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Expedition to Castle Blackmoor

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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.
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Comments

  1. grodogNovember 8, 2009 at 11:49 PM

    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. rmckee78November 9, 2009 at 1:58 AM

    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

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