Sunday, September 30, 2018

Duke Seifried (1935-2018) Rest in Peace

Duke "Uncle Duke" Seifried (Aug 19 1935-Sept 29 2018) passed away today. He was the first executive vice president of TSR. He was also an artist, game designer, writer, musician, music composer, and public speaker who is probably best known as the legendary artist who has sculpted over 10,000 miniatures.He has lived in Madison, Wisconsin, where he has is known as a guitar player. His ancestors are from Austria.

 In 1957, he graduated from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, with a degree in speech/radio-television. Seifried helped bring polyhedral dice and miniatures into the gaming hobby. He claims that his depiction of Helm's Deep was the most accurate as he'd visited with Professor Tolkien and made sketches with him before designing it.

In 2008, he attended Gary Gygax's funeral. A week before Gygax died, Seifried stumbled upon a one-of-a-kind metal miniature he'd made specifically for Gary many years ago. He had set it aside, intending to give it back to Gary. As a result, the miniature wound up in the pocket of Gary's suit, and he was buried with it. The following year also spoke at Dave Arneson's memorial at Full Sail University.


Rest in Peace.

-Havard




Edit: Dates fixed. Thanks Amanda!

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Are You Caught Up on Blackmoor The MMRPG?

Blackmoor the MMRPG was a Living Campaign for Blackmoor that offered free PDF adventures in Dave Arneson's setting. These adventures are now gradually becoming available at The Comeback Inn. Check out the latest installment, The Coming Storm. This episode also offers new monsters and a new town. Let me know what you think?

-Havard

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

93K+ Follower YouTube Show attempts to Erase Dave Arneson from D&D History. Then Censors Comments.

A friend of mine pointed me to a video about the history of RPGs. The video is released by Toy Galaxy, a YouTube channel with more than 93000 subscribers. While the video appeared to be well researched, going into great detail about the life of Gary Gygax and the things he did with gaming before the creation of D&D, the show goes into great lenght to downplay the key role played in the creation of the world's most famous tabletop roleplaying game of the other co-creator; Dave Arneson.



While this is not the first time a wanna-be gaming historian gives Dave Arneson less credit than this blog author believes he deserves, I think this video takes this unjust trend to a new height. According to the video, many people contributed to the creation of D&D, but "ultimately Dungeons & Dragons as published by TSR was credited to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson." While I think it is admirable that other influential figures of the time get credit for their contributions to the hobby, I don't think that was the intent of the video. Neither David Wesely, Gary Switzer, MAR Barker nor others are mentioned by name. The point of this sentence seems only to be reducing the importance of Dave Arneson who is never mentioned again in the video after that single sentence.

To make matters worse, I have gotten reports that people who have tried to correct this misinformation have had their comments removed from the feed. To confirm this, I added a comment of my own, but this comment does also appear to have been removed except from my own feed. I'm not an expert with how YouTube works, but apparently this sort of censorship is often done manually. If anyone else reading this can see my comments, please let me know. This is pretty disturbing.

Now, gaming historians will disagree about who was most influential in the creation of D&D and who contributed what of Gary and Dave. But I have never seen any even semi-serious gaming historian give Dave as little credit as this video does. You can watch the video here. Let me know if you think I am being unfair.




-Havard

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Dave Arneson Game Day 2018 Coming Up!


Dave Arneson was born on October 1st 2018 1947. For many years now, we have been using this day to honor the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and the creator of Blackmoor. The day has been spent playing RPGs and other games, talking about games and gaming history. To read more about previous year's events, go here.

As you can see, several people are already making plans for Dave Arneson Game Day 2018. Do you plan on participating? What would you like to see from the author of this blog, the people of the Comeback Inn and other participants?

Sign up for Dave Arneson Game Day on Facebook here.

Or join us at the Comeback Inn! 



-Havard

Blackmoor Player Bill Hoyt Shares Campaign Notes in Free PDF

  Bill Hoyt is one of the surviving members of the Blackmoor Bunch, the group that played in Dave's Blackmoor campaign and parttook in o...