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In terms of layout, Blackmoor follows the pattern of the original D&D rules and the Greyhawk supplement, divided into “men & magic,” “monsters & treasure,” and “underworld & wilderness adventures” sections. The first section introduces the monk and assassin character classes and a hit location system. The second section introduces a large variety of mostly nautical monsters and magic items. The third section includes the first published appearance of the “temple of the frog” -- the first published adventure scenario for D&D ever – plus notes for running an underwater campaign, the first NPC class – the sage, and game mechanics for diseases.
The monk character class, with its emphasis on martial arts, is clearly based on the kung fu movie craze of the 1970s. Despite the fact that they are members of an order with a “religious atmosphere,” they bear nothing in common with the cloistered monks of the Middle Ages other than being presented as a sub-class of the cleric class. The class initially appears to be balanced, trading armor for increased weapon and weaponless damage, gaining some special abilities like stunning attacks in exchange for a limit on treasure, and a saving throw to avoid missile weapons in exchange for lower hit points than a fighter, but then gains some thief skills and additional spell-like abilities as they advance in level. The class is already out of control when compared to fighters of the same level by 6th level, when the monk can attack twice per round for more damage than any weapon can do.
The assassin character class, presented as a sub-class of thief, may have an even worse reputation for campaign-busting. The assassination rules, determined by a percentage chance based on level comparison, defiantly circumvent the whole death-through-attrition mechanic of hit points. With a whopping 75% chance for a 1st level assassin to kill another 1st level character, the assassination is considerably more effective at killing than the fighter who has a worse chance to hit and then must roll for random damage. Additional conditions, like the assassin needing complete surprise to assassinate, are added in the next edition the assassin class appears in, but are absent at this point. The only other ability that is different from thieves is the disguise ability, which could have been a useful addition for thieves in general. Interestingly, a short paragraph on poison defers the subject to a “future supplement” where an alchemist class was going to be introduced. This promised supplement never happened, though an alchemist class appeared in an early issue of Dragon magazine.
While the monk and the assassin are poor fits to D&D, it is impossible to say how additional house rules for the other character classes from the Blackmoor campaign might have balanced them all out. For example, later published Blackmoor material suggested that magic-users in Blackmoor did not cast spells so much as they used hi-tech items that they mistook for magic, many of them more high-powered than the typical D&D spells.
A hit location system is not an unworthy goal, as it adds gritty realism and a heightened sense of danger to combat. It also undermines the abstract nature of hit point-based combat. The concept of hit location systems keeps returning (it has turned up a few times in Dragon magazine over the years, and other game systems have used or flirted with hit location systems), but this was the first. This hit location system divides hit points between three to five body parts/areas, depending on body type. The body types are humanoid, avian, reptile, insectoid, fish, and snake. In general, a humanoid is going to take hits in the arm (or in the back of the chest if attacked from the rear). Avians will, in general, take hits in the wing (or in the back of the legs if attacked from the rear). Both of these examples make realistic sense. If a body part takes its allotment for hit point loss, it is disabled. The first problem is that there is nothing in the system for un-disabling a body part. Limbs that are disabled are apparently gone forever (one could assume magical healing might re-enable a limb, but the rules do not say so). The second, even worse problem is that losing your head or chest means instant death, and there is a one in two chance of most any attack striking one of those locations. Considering how often most player characters take their lumps, it seems PC death tolls would be inordinately high with this system. The third problem is that everyone has the same hit location percentages, with no modification for attacking as a higher-level fighter – though there is an elaborate modifier table for adjusting the hit location tables for height comparison.
The next section introduces 36 new monsters; including giant aquatic animals, aquatic dinosaurs, aquatic humanoids such as mermen, sahuagin, and locathah, and aquatic monsters such as ixitxachith and morkoth. Of interest from the individual descriptions are the following: a passing comparison between mermen and lizard men suggests mermen are more monstrous than the little mermaid version, giant crabs could be encountered in “tremendous numbers,” and the crocodile entry mentions a “stunning” tail swing without any game mechanic to reflect being stunned while giant wasps have a detailed game mechanic for their poison sting (complete with side effects leading up to death). Is the “minotaur lizard” a typo of “monitor lizard”? Likely yes, but starting a editorial trend at TSR that would later create the thoul, typos were seen as excuses to create new monsters rather than admit mistakes. The sahuagin rate an amazing two pages of ecology above the usual paragraph most monsters receive. Last is a section with notes on how to adapt land-based monsters to an aquatic environment, most notably the sea hag which is here presented as an anti-dryad.
Curiously, over half of these monsters will never appear in a Blackmoor-related module published to date.
The last part of this section is a half-page list of 14 treasures (most are magic items, but some are no more than pearls with a monetary value). The longest description is the one long sentence for the imaginative “manta ray cloak.”
The next section is the “ Temple of the Frog” scenario. Located in the Lake Gloomey area of the Blackmoor campaign, the temple is in the middle of a century-old schism between the “good” Brothers of the Swamp (clerics) and the “evil” Keepers of the Frogs (monks). Actually, neither group is very likable, the difference between them being that the Brothers are feeding slaves to their man-eating frogs and the Keepers are feeding the Brothers to the frogs. Meanwhile, they’ve allowed a whole town full of bandits to congregate around them for protection, as they know someone’s going to try to bust them for all this eventually. So far it is a quirky, but not too unusual set-up for a fantasy scenario, but what changes that is Stephen the Rock and his followers. They came to the temple with an offer of hi-tech equipment in exchange for leadership of the temple. The sci-fi elements are downplayed (again, technology in Blackmoor is described as magic), but it is clear that Stephen and his men are aliens from another world/dimension who need the temple. They are supposed to be here looking for others of their kind and looting items unique to this world for their never-named superiors, but Stephen is sending his bosses false reports and coveting wealth and power for himself. The “new” fortifications on the temple grounds suggest that they are preparing for eventual retaliation.
There are 11 numbered encounter areas outside the temple, 23 numbered areas (and 2 unnumbered) on 3 floors of the temple, and 28 numbered areas (and 5 unnumbered) in the 2 levels of dungeon. The descriptions for each paragraph are information for the DM, with no pre-prepared material for the players to hear (an innovation in modules still six years away) Almost no statistics or even suggested levels are given for any of the NPCs (except for some magic-users in the dungeon), though we have numbers and daily routines for the rest. The temple and its grounds are not a “static” locality as most published modules would later present, but rather a variable or "living" locality meant for player characters to interact with over time. It is an open-ended scenario without any obvious goals. It is not only up to the Dungeon Master to provide goals (besides killing and looting everyone) and NPC stats (based on how challenging the DM wants it to be), but it is assumed the DM understands this is his role without it ever being stated (and, again, later modules will contradict this mindset).
The community surrounding the temple is referred to as a city, but adding up the local population estimates by encounter area gives a rough figure between 2,000 and 3,000 (a city by Blackmoor standards?). Curiously, one-third to one-half of this population is kept underground guarding the dungeons under the temple – a huge undertaking with no given motive, though one can infer that Stephen the Rock is either paranoid, fearful of aerial assault, or both (the fact that Stephen has to report to a satellite --orbital? -- suggests the fearfulness is not unfounded).
The only game mechanics provided are for Stephen’s “magic”/hi-tech items. While perhaps balanced for the Blackmoor campaign, the anti-magic battle armor, lightning-spewing sword, spell-reflecting shield of invisibility, and medical “kit” that can heal virtually anything are monstrously powerful by most standards. Although they make Stephen a truly formidable foe for any PCs seeking a tough boss villain to fight, a DM had best hope that no PCs ever get their hands on this stuff! Of course, nowhere in the course of the adventure is it suggested the PCs must fight Stephen. Indeed, the throwaway line about the progress reports he feeds to a satellite from a communications module suggest that canny PCs could use this to “go over his head” and have him dealt with by his superiors.
In a similar fashion, the scenario seems to be treasure-heavy, with a jewelry-adorned pulpit valued at 100,000 gp in the temple and a library with 10,000 volumes in it (just as available, assuming the books are worth only 10 gp each). While the scenario is not necessarily about looting the temple, it is certainly conceivable (and robbing it would be easier than an all-out assault). Of course, this is not far off from many early D&D/AD&D scenarios where treasure hordes are measured in thousands or tens of thousands of gold pieces. The literary source for this convention is probably Edgar Rice Burroughs, who used ubiquitous wealth to decorate his exotic settings, and the early authors of D&D were more interested in combat simulation than considering the economics of dumping so much gold into a medieval-like setting.
Worth mentioning are subtle dichotomies in the text, such as the well-tended gardens festooned with songbirds next to warehouses where raiders store their “inventories.” The “good,” slave-keeping Brothers is another example. One could even argue the “technology-is-really-magic” is another example of Blackmoor contrasting with itself at the same time it contrasts with tropes and conventions of the sword & sorcery genre. In this regard, “Temple of the Frog” makes for a good introduction to Blackmoor and an example of what play in that campaign was like. But it is also a Blackmoor-specific scenario and unlikely to work in most other campaign settings.
Also worth mentioning is the clue about the pipe organ in the temple being the last “of its kind still in existence,” which is one of the clearest indications that Blackmoor is a post-Apocalyptic setting.
The “underwater adventures” section is, like most of the book, spotty in terms of quality. There are some semi-interesting ideas, like treating seaweed as a terrain feature and phantasmal sunken ships, but other ideas are forced into odd game mechanics (like making the trident extremely deadly underwater, instead of reducing the effectiveness of other weapons). There are underwater encounter “matrixes” (typically called wandering encounter tables in later publications) that yield unusual results, such as lampreys being the most commonly encountered animals underwater and whales being the most commonly encountered animals when sailing. This section begins with its own introduction, explaining the rich heritage of underwater locales in fantasy – Mu, Lemuria, and Atlantis being named. It also includes a line about adventurers being “notoriously gullible and easily duped or led astray.” This line is similar to the tongue-in-cheek, DM-player adversarial comments Gary Gygax has been known for making. Either Arneson possesses a similar sense of humor, or this may be one of the few moments in the text where Gygax’s editorial hand shows.
Next is the sage “class”, or detailing how to apportion campaign knowledge through hired NPCs. The sage is not presented in a character class format, per se, lacking XP, level advancement, and the like. Sages have fields of specialized knowledge and percentage chances of producing any requested facts, as well as fees and notes on retainer loyalty. As a further indication of the economics of Blackmoor (and showing that the treasure available in “ Temple of the Frog” was not atypical), sages are very expensive – research can cost hundreds of thousands of gp. Sages do not have combat or defensive abilities – not even spell use – except for a “dying curse” they can use to mess with players who dare kill sages.
The last section is on diseases and describes 13 diseases PCs might contract in the course of a campaign. It includes some blanket terms of a non-technical nature, such as “grippe” for colds and flus and “crud” for fungal infections and ringworm. Tuberculosis and leprosy are particularly nasty, but most diseases effectively remove a PC from game play until the disease is cured. There is only a non-magical cure provided for malaria. One interesting optional rule is to allow the clerical spell cause light wounds to cause grippe instead of damage. There are some interesting typos missed when this section was edited, such as spotted fever being spread by licks instead of ticks.
The artwork throughout the book is generally better than that found in the original D&D rule booklets and the Greyhawk supplement that proceeded it – high-quality amateur/low-quality professional work. Much of the artwork will later be reprinted in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual and some of it will reprinted in The Strategic Review (the newsletter that proceeded Dragon magazine). Some of the artwork, such as the roper, mind flayer, umber hulk, and chimera are entirely unrelated to the text of the supplement. One could surmise that the original Blackmoor manuscript arrived with very little artwork and was padded out with already commissioned art. Lastly, it is worth mentioning that the maps that go with the “Temple of the Frog” scenario are very simple, hand-drawn maps, such as most people make for their home campaigns. The days of modules with professional cartography were still some ways ahead for the gaming industry.
Is the supplement of value to gamers today? No. Everything that was innovative in Blackmoor 30 years ago was already revisited and done better within the 15 years after it. Was the supplement of value then? Somewhat, for players and DMs looking for new options for their campaigns at the time, or for DMs looking for a ready-made scenario, but still having enough free time to add their own notes and stats. Is Blackmoor of historical significance? Surely. Many players continue to happily play monks to this day in D&D and owe it all to this supplement. Any DM who has taken his PCs beneath the waves has surely consulted underwater game mechanics inspired by these early ones. And gamers continue to buy and play published modules that learned, at the least, from “Temple of the Frog” what not to do in module design.
