Lost original D&D manuscript revealed

[Falconer]

So you would have to imagine, someone rewriting the 3lbb's post '78 by guting them, removing monsters and levels, taking away well established game terminology (dexterity, Player Character, Non Player Character, etc), adding in some original material and, for inexplicable reasons they also add a smattering of very obscure references from only the earliest material preserved in the FFC and nowhere else.

But isn’t that ultimately what Arneson and Snider did in AiF? I mean, if you were planning on publishing your D&D variant (pre-OGL), you WOULD remove all kinds of proprietary material in order to avoid plagiarism. Right?

[Aldarron]

So you would have to imagine, someone rewriting the 3lbb's post '78 by guting them, removing monsters and levels, taking away well established game terminology (dexterity, Player Character, Non Player Character, etc), adding in some original material and, for inexplicable reasons they also add a smattering of very obscure references from only the earliest material preserved in the FFC and nowhere else.

But isn’t that ultimately what Arneson and Snider did in AiF? I mean, if you were planning on publishing your D&D variant (pre-OGL), you WOULD remove all kinds of proprietary material in order to avoid plagiarism. Right?

Ah. The remaining material is 90% straight up D&D, including the exact same sample dungeon. It's definetly not a retooled D&D varient for publication.

[Zenopus Archives]

So you would have to imagine, someone rewriting the 3lbb's post '78 by guting them, removing monsters and levels, taking away well established game terminology (dexterity, Player Character, Non Player Character, etc), adding in some original material and, for inexplicable reasons they also add a smattering of very obscure references from only the earliest material preserved in the FFC and nowhere else.

But isn’t that ultimately what Arneson and Snider did in AiF? I mean, if you were planning on publishing your D&D variant (pre-OGL), you WOULD remove all kinds of proprietary material in order to avoid plagiarism. Right?

Ah. The remaining material is 90% straight up D&D, including the exact same sample dungeon. It's definetly not a retooled D&D varient for publication.

Dan, one thing that might help (when you have time), is to make a descriptive list of the contents of the entire BTPBD document. You did some of this for the reference tables. I think this would help with the overall comparison and arguments. It's hard to follow some of your arguments without having all of the texts in hand.

[Zenopus Archives]

We were discussing this in a parallel thread over on OD&D Discussion over the weekend (I missed the thread here until today).

What was posted over there by Morandir was a link to several photos of the document posted by the owner in 2010 (plus two more random pages mysteriously added last weekend):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53171413@N ... 632283163/

One thing I noted is that one of the illustrations has a reference to a "Lord Arn":





Was Dave ever known to refer to himself as "Lord Arn"?

I remain skeptical (until further evidence is provided) for a few reasons, which I posted there:
-It's not signed by Dave (or anybody), and when he was shown part of it he didn't state affirmatively that it was his, only that it could be and he would need to see more.

-Somebody went through the effort of typesetting the title pages and laying this out with artwork. Who? Why? It has the look of something that was prepared after the original set was published. The page with the Ogre and Ghoul looks like it is trying to mimic the look of the Bell artwork in the published volumes.

[austinjimm]

Anybody know what may have happened to this stuff?

http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/lost-t ... tor-u.html

There might be some material related to the document in question.

(And what's with the picture on that woodgrain box set?? http://www.wired.com/geekdad/wp-content ... G_2057.jpg)

EDIT: This looks to be more info:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/05/ge ... -revealed/

EDIT: From the article above:

Among the highlights: unpublished manuscripts that did not make it into the final draft of Dungeons & Dragons that date as far back as 1973. There are even older items from 1971 and 1972 “dealing with the Blackmoor campaign and the Castle itself,” Stormberg said.

EDIT: OK, I must be behind the curve. Has everybody heard about this already? (http://www.thecollectorstrove.com/)

EDIT: Awesome: http://www.thecollectorstrove.com/discoveries/

[T. Foster]

Looking at those pics (especially the last two showing the treasure tables) I'm coming more to suspect this doc represents somebody's attempt to "reverse-engineer" a more Blackmoor-esque game from the published D&D set - likely someone who had played in games either with Arneson himself or someone from his "circle," and, upon acquiring a copy of the actual D&D rules, thought "hmm, this isn't really what I played, but I bet I can make what I played out of it." If that seems like a silly task, or a big waste of time, it of course is, but don't underestimate the willingness of folks, especially students pre-Internet, to do silly tasks and waste their time.

For instance, c. the summer of 1987 I had copies of the Holmes Basic D&D book, Supplement I, Judges Guild's Ready Ref Sheets. and Best of The Dragon Vol. I, but no copy of the actual OD&D set, and suspected I would never get one (since TSR's Mail Order Hobby Shop was no longer selling it, no local stores had it, and those Lou Zocchi games in Dragon showed he was selling copies for, like, $50+). I also had access to my mom's electric typewriter and a whole bunch of free time (since it was summer and, being 12 years old, I wasn't working a summer job). So you know what I did? I took all of those resources and, using them, tried to reverse-engineer the original D&D set and create my own typed manuscript of it. What I ended up with was pretty much Holmes' text but with OD&D's charts and tables, monster, spell & magic item lists, etc. To someone who came across the manuscript and didn't have the context of how I created it, it could very well look like some sort of early or intermediate version of the Holmes book. This manuscript could be something similar.

[Le Noir Faineant]

*Subscribing.* I said it at the CBI already, for this thread alone, I owe you a horn of mead, Aldy.

[Black Vulmea]

. . . [W]ho wouldn't want to make some fixes to D&D if you were already going to the trouble to type up the whole thing[?] . . .

Surely no sane person would even try in the first place.

[TRP]

. . . [W]ho wouldn't want to make some fixes to D&D if you were already going to the trouble to type up the whole thing[?] . . .

Surely no sane person would even try in the first place?

/me raises hand

It's called, I believe, house rules.

[Aldarron]

Looking at those pics (especially the last two showing the treasure tables) I'm coming more to suspect this doc represents somebody's attempt to "reverse-engineer" a more Blackmoor-esque game from the published D&D set - likely someone who had played in games either with Arneson himself or someone from his "circle," and, upon acquiring a copy of the actual D&D rules, thought "hmm, this isn't really what I played, but I bet I can make what I played out of it." If that seems like a silly task, or a big waste of time, it of course is, but don't underestimate the willingness of folks, especially students pre-Internet, to do silly tasks and waste their time.

For instance, c. the summer of 1987 I had copies of the Holmes Basic D&D book, Supplement I, Judges Guild's Ready Ref Sheets. and Best of The Dragon Vol. I, but no copy of the actual OD&D set, and suspected I would never get one (since TSR's Mail Order Hobby Shop was no longer selling it, no local stores had it, and those Lou Zocchi games in Dragon showed he was selling copies for, like, $50+). I also had access to my mom's electric typewriter and a whole bunch of free time (since it was summer and, being 12 years old, I wasn't working a summer job). So you know what I did? I took all of those resources and, using them, tried to reverse-engineer the original D&D set and create my own typed manuscript of it. What I ended up with was pretty much Holmes' text but with OD&D's charts and tables, monster, spell & magic item lists, etc. To someone who came across the manuscript and didn't have the context of how I created it, it could very well look like some sort of early or intermediate version of the Holmes book. This manuscript could be something similar.

Well, let see. Blackmoor was an ever evolving game and readily adopted new classes, magic items, etc as they became available. The 3lbb's for example, were adopted by the group as soon as they were printed. We know this from the contents of ToTF, FFC and player oral histories. BTPBD has no published material later than 1973 except the FFC content noted. So, this hypothetical player would have to have stopped playing in 1973 and would have to have had intimate knowledge of the rules at that time. Very few of Dave's players had any specific knowledge of the rules (he wouldn't tell them), and of those, who were sometimes handed some "notes" to DM with, none stopped playing in '73. FWIW, The scenerio you are describing would literally have been childs play for someone with my training to spot. The chances of someone trying to create a snapshot from memory or scattered notes of an ever evolving game without including anachronisms are virtually nil. This one reason why Dragons at Dawn takes an eclectic toolbox approach.
You are also failing to address how so much of Blackmoor's uniquness could be missing. If the FFC is presumed to be a source for a late BTPBD, why then are there 2 very clear instances of exact correspondence between the FFC and BTPBD, but none of the many other Blackmoor rules varient in the 92 page FFC?

As it happens, we do actually have a model of a Blackmoor players "houserules" - Freds World. The game rules and setting created by Fred P Funk. III. You might be interested in looking at that for comparison.

[Falconer]

Someone suggested recently (on another forum) that the rules included in B1 represent Mike Carr’s attempt to piece together rules remembered from the Blackmoor campaign, and that it seems he otherwise only had access to Holmes. That made me wonder if there were any possible parallels with this situation.

[Clangador]

Someone suggested recently (on another forum) that the rules included in B1 represent Mike Carr’s attempt to piece together rules remembered from the Blackmoor campaign, and that it seems he otherwise only had access to Holmes. That made me wonder if there were any possible parallels with this situation.

Could you elaborate on the specific rules you are referring to? I haven't read through B1 in a number of years. I don't remember any specific rules in it.

[T. Foster]

I'm obviously working at a considerable disadvantage having only seen a couple pages of the actual manuscript. How many people besides you and the original owner have read and studied the full manuscript? Do they all concur with your findings regarding it?

[Aldarron]

For convenience, I've attached a revised version of the entire paper on the ODD74 forum. (Don't seem to be able to do that here) http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?bo ... 153&page=3

[Aldarron]

Someone suggested recently (on another forum) that the rules included in B1 represent Mike Carr’s attempt to piece together rules remembered from the Blackmoor campaign, and that it seems he otherwise only had access to Holmes. That made me wonder if there were any possible parallels with this situation.

Could you elaborate on the specific rules you are referring to? I haven't read through B1 in a number of years. I don't remember any specific rules in it.

It was me who, a couple years ago put together the B1 rules in a doc. called "Mike Carr's rules addenda" I think it is still there on scribd but I don't use that service anymore. I've mentioned here http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?bo ... hread=6290 that there were some similarities to Blackmoor play, but there are also similarities to the AD&D players handbook that Carr was editing about the same time. Mike was working at TSR at the time so he had access to whatever he needed.