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John Snider -Egg of Coot Campaign
#1
John Snider made a great deal of material available to us from his Egg of Coot Campaign.

We're talking with Havard about having him deal with the majority of this material, so that gamers can have access to it for use in their games.

It will likely go in stages:

1. We assess what is in the masses of papers. We scan the most significant items for our own use.

2. We ship everything else to Havard for him to read through and archive.

3. We make a public archive of this material that covers new lands in Blackmoor.

This will likely be a slow process. We will also be in contact with John Snider, in order to get his input on how to interpret all of his notes.

We posted a map and some comments here:
https://www.facebook.com/blackmoorsecre ... 7248726121

"Time for another Friday Treat!
For a Blackmoor fan this is an easy question to answer:
You are given an unpublished set of campaign notebooks, complete with maps, for an Egg of Coot campaign; that connects off the upper west edge of Arneson's original Blackmoor map, is this official canon?
It is if the dungeon master is John Snider - the illustrious drunken warrior Boozero.
When we visited with John Snider he let us have what was left of his Blackmoor game from the 90's.
There is a lot of other material from his campaign: Around 8 to 10 notebooks of papers and 2 world maps that extend the known lands of Blackmoor. Fragments from old hand typed rules for combat with energy weapons, and a Sci Fi gamers equivalent to the Monster Manual; both dating from the 70's, or 80's.
This "Players's Map" comes from around 1991.
The Egg of Coot campaign used home rules that were derived from John's unpublished Sci Fi RPG game. It was to be the third installment of the Star Probe/ Star Empire trilogy and would have been useable in conjunction with his other games. Although the third section is unpublished, it could possibly be the first Sci Fi RPG in history - what do you think?
It is perhaps because John was one of the early dungeon masters in the Twin Cities that Arneson trusted him with adding to his gaming world's legacy: Blackmoor officially began in 1971, the Star Empire campaign setting began in 1972, so we are told.
John says that he and Dave worked over the phone to make sure that their Blackmoor campaigns would have continuity. Although Dave collaborated on the story concepts, in many ways, it sounds like Dave let John take the lead on developing this part of Blackmoor.
One thing we learned a lot about from John, is the true nature of The Egg of Coot. (And no, the Egg of Coot is not named after Gary Gygax either.) This is a deeply guarded secret that we cannot share publicly. All DM's need their secrets so that they don't give away the story to the players; even John and Dave. Smile
What is most interesting is that the game is being played with a set of Sci Fi RPG rules, but the setting is Blackmoor. This wouldn't come as a surprise to any of the old gang, since there is a crashed spaceship on Blackmoor that comes from John's Sci Fi campaign, and there is a planet in John's Star Empire campaign, that is were Blackmoor is located.
It is said that Planet Blackmoor is quarantined due to some "Weird Science", or magic, that corrodes technological devices rendering them useless; at least that's what Robert the Bald told us. Wink
We've left these images fairly high resolution so you can copy/paste them for personal use. We'll also be sending a set to Havard, so he can post them on his Comeback Inn forum.
Hope you have a good gaming weekend!"

Most of you are familiar with this background. It is written for a general gamer audience. Facebook has a very bad GUI. It fails constantly. We can't edit our posts without losing the Image data. There is a citation from Bob Meyer that might actually be Greg Svenson. We were working from memory and we have hours upon hours of footage. Please pardon our sloppiness.

Thanks!
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#2
A game set in Blackmoor using a Sci FI game for the engine? Not so strange, these days Wink
Rob
[Image: Trista-Thronesig-zps94e26f1f.png]
Follow Thorn's Chronicle on Facebook | twitter | The Blog
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#3
If you right click and download those maps, you can use a graphics program to stitch them together.

We scanned them at a fairly high DPI of 400. So you can zoom into it and really see the texture and details of these maps.

Our interest lies in the time period when blackmoor is in it's original stages. We have not examined any of the later products past FFC/JG/'77. We don't know how it ties in with later maps. It will be interesting to see if anyone uses this map for a game of their own.
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#4
This is really awesome! Thanks for posting and giving up updates on the progress of getting this material processed. I can't wait to see more! 8)

The "is it canon" question could inspire quite a debate. Not Dave's, clearly, but pretty darned close. Also, I love the fact that it was based in part on John's unpublished scifi RPG. I own Star Probe and Star Empires and have wanted a peek into the third "Star" product (the RPG) for a long time now.
Marv / Finarvyn
Member of The Regency Council
Visit my Blackmoor OD&D board
OD&D since 1975

"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
- Dave Arneson

[Image: Giladan.png]
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#5
We asked John about the campaign via email, and he spoke a bit about it in a recorded interview.

The one big takeaway from both is that he wants to get the campaign info out there, so that people can use it. He is very open to people elaborating on what he has created. He spends time playing online games and is very involved with skinning 3d models and making maps for the games he plays. His attitude is that everything should be open source and freely shared.

We've asked about details on his campaign and he seems to have done a lot of the story in his head, much like Arneson did. There aren't any really descriptive module style write ups on anything. It is more like a series of personal notes and memory triggers that only he would be able to recall. He says he never bothered to make up dungeons; he had one of those pencil puzzle maze books in with his gaming material, and would simply choose a pencil maze randomly when he needed a dungeon.

The other thing about his campaign is that he really was using his sci fi rules and he says the game would have eventually ended up in space. After around ten years it hadn't gotten that far yet. Most of the plot lines seem to relate to the players being manipulated by the Egg of Coot into doing it's bidding. The Egg isn't happy with being in the Blackmoor reality anymore. It knows there are bigger fish to fry and it wants to break out into the sci fi universe via a rip in the reality that exists between the two places. The players likely did not know they were helping an evil force expand its influence as they were happy going around and gathering artifacts for the Egg.

Ok, time to get scanning, so Havard can share some things. Wink
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#6
Big Grin
He's a real Nowhere man, sitting in his Nowhere land,
making all his Nowhere plans for Nobody.
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#7
Secrets of Blackmoor Wrote:The other thing about his campaign is that he really was using his sci fi rules...
Did you ask for more details about the rules, or was your focus on the actual setting and adventure plotlines?
Marv / Finarvyn
Member of The Regency Council
Visit my Blackmoor OD&D board
OD&D since 1975

"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
- Dave Arneson

[Image: Giladan.png]
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#8
finarvyn Wrote:
Secrets of Blackmoor Wrote:The other thing about his campaign is that he really was using his sci fi rules...
Did you ask for more details about the rules, or was your focus on the actual setting and adventure plotlines?

There is so much to cover when we do interviews. Even though we sat with John for two sessions, it still felt like we just didn't get enough of his stories.

It wasn't until after we had wrapped everything, and most of the gear was packed, that he revealed he had his old campaign. He gave it to us along with his entire games collection.

We didn't even really look at what he gave to us much, just no time. We had been working hard for two days and just wanted to pack it up and ship it.

So to answer your question: we did not think his campaign was significant at the time because our research focus is the twin cities gamers between 1964 and 1974. The Egg of Coot campaign happens much later in the 90's. That still makes it over 20 years old and a collaborative endeavor between John and Arneson, so in retrospect it is significant.

We knew about his sci fi campaign because the other guys spoke very highly of it. There is one story about how John's ship building system was very open ended. Dave Arneson built a a very large dreadnaught that would be best described as a death star; and just as the death star, it got taken out by another player's swarm of small sub light ships that were dropped from a carrier. Megarry had something freaky happen to him that caused his character to merge with an AI and also created a split in his body making him into a thirty headed creature - The Meggariath, or Meggarian. It was like 30 characters in one body. This is from memory, it was a crazy story. And Bob Meyer was the only one to discover the worm holes between everyone's home space. He proceeded to make contact with everyone, while freaking them out with his ability to appear from nowhere. The whole thing just sounded like so much fun.

What is most interesting about the big campaigns that the twin cities gamers ran, is that most of the players do not know to this day, all the details of whom was doing what to whom. So when you hear the stories from the players, they all tell it from a different perspective. It's a real kick to see the differences.

We have enough material on John's Sci Fi campaign, that we are considering doing some kind of short documentary on just that.

Back to John's Egg of Coot campaign, tomorrow you can see some of it for yourself, we just sent some of the maps for Havard to post on here. We also emailed john to see if he can give us some info on what can be found on those maps. The plan is to release a couple maps and get some notes from John for anyone who plans to DM a game on those maps.

The big question is how to reveal the arc story details on this forum, but only to actual DM's. That way his campaign can be played by other people around the world without any spoilers for the players.

One thing about his Egg of Coot campaign, is that John refers to it as the Blackmoor Alternate Universe. We need to pick his brain on that. Is Blackmoor a parallel to his spec game, or is this Egg of Coot campaign an alternate to Blackmoor itself.
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#9
Now that we have a half-dozen threads (or more if there are some old ones floating around) on John's campaign, any chance that we could have a section of the boards where his stuff can all be moved? I'm afraid that there might be some stuff I miss somehow.
Marv / Finarvyn
Member of The Regency Council
Visit my Blackmoor OD&D board
OD&D since 1975

"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
- Dave Arneson

[Image: Giladan.png]
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#10
finarvyn Wrote:Now that we have a half-dozen threads (or more if there are some old ones floating around) on John's campaign, any chance that we could have a section of the boards where his stuff can all be moved? I'm afraid that there might be some stuff I miss somehow.

That is a great suggestion. However, I am also worried about creating too many sections here at these boards that see activity for a brief time and then die out. One idea we have talked about in the Admin Group is a section called Twin Cities Campaigns. This could include The Egg of Coot campaign, but also Fred's World, John Snider's Star Empires Campaign, the various Braunstein games etc.

What do you think about this? Smile

-Havard
Currently Running: The Blackmoor Vales Saga
Currently Playing: Daniel S. Debelfry in the Throne of Star's Campaign
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