darkseraphim wrote:from Gygax's Role-Playing Mastery book:
increment wrote:postal
Zenopus wrote:Here are my thoughts on the location of Blackmoor and Greyhawk on the original Great Kingdom map reprinted in Playing at the World:
sauromatian wrote:If D&D grew out of PBM games like Diplomacy, Hyboria, & Midgard, it puts the whole hobby in a different context. Today, most RPGs are played by computer. In other words a systematic, remote process rather than face-to-face. Until now I saw it as a linear evolution from the tabletop to the PC, but now it looks more complex. RPGs are a branch that came from more systematic games, but didn't just branch like a tree. D&D feeds back into the main course by influencing computer games. So understanding this history is like navigating the endless swamp islands of Blackmoor, where mythology is difficult to discern from reality.
Zenopus wrote:Here are my thoughts on the location of Blackmoor and Greyhawk on the original Great Kingdom map reprinted in Playing at the World:http://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/201 ... kmoor.html
darkseraphim wrote:Hopefully your book will help to turn that tide ... but until glossy books by Wizards, Adkison, designers and (dare I say?) Eldritch Ent are around to tell more of the real story, most people are not going to know the relative importance of Twin Cities innovations in early role-playing.
sauromatian wrote:I would prefer to use the map in the book, on the assumption that it is earlier. However it contradicts the foldout map. Or at least it looks like it does, maybe it is just poorly drawn. Is the circled dot Castle Blackmoor itself? Then its orientation doesn't match up with the hand-drawn map of Blackmoor & Vicinity as well as the JG map does. Is the Egg of Coot supposed to be upriver in the original map? It is also lacking the locations of Lake Gloomy & the Temple of the Frog. The placement of the Elf Forest is similarly in question, occupying the NW of the book's map but the SW of the foldout map.
increment wrote:Nothing I saw in any document, for example, really explained what happened in November of 1976 when Arneson left TSR. Tons of stories about that are going around, but not a lot of evidence. We collectively need to accept that there will be facts we can establish, and other things that lie beyond the documentary record.The Great Kingdom map is a good example. We can know with relative certainty where Blackmoor and Greyhawk reside on that map, thanks to a few contemporary hints left behind by Gygax and Arneson. When we try to retrofit that map with place names that came about much later, however, we're almost certainly going beyond what Gygax had intended at the time that the map was created.
Zenopus wrote:here are my thoughts on how the "sketch map" corresponds with the fold-out poster map.
sauromatian wrote:Zenopus wrote:here are my thoughts on how the "sketch map" corresponds with the fold-out poster map.At the bottom of the page (12, FFC), Arneson writes "In re-drawing the first campaign map, I have decided.. to link it with the Judges Guild Known World..." The fold out map includes JG's Valley of the Ancients, but the book's map does not. I am interpreting this to mean that the book map is the first one, although it might conceivably indicate Gygax's Great Kingdom map.Meanwhile, I have more questions: -What is the Giant Kingdom mentioned in Gygax's intro to Holmes? Is it a mis-rendering of Great Kingdom, which he mentioned a few lines before? Arneson's map just says "Kingdom" in the SE corner.-FFC includes quite a bit of detail about the Outdoor Survival board, placed south of Blackmoor. However the details cannot easily be tied down, as there is no indication of where on the board any particular domain is. Is there any record of this campaign map? Was it considered to occupy the Great Kingdom map, or did Blackmoor+OS occupy a world of its own? -Gygax stated that players in his Greyhawk campaign could travel overland to Blackmoor. Is there any record of this combined geography?
Zenopus wrote:FWIW, the "Forward" of Men & Magic from the OCE set has "Great Kingdom" twice rather than "Great Kingdom" followed by "Giant Kingdom" as in Holmes Basic (all printings). Holmes used an earlier printing of OD&D (with the Tolkien references) when editing the Basic Set. Can anyone with an earlier set (e.g., woodgrain) check whether it has "Great" or "Giant" in the line 'a spot between the "Gxxxt Kingdom" and the fearsome "Egg of Coot'?
increment wrote: From my reading of FFC, I got the sense that Arneson employed the Outdoor Survival map to improvise the lands that players wandered into when they strayed south from his original tabletop map surrounding Blackmoor (a detail of which is in sketched in DB #13). I don't think this was meant to have any particular relationship to Gygax's original DB #9 map, and the use of the Outdoor Survival board only became canon in OD&D for precisely such improvisations. Obviously, since the DB #9 map came out a year before Outdoor Survival, there's no sense in which either effected the graphical layout of the other. The lack of an ocean and so on makes any greater resemblance to the OS map tenuous, though presumably the bay and the town of Blackmoor was part of the original Blackmoor tabletop and would thus be off-map on OS. The only further hint in OD&D about the use of the OS map is the notation switch that "catch basins are castles, buildings are towns." I don't really see any obvious mapping between catch basins in the towns represented on the page 15 map, though.
