If you have the 1977 print of Blackmoor Dungeon, or even the
Zeitgeist games version, it's easy to think that the maps you have are good to
go. But if you try to run a game with these
maps, you will soon come to notice stairs that seem to exit above ground without
any key or clue as to where. Even the
main stair to the basement on level one is not clearly marked. In fact, lining up the stairs from level to
level just by looking at the maps is far from easy to do. The only labels the stairs have are "up" or "down" and these don't always seem to be correct.
A good long while ago, Tavis Allison of Autarch Games
created a GIMP file of levels 1-6 of Blackmoor dungeon and began labeling the
stairs in order to line up the levels one on top of another. At that time, I decided to build on what he
did by trying to place the stairs and exits that reached the surface onto a map
of the castle of Blackmoor.
As simple as that sounds there is one very real
problem. There is no good surface map of
Blackmoor castle. There are two maps of
the town of Blackmoor that show the castle, but the scale is tiny. There is also a planview of the main castle
building, but it shows nothing beyond the building itself.
There's another problem.
For reasons I have never been able to figure out, the two maps of
Blackmoor town are oriented completely differently. The original map that Arneson drew was
published in the Castle & Crusades Society newsletter issue #13 in July of 1972
and depicts the town south of the castle.
The second, updated map appears in the FFC, and shows the town east of
the castle. Suffice it to say, this second
orientation creates some weird alignment problems, and so I ignored it in favor
of the original map. The actual cardinal
directions aren't really the issue anyway, because what really matters is the
orientation and facing of the castle toward the town. Here is what that original 1972 castle looked
like:
In short, what I did was to create this blow up of the
original castle drawing. Then I traced out the walls and towers and scaled
the traced image to fit the dimensions given in the FFC. After importing this image into the GiMP
files, I noticed right away that the basement on level 1 and the outline of the
inner walls of the Castle were obviously meant to match. So I made a few more adjustments to the
castle outline, straightening out some of the lines, and matched it up in what
seemed like a logical fit. The result of
that was this:
And so it sat for years.
Just so you know what you are looking at, all those letter/number combos
are Tavis' staircase notations on various levels. The letter is just a label but the number
indicates what levels the stairs are on - in retrospect it probably would have
been better to start the label with the level the stair starts on and then give
a letter tag, but it is what it is.
Recently, former Arneson associate Jeff Quinn (author of the
excelent Blackmoor adventure The Redwood
Scar) has been redrawing the maps of Blackmoor dungeon (see here: Map Discussion ). That prompted me to revist this old
project. I was never very happy with my
results and I realized it would make more sense to keep the wall outlines I had
made, but use the official castle floorplan instead of the crude sketch from
the original map. That way I could get
the scale of the castle building exact and adjust the walls to fit. Here then is the castle floorplan from the
FFC (note that this particular version comes from the Arneson estate with his
handwritten notes on it. The Outline is
identical however.)
Using this map allowed me to exactly scale the castle
building (170') to the castle basement.
Playing around with that new image resulted this positioning of the
castle:
Notice how the side entrance actually lines up on the side
of the building and the castle walls line up with or closely parallel the walls
of the basement. There's also a possible
second stair inside the castle itself, stair G1234. I didn't show the outer walls on the above
image for a reason. My original drawing,
based on the blowup of Arneson's '72 map, had the walls fairly close. However, I noticed that on the west (left)
side of the castle there was a line of stairs on level 1 that seemed to follow
the line of the wall. So I extended the
wall over and discovered a remarkable alignment.
As it turns out, I should have known to extend the castle
walls further out anyway. If you look at
Arneson's FFC map of Blackmoor Town and Castle (the one from '77) you can see
this same area between the inner and outer wall is larger and is labeled
"fair", meaning it is the location of the fair of the elves guarding
the castle. So, after trying scores of
combinations and configurations, I'm convinced this is the proper fit or as
close as is possible to get. However,
this would mean that the interior of the castle rooms shown in the FFC has to
be wrong!
Here it is again:
Notice in this image that the throne room is in the smaller
right side wing of the castle, while the tower base on the left is occupied by
various rooms. According to all
descriptions, the main stair (Main 1) should go down from the throne room, and that
appears to be what the "A" above is meant to represent. Believe me, I tried dozens of orientations, size
variations, mirror images and so forth to get the Main Stair to match with the
throne room as shown in this planview.
but it simply won't line up in any way that makes any sense of the
basement below and the arrangement of the outer walls and towers. However, as you can see from the alignment
above, the Main stair lines up quite well with the first floor of the Main
tower, so it appears to me that the throne room should be in the tower, not the
extension to the east where it is shown.
If you ask me, putting the throne room at the bottom of the tower makes
more sense anyway.
Now we have one more thing to mention. Thanks to Dave Megarry's maps for his
character HW Dumbo, we know that the stairs marked "B12" and "D12"
do indeed exit on the surface, and that the corridor heading directly west from
the basement doesn't just end but actually extends to exit on the
hillside. So alright then; using the
above map and Tavis's stair labels, here are the surface entrances and their
locations around the castle.
Name
|
Location
|
A1 Stair
|
Hillside west of castle
|
B12 Stair
|
Tower on NW corner of outer wall
|
D12
|
In section of outer wall west
|
E12
|
At corner of outer wall west and sw
|
HY1
|
At corner of outer wall southwest and inner wall
|
I12
|
Inner wall SE near south tower
|
J1234
|
Well? near SE corner of outer wall
|
L12
|
Hillside just outside SE outer wall
|
Side
|
West wall of main Castle
|
Main
|
Throne room
|
Western corridor
|
Hillside west of Castle
|
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