I got this when it came out. I’ve still got it, and I’ve used it in a bunch of different ways. It would be a mistake to view it as solely some historical curiosity. It’s not a bad campaign guide, even today.
He did actually update some of his original stuff a bit for this Judges Guild publication, and it’s a merged look at the campaign over different points in time, rather than some accurate snapshot of a specific moment. The maps were cleaned up and expanded. Supposedly, the main campaign maps can even be linked to the JG City State, though I’ve never looked to see how well that would work.
I’ve actually been thinking recently about using this again for a 10mm fantasy wargame campaign I’ve wanted to run. For those who have never seen or played it, this is part wargame campaign, part setting book, and part RPG dungeon crawl.
The wargame campaign material outlines the economies, troop limitations, and potential unit/weapon improvements of the various factions, along with the seasonal flow of the original campaign. It includes some narrative details of how things worked out when he first ran it, but it’s prettty simplistic in terms of lore; mostly just good guys and bad guys slugging it out.
The campaign map is really good, but super challenging. There were actually two copies included, one for the DM and one with less info on it for the players. I feel that with a little tweaking of the numbers, this land could still make for an interesting wargame campaign with a lot of castle sieges and battles in difficult terrain. It is a lot of swamps, cut through by a maze of waterways. The economy numbers are a little crazy, and the whole thing is a bit too huge to easily manage without a large, invested player pool. Could be a lot of fun online though, if somebody wanted to put the work into it.
The second half of the book focuses on Castle Blackmoor, other locales and the dungeon. There is a lot of fun background on the campaign’s significant villains; maps and descriptions of town; specific locales, etc. If you wanted to run this as an OD&D campaign, it’s doable, though there is not a lot of detailed plot narrative adventure here. He did develop random table for generating outdoor map sections, terrain and town/castle features for encounters on the road. I wove a lot of this into a campaign I ran in the early '80s.
The dungeon itself is probably the most dated aspect of the whole thing. I think today’s players would struggle with it. There are 10 levels of a lot of frustrating, crazy mazes, made up mostly of hallways jutting off in random directions and dead ends. Most of the described spaces are just combatants and treasure listed.
I used some of this as well. Players hated the mapping at first, but I found they fixated on wondering why the place was the way it was. Were the dead ends just unfinished? What was the original goal of the design? The more we got into it, the more the players were eager to take over the whole place and bring it to fruition in the pursuit of some untapped great power that it must have held!
If you like playing OD&D/Chainmail either at a mass battle level or as a RPG, this is still worth checking out as a usable game resource. But if you’re inclined to more modern games, with extensive story arcs and built-in narratives, this probably isn’t more than a peak at the past for you.
