Go to Part 1

MAPS

Arneson’s maps for the Castle Blackmoor dungeons are simply fabulous. I’ve previously discussed how incredible the first room of the dungeon is, as well as the terrors of Tanglefuck, but all of the levels are deliciously labyrinthine and intricately xandered. Of particular note is Arneson’s heavy use of diagonal tunnels, which are surprisingly effective at confusing the players’ spatial intuition.

When you reflect that, with these maps, Arneson was doing something that no one else had ever done before, the fact that they nevertheless stand the test of time and still create a completely compelling dungeon experience is a jaw-dropping accomplishment. Blackmoor is, in my opinion, a timeless classic.

In terms of utility, though, the biggest obstacle to using the Blackmoor maps are the unkeyed staircases. There are A LOT of them (which is good), but:

• there is no indication of where each staircase goes;
• staircases can attach to multiple levels; and
• staircases can skip multiple levels before reaching their destination.

For example, consider this section of Level 5:

Figuring out where all these stairs connect is made even more difficult because the maps for different dungeon levels are done at different scales (to accommodate larger levels that otherwise wouldn’t conveniently fit on a single page).

Basically, if you jump into Castle Blackmoor without predetermining how the stairs connect to each other, you’re going to end up slamming your face into the wall in the middle of the session trying to figure it out. Fortunately, DH Boggs at Hidden in Shadows has done a bunch of work on this issue, which you can find at Aligning the Stairs, Shafts, and Elevators in Blackmoor Dungeon.

The other thing to note about the Blackmoor dungeon is the lack of a room key. I pulled a few details from tales told of the infamous dungeon, but mostly I just improvised my descriptions. One of the cool things about the campaign was the way in which improvised details would become unexpected poles of adventure, but my notekeeping system wasn’t designed to record these details. As a result, the dungeon was really “living in my head,” and when COVID created a long break in the campaign and the dungeon was no longer being refreshed in my imagination each week, it fell apart.

Another challenge or crux to be solved when using the Blackmoor dungeons are the tunnel maps. Levels 4 and 5 of the dungeons connect to a much larger network of underground tunnels that run underneath the town and nearby area. Here’s a sample of what these maps look like:

The rectangular dotted line indicates where the Level 4 Dungeon map would “fit” on the tunnel map. What the oblong-shaped set of dotted lines indicates is unclear, but you can also see indications given for where these tunnels connect to the Cemetery, Inn, and Church as seen on the Blackmoor Village Map. Additional areas intersected by the tunnels are indicated, but completely unkeyed in The First Fantasy Campaign.

To deal with this, I started by prepping a version of the Level 4 Tunnel Map that included the Level 4 Dungeon Map:

(This was not necessary for the Level 5 Tunnel Map because there are fewer and less complicated connections to the Level 5 Dungeon Map. Although it’s useful to note that the Level 4 and Level 5 tunnels sometimes intersect the same subterranean areas.)

The next question was figuring out what the various numbered areas were. I decided to grab a couple dozen Dyson Logos maps, stock them with my Arnesonian stocking procedures, and drop them in. This was really fun, and one of my big regrets with the campaign is that my players didn’t do much more than dip their toes into these tunnels.

A final crux was how to handling the stocking of huge number of denizens. Basically, if you use the 1974 D&D rules for randomly generating the number of creatures appearing, you can end up with stuff like 17 ents, 76 dwarves, or 23 hobbits keyed to 10’ x 20’ room. This “horde in a small room” is also a problem with Arneson’s published key — which, for example, includes 32 dwarves in a 5’ x 10’ room — and it’s entirely clear what his intention was or how that would be handled at the table.

I saw basically three options:

1. Revise the # appearing to some reasonable count based on the size of the dungeon.
2. If it makes sense, spread the creatures out through several neighboring rooms.
3. If the stocking procedures indicated an impossible number of creatures in a room, treat the room as the entry point to a sub-level that could t hen be stocked with the indicated creatures.

I wanted to use the original stocking procedures as my guiding light as much as possible, so I discarded #1. I did a little bit of #2 where appropriate, but I generally found #3 the most interesting option.

So I once again grabbed a bunch of Dyson Logos maps. In this case, though, I just stuck the blank maps into a folder labeled “Sub-Levels.” When the PCs reached a location that required a sub-level, I would grab a map semi-randomly from the folder and slot it in.

My seed key for the Blackmoor Dungeons, by chance, mostly had these sub-levels generated on the lower levels, so I ended up only developing two or three of these in actual play. But it was a fun way to make the Blackmoor Dungeons my own, and the mixture of Dyson’s mapping with Arneson’s was an interesting change of pace.

ENCOUNTER DIE

In my Blackmoor campaign I also used an encounter die mechanic, as detailed in the Blackmoor Player’s Reference. This was not an Arnesonian technique, but something I adapted from OSR mechanics, most notably Courtney Solomon’s hazard die.

The basic concept is that, instead of rolling 1d6 per turn and generating a random encounter on a roll of 1, you roll 1d6 per turn and each die result has a different effect:

• Encounter
• Monster Sign
• Torches Burn
• Torches & Lanterns Burn
• Rest
• Dungeon Effect / Trap

The idea is that this eliminates a bunch of timekeeping activities, instead loading everything onto a single die roll that you were going to make anyway.

My verdict?

It sucked.

Because something is always happening, every dungeon turn got bogged down in some random bookkeeping. It was a mood- and pace-killing source of constant annoyance.

I ended up dropping the system entirely after a few sessions, and I don’t recommend it.

GROUP VENTURES

Fairly early in the campaign, due to a confluence of events, a group of PCs ended up taking over the local church in Blackmoor. This created an unexpected group venture, and managing that group venture in an open table created logistical issues for which I didn’t find a satisfactory solution before the campaign ended.

The problem, in short, was that there was church-related development and church-related adventures that these PCs wanted to pursue. But because they were all in it together, they wanted to resolve these activities only when they were playing together.

Additional complications were added because some of the activities they wanted to pursue — throwing a big festival to celebrate the rededication of the church; proselytizing to other communities around Blackmoor — both required special prep from me and also had a wide impact on the entirety of Blackmoor.

The result was this tight nugget of activity in bespoke sessions that could also create a weird pattern of lockouts in the rest of the open table. It probably would have worked out OK if these three players had ben able to get together on a regular basis, but there were A LOT of scheduling problems and cancellations. (Which were then further complicated by the COVID pandemic and lockdowns.)

As I say, this is a problem did not actually solve before the campaign came to an end. But figuring out how to handle group ventures like this in the future is definitely on my To Do list for future open tables.

FURTHER READING
Reactions to OD&D: The Arnesonian Dungeon
Reactions to OD&D: Arneson’s Machines

The Blackmoor Cruxes
Reactions to OD&D

Go to Part 1

From 2018 to 2020, I ran an open table set in the dungeons of Castle Blackmoor.

If you’re not familiar with Blackmoor, it’s THE original D&D dungeon. Created by Dave Arneson in the early ‘70s, the very first people to ever play a modern roleplaying game crawled through its tunnels. When Arneson took the game to Lake Geneva and ran it for Gary Gygax, these were the rooms that Gygax’s character hacked and slashed his way through.

In 1977, Judges Guild published Arneson’s The First Fantasy Campaign. Although deliberately incomplete (because Arneson wanted to keep secrets from the people still playing in his campaign) and often frustratingly impenetrable (because Arneson sort of just gave Judges Guild a stack of various notes, drawn from multiple periods of time and with little indication of their context, intent, or even relation to each other), this slim tome provides a unique and irreplaceable insight into the early days of the RPG hobby and the campaign that gave birth to D&D.

In particular, as detailed in my Running Castle Blackmoor series, The First Fantasy Campaign includes a copy of Arneson’s dungeon maps and enough information that you can cobble together something resembling his original stocking procedures. Using this knowledge, I reset the clock on Blackmoor (so that my players would be the first to journey within), stocked the Blackmoor maps to create my own version of the dungeon, and launched a campaign that would, ultimately, last for several dozen sessions.

By the time the campaign came to an end, a little over two dozen players had delved into the Blackmoor dungeons. They’d even begun transforming the village of Blackmoor to suit their desires. (More on that momentarily.) COVID was the primary reason the campaign floundered, but there were also some deeper issues with how the campaign was set up. If not for the pandemic, I might have found the time and effort necessary to correct those issues, but unfortunately that never happened.

Nevertheless, I thought it might be useful to review the lessons I learned from running a Blackmoor campaign – both positive and negative. Some of these may be most useful if you’re interested in setting up your own Blackmoor campaign (which I heartily recommend!), but there are quite a few secrets to be gleaned that could be useful for almost any table.

SPECIAL INTEREST XP

In The First Fantasy Campaign, Arneson also describes an experience system based on “special interests.” Instead of earning XP through combat or simple looting, the PCs would instead need to spend money specifically on their special interests in order to advance.

Unfortunately, the system described by Arneson doesn’t work. (I mean this in the most literal sense: There’s missing and contradictory information that makes it impossible to use as written.) I was fascinated by the potential of the concept, however, and designed my own Special Interest XP System to use in my Blackmoor campaign:

• Special interests included carousing, song/fame, religion/spirituality, philanthropy, caranvale, hoarding, training, and hobbies.
• When creating characters, players would randomly determine which special interests would be favored by their character.
• GP spent on a special interest would translate to XP, modified by the character’s level of interest in that special interest.
• Additional rules limited expenditures by the size/quality of a community, providing motivation for PCs to either (a) pursue multiple special interests, (b) travel, (c) improve their community, and/or (d) avail themselves of trade caravans (which served as an additional font of adventure hooks).

Using Special Interest XP: Implementing (and explaining) this system did increase the amount of time required for character creation. For an open table you really want character creation to be as fast as possible, and there were a few sessions where this extra load had a slightly negative effect. It just took too long to start playing.

The solution I found was to delay explaining how the various special interests actually worked until the end of the session. This:

• Reduced the time spent at the beginning of the session.
• Engaged players when they were most excited about the system (e.g., they had money they could spend to earn XP), increasing their attention and interest.
• No longer kept existing players waiting. Since they already knew how the system worked, they could immediately begin plotting how to invest their loot at the end of the session while the new players got onboarded.

I also experimented with pushing the generation of special interests to the end of the session for new players, but this backfired because:

• Players already familiar with the system who were generating new characters wanted to immediately generate their special interests, often creating confusion.
• It created too much bookkeeping at the end of the session when people often needed to wrap things up and head home.

Effects of Special Interest XP: Tweaking the presentation of special interest XP to make it work smoothly at my open table was well worth the effort because the actual effect of using special interest XP in play was astounding.

Let’s talk about PCs investing in their community – buying houses, founding businesses, establishing strongholds, etc. My typical experience with D&D across many different editions is that, unless the DM specifically frames up an opportunity (e.g., an NPC giving the PCs Trollskull Manor as a quest reward in Dragon Heist), it usually takes somewhere between seven and twelve levels before the PCs start setting down roots like this. In practical terms, it requires not only a certain amount of money, but also for the players to have bought all the other goodies (armor, equipment, etc.) they desire.

Special interest XP, on the other hand, saw the PCs immediately start investing in the local community. Within just a couple sessions, a cleric had built a healing chapel on a hill just outside of town. He only had a limited number of healing spells, but even when he wasn’t playing other PCs could visit his character at the chapel and pay for healing.

Other characters established a meadery, erected an elven tree shrine, took over the local church, bought a house, and all manner of things. When one group found a flying machine, they decided that they should donate it to the Steward and his Council, who then charged them with conveying it to the capital of the Great Kingdom as tribute.

To be clear, this was all happening with characters who were below 5^th level. I’ve run a lot of D&D over the years and, as I say, I’ve never seen anything like this. If you’re interested in exploring this sort of thing in your own campaign, I definitely recommend adapting Special Interest XP to your system of choice.

STOCKING ISSUES

Almost certainly the biggest problem I had with the campaign was stocking the dungeon.

First, Arneson’s stocking procedures simply didn’t generate enough treasure. (This was even more true when it came to restocking.) Since GP = XP, this meant that the PCs were stunted in their leveling. The lack of leveling also meant that the PCs couldn’t penetrate into the lower levels of the dungeon, which exacerbated the problem.

At a certain point, the PCs were just kind of stuck wandering through rooms that had been thoroughly picked over. Obviously not ideal.

I began experimenting with different solutions, but hadn’t found a completely satisfactory solution before the campaign ended. Therefore, I’d suggest going big for your own Blackmoor:

• Double the amount of treasure in your initial stocking.
• For restocking, double both the likelihood of a new treasure and the value of that treasure.

You should be able to dial it in from there.

(I will note that this might be less of a problem if you’re running Blackmoor as a dedicated table instead of an open one.)

Exacerbating this issue is that the first level of the Blackmoor dungeons is rather small, the second level is only of moderate size, and then difficulty leaps up substantially if you go down to the third level.

Related to this is the lack of variety on the stocking tables. Taken directly from Arneson’s manuscript, for example, the list of possible creatures on the top two levels of the dungeon are:

Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Kobolds, Goblins, Elves, Fairies, Sprites, Pixies, Hobbits

Not only is the list limited, but it also contains some problematic elements in the Pixies, which appear in large numbers and, according to the 1974 D&D rules, “are able to attack while remaining generally invisible. They can be seen clearly only when a spell to make them visible is employed.” Low-level characters wisely learned to simply flee whenever they encountered a pixie.

These problems only became more pronounced with some of the foes encountered on lower levels. As a result, the dungeon slowly became overwhelmed by impossible foes, further limiting where the PCs could safely explore.

Finally, partly as a consequence of all this, there just wasn’t enough of the cool stuff that Blackmoor offers: The ghosts, weird items, spell eggs, Arnesonian machines, etc.

Some of these problems could have been mitigated if the PCs were leveling up (with more powerful PCs clearing out problem spots and leading expeditions into the lower levels), but it was clear to me that all of the stocking and restocking procedures needed an overhaul if the campaign were going to perform to its best potential.

Go to Part 12B: More Lessons Learned in Blackmoor

Go to Part 1

In (Re-)Running the Megadungeon, we looked at how you can evolve a megadungeon over time, actively playing it just like the players actively play their characters: You repopulate it. You modify it. You roleplay the inhabitants.

In the process, you create a dynamic experience that’s constantly surprising and delighting (and terrifying) your players, while also dramatically extending the amount of high-quality playing time you can get out of surprisingly simple prep.

Now I want to return to the series, flip things around, and take a closer look at how the players can evolve the megadungeon over time.

(If you’re here because you’ve innocently just started reading the series: Alert! The last link skipped you forward in time by a dozen years! Don’t worry! Any resulting temporal anomalies will resolve themselves shortly without disrupting your personal continuity.)

INTO CASTLE BLACKMOOR

Of course, almost any action the PCs take in a megadungeon will affect its future form. This is, after all, a back-and-forth dynamic. Killing all the lizardmen is what allows the elementalist to move in and set up shop, right? But what I want to spotlight today are the cases where the PCs more deliberately (and proactively) transform the dungeon.

Most of the examples we’ll be looking at here come from the open table campaign I ran in Castle Blackmoor, the original megadungeon created by Dave Arenson in which the modern roleplaying game was invented, and from which modern D&D was born. Running Castle Blackmoor provides a deeper look into how I set up and ran the campaign, but all you really need to know for now is that Castle Blackmoor sits atop a hill and beneath it lies the dungeon.

When the PCs enter the dungeon, this is the first room they encounter:

Speaking frankly and from experience, this room is incredible.

First, it’s too large for normal torchlight to fully illuminate it. So you’re immediately thrown into a fog of war.

Second, even if you have a more powerful light source, the shape of the room means that you can never see the entire room when you first enter it, no matter which entrance you use. Whether you’re entering the dungeon for the first time or returning to this chamber in the hopes of escaping to the daylight above, you can never be entirely certain if the room is empty… or if there’s something lurking just around the corner.

Third, and most importantly, there are ten doors. (Plus three more secret doors, including two hidden in the columns that aren’t indicated on the map here.) Literally the moment a PC steps into the Blackmoor dungeon, the player is confronted by the absolute necessity to make a choice: Which door are we going to open? Where is our adventure going to take us? The DM isn’t going to make that decision for you. You’re in control of what happens here.

Even if you have literally never played a roleplaying game before (and I’ve run Blackmoor for such players), this room inherently pushes them into actively engaging with the scenario while simultaneously teaching them that the game is about the choices they make.

The entire room screams player agency, and then holds forth the promise of endlessly varied adventure (every time you come back, you can pick another door). It tells you literally everything you need to know about Blackmoor, about dungeons, and about the game in an instant and without ever explicitly explaining any of it.

Playtest Tip: Describing the shape of this room verbally is impossible. If you’re playing in the theater of the mind, nevertheless make a rough sketch of its shape and be prepared to show it to the players. I kept a copy of the sketch I made clipped to my Blackmoor maps. But I digress.

The reason I bring it up here is that it’s a really simple example of player transformation of the dungeon: Confronted with all those doors, the players were confusing themselves when discussing their options and making their maps. So for the sake of clarity, they labeled the doors: First on the maps and then, shortly thereafter, in the dungeon itself.

Starting with the door to the left of the staircase, they labeled them alphabetically, A thru J. (Hilariously, however, the group who first did this missed one of the doors, so “J” ended up out of sequence.) The doors were first labeled in chalk (which one of the PCs had purchased), and this was later made more permanent when mischievous sprites in the dungeon started erasing the labels.

In doing this, my players were unwittingly echoing what Dave Arneson’s original players had done nearly fifty years earlier: After arbitrarily choosing the northwest door, they apparently fell into the habit of using it to mount most of their expeditions. It became known as the “Northwest Passage,” and eventually one of the players hung a wooden placard over the door with this name written upon it.

In my game, a later group took this even further, making coded markings at the various stairs in the dungeon to serve as navigational aids. These codes actually referred back to the door names (so for example, a staircase labeled G2 indicated that they were on the second level and this staircase would take them back to Door G… assuming that they hadn’t gotten lost or confused and encoded the wrong information).

TANGLEFUCK

Becoming lost and confused reminds me of another fun story from my Blackmoor table.

Looking at this section of the dungeon on the map, it seems fairly straightforward, although you may note Arneson’s devilish penchant for oddly angled diagonals.

One evening, however, a group headed into this section of the dungeon and began going in loops. Their map rapidly metastasized (because they were mapping the same corridors over and over again as if they were new passages), and by the time they realized what was happening they were hopelessly disoriented. They began making navigational marks (labeling walls and intersections), but because they were already lost, most of these marks were incorrect, contradicted each other, and only added to their confusion.

Fortunately, everyone at the table was having a great time with this, laughing uproariously whenever the PCs circled around, confident they were breaking new ground, only to come face-to-face with their writing on the wall or floor. (At this point, the sprites had already begun messing with the door labels, so there was also paranoia that something was here in the hallways with them and was altering their signs.)

One memorable moment came when they arrived at an intersection, confidently declared that they had gone left the last time they were here, so they were going to go right this time and they would definitely get out! … except that wasn’t right, and so they ended up looping back around and coming back to the same intersection again.

“Okay, so we definitely went left last time, so we need to go right this time.”

They did this four times!

Ironically, the door out was, in fact, immediately to the left of that intersection.

When they finally figured this out and, with great relief, headed through the door, one of the PCs stopped, took out some charcoal, and wrote in large dwarven runes on the wall, as a warning to all who might come here in the future: TANGLEFUCK.

And thus this section of the dungeon came to be known forever after.

OTHER TALES FROM THE TABLE

In another campaign I ran, the PCs began collapsing tunnels to prevent anyone else from entering a section of the dungeon haunted by a malevolent force. In yet another, the PCs memorably hired a group of mercenaries to guard the entrance to the dungeon and prevent other adventurers from entering. (An effort which met with mixed success.)

These player-led transformations are particularly wonderful in an open table: Because there are other players exploring the world who were not part of the group which made the original changes, those players get to discover them as artifacts of the world (and, conversely, leave their own transformations for others to discover in turn).

These long-term interactions across multiple sessions and groups can pay off in a multitude of gloriously unexpected ways. For example, I mentioned that my Blackmoor players began encoding navigational markers. But there were actually multiple characters who had the same idea, which meant that different groups were encoding information in different, overlapping ways. And then there was the memorable group where only one player had previously been part of an encoding group… and he screwed up the code. So not only did that group leave miscoded marks, but the other PCs in the group — who had been taught the incorrect method — carried that mistaken information into other groups and spread it even farther.

So who made these markings? Another group of explorers? Or monsters looking to trick the interlopers?

The fact that there are other real people interacting with this shared game world and that you can see the consequences of their actions and they can see the consequences of yours is intoxicating. (And can easily lead to motivating players to make even larger and more meaningful impacts on the game world.)

Even at a dedicated table, however, player-led transformations are great. It’s basically GMing on easy mode: You can often just lean back and take notes.

More importantly, the players are metaphorically throwing you a ball. They’re inviting you to play with them, and in the process making it a lot easier for you to generate your own responses that will continue to evolve the dungeon. (Like those sprites altering the navigational markings.)

All you need to do is pick up the ball and throw it back.

FURTHER READING
Treasure Maps & The Unknown: Goals in the Megadungeon
Keep on the Borderlands: Factions in the Dungeon
Xandering the Dungeon
Gamemastery 101

Go to Part 1

A few days ago I streamed a session of my Castle Blackmoor open table on Twitch. During that session, my players and I were frequently referring to the player’s reference pamphlet I had assembled for the campaign. The viewers on Twitch were intrigued and one of my patrons requested that this pamphlet be shared, which I’m now doing.

As I described in Reactions to OD&D years ago, when I first started running an open table using the original 1974 rules of D&D, the various groups I played with would frequently start each session by examining the strange gaps and contradictions in the original text and discuss how we wanted to resolve them. This often meant we were playing with different rules from one session to the next! However, after a half dozen or so sessions we came to sort of a collective agreement on what the “right” answers were (at least for us) and these were codified into house rules. Other house rules have slowly accumulated over the years.

Designed to be printed as a booklet at the same size as the original 1974 D&D rulebooks, this pamphlet collects all of these house rules into a convenience reference document. I’ll usually have multiple copies of both Volume 1: Men & Magic and this pamphlet on the table so that my players can easily flip through either one.

This particular version of the pamphlet has been customized for my Castle Blackmoor campaign. It includes:

• Encumbrance By Stone: An alternative encumbrance system which makes tracking encumbrance as easy as writing down your equipment list.
• OD&D House Rulings: The modern version of what was first described in Justin’s House Rules for OD&D. (Also check out Gary Gygax’s House Rules for OD&D, which are not used here.)
• Special Interest Experience: As described earlier in this series.
• Referee Reference: Which include my personal interpolations for both Hirelings and Morale; the Encounter Die (rolled each turn); and the original Underworld & Flight/Pursuit rolls from OD&D. This material has not previously appeared on the Alexandrian.
• Blackmoor Village Map: Also from earlier in this series.

DOWNLOAD THE PDF

Go to Part 12: Lessons Learned in Blackmoor

Go to Part 1

In running my remixed version of Castle Blackmoor, I knew that the village of Blackmoor at the foot of the castle would become quite important. I printed out copies of some of the earliest maps of Blackmoor created by Arneson, but quickly discovered in actual play that they had not been made available at legible resolutions. With a little bit of research you could sort of figure things out, but the map ultimately proved more confusing than illuminating to most of my players.

What I needed was a copy of the map at a higher resolution so that I could print it out, put it in my GM screen, and have it be clearly visible to players at the opposite end of the table. On the other hand, I didn’t want to radically depart from Arneson’s original material. So what I ended up doing, basically, was redrawing the entire map.

The map above is based on this map from Domesday Book #13:

An even older version of this map was made available on Havard’s Blackmoor blog:

There were a few places where I was tempted to make alterations/corrections. But I ultimately decided to remain as true to this original map as possible. (There is exactly one exception to this, and it shouldn’t be too hard to spot.)

For the version given to my players, however, I did decide to roll the clock back: Jenkins Hill is not yet (and may never be) Jenkins Hill in this version of Blackmoor, nor has the Great Svenny built his freehold. So this will be the version of the map I give to my players:

You can click either of these maps to download high resolution copies.

Go to Part 11: Blackmoor Player’s Reference