Dave Arneson created the theme of the campaign setting as over arching world from the ground up. Blackmoor isn't to be taken lightly & I've come to respect the campaign world setting over the years. There are a variety of reasons for this but one important one springs to mind.
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Both Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson's approaches to gaming were day & night in many senses of the word. Yet there was common ground in the both the war game hobby & the design of what would become the original Dungeons & Dragons rules. At two thirty in the morning I'm trying to hammer out in my head what Dave Arneson, Blackmoor, & The First Fantasy campaign Judge's Guild product code thirty seven mean to me. I'm seven years old & the First Fantasy campaign is being explained to me by the older brother of a friend of mine. Impressions don't cut it. There are rules for baronies, things for characters to do, & the entire Blackmoor dungeon. That's where my first player character was killed.
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Blackmoor is laser etched into my tiny little brain back in Nineteen Seventy Seven & original Dungeons & Dragons has me hooked when I was killed by my first encounter(murder) with a skeleton. By the way that was in Blackmoor dungeon & it slaughtered me. Fifteen minutes later I had another first level player character ready to go. A magic user named 'Clavus The Creator' who lasted a bit longer because I got a bit smarter. That's what Blackmoor did for me as a setting. It got me to play smarter & then think things through as a player. I wouldn't be allowed to be a dungeon master until much later on. I never have forgotten that skeleton nor the nastiness of that first go around in the dungeons of Blackmoor.
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By age eight years old I was taking on the role of dungeon master & had my own copy of Blackmoor, plus The Judge's Guild First Fantasy Campaign. Later on I subject other players to the tortures of the dungeons of Blackmoor.So I have a bit of a different take on Dave Arneson to a certain degree, is he actually smiling at all those poor bastards who had fun being killed by his various creations?!
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