Review of Dungeons & Dragons Supplement II: Blackmoor (original) (raw)

People commonly see D&D as a cancerous growth of more or less incompatible rules, badly written and centered around the hack'n'slash idea of killing people and stealing their stuff. I always thought this was an exaggeration, because my in first steady role-playing group we played AD&D and it ran as smoothly as can be imagined. Now I know we were gifted with a level 21 GM, who knew the game mechanics by heart and created interesting adventures. I can't say I never had a look at the Players' Handbook, but I definitly never needed to work with it, or any other _(A)D&D_publication. And I never wanted to; the things looked just too voluminous for my GM tastes.

So Blackmoor I only bought out of interest in the field of RPG palaeontology, to see what one of the first RPG supplements looked like. And nobody else had bid for it on Ebay, which I thought at that time to be a bit of a shame. I fully expected a dinosaur of rolegaming, something old, which in ancient times ruled the earth, now long made obsolete by more evolved creatures, with a set of quaint idiosyncrasies and something of the appeal dinosaurs have to children. I expected to find a few spots justifying the exaggerated views of the general public about D&D, something to smile about and nod and say to myself, "well, they could have done better here", and continue reading.

To put it bluntly, I was wrong and they are right.

Blackmoor is the second supplement to the original_D&D_. It presents two new character classes, the (martial arts) Monk and the Assassin, subclasses of Cleric and Thief, respectively. The descriptions are less than inspired, probably because they aren't descriptions but rules only, and intensional ones to boot: "Opening Locks: Same as a hobbit thief." If you don't know the rules for hobbit thieves, it doesn't mean a thing. And it goes on like that, without a word about a Monk's philosophy or an Assassin's motivations or why or when a player might want to take one of the twain as his or her character's class. What is more, the new classes' powers and limitations are only stated but it is never explained why the Monk or Assassin should be subject to them.

The new classes take up six pages, the same amount as the (new) rules for hit locations, which come next. If you asked me whether I would call the former insufficiently or the latter overly represented, I'd say both. But I never liked the idea of hit locations, because, in my opinion, it slows down game play. However, the rules support the notion that had crept on me reading the character classes section: That D&D really is about killing people and stealing their stuff. Granted, an Assassin is a killing machine by definition, but much of the Monk's rules concern themselves with killing abilities. Now with hit locations we learn that it's much more economic to just bash a monster's 15 HP head in instead of reducing its 75 HP total.

After that are twelve pages of assorted monsters. Again, mostly without description. Take the Minotaur Lizard: "[...], they in no way resemble dragons or fire lizards, [...]" What do they resemble? Why "Minotaur" lizard? A lizard with a bull's head, a man with a lizard's head? A lizard with a reptile pendant of a bull's head? Or take the incongruous descriptions, e.g. the Giant Toads, who "[...] prey on all types of insects, [...]". I wonder how many (ordinary) insects are needed to sustain a giant toad. At times, the mixture of game mechanic and imagined real-life terms produces involuntary funny results: "[Giant toads] have the ability to leap 18"/turn, passing over obstacles/creatures up to 30' tall." Every monster seems to be protecting a treasure of some sort, but there is no indication of how the monster came into it.

The core part of Blackmoor is the twenty-two page setting "Temple of the Frog". A Fantasy-SciFi crossover, in which an eevil man from a SciFi dimension takes over an eevil swamp cult worshipping frogs, raises an eevil army of genetically engineered frogmen and, er, waits for the PCs to come, kill him and steal his stuff.

I hate Fantasy-SciFi crossovers for two reasons, Fantasy and SciFi. In this particular case, the SciFi part is the thinly disguised Harry Mudd (he even brings a set of matched Starfleet replicators! (third floor, rooms 2 and 5)), who really didn't deserve being abducted from Roddenberry's universe, raped, mutilated and plugged into Blackmoor, while the Fantasy part is that it's unnecessary. Applied to the situation, the points about the whole "indistinguishable from magic" are that (a) everything could have been accomplished if the High Priest were "just" a powerful mage, (b) to the player characters it doesn't make a difference, anyway, and (c) it completely spoils the players' sense of wonder. "Oh, it's only a phaser. Let's throw rocks until the charge runs out, then we saunter over, kill the guy and steal his stuff."

The interesting thing about the "Temple of the Frog" is that it's not an adventure. It's just the physical setting for an adventure, listing the architecture, trasure to be looted, and the roster of the guards who need to be killed beforehand. There is no such thing as a plot, nothing said about the behaviour of the inhabitants (other than a few words about poor Harry's background), and no motivation for the player characters to check out the temple. This is either left to the GM, or, I suspect, to rules implicit to D&D, meaning the plot is "PCs raid the Temple", the behaviour is "guards come running to be slaughtered by the PCs" and the motivation is "the Temple needs looting". The description supports the latter, I think: For a magically levitating pulpit, Arneson quotes a price as if it were a used car, and there is a short section on how to disassemble, transport, and reassemble the temple organ (Toccata and Fugue time, folks).

After that, Blackmoor presents two pages of rules for underwater adventuring, two pages of rules about the care and feeding of sages, and three pages of diseases that might afflict the player characters.

The illustrations rarely bear any relation to the accompanying text, and they aren't exactly Hildebrand quality. Some are grade school level, a few show inspiration but lack of proficiency. That doesn't bother me, "fannish" pictures have a charm of their own, in my opinion. The maps, on the other hand, are as bad as possible with compass and straightedge. Euclid wept! They are too crowded, with a thick overlay grid, both film and hand-drawn crosshatch shading, and too thin lines. The maps depict walls only (at the thickness of the pen used) of square buildings conforming to the grid (or they would if the grid transparency hadn't slipped). Oh, and stairs to access the other levels, of course. Even I can do better than that!

Blackmoor has three big problems. The first is the maps, the boring prose comes second. Rule after rule after rule, presented in an unchanging drone with far too few breaks into too subtle humour (e.g. the giant beevers, who can be hired for construction projects in exchange for "jewelry, gold, or gourmet bark") and far too many questions remaining (e.g. what do the beavers do with the gold and jewelry (apart from putting it into their hoard to give the next gang of PCs an excuse to kill them and loot)?). But the third and biggest problem is the total lack of any content related to roleplaying. There is nothing inside which inspires players or GMs, nothing which could awake their powers of imagination and draw their characters into the story (what story?). Judging by their publications, the 1975 role-playing community must have been a lot more creative than today's.

Of course, Blackmoor is only the second supplement to the first role-playing game ever. Many things I take for granted hadn't evolved yet back in 1975, things the book probably sparked off or supported their evolution. If TSR had collapsed under the weight of unsold supplements, the whole role-playing hobby might not exist today. Maybe Blackmoor deserved a 5/5 rating at its time, or a 5/5 rating for lifetime achievement, but, johnny-come-lately role-player that I am, I can't decide that. And in 2005 Euros, it's just 103 grams of dead tree. I'm sorry.