The players were nonplussed—save for the delighted commander of the British druid. But Arneson wasn’t put off from sneaking elements of fantasy into his war games. In December 1970, after a two-day binge of watching monster movies and reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian books, Arneson invited his friends over under the pretense of playing a traditional Napoleonic war game. Instead, he introduced them to the city of Blackmoor.
