Secrets of Blackmoor: A D&D Documentary

July 25th, 2018

7/25/2018

David A Wesely

7/28/2018 03:33:31 pm

These are good observations, but I remember the concept of PCs gaining skill and power through experience was taken from Mike Carr's WW1 air combat game "Fight in the Skies". David and I met Mike at Gencon 2. He and his group were then merged with ours. At that time Mike was already working on what became "Fight in the Skies". In his game one operated only one airplane at a time, but would maintain a "stable" of pilots, usually from different air forces, allowing one to fly different aircraft from game to game not be stuck flying the same thing every game. Every time your pilot survived a mission, he gained experience and a small increase in his flying skill for later missions. Players took to maintaining card files on their pilots, and recording their status (wounded for three months, awarded Croix d guerre, has girlfriend named Babette, etc) which began to take on some RPG aspects. At the same time Dave and I could see that it resolved some problems with early Blackmoor games, where each player had one character (nominally himself) and kept playing him until he died: too much invested in the single PC to accept his death, or being stuck with his history, even if the there were more interesting things one could be doing with a different character. David had also developed rules for improving the "morale grade" or "eliteness" of our battalions in his Napoleonic campaign (using Strategos-N): Making successful morale rolls in a battle in spite of casualties, capturing enemy colors, etc, could give them improved value in later battles, while absorbing a large number of green reinforcements to replace casualties could "water down" their eliteness. Thus experience points grew out of the cross-breeding of several different still unpublished rules sets that were being developed and played within our group in the 1965-1970 time frame, all before we saw Chainmail.

Secrets of Blackmoor

7/29/2018 04:11:06 pm

David, your observations are interesting, and it brings up the problem of finding and tracing sources.

As we mentioned, your own adaptation of Strategos predates everything else. Are you trying to deny Prussian Collusion? ;)

Seth Nelson

10/23/2018 10:06:24 am

Is it possible to still purchase Strategos N? I can't find a copy of Totten Strategos anywhere.

July 25th, 2018

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