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Post by Dartanian on Aug 20, 2018 8:35:57 GMT -5
This thread is for links concerning Secrets of Blackmoor: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons. Make sure you read this thread We have a kick Starter give us money, don't let the thread title put you off. SECRETS OF BLACKMOORThe website link takes you to a Trailer, a blog and the Shop. The most recent blog post of 8/19/18 is titled QUICK AND DIRTY DISPOSABLE DUNGEONS - PART 1: THE MAP It is a great discussion about maps and map creation and gets back to the way most of us have always done our maps. The method they espouse is easy to follow for those of us who are artistically challenged and so never became map perfectionists. The post before that was of 7/25/18 titled ON THE USE OF STRATEGOS FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF HIT POINTS AND EXPERIENCE BY THE TWIN CITIES GAMERS - BY MICHAEL WITTIG Mr Wittig is a guest poster. While introducing him they sayIf you are like me, you have no idea who Michael Wittig or Ara Winter are and I hope that secretsofblackmoor will shed some light on that for us. We all know who Daniel Boggs is ( aldarron ) of the Hidden in Shadows who has the reputation of being almost the only historical researcher that doesn't try to twist the facts to fit pre-drawn conclusions. Mr Boggs can be trusted to tell us the truth and to give us his interpretation of the facts, clearly labeled as this is what I think. If Mr. Wittig, Mr. Winter and secretsofblackmoor are of the caliber of Mr. Boggs then perhaps all the published distortions may yet be corrected. Of course we anticipate more fact based information once robkuntz next few books are published. Can we hope that at some point after the Secrets of Blackmoor Documentary has been out for a while that a transcript will be published or an accompanying book? David Megarry's Dungeon! on YouTube there are currently nine great video on this location. Here is the Facebook page Secrets of Blackmoor (Facebook) Look at this post at the Facebook account www.facebook.com/blackmoorsecrets/posts/today-something-very-astounding-has/1461279737264870/Here is the Twitter account David Arneson @blackmoor_Film there is lots of great information posted here.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 20, 2018 10:01:42 GMT -5
Dartanian thank you for doing the legwork and serving up those links, have an exalt! I am going to have to wait till tonight to watch those videos at David Megarry's YouTube site.
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Post by secretsofblackmoor on Aug 20, 2018 11:55:19 GMT -5
Thank you for that well thought out post. The web is so huge and finding anything can be a hassle. It's a place of useful knowledge hidden in a sea of Shoot. Our facebook page is the hub of all our efforts to get people curious about the project, but we've since expanded to the blog and twitter. Twitter and facebook being designed to absorb your life, we're mostly focusing on the Facebook page. Twitter is something we'd tried years ago personally, but found to be somewhat ridiculous and deleted our accounts Dartanian, You've actually gone to all of our online presence and looked at it!!! We are humbled. A lot of our posts are on the history of the game, but we realized that maybe it was getting too wonky. A lot of people just want to see cool maps, character sheets, and monster drawings. Film making is a collaborative art and it is also an expensive art. We have shot all of the film at this point. It was 5 years of traveling around the country and interviewing gamers from the Blackmoor Bunch and the Midwest Military Simulation Association. A great deal of the research was with older war gamers as that is where RPG's begin. In that time we were also making draft edits of the film. It took us a while to really nail the first 3 minutes of the movie, with each draft being wildly different. Now we have a 2 hour draft that still needs a lot of work. It needs that eyes, hands, and ears of many specialists to go over things and smooth them out so the film looks like a real film and not someone's home video. A quick list of people is as follows: -An extra editor to speed up the final edit -A motion graphics person to do all the moving pictures and titles -A 3D artist to make more of the animations of castles and other things -A composer to do all the music. WE have one, but we haven't paid his entire fee yet. He worked on Fantastic beasts, so he is top notch. -Lastly, we want to hire a real voice over artist to do all the narration. Then we will be needing the next stage where the film is broken apart:and gets refined: -A colorist to go through and make the images all match up and adjust exposures -A sound designer to mix all the dialogue and music Once this is done it's on to Mastering: -The audio needs to be mastered for both a stereo mix and a surround sound mix. It also needs to be mastered for both a DVD and Theatrical setting. 4 sets of audio all together. -When all of that is all put together a final movie file is created, the DCP file. Film making is a complicated art with many hidden steps that viewers never hear about. Some of things things we can do ourselves, yet if we are doing one thing, we can't do another; thus our production pipeline gets slowed down a lot. We want to get this done in a timely manner so people can see it. We thought we could sell T-shirts to make this happen, along with the movie draft sample. We are relying on grass roots support to make this project happen - so tell a friend and share our posts online.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 20, 2018 13:32:02 GMT -5
Telling a friend is something we all can do.
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Post by mormonyoyoman on Aug 20, 2018 14:55:09 GMT -5
Telling a friend is something we all can do. Could we tell our enemies too, or should we hope this flies under their radar?
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Post by El Borak on Aug 20, 2018 14:56:44 GMT -5
Telling a friend is something we all can do. Could we tell our enemies too, or should we hope this flies under their radar? We don't have to, they already know. So don't worry about it.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 20, 2018 15:37:33 GMT -5
Oh, before it gets lost in the shuffle, up in the OP the question was asked " Who are Michael Wittig and Ara Winter and how are they connected to all of this?), we were hoping that secretsofblackmoor could tell us more about these two men.
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Post by secretsofblackmoor on Aug 20, 2018 15:59:58 GMT -5
Oh, before it gets lost in the shuffle, up in the OP the question was asked " Who are Michael Wittig and Ara Winter and how are they connected to all of this?), we were hoping that secretsofblackmoor could tell us more about these two men. Well here goes. Michael Wittig is an independent researcher who lured to some forums to discuss history things. This resulted in his being banned, despite my not being able to see any bad behavior on his part. No name calling or anything too personal like that. He did hold some people's feet to the fire, which was a delight to stand back and watch. His big interest at that time was tracing origins of Character Stats. Interstingly some of his observations were right on. And while in the Twin Cities we discovered a document from Arneson's Napoleonic campaign which revealed an origin for Character stats in the Twin cites as being at the exact same time as Arneson's first blackmoor game. This is from our facebook page, hope you can see it. Some are of the opinion that these stats indicate an influence from Hyborea the British campaign game. I do not know enough about that campaign, Dangit, it's either featherstone or... orrrr... brain damage sets in. What struck us immediately is that Arneson starts with 6 stats and age which could be a stat too. If you look at Megarry's character matrix of all his characters, they have a ton of stats, as he did not see them as different from skills. And then by D&D time, what do we have? 6 stats. More seems to become overwhelming and less does not handle a great enough variety of situations. Ara Winter seems to go by several names. His specialty is data mining. We have provided him with many old manuscripts, some unpublished, in order to do analysis on the language used in those texts and see if there is any kind of relationship that can be drawn between these old texts. We've also reached out to some DNA specialists, although Ara does that too. We are waiting to receive a PRE D&D manuscript that may not have been handled by a lot of people because it just sat in a box for 40 years. Thus we could see if we can extract DNA from the borders to see who handled it. Does that help
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Post by El Borak on Aug 20, 2018 16:49:03 GMT -5
Ara Winter does analysis on the language used in those texts and see if there is any kind of relationship that can be drawn between these old texts, that kind of thing is just amazing. Does he post on a blog or anything?
What name was Michael Wittig posting under?
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Post by ripx187 on Aug 20, 2018 16:53:14 GMT -5
This sounds like a fantastic project! I can't wait until it's finished BTW, you are thinking of Tony Bath. That NPC document is amazing, secretsofblackmoor.
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Post by mormonyoyoman on Aug 20, 2018 18:37:27 GMT -5
I am rather grateful for the title of "the TRUE History," since some vocal 21st century Americans are more devoted to false history and ignoring facts. It's sad that now we have to specify when a historical history is based on facts and primary sources.
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Post by Mighty Darci on Aug 20, 2018 21:45:03 GMT -5
Oh, before it gets lost in the shuffle, up in the OP the question was asked " Who are Michael Wittig and Ara Winter and how are they connected to all of this?), we were hoping that secretsofblackmoor could tell us more about these two men. Well here goes. Michael Wittig is an independent researcher who lured to some forums to discuss history things. This resulted in his being banned, despite my not being able to see any bad behavior on his part. No name calling or anything too personal like that. He did hold some people's feet to the fire, which was a delight to stand back and watch. His big interest at that time was tracing origins of Character Stats. Interstingly some of his observations were right on. And while in the Twin Cities we discovered a document from Arneson's Napoleonic campaign which revealed an origin for Character stats in the Twin cites as being at the exact same time as Arneson's first blackmoor game. I wonder if he is a member here, he sounds like someone we'd like. This is from our facebook page, hope you can see it. Some are of the opinion that these stats indicate an influence from Hyborea the British campaign game. I do not know enough about that campaign, Dangit, it's either featherstone or... orrrr... brain damage sets in. What struck us immediately is that Arneson starts with 6 stats and age which could be a stat too. If you look at Megarry's character matrix of all his characters, they have a ton of stats, as he did not see them as different from skills. And then by D&D time, what do we have? 6 stats. More seems to become overwhelming and less does not handle a great enough variety of situations. That last column looks like it was whited out. Do we know what that column is? Ara Winter seems to go by several names. His specialty is data mining. We have provided him with many old manuscripts, some unpublished, in order to do analysis on the language used in those texts and see if there is any kind of relationship that can be drawn between these old texts. We've also reached out to some DNA specialists, although Ara does that too. We are waiting to receive a PRE D&D manuscript that may not have been handled by a lot of people because it just sat in a box for 40 years. Thus we could see if we can extract DNA from the borders to see who handled it. Does that help Does Ara Winter hang around forums at all? I never guessed that DNA would be used in that way.
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Post by ripx187 on Aug 21, 2018 8:30:24 GMT -5
That would be the year that they died.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 21, 2018 9:42:43 GMT -5
That would be the year that they died. Yeah, it does look like it was whited out, maybe they all got raised from the dead.
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Post by secretsofblackmoor on Aug 21, 2018 10:46:07 GMT -5
That column was cut out of the page.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 21, 2018 11:26:15 GMT -5
That column was cut out of the page. I wonder what the story behind that is?
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Post by secretsofblackmoor on Aug 21, 2018 11:57:37 GMT -5
Well here goes. Michael Wittig is an independent researcher who lured to some forums to discuss history things. This resulted in his being banned, despite my not being able to see any bad behavior on his part. No name calling or anything too personal like that. He did hold some people's feet to the fire, which was a delight to stand back and watch. His big interest at that time was tracing origins of Character Stats. Interstingly some of his observations were right on. And while in the Twin Cities we discovered a document from Arneson's Napoleonic campaign which revealed an origin for Character stats in the Twin cites as being at the exact same time as Arneson's first blackmoor game. I wonder if he is a member here, he sounds like someone we'd like. This is from our facebook page, hope you can see it. Some are of the opinion that these stats indicate an influence from Hyborea the British campaign game. I do not know enough about that campaign, Dangit, it's either featherstone or... orrrr... brain damage sets in. What struck us immediately is that Arneson starts with 6 stats and age which could be a stat too. If you look at Megarry's character matrix of all his characters, they have a ton of stats, as he did not see them as different from skills. And then by D&D time, what do we have? 6 stats. More seems to become overwhelming and less does not handle a great enough variety of situations. That last column looks like it was whited out. Do we know what that column is? Ara Winter seems to go by several names. His specialty is data mining. We have provided him with many old manuscripts, some unpublished, in order to do analysis on the language used in those texts and see if there is any kind of relationship that can be drawn between these old texts. We've also reached out to some DNA specialists, although Ara does that too. We are waiting to receive a PRE D&D manuscript that may not have been handled by a lot of people because it just sat in a box for 40 years. Thus we could see if we can extract DNA from the borders to see who handled it. Does that help Does Ara Winter hang around forums at all? I never guessed that DNA would be used in that way. Good questions: The Death column was cut out like a little window on the sheet. Another thing of interest is that unlike all the other Blackmoor Bunch, Dan nicholson had been trained as a IBM programmer. Thus any document he would get, he would date at the top corner. Sadly, Arneson never did this, so his documents are really hard to date. I can ask Ara. He is a very busy person. We have severl email chains where our team wrangles over history things. I have not seen him respond lately, so he's likely working a lot. Here is an article about DNA extraction being done on old texts. We literally want to go Medieval on things! www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/the-secret-life-of-illuminated-manuscripts-as-told-in-dna/536172/
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Post by secretsofblackmoor on Aug 21, 2018 12:13:25 GMT -5
That column was cut out of the page. I wonder what the story behind that is? Possibly the saddest thing about doing research now, is that many people have passed away. We would love to have met Dan Nicholson, as he was very dear to the core members of the group. His involvement is more shadowy as far as real world fame, but he was a huge influence personally to all the people in the group. We know that he was working on creating a data base back in the early 70's for Dave Arneson's Napoleonic campaign. We've seen lots of computer print outs from that. We are fortunate to have gotten to interview Pete Gaylord (the worlds first wizard) And Duane Jenkins, creator of the first Campaign style RPG. Sadly both passed away recently. If we could have met Dan, he could have told us why the page is cut out. Dan's widow was with him early on. She took part in the second attempt David Wesely made on a Braunstein, thus she is the first woman to ever play in a role playing game. She is in the film and speaks briefly about that.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 21, 2018 17:30:08 GMT -5
I wonder what the story behind that is? Possibly the saddest thing about doing research now, is that many people have passed away. We would love to have met Dan Nicholson, as he was very dear to the core members of the group. His involvement is more shadowy as far as real world fame, but he was a huge influence personally to all the people in the group. We know that he was working on creating a data base back in the early 70's for Dave Arneson's Napoleonic campaign. We've seen lots of computer print outs from that. We are fortunate to have gotten to interview Pete Gaylord (the worlds first wizard) And Duane Jenkins, creator of the first Campaign style RPG. Sadly both passed away recently. If we could have met Dan, he could have told us why the page is cut out. Dan's widow was with him early on. She took part in the second attempt David Wesely made on a Braunstein, thus she is the first woman to ever play in a role playing game. She is in the film and speaks briefly about that. Yeah, it is a shame that people are passing away before they can be interviewed and so many documents are already gone. That DNA article is pretty wild, who would have thought of all that.
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Post by mormonyoyoman on Aug 21, 2018 18:11:05 GMT -5
Yeah, it is a shame that people are pfannying away before they can be interviewed and so many documents are already gone. Yup. Do yer family history (genealogy) while your parents are still on Earth, boys & girls.
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Post by True Black Raven on Aug 21, 2018 20:26:19 GMT -5
Dartanian thank you for doing the legwork and serving up those links, have an exalt! I am going to have to wait till tonight to watch those videos at David Megarry's YouTube site. Dartanian have an exalt, this is a lot of work, thank you!
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Post by True Black Raven on Aug 21, 2018 20:32:01 GMT -5
We are relying on grass roots support to make this project happen - so tell a friend and share our posts online. Great stuff, thanks for your hard work and we will do our part in getting the word out. As I mentioned in the other thread I posted on my blog and others here will be too, I am sure. I saw where someone shared about this elsewhere and the first post in the thread was one word "Spam." Don't let that kind of negativity get you down. This film will disprove everything that some people have built there game lives around and no one likes finding out their beliefs are built on sand and of sand. Preserve, this is well worth doing and should have been done 20 years ago.
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Post by True Black Raven on Aug 21, 2018 20:48:17 GMT -5
secretsofblackmoor, I saw above and on your site you mention As noted we all know Daniel Boggs aka aldarron, there are too few like him. Do Michael Wittig and Ara Winter ever post online, I am not familiar with either one of them. I liked his blog post at your site and I enjoyed reading through all of the 2018 posts and I will get to the other years in a few days. I really enjoyed the "Killer DM" essay. That is why you don't write 30 pages of backstory before the game. You develop backstory as the game progresses. You want backstory, a 3x5 Index card one side is your character and the other side is the backstory.
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Post by secretsofblackmoor on Aug 22, 2018 1:07:56 GMT -5
secretsofblackmoor , I saw above and on your site you mention As noted we all know Daniel Boggs aka aldarron , there are too few like him. Do Michael Wittig and Ara Winter ever post online, I am not familiar with either one of them. I liked his blog post at your site and I enjoyed reading through all of the 2018 posts and I will get to the other years in a few days. I really enjoyed the "Killer DM" essay. That is why you don't write 30 pages of backstory before the game. You develop backstory as the game progresses. You want backstory, a 3x5 Index card one side is your character and the other side is the backstory. I think if you go to ODD74 there may be a post on text analysis using a variety of game rules sets. That is Ara, whatever his handle is there. We provided a lot of the old rules for that analysis and had some say in what we were seeking to find out. The results may not exactly support what we want to find, but that is science and I have to stick by that. Yeah, gamers are a tough bunch.. Everyone is an expert right? I know I was before and sort of am now. Yeah the SPAM comment. it was interesting to see others go after him after that comment. I think the larger forums attract a greater variety of people. In that mix will be your griefers, who want to provoke things. TO be honest, as soon as the movie is finished, I'd like nothing more than to not see any forums or any social media for some time. My only good news is that we're taking a break this week, I have to plan for our weekend game into the depths of Tonisborg dungeon. I tend to wing it though. Been playing so long that as long as I am fair, the players never notice. And often my made up on the spot stories can be quite fun. Glad you liked the Killer Dm series. I worry that I get a bit pedantic. Dan Boggs sometimes wonders what the hell I am trying to write when we work on some things together. But the core premise is to point out how the original rules had a lot of casualties built in. Try rolling up some characters and just running a straight shot for shot battle between them and some monsters to see how many just buy the farm in direct combat. So if you look at modern games, you find the opposite and players get so many things they can use in battle that they really never feel danger like the old days. You can really see it in computer game designs especially. I often see people talking about how dungeon masters have to be fair, Well, as a DM I might say something like, " You see large claw marks all over the walls and there seems be a lot of soot on the ceiling as if a large fire had gone through here... Are you sure you want your first level party to continue down this passageway? Well, if the hint is ignored, so be it! Gave you chance to put 2 and 2 together and that WAS being fair. And again my group is going back to Tonisborg, they know how deadly it is, they know I am not going to pull any punches, last game they lost two dwarves. They need to be clever, lucky, and perhaps just run away to survive.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 22, 2018 7:42:43 GMT -5
I often see people talking about how dungeon masters have to be fair, Well, as a DM I might say something like, " You see large claw marks all over the walls and there seems be a lot of soot on the ceiling as if a large fire had gone through here... Are you sure you want your first level party to continue down this passageway? Well, if the hint is ignored, so be it! Gave you chance to put 2 and 2 together and that WAS being fair. You can't be more fair than that. You give the players the info they need to make a good decision; but the decision, good or bad, is theirs and they have to own that.
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Post by Warrior Twin Two on Aug 22, 2018 13:11:58 GMT -5
My only good news is that we're taking a break this week, I have to plan for our weekend game into the depths of Tonisborg dungeon. I tend to wing it though. Been playing so long that as long as I am fair, the players never notice. And often my made up on the spot stories can be quite fun. IMO games where the ref wings it are far superior to games that are planned out, planning almost always introduces tracks. It is a rare ref that can plan and not install tracks.
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Post by Hexenritter Verlag on Aug 22, 2018 14:47:13 GMT -5
My only good news is that we're taking a break this week, I have to plan for our weekend game into the depths of Tonisborg dungeon. I tend to wing it though. Been playing so long that as long as I am fair, the players never notice. And often my made up on the spot stories can be quite fun. IMO games where the ref wings it are far superior to games that are planned out, planning almost always introduces tracks. It is a rare ref that can plan and not install tracks. That is true, but some systems almost require prep unless the ref can pull rules out of their photographic memories, which is why I now love OD&D/its clones & Classic Traveller.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 22, 2018 16:36:51 GMT -5
Wouldn't a photographic memory be a great thing for a referee to have. But with OD&D if you run it a lot, it is almost like have a great memory.
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Post by ripx187 on Aug 22, 2018 17:45:38 GMT -5
I've come to the conclusion that specific rules usually don't matter. There are procedures that work well, and then there are the nuanced little rules that we believe define a system, but does it really? Why should we even need that in our games? Does it really matter if we are using mechanics which so-and-so says that they use, or if we just use the ones that come to us in real-time when we need them?
If a badguy throws a lit torch into a house, the house will burn because I said it will; or, if the PC's are in that house, I'll see what they will do with it and go from there. I don't need to look up fires. I know what I want to happen, if the orcs want to burn down an entire village, it's either going to happen or the PCs are going to try and stop me from doing it. They are the deciding factor, not a handbook. If the players decide to play a war game, then we can play the war game, but that is about the extent of what a handbook can do, everything else is up to us.
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Post by El Borak on Aug 22, 2018 20:30:58 GMT -5
I've come to the conclusion that specific rules usually don't matter. There are procedures that work well, and then there are the nuanced little rules that we believe define a system, but does it really? Why should we even need that in our games? Does it really matter if we are using mechanics which so-and-so says that they use, or if we just use the ones that come to us in real-time when we need them? If a badguy throws a lit torch into a house, the house will burn because I said it will; or, if the PC's are in that house, I'll see what they will do with it and go from there. I don't need to look up fires. I know what I want to happen, if the orcs want to burn down an entire village, it's either going to happen or the PCs are going to try and stop me from doing it. They are the deciding factor, not a handbook. If the players decide to play a war game, then we can play the war game, but that is about the extent of what a handbook can do, everything else is up to us. Yeah, it is a mistake to stop a game to look up rules, just make a ruling and move on. Good players don't have problem with that if you are not a flake and it keeps the game moving. Everyone doesn't like it when the game stops.
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