OD&D Original Blackmoor player Bill Hoyt posts his campaign

[overgeeked]

Over on the Piazza someone posted about this.

Blackmoor Player Bill Hoyt's Old Campaign (Free PDFs and Maps)) - The Piazza

Bill Hoyt is one of the original Blackmoor players. After OD&D came out he started his own campaign. These documents are his notes from that campaign.

The materials are freely available here:

Bill Hoyt - My Old Campaign by Smoldering Dung Games

smolderingdung.itch.io

 

[Gus L]

It's an interesting resource - and shows the extent to which early games in Lake Geneva and the Twin Cities were very much informed by wargames. The Vance and fantasy literature influence is strong of course, but the stories that Hoyt's (and others') games from that period tell strike me as less genre emulation and more wargames set in the Dying Earth (or another appendix N type setting). This and Hoyt's quick treatment of the dungeons, including his use of proc-gen for his is interesting as well. When I compare both of these focuses to the first volume of Alarums & Excursions (representing the early West coast D&D scene) where the campaigns were very dungeon based it's quite striking.

Increasingly I think most RPGs as we tend to understand them owe as much or more to Lee Gold and the West Coast games as they do to Gygax and Lake Geneva. Also that there was a lot of design and ideas about what play involved going back and forth between the two communities.

 

[J.Quondam]

I especially like the world Olympics Games results in the final pages! It'd be neat to learn how they played that out at the table.