Blackmoor

Blackmoor is a fantasy role-playing game campaign setting generally associated with the game Dungeons & Dragons. It originated in the early 1970s as the personal setting of Dave Arneson, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, first as a setting for Arneson's miniature wargames, then as an early testing ground for what would become D&D. Blackmoor is one of the longest continuously played fantasy role-playing campaigns in existence.

Early history

Blackmoor grew out of Arneson's wargaming sessions, after he began to expand them to include ideas from The Lord of the Rings and Dark Shadows. Arneson applied the Fantasy Supplement rules from the Chainmail game to dungeon exploration in Blackmoor. Blackmoor was a campaign with an endless series of progression, encouraging cooperative play to succeed.

The origins of the Blackmoor setting lie in the Castle & Crusade Society, a subgroup of the International Federation of Wargaming specializing in medieval miniatures combat; the group was initially driven by Gary Gygax. Dave Arneson was among the first to join the Society in April 1970, and many other members of his Twin Cities gaming group followed, including Duane Jenkins, Bill Hoyt, Ed Werncke, Mike Carr, and Marshall Hoegfeldt. Within months, the leadership of the Society had decided to form a fictional "Great Kingdom," with parcels of land awarded to and contested by members of the organization. Arneson assumed responsibility for the far northern reaches of the Great Kingdom, and it was there that he began to stage medieval games that led up to the Blackmoor setting. An announcement in Arneson's fanzine Corner of the Table describes the first game in the campaign, one built on the model of Dave Wesely's "Braunstein" series of games:

Blackmore (disambiguation)

Blackmore is a village in Essex. It may also refer to:

People

Flanaess

The Flanaess is the eastern part of the continent of Oerik, one of the four continents of the fictional world of Oerth in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. The Flanaess has been the setting of dozens of adventures published between the 1970s and 2000s and continues to be the central focus of the campaign world. As well as being home to a number of demihuman and humanoid races, it is also inhabited by the Suel, Bakluni, Oerid, and Flan subraces of humanity.

Development of the Flanaess

In late 1972, Dave Arneson demonstrated a new type of game to a group of gamers in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, including game designer Gary Gygax. Gygax agreed to develop a set of rules with Arneson and get the game published; the game eventually became known as "Dungeons & Dragons". Gygax designed a set of dungeons underneath the ruins of Castle Greyhawk as a testing ground for new rules, character classes and spells. In those early days, there was no "Flanaess"; the world map of "Oerth" was developed by Gygax as circumstances dictated, the new cities and lands simply drawn over a map of North America. Gygax and his friend Rob Kuntz further developed this campaign setting, and by 1976, the lands within a radius of 50 miles had been mapped in depth, and the lands within a radius of approximately 500 miles were in outline form. In addition, more distant lands had been roughly sketched out to accommodate various adventures. (For more information about the first days of Gygax's home campaign, see Greyhawk.)