Blackmoor


 * This article is about the fantasy campaign setting, for the goldfish type see Black Moor

Blackmoor is a fantasy role-playing game campaign setting generally associated with the game Dungeons & Dragons. It originally evolved 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 the longest continuously played fantasy role-playing campaign in existence. It is a mysterious land of sword and sorcery mixed with relics of highly advanced technology.

Original
The original Blackmoor was published by Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) in 1975 in booklet form as the second supplement to D&D (the first being Greyhawk). It added rules, monsters, treasure, and the first ever published role-playing game scenario, "Temple of the Frog". Despite the name, however, it did not include any information on the setting itself.

The Blackmoor supplement introduced the following options to the D&D game:

Additional Character Classes

 * Assassin - thief sub-class
 * Monk - "Monastic Martial Arts", cleric sub-class, attributes of thief and fighter classes

Hit Location System
Regions of a character's body were assigned their own hit points (HP). If any of the specific regions 'died', the character would be crippled or killed. Therefore, vulnerable areas such as the head had fewer HP, and less critical ones, such as the legs, might have as many HP as the character itself. These rules covered a wide variety of creatures, from humanoids to fish. Characters had a greater chance to hit another character's upper body than the head or lower body. This chance was adjusted based on the character's height and weapon reach.

Underwater Adventures
Rules for swimming, equipment weight restrictions, weapons use (few missile weapons, electrical attacks, no fire, etc.) plus numerous new water-dwelling monsters and useful equipment to populate these adventures.

Diseases
Lastly, Blackmoor added guidelines for handling of character diseases.

Expansion Modules
Though Arneson left TSR in the early 1980s, Blackmoor remained a part of D&D lore and was referred to in many later supplements. In a subsequent re-release of the world of Greyhawk for the AD&D game, an artic region of mysterious black ice in the northwestern area of the map was called Blackmoor. But Blackmoor would become integral to a different setting and even rules-system, that of the Basic Dungeons & Dragons game.

For various reasons, TSR published two different versions of their flagship game line. Over the course of several supplements, the "Basic" version of D&D developed its own campaign setting, referred to at first simply as the Known World and later as Mystara. When the history of Mystara was codified, it was established that Arneson's Blackmoor had existed in the world's distant past, achieved a technologically advanced civilization and then destroyed itself in a global catastrophe which shifted the planet's axis.

Though its influence was now central to at least one of TSR's published worlds, the actual setting of Blackmoor as Arneson described it had yet to be presented. This was finally remedied in the mid-1980s through the DA series of modules, which carried a party of adventurers into Mystara's past to visit Blackmoor. The first of these, DA1 "Adventures in Blackmoor", described in general the geography and politics of Blackmoor and the means by which the characters travel there. DA2 "Temple of the Frog" expanded the scenario which had appeared back in the original Blackmoor supplement. DA3 "City of the Gods" explored the starship crashed near the Kingdom of Blackmoor from which the setting's intentional anachronisms derived. DA4 "The Duchy of Ten" dealt with a horde of invading barbarians but was the only work not derived from Dave Arneson's original campaign notes. A fifth installment, DA5 "City of Blackmoor", was announced but was never written or published.

Though there were no further direct explorations of Blackmoor, later Mystara products continued to make reference to it. For instance, "The Wrath of the Immortals", an epic adventure which described a massive war involving both heaven and earth, climaxes with the discovery of the preserved control room from the starship which had crashed near Blackmoor millennia ago.

d20 System
After the Basic D&D game and its Mystara setting were discontinued, Zeitgeist Games, where Arneson now works, produced an updated d20 System version of Blackmoor, Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Campaign Setting, published by Goodman Games in 2004. Goodman and Zeitgeist also produced a Blackmoor d20 adventure module, Dave Arneson's Blackmoor: The Redwood Scar (2004) and sourcebook, Dave Arneson's Blackmoor: The Wizards Cabal (2005).

There is also an ongoing "MMRPG" - Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game - campaign organized by Zeitgeist games, which is similar in form to the Living Campaigns organized by the RPGA. There are currently (May 16th 2006) about 20 released modules for the MMRPG available for play at home and at Gaming conventions such as Gen Con and Megacon.

Megacon is Blackmoor's home convention, where the new season is kicked off each year.