Amazing Blackmoor Map by Greyhawk and Blackmoor Fan

(map excerpt only)

This amazing Blackmoor map details Blackmoor as it appears in the World of Greyhawk. It was by a Blackmoor fan named Steven Quigley who allowed me to share it on my website. Sven made this for his campaign which takes place in Greyhawk. 

You can download the full version of the map with a higher resolution  from the Comeback Inn here. 

-Havard

Map by Ashtagon of Blackmoor is Complete

Last week, I talked about how  Ashtagon was making maps of Blackmoor based on the maps from the DA modules.The map hs now complete:

What was particularly fascinating was that fans could follow the map making process live as Ashtagon was creating the map. The process was live streamed on Discord via the Piazza Discord Server. The final version of the map is being offered for free.

Go here for the final results!

What would you like to see Ashtagon tackle next? If you like Blackmoor maps, also check out the maps we have offered for free at the Blackmoor Archives, companion site to the Comeback Inn!

-Havard

Live Map Making from Ashtagon for Blackmoor This Sunday

A follow up from a post from earlier this week when Asthagon, the founder of the D&D Worlds Fan forum known as The Piazza started making Blackmoor maps to share with other fans. The map she made at the time was a replica of the map from DA3 City of the Gods which shows the southern lands of Blackmoor with the Valley of the Ancients in the center. 

The question was, would this be Ashtagon's only venture into Blackmoor map making? Fortunately, she just announced that she will be doing another map. Moreover, this will be done live on the Piazza Discord Channel to demonstrate the process. It is not clear what map she will be tackling next, but only that it is related to Blackmoor. The live mapping process can be watched this Sunday afternoon GMT time. 

Find out how you can join the Piazza Discord Channel here. (its all free, fan organized). 

-Havard

Blackmoor Replica Maps Made by Piazza Founder

Ashtagon, the founder of the D&D Worlds Fan Forum known as The Piazza has been making Blackmoor maps based on those found in the DA series. 

The map making process was demonstrated on The Piazza's Discord channel before posted at The Forum. The current map is based on the map from DA3 City of the Gods and shows the Valley of the Ancients and its surrounding areas. 

Lets hope Ashtagon will make more Blackmoor maps in the future! :)

Grab your free copy of the map today. Visit Blackmoor at The Piazza here.

If you love fan made Blackmoor maps, you may also check out the maps available at my website the Blackmoor Archives, where you can find maps by myself as well as other very talented artists. All for free of course! 

Do you prefer hex maps or other styles when it comes to D&D maps?

-Havard

Unique Blackmoor Map Signed by Dave Arneson Considered Sold at Gary Con 2022

Brent Chumley recently posted on Facebook about this wonderful map on Facebook. Chumley created this Blackmoor map based on Dave Arneson's maps for the Zeitgeist Games iteration of Blackmoor. The map was released in poster format with the Softcover Blackmoor Campaign Sourcebook from 2004. The big news now is that Chumley is in possession copy of this very map that he made that was signed by Dave Arneson. And he may be convinced to sell it off at the Gary Con auction. 

Here's what Chumley had to say about the map:

"As the Artist that created the Dave Arneson Blackmoor map for Zeitgeist Games back in 2005, I have the ONE AND ONLY copy of this map SIGNED by DAVE ARNESON himself for sale!!!! I am attaching photos of it along with pics of his signature and my cartography credit. I am interested to see if anyone is interested in this piece of history as it is the only one in existence!!! I WILL have this map with me at GaryCon. There is a room dedicated to Dave at GaryCon with a miniaturized version of this map that sits on the table just inside the entrance to the room. I am the artist that created this map and may try to put it in the Auction if there is interest. Direct Message me at the show or before for details if interested. Luke Gygax"

If anyone has an insane amount of money and are going to GaryCon, feel free to buy it and send it to me as a present. :D Just kidding of course, but I always loved this Blackmoor map. Gary Con is March 24-27

-Havard

Greg Svenson's Lost Dungeon of Tonisborg: What Can The Maps Tell Us?

The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg is an adventure with a history going back to the Blackmoor Campaign of the 1970s. It was created by Greg Svenson, player in Dave Arneson's campaign back in 1973/1974. Greg placed the adventure in Blackmoor and the city also appeared in Dave's campaign, although when the First Fantasy Campaign was published in 1977, Dave changed the name of the city to Vestfold, which was kept in later publications of Blackmoor. The origins of Vestfold and Tonisborg are discussed in more detail in this article.

Greg's Dungeon Maps were thought lost forever untill a copy was rediscovered by another member of Dave Arneson's group, David Megarry, the designer of Dungeon! More details about the dungeon and its rediscovery can be read at Dan Bogg's blog here. A rewamped version of the dungeon is currently in the works to be published as a special stretch goal for the Secrets of Blackmoor Kickstarter. Recently many backers of the Kickstarter have joined the Comeback Inn Forum as the Secrets of Blackmoor creators have promised to share more details with Kickstarter backers there.

Recently, the Secrets of Blackmoor Facebook page shared Megarry's copies of the original dungeon maps for Dungeon Level 1 and Dungeon Level 3 of the Tonisborg Dungeon. It is interesting to see that this map shares certain features with Dave Arneson's dungeon maps that are less common in dungeon maps from later decades. We see the characteristic diagonal corridors, non-standard rooms and long corridors that seem to lead to no rooms.

David Megarry offered the following suggestion to why Dave Arneson may have used diagonal corridors in his dungeons

"My hunch is that it is a consequence of Arneson drawing the roads and streams for table top battlefield maps for the Napoleonic Campaign. Outside of urban areas, roads and streams go any which way; it is only in cities and towns you end up with grid systems (though some older east coast towns road designs may have been drawn by drunken city planners, who knows?;) He did use graph paper to draw his maps but was not bound by those grid lines. If you look at the original Blackmoor town map, you can see that a tunnel from the town to Elf home or the Freehold would follow a diagonal line." 

This theory certainly makes sense, and I do agree that Dave Arneson was probably thinking in terms of what was going on above ground much more than what later dungeon mappers would have been. From the FFC we know that his maps point towards where certain corridors would connect to other dungeons (like the Glendower dungeon connecting to the Blackmoor Dungeon) and other parts of Blackmoor.


Interestingly, this might also tell us how the designers of such maps (in this case Greg) imagined the surface world above the dungeon might have appeared. Upon Greg's suggestion, I placed Tonnisborg on the small island outside of Vestfold. Do I need to revise my city plan map now? :)

-Havard

Awesome Fantasy Maps by Thorfinn Tait Cartography

Although we have never met in person, I have known Thorfinn Tait for decades now. He is one of several people from the Mystara fan community that I consider my friends after so many years of talking online about our favorite fantasy setting.

Over the years Thorfinn has developed amazing skills as a fantasy map maker. He started out making fan maps of Mystara, but in recent years he teamed up with D&D designer and former TSR product manager Bruce Heard in order to produce maps for the World of Calidar from Calidar Publishing.

You can get tons of free maps made by Thorfinn Tait Cartography over at http://thorf.co.uk/

Recently Thorfinn also joined Patreon so that you can now support his Calidar Maps through that program. Making maps for small fantasy RPG publishing companies is not something that typically makes you filthy rich, so it would be really cool if you went on to support Thorfinn Tait at Patreon. I hope to see many more maps from Thorfinn in the future so any small amount sent his way will probably help!


-Havard

More Blackmoor from Anna Meyer!

Gotta love Anna Meyer and her spectacular maps of the World of Greyhawk. I have talked about Anna's maps before. Once again she turns to the Blackmoor region. Here is the latest sample of her work in progress:

Watch how this develops in the Facebook group here.Thanks to my friend, Big Mac from The Piazza for bringing Anna's latest map to my attention.

As I said, this is a work in progress. More locations will presumably be added later on, perhaps including the ones from the map below:

-Havard

Exploring the Vales of Blackmoor

Heroes of the Vales is the second chapter in my Play by Post Campaign. Hosted at the Comeback Inn, this game is  set in the Vales, a remote region west of Blackmoor. It has been great running this game for a group consisting of some of the most hard core Blackmoor fans on the Internet, including Greg Svenson who was a regular in Dave Arneson's original campaign.

One of the great things about the Vales is that it is a region where very little has been detailed in published sources. This offers a lot of creative freedom. On the other hand, one of my goals is to preserve a certain Blackmoor atmosphere for the campaign. Most recently I revealed to my players a map of a much greater area of the region than they had seen before...




-Havard

Greyhawk Mapper Darlene Speaks!

Darlene Pekul, TSR illustrator and map maker, began answering questions to fans today over at The Piazza D&D Worlds Forum. Perhaps best known for the first published versions of the World of Greyhawk maps, Darlene is happy to get back in touch with her fans after decades: "I feel like I'm a comet in an elliptical orbit on a return journey after 30-years" says the 58 year old artist.

Parts of The Darlene Greyhawk Map

In the Piazza discussion forum thread, she talks about her friendship with other well known former TSR employees such as Joe Orlowski, Dave Sutherland,Jon Pickens, Kenneth Reek and Tim Kask as well as her relationship to game designer and Blackmoor alumni, Mike Carr.

In her first batch of answers to curious fans, she also talks about her first jobs for TSR:

"Among the first jobs I was given to do was to design and produce an outdoor sign for TSR's Williams Street building. I made the sign in the shape of a shield and painted The Dragon on one side and TSR on the other. Although I had earned my BA degree in Art, nobody initially associated me with illustration. I was first and foremost associated with graphics design, happy to receive any freelance work I was given..."

It is going to be interesting to follow this discussion with Darlene and listen to her experiences and see what they tell us about the early days of TSR and the early development of Greyhawk.

Also, make sure to visit Darlene's Facebook Fan Page and her website.


-Havard

More Maps!

When I posted about Dave L's maps the other day, some of those who commented expressed a dislike about the site hosting the maps. Now Dave L has made more Blackmoor hex maps and he has allowed me to upload them all to my site!

The maps can be downloaded here.

Discuss the maps with their creator at the Comeback Inn.



-Havard

Dave L's Blackmoor Hex Map

Piazza poster Dave L is making new gorgeous looking Blackmoor hex maps! He just posted his version of the DA1 map here. Everyone should click on the link above and download it!

Here's a sample:

Some more discussions about Dave L's maps can be found at the Comeback Inn.







-Havard

Age of the Wolf Map!

 Looking at the cover for Age of the Wolf, you may have noticed this part of a beautifully rendered map for the Age of the Wolf campaign setting.  As you may remember, Age of the Wolf is set 269 years into Blackmoor's future. A lot has changed during the years that have passed, apparently. From the map alone we can learn that the City of Blackmoor has been destroyed. Boggy Bottom is also marked off as ruins. What has happened to these places? Is it the Afridhi? Or the Egg of Coot? Notice also a new city, Rodhin located in the Spine of the Dragon. I don't recognize it from any of the older maps. You will also notivce that Glendover is misspelled on this map, but I assume that is only a typo. Back to the Ruins of Blackmoor, we already know that Blackmoor would be destroyed in the Age of the Wolf since the announcement of the product called Ruins of Blackmoor. What disaster caused all this destruction to our beloved realm? Hopefully, some day someone will share with us what they had planned for this setting.

-Havard

C&C Society Setting

In a blog entry from the 20th of Novemer this year, James Maliszewski writes that:

"Both Blackmoor and Greyhawk have at least part of their origins in the Domesday Book map of the Castle & Crusade Society of the International Federation of Wargamers. Issue #13 of that periodical included an early version of Blackmoor, well before OD&D was ever published."

The Castle & Crusade Society was a chapter of the International Federation of Wargamers and was formed in 1968 by Gary Gygax. In the First Fantasy Campaign, Arneson writes that he reserved a remote spot on the IFW's Castle & Crusade map of the Great Kingdom. The Great Kingdom is ofcourse the basis of Greyhawk's Great Kingdom and also the Great Kingdom of Blackmoor, which Dave Ritchie turned into the Empire of Thonmia in the DA series and beyond.

What is known about the original C&C World? At the Acaeum, Rob Kuntz describes how he was listed as King of the Great Kingdom. This is reflected in the Blackmoor timeline even today, as it is stated that Blackmoor was founded by King Robert I of Geneva.

Maliszewski further describes how the C&CS World can still be seen in both Greyhawk and Blackmoor:

"Echoes of this reality can be seen in the existence of a northern realm of Blackmoor within the World of Greyhawk and of a "Great Kingdom" in each -- a formerly good and noble realm that fell to evil and despotism and against which several nations rebelled. Likewise, there's also a Duchy of Ten(h) in each setting, whose name, legend has it, derives from its existence in section 10 of the C&C map, which was parceled into "land grants" to be given to C&C members to develop on their own."

The C&CS World map was roughly based on North America. More information about this setting can probably be learned from the Domesday Book, the C&CS Newsletter. Issue #13 has the first known printed information about Blackmoor.

 

An original map of the town of Blackmoor from #13 of the Domesday Book can be viewed here. A revised version of this map appears in the FFC.





Illustrations: Top: Reworked illustration of the Domesday Book Cover by Kevin Mayle. Bottom: Original Domesday Book #13 cover.



-Havard

BLACKMOOR MAPS

A few days ago, I asked the wise folks over at the Original D&D Discussion Forum about the origins of the Blackmoor map. Two rumours have been circulating about the maps as told by Finarvyn:

1. Both Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns were tied to the old C&C Society kingdoms map. (This certainly fits the Greyhawk=Chicago model that Gary has stated but, since the original Blackmoor campaign was not directly linked to the original Greyhawk campaign, it doesn't really explain Blackmoor's coastline. Also, I can't recall if Dave has ever made this claim, or if it was a Gary-only thing.)

2. Blackmoor was based on Dutch maps, only possibly inverted or reversed or somehow in a way that makes them hard to identify. (I've spent a lot of time looking at Dutch coastlines and haven't been able to match anything up close enough to match Dave's maps. However, since this is Dave's version of the story I'm inclined to put a lot of faith into it.)

Now, it didnt take long for replies to my query. James Mishler posted this excellent article on the connection between the Dutch maps and the original Blackmoor map.

I am still not convinced that the C&C Society maps are irrelevant to the shape Blackmoor took, but James certainly convinced me of the connections to the Dutch maps. His blog article is a real gem!

Havard