Hidden in Shadows

In a sense Blackmoor "grew like Topsy", that is to say wild and on its own.

Perhaps the first iteration of anything we might call Blackmoor is the well-discussed medieval game designed by Dave Arneson wherein Baron Hoyt of "Keston" defends his lands from Viking raiders.

1a) Nascent Blackmoor (1970) - So if we count it, the medieval wargame Dave Arneson created and ran in the fall of 1970 sets the tone of a medieval-esque land where Vikings mix it up with knights and monks in a place called "Keston". 

1b) Pre-Blackmoor Dutch Map (1970) - for this we only have the map Arneson drew, apparently from a tracing based on Holland. It has no names, but it does show the locations of all the major cities, forests, roads and swamps. Blackmoor foundations shows the eastern half of this map on page 32.

1c) Planned Blackmoor (1971) - For this earliest phase of Blackmoor we primarily have the March '71 letter to Rob Kuntz briefly describing the setting and a couple maps from the Fletcher collection shown on pages 12 and 14 of Blackmoor Foundations.

Altogether this gives us the following places:

 - Region of Keston/Keiston

- Region of Williamsfort (centered on the town we now know as Blackmoor - the name is re-located later)

- Region of Jenkinsland

- Region of Swampland/Swampwood 

- Land/City of the Red Coven (northwest)

 - Land of the Skandaharians (north off map) 

- Region/Forest of the Eraks (east)

- Region of the Picts (west)

- Region of the Palatinate (Great Kingdom?) (southeast)

2) Played Blackmoor (1972 - 1976)

After Arneson sent in the initial letter describing Blackmoor, Gary Gygax altered, perhaps unknowingly, Arneson's initial vision for the setting. He made a single change that greatly impacted the geography and development.

Arneson intended Blackmoor to reflect the geopositioning of the Netherlands, with oceans to the west. As such he located Blackmoor on the Far Ocean (Dramidje) in or near to the area that would become Ekbir on the map of the world of Greyhawk.  However, Gygax placed it eastward, closer to the Great Kingdom in an area known as the Great Bay. 

This change flipped the coastline so that the ocean was now in the east. To accommodate this change Arneson drew a new map, frequently known as "the sketch map" of which we now have several similar versions (Foundations: pp 8 - 10).

It was also at this time that the isometric map seems to have been produced, probably to accompany the Return to Black Moors story. (Foundations 24 - 29)

From these sources we can add the following places and features.

- City of Maus

- Town of Blackmoor

- Town of Glendower

- Great Swamp of Mil

- Black Marsh

- Loch Gloomen/Lake Gloomey

-  Frog town/island

- Forest of the Elves (formerly Eraks)

- Bramwald

- Regent of the Mines 

- Wizard Mountains

- Witchwood Mountains

- Glomma River

- Arafasta gorge

- Lake of the Heavens

- Peshwan

- Region of Hyth

- North Watch Tower

- Wizards Wood

- Temple of Id

- Tower of Tears/Booh

- City of Tonisborg

- Sage's Tower

- Black Hills

- Dragon Hills

- Town of Tillburgh

- Duchy of Ten Heroes

- Duchy of the Peaks

- City of the Gods

- City of Father Dragon

- Desert (southwest)

3) Wilderlands Blackmoor (1977)

When Arneson left TSR he struck a deal with Bob Bledsaw to pull Blackmoor into Beldsaw's Wilderlands setting.

Arneson off course gave copies of maps to Bledsaw to work from - but it is not entirely clear which. What is clear is that the decision was made to scrape the "Sketch Map" version of Blackmoor and use the original, Holland based map, with one exception: the orientation of the ocean to the east. Likely, this was simply because the "sketch maps" we have are pretty crude affairs. Bledsaw then produced a new version of the map which formed the basis of every map since.

Only a few geographic features were added at this point. These are:

- Barrier Swamp

- The Stormkiller Mountains (as yet un-named however)

- The Peaks of Booh (as yet un-named however)

- The Haven Peaks (as yet un-named however)

- The Valley of the Ancients 

This last place is a location on the Wilderlands Map, not a Blackmoor place per se, but it is where Blackmoor was tacked on to the Wilderlands map and served as a replacement for the "Desert" area of Blackmoor where the City of the Gods was located.

4) Blackmoor Chronicles Blackmoor

The Blackmoor Chronicles materials refers to the maps and manuscript prepared by Arneson and his Adventure Games Inc. staff for planned publication initially, then later for publication by Mayfair games, then later again for TSR. This also includes Garbage Pits of Despair  published in Different worlds magazine.

Unfortunately, our resources from this era have serious gaps. For example we have a writeup Arneson prepared for the character of Robert the Bald which formed the basis - much altered - of what is seen in DA1. Arneson wrote an unknown number of these, but I have only seen this one, because Robert Meyer saved the letter Arneson sent him with the write-up in it. Anyway from the Blackmoor Chronicles material we have:

- Powers Pass

- Keep of Robert the Bald

- Desert of the Gods

- Stonebrook

- Feinstein

- Dinsbury

I'd also bet that Kenville was in some of this material, but I haven't seen any proof. I'm betting it was because it shows up as a location on earlier maps but has no name, and I presume it to have been named for artist Ken Fletcher. The same might be true of the city of Eraks, and a few other places like Starmorgan and Starport - maybe.

5) TSR Blackmoor (1986 - 1989)

Now we come to the shocker. Notice that up until this point I have provided a few short lists, but I'm not even going to try to make a list for this iteration of Blackmoor. That's because it would consist of a hundred or more entries. David Ritchie was given the job of fleshing out the setting and that is exactly what he did. It is not an exaggeration to say the Ritchie added hundreds of names. Not only did he provide names for every and any geographic feature, but many places were given new "improved" names too.

These aren't just little villages or mountains either.  Many of the familiar and iconic places in Blackmoor show up in TSR material for the first time ever and appear to have been invented by Ritchie, including Jackport, Octagern, Kerman Peaks, Thonia, Karsh, Misauga river, the Redwood Forest, Ringlo Hall, etc. 

In fact by far the majority of places on the map were named and added during this era. Truthfully the TSR version of Blackmoor was its own setting, quite distinct from the Twin Cities Blackmoor. 

6) Zeitgeist Blackmoor

Arneson certainly had the opportunity to make changes to the setting when He and Dustin Klingman published Blackmoor setting books again under Zeitgeist. However the decision was made to not throw out the established TSR material, but rather to tweak it at the edges so as not to divide the fan base. As such Zeitgeist added nothing of consequence to the map. A few new locations, such as Croc's Nest, do show up, but these are generally minor towns, etc. A dozen or so more places are also mentioned in the semi-canon MMRPG material, but again, these are not mapped locations.

So there you have it. Geographically and politically as it is known by most people today, Blackmoor is largely a creation of TSR, but several others have had their hand in it too, over the years and eras.

 In this POST from a few years ago, I was concerned with the issue of scale and distance in Blackmoor in the course of which I attempted to determine the intended scale of the "original Northern Marches" - the March 1971 map of Blackmoor - by fitting it onto a map of the Netherlands. For those unaware, the reason for doing so is that in the FFC, Arneson said his Blackmoor map was modeled on a map of Holland. Of course, there have been several attempts by different folks over the years, trying to figure out how Blackmoor might fit on a map of the Netherlands. For the most part it was assumed, by me certainly and I think others, that Arneson's "old Dutch map" on which he based his map of Blackmoor was a 19th or 18th century one.

It was purely on a whim, mostly because I wanted an accurate scalebar, that I choose to look for an older 20th century example to use instead, and so I settled on a colorful Rand McNally Atlas map of the Netherlands from the 1930's.

I now think this map I had more or less stumbled on is the very map that Arneson actually used, and I have come to this conclusion in the light of new material from the Fletcher collection.

There were several outstanding maps among the material Ken Fletcher had collected and handed over to Griff Morgan at last years Arnecon, now published in the Blackmoor Foundations book.

Two of these in particular caught my eye, as being truly Foundational.  I wasn't sure if these two maps on separate sheets, one vertical and one landscape in orientation, were part of the same drawing or would go together but shortly after I mentioned they might be related (and that one of the maps had been scanned upside down, the other sideways) Michael Calleia   http://chanceand.com/  demonstrated not only were they related but they fit together seamlessly, like this:

What you are looking at is, almost certainly, the original "proto Blackmoor" map. For the rest of this post I will refer to this map as the "Ur" map for convenience. Of course, this isn't a Blackmoor map at all, but a map of central Holland, drawn by Arneson, most likely on a light table or using a projector or some such.  You would be forgiven if you don't see an immediate resemblance to Blackmoor as you know it, especially considering how "busy" the Arneson map is.  However if you look closely you can clearly see Glendower peninsula with it's funny little finger of land at the northern tip, and that curving western coastline noticeable in Arneson's March of 1971 Blackmoor map but turned to dry land in all later versions. To show you what I mean, here is the same map superimposed on the Rand McNally Netherlands map.

And here it is again ghosted:

And here it is with the March 1971 "Northern Marches" map of Blackmoor, that heretofore was our oldest know map (note I colored in the water on this version to add clarity):

I don't know why the "Ur" map was created. Arneson's Corner of the Table Top newsletter does mention a planned Napoleonics campaign in the Netherlands and it seems quite possible that is what the map was originally made for, before becoming repurposed as a basis for Blackmoor, but at this point I'm only speculating. If that were the case it seems a bit odd to use a twentieth century map for an early nineteenth century campaign, but maybe that was all Arneson had access to and perhaps the inaccuracies seen here and there, the occasional odd line, and the non-matching settlements are a result of imperfect tracing conditions compensated for with creative license. In any case, what this series of map images hopefully demonstrates is that the "Ur map" was traced off of the Rand McNally map, and the 1971 Northern Marches map was then traced off of a portion of that. The Rand McNally map is sure to be the model as can be seen most clearly in the Markermeer/Ljssemeer / Blackmoor Bay region of the Ur map.

Note in particular the red outlined areas with red diagonal lines marked NE, and NW in what is now the Ljssemeer lake region of the Netherlands. These lined areas only appear on Rand McNally maps and I have only found it on maps in atlases with print dates ranging from 1936 to 1941. The one I used was dated 1937.  The red slashed areas represent a land reclamation project begun in 1932, never fully completed and later changed, so you won't see these areas marked on earlier maps at all or in the same shape on later maps of the Netherlands.

However, looking at the Ur map, we see that Arneson traced the red diagonal area marked NE nearly exactly as if it were land:

Identifying these maps is a breakthrough, but only a start.  I notice for example, that many of the roads, rivers and borders in the Rand McNally map line up with lines on the Ur map that could be roads or rivers, but many of the other features such as lakes, forests, mountains and swamp seem to be filled in by Arneson without much regard for the real topography of the Netherlands. Settlements also seem to have been placed by Arneson without regard to the location of actual Ducth towns.

One humorous exception I noted is that there is a city marked on Blackmoor maps at the corresponding location of Amsterdam on the Netherlands map, and that city is none other than the Coots Nest of the Egg of Coot! 

We are only scratching the surface here, but for this post I want to bring in one more observation of particular interest to Greyhawk fans. One the many fascinating bits of information Jon Peterson related in the Dungeons & Dragons - the Making of Original D&D 1970-1977 book sprang to mind as I looked at this map of Blackmoor on Holland. On page 18 Jon offhandedly mentioned that "Arneson was allocated the Northern Marches; he originally planned for this realm to occupy the northwest corner of the map below the Far Ocean, but Gygax placed it at the innermost cove of the Great Bay instead." 

According to Rob Kuntz, who was in charge of the newsletter at the time, Arneson was involved with preparing the images due to Gary Gygax having lost access to the necessary equipment. In this case he would have had the opportunity to pick his spot before the map was published. If one looks at the Great Kingdom map and at the Blackmoor map it is easy to see what Arneson was thinking.  Here is the "official" map as it appeared in the Domesday book Newsletter in 1971:

In fact, we can drop the Netherlands map right into that section like so.

 Ten years ago I started this 'blog.  To celebrate I have a gift for all of you.

Below is a new, top quality map of Arneson's Blackmoor set within the Flanaess, continent of Oerik, world of Greyhawk, drawn by professional mapmaker Daniel Hasenbos of the Netherlands - where better to find a mapmaker for Blackmoor!  For more of Daniel's Maps look here.

Last fall I began to create something I realized was sorely needed.  Blackmoor, as my readers will know, and Greyhawk started out together as locations on a shared world.  Blackmoor belongs to the world of "Oerth" as much as Greyhawk does, yet few Greyhawk fans know anything of Arneson's Blackmoor and those who may be interested can't be faulted for not knowing where to start the journey, being bombarded with an array of products from OD&D supplement II to current day fan works.

So I took it upon myself to write a free guidebook to Blackmoor for Greyhawk fans.  To that end I commissioned this fantastic map.

Interestingly, and coincidentally Daniel finished the map in March of this year - the fiftieth anniversary of the letter Arneson sent to Rob Kuntz with his first map of "the Northern Marches" enclosed.  That map formed the bases of our new map, along with some input from the "sketch map" of Blackmoor found in the FFC.  All the later maps were also drawn upon for fringe areas, particularly to the south. For more see these posts:

10a/2019

10b/2019

I'm releasing the map now because I am nearly finished with the guidebook and will have that out shortly.  You all may freely use this map as you please as long as you ALWAYS acknowledge where you got it.

I cannot begin to explain in this blogpost all the care and research that went into the maps production but let me reassure you all that this map is as true as I can make it.  I'll even venture to say no Blackmoor map has been so exhaustively researched for accuracy and fidelity to the 1972 Blackmoor and Castle & Crusade society originals while simultaneously designed to fit directly onto the popular Greyhawk map of Anna B. Meyer as shown below.  

And a better resolution version on the 2017 hexmap:

Happy Anniversary everybody.

 Funnily enough, this process started with Izmer, the setting of the first and second D&D movies, as discussed in previous posts.  You might think that placing Izmer off the western edge of the Greyhawk map would be a fairly simple matter.  The trouble begins, however, with the fact that no map of the lands of Izmer was ever published. 

Luckily (?) it is pretty well established that "Izmer" was drawn from the filmmaker's home brew campaign, loosely based on Alphatia, an Island empire in the Mystara setting.  Again fortunately, Bruce Heard, one of the principal creators of Mystara, has been posting useful maps of the island. So I just snagged one of Heard's maps of Alphatia, played around with resizing to get a good fit, and tacked it on to the missing end of the Oerth map.  Okay, that's good, I thought.  I'm done.

That's not quite the end of the story, as I read deeper into what others had to say about western Greyhawk, more "canon" material came to light.  First there is a fair amount of information to be found in Gygax's Gord the Rogue books, a useful summary of which is On Drangonsfoot.

So, of course I had to add all those in.  I also found a useable Telchuria map that fit and scanned in some screen shots of area maps from the movies, including a map of the islands where the Orb of  Falazure was hidden: 

and This map of the area around Antius and the Tomb of Savrill.

Still not done.  There is still a blank area to the south unaccounted for.  Typically fan made maps of Western Oerik utilize the Dragon Annual "Bearskin" continent, - namely this turd-like peninsula dangling from the south end.

Okay, now I'm done right?  Nope.  Enter Sagard the Barbarian.  Let me quote Wikipedia. "Sagard the Barbarian is a series of four Hero's Challenge Gamebooks written by Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and Flint Dille, screenwriter,... Flint Dille met Gary Gygax while Gygax was in Hollywood and they began collaborating on a number of projects, including the Sagard the Barbarian gamebook series (1985-1986)...".  

These are teen "choose your own adventure" type books, set in yet another version of Greyhawk.  I don't have these books, but the maps are readily available online.  Here they are in order from the books:

If you look closely, you will note that it is only the Hydranian Islands that connect all these maps.  We can easily assume their placement on the book 3 map is simply wrong, and therefore Ratik can remain as Ratik is in the first map and as it is in all other Greyhawk maps.  

So then we are left with placing the peninsula shown in maps 3 and 4, and where better to put this than in the place of the "turd" peninsula from the Dragon Annual, non-Gygaxian map.   

It turns out I wasn't the first one to think along these lines.  Oerth Journal #26 (Here) has an excellent article by Erik Mona wherein he distills all the important setting information from the Sagard books and places them on the map in this very location.  Unfortunately, he choose to scrap the Sagard maps and tries relocate these countries onto the turd, along with the place names TSR had already put there ("Nippon") and some fan created material ("Sunela").  Nevertheless, most of the country descriptions in the article are terrific and useful if you just ignore his map.  Heck, if I had seen this article first I might not have done all the research into the Sagard maps, but I'm glad I did.

Now, yes, I'm done.  Below is a map - crudely but accurately done - that incorporates all the research from Izmer, the Gord novels, and the Sagard books into one functional, fascinating, gameworld. Whew! 

 Here we go.  For fun, take a look at the map below.

What you are looking at is one of the best medieval maps of the world, produced in 1154 by geographer al–Idrisi.

Observe how it is recognizable, yet "wrong".  Some places - like Spain or Arabia, are almost correct, while others like Britain and India are very wrong and in some cases there are places that are likely not even real.

That "similar but wrongness" is one way to look at the Great Kingdom map below.   

This map, as we've talked about before, was published in the Castles & Crusades societies Domesday Book #9 newsletter around June of 1971.  Details are still being researched, but the map was drawn by some artistic hand, apparently based on a map by Gary Gygax.

Technically, it is the first published map of what we now call the Flanaess.

Originally it was intended to be the shared map Castles & Crusades society members would use for campaigns - using whatever rules - involving their various holdings in and out of the Great Kingdom.

Few labels were put on this map by the cartographer, but using other hand-drawn copies, such as Dave Megarry's below, we are able to fill a lot of those blanks in.

Some of those names are familiar to Greyhawkers - like Nyr Div and Urnst - some, like Catmelun, not so much.

Nevertheless, it was on this map that the earliest Greyhawk adventures took place, and early Blackmoor adventures too, but like the al–Idrisi medieval map above, it was a crude representative of the world.

When TSR decided to publish Greyhawk in the late 70's it was decided a new and better map was needed - a modern map.  "For certain the WoG product as published by TSR came into being about two or three months before the date of its printing and sale.  Brian said that a campaign setting was needed, so after ascertaining the maximum size map sheet we could have printed, I free-handed the land outlines on... two sheets of paper, used colored pencils to put in terrain features, located the cities, and made up the names for everything. That took me about 1 week. Then I went to work on the text while Darlene made prettier maps."  Gary Gygax DF Forum

The end result of this process was the Darlene map of the Flanaess.  Did Gygax create one or more intermediary Flanaess maps between the 1971 C&C map and Gygax's new map of the Flanesse used by Darlene?  It doesn't appear that there was, but I don't presume to know all the steps it took to get to the final Darlene version, except that it all starts with the C&C Great Kingdom map.  

So I thought it would be fun to map the parts of the C&C map onto the corresponding locations on an official Greyhawk map, along with location labels, to see what may result.

The first thing you will notice is that I have cut the C&C map into 8 pieces where it seemed logical.  In two cases (Nyr Div and Catmelun) sections have been rotated, and in all cases the sections have been resized, bigger or smaller for best fit.

Now I don't for a second think somebody at TSR did something like that.  I expect the process was a lot more free form.  Gygax probably, sat down to sketch the new map with a copy of the C&C map close to hand and drew as he said in the quote above.  Certain areas, like the sea of dust and the Nyr Div, he copied pretty closely, while others, especially in the east, were more loosely inspired, and a whole lot of new geography was added, or redefined in between places - again especially on the eastern side of the new map.

Even so, there is much in the C&C map that is recognizable on the new Greyhawk maps we have now.

Here is the same map again, but this time I've ghosted the image so you can see what lies beneath and perhaps why the sections are where they are.

You can readily see, if you look closely, how mountains and coastlines follow together, and sometimes even rivers and forest.  The eastern three sections were the most difficult to place, but I think even there you can readily see how someone eyeballing a new map on a sketchpad is being guided by the C&C map outlines, at least in some places.  

Perhaps the NE section is most interesting.  That squiggly peninsula on the C&C map for all the world looks to have been followed on the Greyhawk map to form the line of The Frozen River, leaving the islands of Botulia and Maritz to be paved over by new land.

Here is another look.  This map has all the C&C sections removed but the place names left behind.  Placement for a lot of these labels was straightforward, but there were also a few that are more of a best guess, because they fall on the edge of a section that is separated from it's neighbors by a lot of space.  

There's some very interesting alignments and some possibilities for place names where our current Greyhawk map lacks detail.

Of the places listed, many have direct corollaries on the world of Greyhawk map.  Places like Urnst, Perrenland, Keoland, and Geoff have retained their names and the same general locations.  Some others seem to have simply changed names, while a few seem to be altogether novel.  For these new and usual names we have limited source information, the best source being Andre Norton's Quag Keep novel.  Norton was invited by Gygax to play D&D in his early Greyhawk campaign.  Her 1978 novel mentions several of the unusual place names seen on the various C&C maps, indicating she either had a copy of a similar Greyhawk map or, perhaps more likely given her unusual spellings, had jotted down some notes after having looked over Gygax' map.

Given that there are names in the list that we can identify in Quag Keep, but have been changed - for example Faraz/Furyondy - and that many of these can also be found in the older form in the pages of Andre Norton's Quag Keep, I would suggest that they are simply "old fashioned" or antique regional names, dating from the same period as the Quag Keep events.  Erik Mona, pegs this to CY 498, and I see no reason to argue otherwise.  That would of course also suggest that our "antique" C&C map represents some scholar's knowledge of the world at that time, much as al–Idrisi's world map reflected his knowledge of his time.

Leaving aside the familiar place names that are the same on both maps, we get the following list of new or changed places:

The Hold of Iron Hand - the location of the Hold of The Iron Hand on the coast north of the Paynims places this territory in the Greyhawk realms of Ekbir,  We can take Hold of the Iron Hand to be a nickname or older name for this collection of sheikdoms.  It is possible "Iron Hand" inspired "Stone Fists" but the Stone fists are nowhere near this location, so there's no good reason to take them as being the same, at least in game terms. 

March Slove  - Slove appears to be a small, otherwise unnamed area just north of the Yatil Mountains in an area dominated by lakes.

County of Hither Hills - The Hither Hills are mentioned in Quag Keep (p22) where it is described as a land of "Half Bloods", perhaps some kind of half elves or something else.  These Hills are one of the border areas on the map that are harder to place, but must fall between the Burneal Forest and the Land of Black Ice and appear to abut the Hold of the Iron Hand.

County of Celate - Celate appears in a mountain chain just NW of Blackmoor and west of the Egg of Coot.  While otherwise unknown in Greyhawk lore to my knowledge, Celate falls squarely on a place known only as "The Duchy of the Peaks" in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign.  This is fortunate, because it allows us to give a "real" name to a place otherwise known by an unimaginative nick-name.   

County of Stabilny - Stabilny is another location seemingly in between C&C map sections.  Best fit seems to be the NW shore of Quag lake. 

Neron March - The Neron March on the old maps falls very near to the "Gran March" on the Greyhawk, map and we can safely assume these are one and the same.  As a name, Neron March is preferable to me.  One of the quirks of both Greyhawk and Blackmoor is the ready use of English words for names (The Cold Marsh or the Firefrost channel for example), so it is nice to have a non-English alternative.

Kingdom of Faraz - Faraz or Faraaz in Quag Keep, is undoubtedly Furyonody.  In Andre Norton's 1978 novel, Quag Keep Faraaz gets mentioned a fair few times.  We learn a for example that it appears to be some kind of theocracy under the control of Holy Lords.

Yerocunby - Yerocunby covers several territories on the Greyhawk map, including Dyvers, Narwell, Verbobonc and possibly Devarnish and Greyhawk itself.  We can imagine this name may have covered a temporary alliance of nations or may represent an old name for the geographic area. Zach Howard of Zenopus Archives made the suggestion that the Kingdom of Furyondy derives from a combination of Faraz and Yeroconby.  That seems very likely to me, and so we can imagine that Faraaz expanded at some point after 500 CY to merge or absorb Yerocunby temporarily - perhaps through a royal wedding, resulting in the merged name Furyondy.  For some reason the area of Yerocunby later Balkanized, but Furyondy retained the name (and perhaps the territorial claim).   Interestingly, as the protagonists travel away from Greyhawk toward the Sea of Dust, Quag Keep also mentions Yerocunby in the same relation we see on the C&C map. "We shall have Yerocunby and Faraaz facing us at the border. But the river then will lead us straight into the mountains." p32

Duchy of Maritz - The island duchy of Maritz or Maritiz as it is spelled in Quag Keep, seems to have been entirely swallowed up by the new NE peninsula drawn on the World of Greyhawk map, possibly falling about where the Atmanship of Kelten lies.  We know nothing of these islands except the useless but colorful fact from Norton that they use half-moon coins with sea-serpents on them.

Botulia - another island paved over in Greyhawk by the added NW peninsula, falling about where the Atmanship of Amaran is now.  Other than being given a name and kingdom status on the old maps, this island was not mentioned anywhere else that I have found. 

Walworth - Walworth derives from the county of the same name in Wisconsin where Gygax lived, and in fact, Earl of Walworth was a title Gygax used in the C&C Society.  It's useful to remember that Gygax envisioned the C&C map as an alternate North America in a parallel  dimension.  Of course the map doesn't look like North America, but it does have the same climactic regions (cold to the north, tropics to the SW and mountains running up the mid west.)  In an article sent to Alarums & Excursions #15 (October, 1976), Gary tells us, "The game world is a parallel earth, but the continents are somewhat different.  Most of our campaign activity takes place on what corresponds to North America, on the eastern half of the continent.  The "Blackmoor" lands lie far up on the northeast coast.  "Greyhawk" is in the central portion."  Elsewhere Gygax specifies that he imagined the Free City of Greyhawk to be positioned similarly to Chicago.  On the Greyhawk map, Walworth falls directly on the Shield Lands.  This may be another case where a real name (Walworth) may be a preferable substitute for an English Language nick-name (Shield Lands).   

Kingdom of Catmelun - The last mystery name we have is the Kingdom of Catmelun, and it is another example of having a name on a map with no other details.  If my guess is right, Catmelun is none other than Sunndi.  Perhaps Catmelun was the name of a royal house who ruled the area around 498, or perhaps the name can be ignored altogether in your Greyhawk campaign. 

For more on Quag Keep people and places, have a look at This Post by Eric Mona.

Earlier this month I posted a Blackmoor town map re-designed to properly fit the dungeon below That's Here

The esteemed Paleologos has put up a couple very interesting posts on The Gnome Cache, an early Greyhawk story written by Gary Gygax and serialized in The Dragon magazine.  Have a LOOK.

Paleologos pointed out that the installments in issues 6 and 7 feature Blackmoor and reading his posts have prompted me to take a closer look at this portion of the tale. 

The protagonists are part of a merchant caravan heading north to a settlement called "Weal" in the north of Blackmoor to trade for furs.  They depart from "the walled town of Rheyton" where they exchanged their carts for pack animals because "the roads to
the frontier and beyond being little more than rough tracks".

Two ethnic groups seem to dominate this frontier.  Western, bow using plainsmen, some of whom are from a place known as the Vale of Kimbry (Wolf Nomads?) and other "Northerners" from the more immediate area of "Nehron"(Rovers of the Barrens?).  Nehron seems to be a regional term including Blackmoor and lands east to the sea.  Blackmoor is populated by Nehronlanders.  

The caravan reaches Blackmoor where it is taxed, and then journeys on toward Weal.  Here is the description:

"As they departed from the village of Blackmoor, the grim walls of the guardian castle frowned down upon their left,..."

"A few leagues journey brought them to the beginning of the great evergreen forests, and they entered into the heart of a foreign land. Each day’s travel brought them closer to the town of Weal.... beyond that place Nehron became a wilderness of forest and hills.... hostile barbarians dwelling there..."

"A large tree had been felled so as to completely bar the road where it passed between two very steep hills. The dense growth of trees on either hand made by-passing the track next to impossible"

These quotes tell us there is a road entering Blackmoor village from the south and another leaving to the east and heading north.  This road passes through an evergreen forest and between an area of steep hills before reaching Weal, beyond which is a rough wilderness.

We can find a near identical Blackmoor as that described above in this map:

Above is the map Blackmoor Village accompanying Arneson's article in the Castle & Crusade societies' Domesday Book #13 circa Jul 1972.  We have a couple versions of this map, but they are all much the same in principal detail.  All of them show Svenson's Freehold toward the upper right corner of the map, and that detail let's us know that the map as it appears could not have been drawn much more than a few months before being printed in the Domesday book.

1971-1972 was Greg Svenson's senior year of High School.  In the fall semester, he took advantage of an opportunity to take a class in architecture taught by his assistant football coach, Mr. Pike.  Greg was inspired by what he learned in that class to draw the plans for Freehold.

In Arneson's Blackmoor Gazette & Rumormonger #2, from circa May of 1972, we can see that Freehold has already been built. The newsletter mentions "...some weeks ago when Swenson's Freehold was wiped out..."  and further along it says "... until Swenson's Freehold is rebuilt and restocked..."  

So it is likely the Domesday book village map dates to the winter of 1971-2 and certainly not before Greg's architecture class in the fall months of 1971.

Given that the first recorded games set in Blackmoor took place in March and April of 1971, one of which involved the infamous Troll Bridge of Blackmoor Village, we can safely presume there was some sort of an earlier version with no Freehold.

It's entirely possible this earlier map was nothing more than a sketch Arneson made on the butcher-block paper he spread on his gaming table, and maybe the only difference was the absence of Freehold.  Whatever the case, the point to note here is that some other map of some kind existed before the one we now know of.

We do have another map of at least a part of the village of Blackmoor, as shown on the Level 4 tunnel map in the FFC.

I've mentioned this here and there before, such as HERE (where I talk about some of the surface entrances), but several years ago I meticulously aligned all the FFC levels of Blackmoor dungeon as layers in a Gimp file.  I then labeled all the stairs, shafts, and elevators so I would know exactly what goes where.

When properly aligned 95% of the stairs and shafts line right up, and when you take in corrections from David Megarry's maps (talked about HERE ) I'd put it at 98%.  Given how incredibly complex Blackmoor dungeon is, that's pretty remarkable.

I labeled the stairs in such a way as to know exactly where they start and where the go.  The first number is 0 through 9.  A 0 indicates the surface, a 1 level 1 and so on.  Next will come a letter to differentiate one stair from another on the same level, and last are all the levels a stair will go to.  So, for example a stairwell starting on level 2 might be 2B356.

Megarry's maps also give us the depth of levels 2-7 which is useful for knowing how long the stairs are.  It goes as follows.

When Arneson drew his original map of the Northern Marches and sent it off in a letter to Rob Kuntz in March of 1971, it is unclear what he intended.

"WOLF's HEAD PASS: This area lies some five miles to the North East of the Castle along the only road that leads to the Southern confines of the Egg of Coot. Beyond the pass there lies an extensive no man lands of some twenty miles before the southern reaches of that evil area are reached." p26

The road thus described can be easily seen on the sketch map:




When Arneson decided to publish the First Fantasy Campaign, he had little incentive to maintain the Greyhawk/Blackmoor connection and when Bob Bledsaw drew those excellent maps that came with the FFC, he went back to Arneson's original Northern Marches map.  The obvious differences in the bays and waterways were hand-waived as "Sinking Lands".  Blackmoor had gone back to it's roots, but in doing so the geographical context of those early games was significantly obscured.