Secrets of Blackmoor: A D&D Documentary

Time and Sand

1/27/2023

I found this on the web and have no idea what it is from

Sample Chapter from, The Essential Blackmoor
by Griffith Mon Morgan III Copyright 2023

Time and Sand - how and why to streamline your game

As a referee you have to contend with the desire players have for more powerful weapons and spells, and even more so, for rules systems that give them abilities that border on magical super power.

In order to operate the Blackmoor World setting I always will advocate for games with simpler mechanics and faster abstract combat because it allows for more exploration in a smaller amount of game time. Yet, there are issues that arise which are endemic to the role play format which I want to discuss.

A dilemma that will confront you as a game referee is that you must avoid granular play. By granular, I mean that time has slowed down and hardly anything is getting accomplished.

It is easy to get players to explore your game world in more detail and this takes more time to play through. When you want to give your players something to focus on, all you need to do is slow the game down by giving players information such as this:

“The elf feels a draft coming through cracks in the wall…”

“You can see some kind of writing on the floor…”

“You find a wooden chest hidden under a flag stone…”

Yes, players should be examining their surroundings closely for clues. And these clues become keys to guide them into exploring objects and places in more detail. The problem is - it can backfire!

Time is a problem when running a game; both in-game passage of time and real world time for a play session. Game referees always want to embellish setting with details. Often what happens is that something a referee is putting into a description in order to add more flavor becomes too interesting for some of the players. What was meant to add mood and ambience becomes a focus element and the players become obsessed with exploring it.

It can be almost anything. A small container that is one of many food jars, or a random non combat encounter with a person. What you as game referee wanted to skim over is now going to become the major focus of play for the next half an hour. What is worse, it has nothing to do with advancing the players through the real story of exploring and discovery. It is a dead end and a time waster.

The granules of sand are slipping through the hour glass and not a lot is actually happening despite a great deal of player chit chat and referee improvisation.

Many will argue that a good game referee should be willing to take this small and innocuous story element and weave it into an actual in-game element. I agree, it is a tough call as to when to expand on something and begin to invent an unplanned situation, and when to minimize the attention to detail the players can fall into.

The greater question is that you must weigh is the enjoyment your players get from such an event vs. the rewards they will get from the event.

Searching for Gold

For players, all rewards are gold. Whether it’s locating a secret door, beating some monsters in a battle, or actually finding make believe gold. All of this gives them feelings of accomplishment.

Motives for seeking rewards in a dungeon adventure are fairly straight forward. Players go to dungeons to find treasure and magic items. They may also be on a quest to solve some kind of problem. Wilderness and world exploration will likely have some purpose as well. Players need to travel to another town, or they want to get to the location of an old ruin. Yet, the reward, or goal, in either of these situations is a prize that has been placed in advance by you the referee, thus the purpose of the game is to reach an objective. This is true even if the players are merely exploring. The true objectives are the placed encounters in your adventure. These are the really shiny gold that may have all three elements of exploration and discovery, victory in battle, and magical treasure.

Of course, you also have to have time for unplanned random encounters and those must feel as ‘real’ as any of your placed encounters. Referee work can be hard.

It really comes down to whether there is more gold to be extracted from this mine, and I am being a bit prosaic here, yet the investment of time vs. returns has to be considered in every encounter. Players will want to dig deeper into a situation thinking they can get more proverbial gold out of it. They are having fun doing this, or at least that one player is having fun while the rest of the party is twiddling fingers. What if a situation is already mined for all the gold it can provide? What then?

The most painful aspect to these kinds of expansive non quests is that as the game referee you’ve spent hours preparing yourself to present a world to your players and they’ve somehow decided to do the equivalent of parking themselves somewhere in order to examine their own belly buttons.

As the game referee you know what is gold, and what isn’t, that’s the easy part. The hard part is how to guide players away from distraction so they can continue the quest.

This is true in my own game as well. A recent adventure to the Forest of Forgetfulness had the players entering a strange dimensional rift. They were literally exploring a soviet era secret military installation that they had gotten transported into. My players wanted to look in every nook and cranny in every place and thing they found. I had not planned for all of this and I was having to think fast about every little detail. Fortunately, I have explored many actual abandoned places and I could close my eyes and image what my players would be discovering.

The perfect memory for recall came from when Chris and I explored an entire derelict mining town in the mountains west of Denver and it didn't take much to see this in my mind for what I needed to describe to my players.

Some Tools You Can Use in Your Own Game Sessions

In a game, you really can’t break immersion with, “That’s not what I had planned for during this adventure, so you’re not going to get anything worthwhile out of doing that.”

We can all agree this is bad referee technique.

What referees need to do is develop tools for managing time granularity in their game.

Referees often use simple phrases such as “It looks harmless.” This is a short-cut when you want players to know they have to actually do something to find out what is going happen.

The same can be done to speed play. You can tell your players, “There doesn’t seem to be anything of value here.”

This only works some of the time.

Some of my players can be really tenacious and despite my signals stating that they are wasting time they will continue to persue worthless avenues of play. If you have a similar kind of player, it is at this point that you may need to teach them, or remind them, of how you run your game with, “I will let you know if you find anything that is relevant to your quest.”

Ok, this is not as bad as. “Stop doing that, I want you to go over here…” The experienced referees reading this may be squirming at this advice, because they feel that even random details are important to an adventure.

Allow me to add some context. My players are exploring a massive military research facility that takes up hundreds of square miles of land. They really can’t get granular with every single building they encounter. I will role play one building to get the feel of the place, but all the rest needs to be skimmed and time needs to dilate and move more quickly. In this situation, the players are examining the contents of old office desks that have already been broken and rifled through over decades of abandonment. They don’t need me to describe every address in an old rolodex they find lying on the floor. Time is going to go fast and in 15 minutes of real time 4 hours will have passed in the game world.

Step three in reducing granular play is to ask the players if they are looking for anything specific? Turn the game on the players and make them declare themselves!

Everyone twigged to what was going on as soon as I described the setting. The buildings weren’t medieval and certainly the garage full of work trucks was a good giveaway they weren’t in Blackmoor anymore. They were good about it and played along as if they had no idea what these things were. Even when they found the box full of live ammo they played along by saying, "These little metal sticks may be worth something."

Lots of knowing winks were also exchanged.

Obviously, they knew what kinds of things one might find there and they could avoid entirely ‘Metagaming’ by saying something like, “I am looking for anything I could use to do X thing”

To which I was able to respond, “Ok, if you see anything like that here, I will let you know.”

Lastly, you need a couple experienced players that are willing to help you out in keeping things on track.

It’s likely an experienced player has been a game referee themselves. And they can spot when players get too granular and detail focused as well as you can. They know exactly the kind of hell that players can put you into when all you want to do is get them to move to something more interesting to explore on a much larger scale.

Instead of talking to the player who is engaged in minutiae, you can turn to your helper player and say, “You don't sense there is more of interest to be found here.”

Your helper player will then interject and address the other players by suggesting to move along.

So far so good.

The other problem is when you are dealing with an encounter where players are speaking to a non player character. You really gotta cut these short sometimes. I will even go as far as suggesting that you need to railroad the encounter a little bit to keep things on track.

The encounter needs to let the players know whatever information they need for their adventure, but you must avoid chit chat.

Thus a NPC will provide this to players:

NAME: This is who I am (or who I want you to think I am.)
MOTIVE: This is why I am talking to you. (or what I want you to think my motive is.)
INFORMATION: This is what I can tell you. (Yes, I may be lying.)
OBJECTS: This is what I can give you in order to aid your quest. (Is this a gift or manipulation?)
CONCLUSION: I need to get going, I have to meet someone, are there any questions?

Don’t misunderstand me in wanting to speed play. This kind of encounter is generally meant to guide players forward, but they often get wrapped up in chit chat and wanting to know more than they need to know. So, yes, enjoy running the situation, and do not go too fast with it. Yet, the real goal is to advance the players along their way of seeing your world. If your players spend an hour here, then you may not have enough time left on game night to explore the places they are meant to find.

Referee skills are something that take time to develop. There are no hard rules for how to deal with every situation that will occur during a game. Over time one learns a greater ability to read players and know how to use what tools when.

I hope this sparks some new ideas for running your own games.

WE NEED YOUR HELP

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Or,

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Thank you so much, The Secret Team

(Chris, Griff, and everyone who helped make Secrets of Blackmoor possible.)

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ADD SALT FOR MORE FLAVOR

1/20/2023

0 Comments

I’m no genius game referee. I am just a regular gamer like you who works to keep their game fresh for their players. In order to do this I try to expand on what is in the rules of my game. I do it in order to create more lore about what the people places and creatures that can be found in my world are like. I assume all referees do this with their game.

Often it is within the little details that one can expand their setting. Just take something seemingly ordinary and give it a little bit of a twist and you’ve added some flavor to your world setting that can be discovered by players.

Here is just one example for how to slightly alter what is written in the game rules in order to add flavor.

SALT

Salt is a very valuable commodity in early cultures. So much so that it has been attributed with both magical and economic value. Don’t believe me, here is a link proving that salt has the power to ward off evil spirits.

https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/u-s-world/man-pours-salt-on-feet-to-ward-off-evil-spirits-at-walmart/

Now that I have established the real world power of Salt Magic via Scientific Research and web sourced corroboration we can move on to applying this to our RPG games.

Many traditional warding concoctions use common herbs mixed into salt such as Rosemary. The resulting mix is known as Black Salt. My encounter only has salt, but you may want do some some research of your own.

I have a tendency to riff off of tiny comments people make. The other day someone mentioned that one of the D&D books has a passage saying that zombies are somehow averse to salt. I can’t recall what book this comes from and I am too lazy to look it up right now. What matters is that I got to thinking and quickly added a zombie salt encounter to my next week's game session.

Salt vs. Zombies:

In AD&D Zombies are hurt by flasks of holy water. In OD&D this does not apply.

Let’s change zombies and make it so they will not approach salt. Why? Because salt has purifying magic in it.

Thus a solid line of salt on the ground, say an inch or more in width, is enough to keep zombies from advancing across it.

A line across the typical 10 foot wide passage would require several pounds of salt to create a barrier large enough to deter zombies.

Throwing salt on zombies might be another tactic, but I think most of it would fall off of them and it might cause them to be confused for 1-2 combat rounds is all.

Immersing a zombie in salt might paralyze them.

Salt does not harm zombies, it merely confuses them and keeps them at bay.

A Zombie Room

Our players arrive at a place where someone has placed a treasure in a chest.

What they see as they come down a hallway is what appears to be a sack leaning against the wall and a scattering of pure white powder across the floor. Foot steps can be seen that may have scattered the powder, yet the powder effectively covers a 10 x 10 foot area. An examination reveals this may be salt. A tasting 100% verifies this for the players.

The sack leaning against the wall is partly empty and still contains about 4 pounds of salt.

About 30 more feet farther and the players come upon a closed door at the dead end of the passage. It seems to open outward and there are wood wedges jammed into the door to keep it from opening.

The players can listen, but zombies do not make noise, so they will not detect anything.

If the players remove the wedges they can pull the door open. Roll for success and surprise as always.

What do you want to do?

Now it is up to the players to decide what they want to do.

The clues are there for them to deduce a non combat solution.

If they retreat back to the salt the Zombies will only chase them as far as the salt on the floor.

Arrows, pole weapons, even ten foot poles can then be used to beat them into submission. Yet, some may simply wander back away from the salt.

It really is up to you how you handle specifics. In my case a player opted to carry the salt bag. This was enough to keep the Zombies from outright attacking. I did do a 50% chance that a zombie would wander close and take a swipe at the PC. I rolled to hit and to do damage, if they did hit, another D20 roll equal or under Dexterity for the PC would be required to keep from dropping the salt bag which could spell disaster for a lone PC in a room full of zombies.

Once inside the zombie room the players found a half circle line of salt poured near the back wall that encircled a treasure chest. It makes sense that the treasure chest had to be guarded from having the zombies gnawing on it - they do get bored and chew on things.

In my game the players have entered a dimensional rift called the Zone. The treasure chest turned out to be an ammo box full of bullets. This is a group of adventurers who came from medieval Blackmoor and they have yet to discover guns.

Of course anyone they encounter who has a gun will know how to use it. An encounter with an armed NPC is sure to come in the near future much to my game group's dismay.

Now It's Your Turn

Ok, this is not the kind of encounter that will make or break an adventure. My main reason for sharing this is to hopefully re-inspire some of you about going a tiny bit farther when creating encounters.

Yes, you can make a combat and treasure situation into an easy puzzle for your players to solve.

You probably have similar ideas in the back of your mind already. See if you can create just three little situations for your players to resolve using their brains.

Keep Gaming and Having Fun with Friends!

SECRETS of BLACKMOOR part II

If you are reading this Blog you likely have already seen Secrets of Blackmoor.

The other day Chris and I had a long meeting where we reviewed projected costs for making the follow up film a.k.a. Part II: Imaginary Worlds.

We would love to use more of the footage we have and also get more interviews that talk specifically about Blackmoor and maybe even some other early RPG settings.

In order to raise funds for another film we will need to do a KickStarter project and its success will rely on how many people have already seen the first film. It will be an all or nothing 'make it or break it' KickStarter with a very high goal minimum to reach funding.

I urge everyone to keep telling gamer friends about the film and sharing the link to this website everywhere.

Where else can you think of that gamers may not have heard about Secrets of Blackmoor?

We really appreciate all the support you've already given us. We work hard to produce things that have value to you. Don't worry, we're still working on other games too!

Thanks so much, The Secret Team (Everyone involved in the making of Secrets of Blackmoor)

0 Comments

The Lost Sci-Fi RPg's By the Snider Brothers

1/9/2023

40 Comments

Image source: Wayne's Books

Photo of one of the boxes we found while making Secrets of Blackmoor

Today I just want to tease a couple of RPG games we are interested in publishing.

Mutant by Richard Snider

Star Master by John Snider

I was chatting on reddit and we got onto the subject of Gamma World and other variants.

I posted this:

Metamorphosis Alpha was published in 1976.

TSR had copies of Mutant, but due to conflicts with Dave Arneson they were rejecting any games produced in the Twin Cites.

It is suspected they reverse engineered Mutant to create MA. The author likely had no idea of the previous game, he was merely told concepts. I personally do not believe James Ward willfully copied the concept. He was merely told of a game idea by Gary Gygax in conversation and built from that.

The same is said about the third volume from the Star Probe + Star Empire series titled, Star Master. TSR was in possession of a draft which had been submitted and they never returned. It became Star Frontiers and the original was suppressed. It seems likely even if the mechanical aspects do not match, the idea was plagiarized from the drafts.

Both games are by the Snider brothers who it should be noted were original Blackmoor players before D&D is published.

Thus the sequence for those games is:

Richard Snider, Mutant in the early 70's > Ward with MA by TSR 1976 > Ward with Gamma World by TSR 1978 > full color boxes and drafts exist for a later attempt at publication of Mutant by Adventure Games in the mid 80's.

John Snider, Space Campaign which Arneson dubbed Stellar 7 in 1973 > Star Probe '75 > Star Empire '77 > Star Master draft never published > A print out draft and typed fragments exist of Star Master which was slated for publication by Adventure Games in the 80's > TSR Star Frontiers '82.

The Wikipedia entry states that the artwork for SP and SE was done by Paul Snider and that the layouts were done by MMSA members.

Perhaps a telling clue about the possible plagiarism is the absence of space ship rules in both the Star Master Draft as well as Star Frontiers. Snider's game was intended as an expansion on his rules for space exploration and empire scale space campaign rules which do cover space travel and space ships. Star Frontiers did not include space ships in the original game, adding them later in an expansion set. We likely will never have a concrete answer, yet, it does lead to conjecture.

The question is whether anyone would want a hard copy of either of these games.

Thanks, from The Secret Team

As always, tell a friend about Secrets of Blackmoor: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons

40 Comments

Time and Sand

Sample Chapter from, The Essential Blackmoor
by Griffith Mon Morgan III Copyright 2023

Searching for Gold

Some Tools You Can Use in Your Own Game Sessions

WE NEED YOUR HELP

ADD SALT FOR MORE FLAVOR

SALT

Salt vs. Zombies:

A Zombie Room

What do you want to do?

Now It's Your Turn

SECRETS of BLACKMOOR part II

The Lost Sci-Fi RPg's By the Snider Brothers

Author

Archives

Categories

Time and Sand

​Sample Chapter from, The Essential Blackmoorby Griffith Mon Morgan III Copyright 2023

Searching for Gold

Some Tools You Can Use in Your Own Game Sessions

WE NEED YOUR HELP

ADD SALT FOR MORE FLAVOR

SALT

Salt vs. Zombies:

A Zombie Room

What do you want to do?

Now It's Your Turn

SECRETS of BLACKMOOR part II

The Lost Sci-Fi RPg's By the Snider Brothers

Author

Archives

Categories

Sample Chapter from, The Essential Blackmoor
by Griffith Mon Morgan III Copyright 2023