DA1: Adventures in Blackmoor

DA1 "Adventures in Blackmoor" (1986) by Dave Arneson and David Ritchie is a 64 page supplement, part campaign setting/part D&D adventure for character levels 10-14.

Module DA1 "Adventures in Blackmoor" (1986) by Dave L. Arneson and David J. Ritchie.  Cover illustration by Jeff Easley.

Creative Team:

"Adventures in Blackmoor" marked Dave Arneson's return to TSR:

I think the next time any work with TSR was 1985.  That was after Gary was able to become president after some sort of stockholders battle which I don't have any details on.  One of the first things he did was approach me about doing a series of modules based on Blackmoor, and that seemed really exciting.  He was president, I think, for three months when new people came in, and they suddenly weren't interested in working with me for various reasons.  Again, I can't go into it, but that was it.

Dave Arneson, from this interview in 2004

Arneson had previously been in discussion with Mayfair Games to publish 12 modules based on his original Blackmoor campaign.

Arneson's co-author, David Ritchie, worked on several projects at TSR from 1982-83 (see this thread from Dragonsfoot in 2008).  He coauthored DA1-3 with Arneson, although garnered sole credit for DA4 "The Duchy of Ten" (1987).

Ritchie's wife, Deborah C. Ritchie, worked at TSR around the same time, serving as editor for B3 "Palace of the Silver Princess" (1981) and X3 "Curse of Xanathon" (1982).  She is credited as editor for the entire DA series, DA1-4.

Interior illustrations are by Jim Holloway, together with a couple of pieces by Clyde Caldwell, originally from AC7 "The Spindle of Heaven" (1985), and Jeff Easley.

The map of "The Northlands" is by Tom Darden, and was based on the First Fantasy Campaign Map from JG 37 "The First Fantasy Campaign" (1977).

Design Origins:

Parts of DA1 are drawn from JG37 "The First Fantasy Campaign" although much of the DM Background relates to subsequent events in the original Blackmoor campaign, dating from the early 1980s

The Adventure:

The PCs discover the infamous Comeback Inn* within the Broken Lands.  They must explore a mysterious gate within its cellars, which leads them into the distant past, and a nefarious plot to kidnap the king.

*see "Making sense of the Comeback Inn maps in DA1" posted on The Comeback Inn forum on April 23, 2021

Location:

Map of "The Known World" from the D&D Master Set (1985)

The DM Background mentions several place names from the map of the Known World in the D&D Master Set (1985):

Before there was Thyatis - before there was Hyboria - before there was the land of Norwold - before the cruel Nentsun built their longships or the Four Kingdoms fought their deadly wars - before the dread Alphatians fell from the sky - before all this, there was Thonia.

Not the Thonia of our time.  No.  That barren, frozen Thonia is but a pale shadow of the Thonia that was, and the mind can but weep at the sightless vision of its past glory.  Full 3,000 years agone and 2,000 years before the crowning of the first Emperor of Thyatis, whose coronation day marks the beginning of our own age, that elder Thonia was torn apart and half drowned in the vastest cataclysm this world has known.

DA1 "Adventures in Blackmoor" pg 2

The text suggests that the Broken Lands are where Blackmoor was originally located:

None in our time knows which of the devices of the Blackmoor philosophers set off the chain of disasters that destroyed that land.  Even the names of such machines have been lost.  All that is known is that some accident occurred, and Blackmoor sank beneath the seas, its shattered shores becoming the Broken Lands we know today.

DA1 "Adventures in Blackmoor" pg 2

A later passage suggests that the Comeback Inn migrated south from its original location over the course of a millennium:

After the sea drowned Blackmoor, the land again rose, only to be swept by glaciers that changed the face of the continent before receding as rapidly as they had come.  In this vast shifting of land masses, all else was destroyed.  But the Comeback Inn, with its powerful enchantments had somehow endured.  Lying hidden beneath the ice for a millenium, it was carried away from its former site by the moving glacier - eventually to surface in the area called the Broken Lands.  Gone was the castle that had once towered above it.  Gone too was the surrounding town.  Only the inn and the enchanted bedrock remained high upon a broken chimney of land, hidden from the world. 

DA1 "Adventures in Blackmoor" pg 6

Further Adventures:

A section detailing the Empire of Thonia and the Kingdom of Blackmoor includes ten ideas for additional adventures, many of which I used when I ran this module, back in the 1980s.

Rogues, Regents, and Rascals:

A 19-page section describes many of the more notable NPCs in Blackmoor.