Skip to main content

Expedition to Castle Blackmoor

I have been thinking about running a game set in the dungeon of Blackmoor Castle. I started my research a few days ago and thanks to some very nice people (you know who you are) I was able to read Supplement II: Blackmoor and The First Fantasy Campaign. Both of these were interesting reads but didn't help me as much as I thought they would. The First Fantasy Campaign was very difficult to work through. It was basically a dump of Arneson's campaign notes, and in many cases assumed that the reader already knew a lot about the players and the setting. There were some great maps of the dungeons, so I will be using those.

Luckily, a guy named Harvard has an awesome site dedicated to Blackmoor. He also has a rockin' blog on the subject. Thanks to those sites and some articles in Fight On! I was able to read accounts by the actual players of those early games. I found the accounts by Greg Svenson to be especially useful.

There is no way I can reconstruct the actual story of what happened for my game, and I really wouldn't want to anyway (then it wouldn't be my game). I did get enough information to get an idea of the feel. It seems that many of the excursions into Castle Blackmoor were made by a group of PCs with a large retinue of guards and soldiers. I also managed to get enough plot ideas to grab some of the old style.

I am planning on using Searchers of the Unknown to keep it as rules light as possible. I thought about using Swords and Wizardry: White Box but I don't want to spend any time on rules explanation. I plan on giving the players a large number of soldiers to take into the dungeon, SotU will make the combat really easy to handle.

My basic plot idea revolves around Baron Fant and his transformation into Lord Fang. I actually couldn't figure out if they were historically the same character, but I am going to go with it.

Comments

  1. Just FYI, if you decide to dig into Castle Blackmoor, avoid the "Dungeons of Castle Blackmoor" product (it details levels 1-20) as it's pretty horrible.

    Allan.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, I have already run into that particular product and decided not to use it. Glad to see I am not the only one to feel that way.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hex Crawls

Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I have never run a megadungeon before. I have always used more realistic dungeon settings, keeping all underground areas to a minimum and keeping the over all size of castles and the like fairly small. There is another style of gaming I have never indulged in: the hex crawl. I have never seen hexes as discrete chunks of the map. I always just used them as a guide to find distance if they were present and not worrying about themif they were not. I have always taken a more continuous view of overland maps. This is another streak that will be ending with my upcoming OSRIC game. I will be using James M's Outdoor Map as a starting pont in my campaign. I will be heavily modifying it for my purposes but most of the features will stay the same. I will be adding my own versions of Castles Blackmoor and Greyhawk to the map. I have been struggling with how a hex crawl works. How do I know if they find features in the hex and isn't 5 m

Traveller: Session 5

    This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on October 27, 2022. This session contains secret communications between me and the individual players. This means that these recaps do not cover everything that happened in the session. I will be reporting only the information that all players had access to.   131-1116   After the council meeting ended, Nashu, Archduke Ishuggi’s chief of staff, pulled him aside. Following the revelation that Yuri Lang, the emperor’s would-be assassin, had been a member of Archduke Adair’s intelligence service and had been involved in a combined operation with Gateway Intelligence, she had the staff run overlap checks on all recent contacts. The goal was to determine if there were any more unexpected connections between people that could be a threat to Ishuggi or the emperor.   She learned that, in 1113, Yuri Lang (“Baron Pazi”), Zurzi (Archduke Bzrk’s chief of st

Traveller: Session 24

    This session was run on March 30, 2023.     With the Prismatic Ray safely on the ground and camouflaged, Aryanna decided to head to the artists’ commune to monitor the situation with the pirates they had escaped from and to establish radio contact with Arenui and Mar-ven through local channels to avoid giving away their position. Mhan, Hal, and Zarf stayed behind with the ship. Using the Ray’s passive sensors, they could see that the Razer’s Blade , the 100 ton boat launched from Jugisaal’s Razer to intercept them, had finished with Jade’s cargo lighter and was entering Twinsong’s atmosphere. In Caldera, Arenui and Mar-ven were finishing up negotiations at the life support supply warehouse when the air defense alert sirens started to sound. The warehouse owner told them that they had to leave the building while he took his employees into the strong room. They attempted to convince him to allow them to shelter in the strong room as well, but he refused becau