Blackmoor Foundation Arneson Manuscripts Content

 Blackmoor Foundations is a book to be published towards the end of this month. I talked about the book a few weeks ago and how it is going to include many unpublished documents and maps that can be linked back to Dave Arneson's campaign, including material written by Dave Arneson himself. Much of the content is still unknown, but some is starting to get leaked. 

Fellow Blackmoor scholar DH Boggs wrote on his blog that much of this material comes from illustratior Ken Fletcher's collection. Ken was employed by Dave Arneson's company and was tasked to prepare Blackmoor material for possible publication in the early 1980s.

More details comes from YouTuber DaddyRolledA1 who has been given a first draft copy of Blackmoor Foundations. In his video D&D History: Foundations, Product Lines, Art, & Creators, he covers many sources for gaming history, but I want to direct your attention to the section where he is talking about this specific book and reveals some of the content. 

The explains how the book discusses dates that are often uncertain and how it contrasts some documented dates with sometimes contradictory information from what people who were there rememeber. Given the type of "documentation" that is available from someone's personal games, I 

Some of these maps or variants of them have been shared among fans already, but it will be nice to see everything collected. 

Ken Flether apparently had lots of pages of documents that he shared with The Fellowship of the Thing (DaddyRolledA1 does not seem to appreciate the name of that company) that produced this book. 

This illustration made be curions. According to the youtube video this illustration was made by Dave Arneson.

The firearms of Blackmoor are shown in the illustration below. I am not sure if this refers to artifacts origination from the aliens, or if these are supposed to be regular firearms that the men of Blackmoor were able to produce. Both types are referenced in the FFC. 

Credits for this book are given to Griffith M. Morgan III of Fellowship of the Thing, but others have also contributed as shown on the intro page. 

So the final version of this book should be available soon. If you already own a copy, let me know what else might be found there!

More discussion of this article at The Comeback Inn.

-Havard