Looking well beyond our current campaign (4-6 months away, maybe?), I've made it clear that I want to test out a different system called Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC for short). It's a weird, old school RPG very similar to d&d. In many ways it's a MUCH simpler version of 5th edition d&d. I still want to keep this future campaign in the Mystara world, so I decided to make the start date 4000 years previous to our current campaign. This DCC start date is before the Cataclysm and Great Rain of Fire that destroyed and reshaped the world. When magic was powerfully raw and the ability to tame it was still uncertain. It's called the Age of Blackmoor.
I found an article on the Blackmoor setting (Partial version below. Full article here: http://www.pandius.com/bmooruse.html ) Interesting read that talks about the significance of Blackmoor to d&d. Although there are many people who contribute to making the Mystara universe, I think this guy has contributed the most. Just a warning: I plan to keep the campaign area very small. It's dark, grim, and gritty style of play. I usually play 5th edition as "big heroic fantasy."
I have an old PDF of Blackmoor published by zeitgeist games that I picked up from DrivethruRPG.com
Using Blackmoor in Your Mystara Campaign
By Havard
Most Mystara fans will know of the ancient land of Blackmoor. From the early D&D Gazetteers, it appeared in the timelines and histories of the setting not just as a mysterious place, but an entire ancient era, laying the foundations for the modern world. The exact nature of Blackmoor, what it was and what happened to it is something that most sourcebooks kept vague. Many gamers will also know that Blackmoor was the name of Dave Arneson’s Campaign that he ran in the early 1970s before designing Dungeons & Dragons with Gary Gygax. But how much does the campaign Dave Arneson ran in his father’s Minnesota basement have to do with Mystara’s past? In this article, we will look more closely into that as well as what Blackmoor is, what material is available for Mystara’s Blackmoor and explore how Blackmoor can be used in many different types of Mystara campaigns.
How did Blackmoor End up in Mystara (And Greyhawk)?
How did Blackmoor end up as part of Mystara anyway? And why is there also a place in Greyhawk with the same name? As mentioned Blackmoor was originally the name of Dave Arneson’s fantasy campaign that he ran for his friends in Minnesota in the 1970s in a game that had not yet developed into what we know as D&D. During the first decade following Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax creating D&D in 1974, two products were published; Supplement II: Blackmoor (TSR, 1975) and The First Fantasy Campaign (JG 1976). While Mystara fans can find these products useful, they do not reference a specific game world outside the Kingdom of Blackmoor and its closest neighbouring realms.
Gary Gygax wished to pay homage to this campaign that was so important in shaping the world’s first roleplaying game so when they were getting ready to turn Greyhawk into a published campaign setting, he decided to name one of the baronies Blackmoor, but TSR did not go out of its way to accommodate the lore of Blackmoor within the Greyhawk setting. Greyhawk fans have later tried to incorporate more of Dave Arneson’s material into Greyhawk, but for future published material, it would be another setting that would become home of Blackmoor.
So how did Dave Arneson’s fantasy kingdom end up in Mystara? With the publication of AD&D 1st Edition between 1977 and 1979, the D&D line became split into two. The advanced D&D product line and the line that was simply called D&D (or later sometimes referred to as Classic D&D). It is a well known fact that there were several disputes between Dave Arneson and TSR over the rights to D&D. This is too complex an issue to get into in this article, but it is possible that these legal disputes were part of the reason why TSR wanted to keep Blackmoor away from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons product line as much as possible. Since Greyhawk was published as an AD&D setting this meant the Blackmoor found in Greyhawk would not see much further development while TSR instead looked at another home for Dave Arneson’s fantasy world.
In 1981, the module X1 the Isle of Dread was published for the “Classic” D&D line. Within that module was a map and detail of countries simply referred to as “the Continent”. This was the birth of the Mystara setting. From then on, anything published for the D&D product line was to be placed in this world. Now many people believe that Bruce Heard was the one responsible for connecting Blackmoor and Mystara, but although Bruce Heard is probably the designer that had the most influence over how this setting came to be developed, the decisions regarding Blackmoor predate his position as product manager of the D&D product line. Instead it was Harold Johnson who contacted Dave Arneson and David J Ritchie to produce a series of modules for Blackmoor and it was on Johnson’s watch that it was decided that these modules would not be placed on the map of “the D&D Game World” as Mystara was known back then, but rather placed in the setting’s past, accessible only by time travel.1 The result was four modules labelled the DA Series. From then on references in Blackmoor were included in various D&D books, most notably in the Gazetteer Series whose timelines for the world’s history often began with the Great Rain of Fire and the destruction of Blackmoor.
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