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!

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

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

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

European D&D/MtG handcuffed and denied entry to the USA

Anna Steinbauer, Magali Villenue and Titus Lunter were travelling to the USA  on the ESTA visa-waiver. The three artists known for their work on D&D and Magic The Gathering were denied entry and instead hand-cuffed and detained for 11 hours. Their ESTAs appear to be permanently cancelled.

Titus Lunter reports the following via Twitter:

This is what happened:
Please don't point fingers. It's a very complicated situation and we are figuring out what exactly went wrong and why. Mostly, we are tired, scared, glad and overwhelmed. A huge thanks to your support and love. pic.twitter.com/c9hadptU8f

— Titus 'Tired AF' Lunter (@TitusLunter) 27. august 2018

Please help me understand how this happened. :(

-Havard

Andahar Coat of Arms

Years ago, I was working on coats of arms for various noble houses of Blackmoor. I guess I never got around to sharing all of them. Here's one I found on my hard disc. The bird on the crest should ideally be a swooping hawk as depicted in DA1 p 18, but this was the closest thing I could find. 

Maybe someone has a better depiction out there?

PS: Thanks to my friend Yaztromo for bugging me enough to dig this one out!  :)

-Havard

No, Bruce Heard did not get involved with The Known World/Mystara towards the end of its run.

Replica of a map appearing in Dragon #155. Replica by Thorfinn Tait.

Mystara first appeared in published form in 1981 and even existed before that as the home campaign of Tom Moldvay and Lawrence Schick in Ohio. Of course, it would take years before it got the name Mystara. While most fantasy worlds evolve over time, this is especially true for Mystara which saw significant changes over the decades when it was published by TSR. The incorporation of Blackmoor into Mystara's past is one such major evoltionary step of the setting.

There seems to be a common misconception that you can divide the evolution of Mystara into two stages:
1) The Known World
2) Mystara under Bruce Heard.

While Bruce Heard is probaly the single person who had the most influence over the development of Mystara (no disrespect to Aaron Allston, Frank Mentzer, Tom Moldvay, David Zeb Cook and others), it should be noted that Bruce did not join the development of Mystara late in the process. Bruce Heard became Product Manager of the Classic D&D line (and by extension the Classic D&D Setting, later known as Mystara) no later than 1987 with the release of Gaz 1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos. By that time he had already published several adventures for the setting, including M1 Into the Maelstrom (1985) and CM7 Quest for the Tree of Life (1986). He also wrote Gaz3 the Principalities of Glantri that was published in 1987.

Sadly, Bruce Heard was not able to work with Mystara anymore when TSR decided to dump Classic D&D and turn Mystara into an AD&D setting in a process which lead to Jeff Grubb leaving TSR.
Bruce did continue supporting Mystara in the ways he could and did return with articles in Dragon even after the setting was effectively discontinued in 1995  with articles such as the Rakasta article in Dragon Magazine 247 in 1998. He also returned with a final installment of the Voyage of the Princess Ark in Dragon #344 in 2006.

So while an important framework for the setting was laid down with the description in X1 the Isle of Dread (1981) and with the B/X and BECMI D&D rulesets between 1981-1986, it is difficult to divide the history of Mystara as before and after Bruce Heard. Bruce Heard's influence of the setting increased gradually, just as the development of the setting itself happened as a process of gradual evolution rather than as stages of revisions under different management.

-Havard