We’re one month away from Dave Arneson Day, a celebration of the Father of Roleplaying Games on the day of his birth, October 1st.
Last year I talked about the Arnesonian Dungeon and I described how I wanted to celebrate Dave Arneson Day by Running Castle Blackmoor: Seeking to recapture that moment, almost 50 years ago, when Dave Arneson’s players went down into his basement, discovered the Castle Blackmoor miniature sitting on his table, and ventured down the stairs into the dungeons beneath it.
It’s a powerful, iconic image. But the truth is that it’s not quite that simple.
My first exposure to the dawn of the modern roleplaying game came through Greg Svenson’s “The First Dungeon Adventure,” which has been revised several times, but which you can read in its most current form here. Greg Svenson played in Arneson’s original Blackmoor campaign, and his story of having “the unique experience of being the sole survivor of the first dungeon adventure in the history of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ indeed in the history of roleplaying in general” is really cool. It captures the imagination. It invites you to really envision what it would have been like to sit at that table with Dave Arneson and discover something truly new and unique and amazing. To be there when it all began.
But it’s probably not true.
For those unfamiliar with this topic, there are several key cruxes in the early history of Blackmoor:
When the first session was played: Several key pieces of documentary evidence are widely considered to point to 1971 as the date of the first Blackmoor session. (These are not actually conclusive, IMO. They’re just the earliest contemporary documentary evidence that can be reliably dated.) This date has gotten particular weight after publication of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World, an incredibly authoritative treatment of the early history of RPGs, because Peterson virulently rejected all eyewitness accounts in favor of contemporary documentary evidence.
(Peterson has good reasons for this: When Gygax attempted to claim that AD&D was a game unrelated to D&D so that Dave Arneson didn’t need to be paid royalties any more, Dave Arneson sued him. As often happens, the ensuing legal battle separated everyone involved into two distinct camps and created disparate narratives about what “really” happened which became entrenched. Once that happened, virtually all eyewitness accounts were irreparably tainted. You get the same thing in another case with Gygax, who miraculously starts claiming that he never liked Tolkien that much and his work wasn’t a significant influence on D&D at exactly the same time that TSR got sued by the Tolkien estate.)
However, in their earliest accounts virtually all of the Blackmoor players cited 1970 as the date of inception. Although several people, including Arneson, later decided that their memories must be faulty after looking at the documentary evidence (further muddying the waters), the most significant testimony is that of David Fant: He was the original Baron of Blackmoor and infamously became the first vampire. As such, he definitively played in the earliest sessions of Blackmoor, and yet he stopped playing when he got a job at KSTP at the end of 1970 and definitely was not playing with Arneson in 1971. (The fact he can definitively date the event which caused him to stop playing with Arneson lends his account substantial credibility.)
What the first session actually consisted of: The three main variations of the tale are the dungeon crawl (“we came in, there was a model of Castle Blackmoor in the middle of the table, and we started exploring the castle’s dungeons instead of playing the Napoleonics game we were supposed to”), the troll under the bridge (related in a fanzine and also attested to by players as being the first use of Chainmail), and the “rescue Dave Arneson from a plane crash in Europe, go through a cave, and emerge into the world of Blackmoor” (in which everyone was playing themselves and only later transitioned to a form of the campaign where they were playing different characters).
Who actually played in that first session: Even once you get past the question of what was in the first session, there’s a significant disagreement over who was there.
What were the original rules: Did the original Blackmoor use the Chainmail rules for combat or not? This is incredibly complicated by the later TSR vs. Arneson lawsuits where the question of whether or not Arneson’s game was derivative of Chainmail was legally significant.
To give a small sampling:
David Fant says he was at the first session, it was the “castle in the middle of the table instead of Napoleonics and we went into the dungeon” variation, and Dave asked him if he wanted to be the Baron of the castle.
Bob Meyer says he was at the first session, it was the “troll under the bridge” scenario, and it definitely used the Chainmail rules because he died in one hit as a result, declared he thought the game was terrible, and refused to play again for several years.
Greg Svenson says he was at the first session (later revised to be the “first dungeon adventure”), it was the “castle in the middle of the table instead of Napoleonics and we went into the dungeon” variation, and it involved Baron Fant being an NPC (which clearly contradicts Fant’s account).
To be clear, I’m not saying any of these people are being deliberately deceptive. I’m saying these things happened a long time ago, and it’s also quite likely there were many people who played in what they thought was the “first session” of the game without being aware that Arneson had run stuff in the Black Moors before that, and there are also all the foibles of an inconsistently shared communal narrative PLUS the complications of the Arneson vs. Gygax feud and legal troubles.
If you’re interested in delving into this lore more deeply, check out the aforementioned Playing at the World by Jon Peterson. A documentary called Secrets of Blackmoor has also just recently been released. Although I found it to be a somewhat flawed work when I attended the world premiere, it nevertheless affords you the irreplaceable opportunity to hear these stories from the lips of the people who were actually there.
And start planning your celebration of Dave Arneson Day now!
I didn’t get that Meyer’s “Troll under the bridge” scenario happened at the first session. When he told the story when I played with him, he said he didn’t play again for months, not years. From the condensed time frame, I think “months” meant like two or three; Meyer was mentioned as beating the top level in FFC.
I was at the first ever session of Blackmoor, and I distinctly recall saying, “Dave, old buddy, instead of Napoleonics, let’s try something else.” And then I told him exactly what later would became Blackmoor and the entire D&D hobby. I cite as proof my autobiography, “By the Gods, I Wish This Was True,” due out Real Soon Now.
Good post Justin and I agree with most of your points as you present them. The problem is this “first session” idea, which isn’t a very useful way to understand the origin of Blackmoor, because it causes confusion and conflation. Case in point: Greg Svenson doesn’t claim he was at the first Blackmoor game. He has stated several times that other games took place before he got involved. What he describes is HIS first Blackmoor game which he thinks was the first time there was a dungeon adventure (maybe, but probably not). For Wesely and Maker, their first Blackmoor game involved the adventure in Iceland. Neither of these two were present at the earlier Troll Bridge game, which is the first documented game in Blackmoor (April 17, 1971). There may have been battle games prior to that (the first coot invasion). So the question isn’t really “When was the first Blackmoor game?”, the question is really three fold “When did player x first play in a Blackmoor setting, and what kind of game was it?” and “When was that first dungeon adventure and who was there?” Check out my Cinematic Influences posts from August last year for more context. 🙂
I guess I should comment on this too.
>>>David Fant: …stopped playing when he got a job at KSTP at the end of 1970 and definitely was not playing with Arneson in 1971. (The fact he can definitively date the event which caused him to stop playing with Arneson lends his account substantial credibility.)
Well, I don’t think so. Fant’s memory is meaningful, but not black and white. Arneson’s gaming table was always in flux. Some people came sometimes, almost nobody came all the time. Some Blackmoor players, Wesely for example, played very infrequently. I think the takeaway from Fant is that his job interfered with and put an end to his gaming, but I don’t think we can assume that young Fant really never played again after the summer of 1970 when his KSTP internship turned into a job. I think he must have continued to drop in for a game or two in 1971. Frankly, I find it very unlikely Blackmoor existed prior to Brownstone, which probably comes after January 1971, but certainly is after October 1970.
“You get the same thing in another case with Gygax, who miraculously starts claiming that he never liked Tolkien that much and his work wasn’t a significant influence on D&D at exactly the same time that TSR got sued by the Tolkien estate.”
My understanding is that long before the Tolkien estate took notice of TSR, Gygax had been rather down on Tolkien’s works. I believe that even before TSR was founded, Gygax had said that while he found The Hobbit enjoyable enough, The Lord of the Rings had struck him as boring. Given that he’d come up on the old pulp stories, that’s an entirely believable claim on his part.
Personally, I’ve always wondered why some people think that Gygax was being disingenuous by saying that Tolkien wasn’t a big influence on D&D, because insofar as I can tell that’s self-evidently true. There are only a few things from Tolkien’s books that show up in the D&D rules; it’s just that several of those things are player-facing, and so seem to occupy much greater prominence than they actually represent. Yes, Tolkien was the inspiration for D&D’s nonhuman PC races and the ranger class, but I simply don’t understand why those somehow constitute a “significant influence,” given how much early D&D downplayed non-human PC races to begin with. Beyond those, all you have are a couple of monsters and a few magic items.
@5: Gygax’s remarks about Tolkien came from Dragon Magazine in the early 1980s. Having said that, I concur. Tolkien’s works add a lot to the trappings of early D&D, but not much to the game play, which has a less heroic feel. Of course, we still should take his Appendix N with a grain of salt, since Gygax lists Lovecraft as a major influence on D&D when his influence is almost wholly absent when you look at the game itself. By contrast, the other major influences—de Camp and Pratt, Howard, Leiber, Merritt, Vance—shine readily through. These dovetail well with Gygax preferring the less epic, more personal Hobbit than the epic Lord of the Rings.
@Charles Saeger: I have no doubt that Gygax made remarks in 80’s issues of Dragon Magazine about how Tolkien had little influence on the course of D&D. But those remarks would have been entirely consistent with his attitude towards Tolkien’s works prior to any threat of legal action.
According to Jon Peterson’s authoritative book Playing at the World (Section 5.10), the original threat of legal action didn’t even come from the Tolkien estate, but from Elan Merchandising, who held the non-literary (including game) rights to Tolkien’s works, and they sent a cease-and-desist letter in late 1977. By that point, however, Gygax was already on the record several times over about how much (or rather, how little) Tolkien’s influence had been a factor in the development of D&D (as the book notes in Section 2.3). In “La Vivandiere” vol. 1 no. 4 (late 1974) Gygax asserts that of Chainmail and D&D “the first is very much more influenced by the works of Professor Tolkien than is the second.” That came at the end of a longer section where he lambasted the idea that Tolkien was “the ultimate authority” on fantasy and how many gamers saw “his writings as sacrosanct,” noting that he didn’t think that position was deserved.
Make no mistake, the idea that “Gary Gygax was downplaying the influence of D&D only after the Tolkien estate threatened TSR with legal action” is entirely a fiction. Gary was never happy with the idea that Tolkien was the be-all end-all of fantasy, and he had no qualms about saying so long before any legalities were involved.