I did not enter this thread to opine on your thesis, but just to explain why PatW said what it did (though I have apparently broadened that to include whether the "Northern Marches" piece changed my thinking).
I’m a little surprised--I thought you’d be very interested in the analysis. Based on it, I suspect Arneson sent a letter to Gygax that included earlier versions of
Chainmail’s creature descriptions, Fantasy Reference Table, and Fantasy Combat table, (all taken from Arneson's Blackmoor campaign), likely along with a copy of Leonard Patt’s “Rules for Middle Earth” (as both Arneson and Gygax clearly drew from it according to the analysis above). I remember you mentioning that you had gotten hold of 90 letters between Arneson and Gygax since writing
Playing at the World, too bad it wasn’t in there with the other letters.
Regarding Sir Jenkins and when he gained his honorifics, PatW here followed FFC pg25 (i.e. DB#13). I do agree that the "Northern Marches" description of "Sir Jenkins" leaves us with a question there, especially because, as you rightly point out, the map of the "Northern Marches" is obviously a direct precursor to the later Blackmoor map.
Precursor? The map included with the letter and the map of Blackmoor in
The First Fantasy Campaign look nearly identical to me:
But at the same time... I'm not sure the rest of the description of the Northern Marches seems to match up with the Blackmoor story we find in DB#13. It seems to me like it's no accident that all of the individuals mentioned in the Northern Marches description happen to be C&CS members. But Dave Fant, who gets a lot airtime in DB#13 but was not a C&CS member, isn't mentioned in the Northern Marches. And although DB#13 mentions Jenkins in connection with the "Northern most march," it sounds like it's talking about a place separate from Blackmoor. And well, the name "Blackmoor" is conspicuously missing from the "Northern Marches" description.
Note that the “Northern most march” is listed as being part of Blackmoor in
The First Fantasy Campaign/
Domesday Book #13, “on the actual frontier with the Egg of Coot” (which has a location marked on the map of Blackmoor included with the
FFC).
Maybe what we're looking at here is a continuity shift: there was some vision of the Northern Marches campaign before they played the thing DB#13 calls the "First Coot invasion", something specific to C&CS membership, and then there was some kind of reset, which apparently involved a broader cast of characters and a slightly shifted setting. But, you know, they kept the map.
Sir Jenkins, a well-known Blackmoor character, complete with his honorific "Sir" title gained during the first Coot invasion in Blackmoor, is mentioned in the letter as ruling a portion of the map of Blackmoor included with the letter. Its hard to see the letter as describing something other than Blackmoor. Additionally, Arneson said that “Blackmoor has always been my only setting," so it is of no surprise that what we read about in the letter and what we see on the map matches Blackmoor.
And that is kind of my point about the shift from the "Great Kingdom" to "Blackmoor." When I wrote PatW I had the sense that there was some kind of C&CS "Great Kingdom" campaign plan, and that when the "medieval Braunstein" stuff started, things got a little different, and that was what we saw reflected in DB#13. I'm not sure the "Northern Marches" piece alone convinces me otherwise.
Gygax, Kuntz, and Arneson have all given no indication that the Great Kingdom was ever viable as a game campaign:
Gygax (in 1977): “we planned to sponsor campaign-type gaming at some point.”
Kuntz: “It was not considered a setting, but a realm that was expanding for societal purposes and thereby had no strict gaming potential.”
Arneson: “The Society set up a mythical map where ‘kingdoms’ were assigned to the ‘lords’ of the Society and a society-wide campaign, using medievals was proposed, which never got anywhere.”
What preceded the so-called “’medieval Braunstein’ and ‘the Black Moors’ in that April-May 1971 period” was not a Great Kingdom campaign. Rather, the games in April and May were simply the first Blackmoor games that were announced in
Corner of the Table—but there were many other games that preceded them. Svenson’s “First Dungeon Adventure” describes one game that took place during the Christmas 1970-71 holiday, but as Svenson noted in his story, even that game was not the first Blackmoor game. Blackmoor seems to have started in 1970, months prior to the publication of
Chainmail and the Fantasy Supplement—so the result of the analysis that Arneson must have sent material from Blackmoor to Gygax and that it ended up in the Fantasy Supplement seems to make sense from a timeline standpoint.
