Retrospective: City of the Gods

The earliest roleplaying game campaigns – Greyhawk, Tékumel, Glorantha – fascinate me, but none more so than Blackmoor. Blackmoor was the first fantasy campaign and yet, compared to most of those that followed in its immediate wake, it's one of the least well documented. Certainly there are published products from the pen of Dave Arneson that shed a little light on what that venerable campaign was like, but what we mostly have are lots of stories and reminiscences from the people who participated in those foundational adventures rather than anything more systematic.

That's a big part of why the DA-series of Blackmoor modules TSR started publishing in 1986 still hold a lot of interest for me. I see them as a possible source of insight into the campaign setting where it all began, so to speak. Unfortunately, as I would later learn, the presentation of Blackmoor in these modules often bears little to no resemblance to Arneson's actual setting. Precisely why this is the case I couldn't say, but I suspect at least part of it has to do with the exigencies of TSR's publishing plans at the time. 

Even so, I happily purchased modules DA1 and DA2, both of which offered up some additional insights into Blackmoor as a setting. One of the things that both these modules made clear was that Arneson was not at all bothered by the inclusion of science fictional elements in his fantasy setting – quite the contrary! So, when the third module in the series, City of the Gods, was released in 1987, I was very interested. Based on its cover illustration by Doug Chaffee alone, it was clear that this one would feature even more explicitly sci-fi material and that intrigued me greatly, despite my ambivalence toward this at the time. 

City of the Gods details a crashed spacecraft called the FSS Beagle, a vessel of the Survey Bureau of the Galactic Federation. The Beagle crashed on Blackmoor five years before the events of the module and had suffered enough damage that nothing short of a rescue by another starship could return its crew to the Federation. As established in the background material, the Federation is notoriously slow to locate missing Survey Bureau vessels. Consequently, some of the Beagle's crew felt the best course of action would be to contact the inhabitants of Blackmoor, establish cultural ascendancy over them, and the mobiliize them to create an industrialized civilization, one capable of repairing their ship. 

This, however, violated the Federation's principle of non-interference, leading to a schism in the Beagle's crew. Those who favored interference were ultimately defeated, but not before a few of them, led by the ship's chief of security, Stephen Rocklin, escaped. The failed mutineers eventually set themselves up in the swamp that held the Temple of the Frog, which forms the background of the module of the same name. Meanwhile, the other crewmembers simply avoided local contact and waited for help from the Federation to arrive. This is the situation into which the player characters stumble when the explore rumors of a strange "city of the gods" in the desert south of Blackmoor.

City of the Gods is, in many ways, similar to the earlier module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, right down to the inclusion of lots of weird-looking advanced technology. What separates it from its predecessor is context. We know know very little about the circumstances of the starship's crash in Barrier Peaks. More than that, all of its crew is dead, leaving behind only robotic servants and alien monsters aboard the vessel. In City of the Gods, though, the crew is still very much alive and divided into two antagonistic camps. Even beyond that, one of those factions has had a lasting impact on the world of Blackmoor. This is in stark contrast to Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which is a much more self-contained scenario.

On the other hand, the presentation of the titular City of the Gods, as the Beagle comes to be known, is isn't very detailed or indeed interesting. I don't believe this is at all reflective of the original "City of the Gods" adventure that Arneson famously refereed first for his own players and then later for Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. This is sadly a common problem when it comes to published Blackmoor material. So much of it seems invented by a collaborator – in this case David J. Ritchie – rather than instead presenting what Arneson used in his own campaign. It's a shame, both in this particular case and more generally. I'd love to learn more about the Blackmoor setting as Dave Arneson imagined it. Sadly, the City of the Gods doesn't do that.