward to hearing more from you!

-Havard

I didn't make recordings of interviews, as really I only used them for background - actually, virtually all of my interview questions related to ways I could identify or find more primary sources. I'm sure I could remember some colorful anecdotes, but there are plenty of people who could recall them better than me (Major Wesely comes to mind).

There is a whole section of my book which covers the concept of progression (experience) - section 3.2.3.1. Of course, progression has been with us ever since a chess pawn could become a queen by reaching the eight rank. There were a variety of morale systems for miniature wargames, common in the late 1950s, that allowed successful troops to gain advantages in later combats. These kinds of systems were prevalent enough that we don't need any special explanation for how they ended up in the NapSim game.

The Braunstein games were one-shots, so they didn't have progression as such. You didn't play the same character twice. The fact that Blackmoor became a campaign, a series of continuous games with persistent characters, naturally encouraged various forms of progression. Chainmail had various different strata of fighters, and famously five hierarchical ranks of wizards, but no specified way to move between the ranks. It seems pretty straightforward, again, that the experience mechanisms that had been in play in NapSim would migrate over to Blackmoor.