An Interview with Bob Meyer - Part 2 of 3

From 8 December 2025

Continuing our conversation, I am using RH to represent me (Rod Hampton - interviewer) and BM to represent Bob Meyer, the interviewee.

[BM] One thing that I should warn you about… I love to talk. I mean, that’s obvious, but my memory is really going bad. And as a matter of fact, I’ve basically given up playing games because my memory is bad enough now and I’m not as sharp as I used to be. I don’t want to be one of these guys that plays the games when people groan and say, “Oh, Meyer is here again” because I’m good. um, at least I have been good. I usually win games. I have played so many games in my lifetime. I started gaming when I was around five when I learned chess. And I’ve played so many games. I’ve probably won more games than you’ve played. Here’s the way I put it: I’ve probably lost more games than you’ve played.

[RH] [You’re probably] right.

[BM] And I’ve won more games than I’ve lost. I am very experienced, which makes for a very good player. Well, not so good anymore now with my mind not necessarily being there.

[RH] I’m, I’m 55 going on 56 in a couple of months, and I have senior moments, and so I sympathize. And I’m not looking forward to my game skills deteriorating either.

[BM] Yeah. And, you know, I often say, “Well, maybe you’re talking to the wrong person because if you want to know about Braunstein, you need to talk to Wesley.” Or Strategos.

[RH] Right.

[BM] Source of the Nile I know about because I was one of the original investors. I was a play tester for that. So that I know about. Brownstone, unfortunately, Duane [Jenkins] is gone so you can’t talk to him. And Arneson I know played it. Greg Svensen I’m pretty sure was in it. Greg knows a lot of things, and I think he’s still active on the forums. So if you want to talk to someone about a lot of the things back then Greg would be one to talk to and David Megarry because he was involved in a lot of this, and I think he may even be on the forums also. So I, I can tell you things [but] I’m not sure if what I’m telling you is absolutely what happened though.

[RH] That’s okay. I’m trying to keep it relevant to your specific experience. And before we spring back to where we were . . . So after that character died [fighting the troll], I’ve heard that you went away from Blackmoor games for a bit.

[BM] Mm-hmm

[RH] When you returned did you start playing Robert the Bald, or was, were there other characters?

[BM] No. No, one thing about me is that I didn’t name my characters. Robert the Bald is a name that I was given for publication because David wanted to have my character because I was semi-famous as the first person to reach the highest level in Blackmoor. And I was, [rather] my character was, instrumental in a lot of the things that happened, so he [Arneson] wanted it published in one of TSR’s various things, whatever it is.

[RH] DA1: Adventures in Blackmoor.

[BM] Okay.

[RH] And that’s got you as a 19th level magic user or something.

[BM] Yeah, so I, I never thought of my characters as characters. I always thought of it as me being in there. Because I didn’t really understand role-playing. You know, I role-played with my brother when we were kids, but all kids do that kind of thing. But when you do that, you do that as yourself. I mean, you may be a cowboy or a lawman or a general or whatever, but as a kid, you think you’re the person. And so that’s the way I always played this role-playing, which is probably why I never really clicked with it to begin with. I was talked into doing Blackmoor because everyone else was playing it. You know, I’d show up to play a game and everyone would say, “Oh, we’re playing Blackmoor today.” Well, I didn’t wanna just go back home. I’ve gone through the trouble of being there, so, eventually I kind of had to play Blackmoor. And the thing is that by then, the other guys had leveled up some. And, you know, it’s kind of boring to do the same thing over and over again. Yes, you get experience, but it’s not very much experience, and it’s boring. So these guys were doing a lot more dangerous things.

[RH] [laughs]

[BM] You know, David [Arneson] came up with the dungeon, actually fairly early because he had the dungeon by the time I got back into it. It seemed like a long time to me before I went back into it. It seemed like years and actually it was just probably a couple of months. So they were going down into the dungeon. These guys were going down into the second- and third-level dungeons. Well, I’m starting out as a level one. These guys are already up to level three or four. So they had no problem doing that. Well, it’s a real problem for me. In my story what I like to tell everyone is, “Do you remember the original Star Trek, the guys that wore the red shirts?”

[RH] Yep. Absolutely.

[BM] And their their only real purpose in it was so that the main characters would survive, because they would die. Well, I was the red shirt of Star Trek in Blackmoor. These guys would go down into the dungeon, I would go with as a level one, and I would die. And it didn’t take very much of that before I decided, “This is not fun.” And so I told David that “I’ve tried your game, I tried the play testing, I’ve tried this. It’s not working for me. I’m sorry, but that’s it.” And he told me, “No, you’re not doing that. We will get you into the game.” And basically what he did was he taught me how to role-play in Blackmoor.

[RH] Hmm

[BM] Because we sat down and he gave me clues, tips, told me what I should do or not do. Part of the problem is I’ve always been a very aggressive gamer. Any game that I play, I’m aggressive, very much so. It works! You know, it puts the opponent off their game. It puts them on their back heels when you do that. Well, when you do that in Blackmoor, you can’t charge 20 orcs when you’re a level-one character.

[RH] Right. [laughs]

[BM] It doesn’t work. And that’s something I was not clicking onto, and David realized this. So he taught me, first of all, survival strategy. Secondly, “You’ve got to think, Bob. This is not a game where you just draw your sword and charge in. Think on how you’re going to do this.” And so he ran through some scenarios with me where he leveled up my character to second or third level. That’s how much time he spent with me.

So the first thing I did was the thing that all the gamers do, which is to go off in a completely different direction. I believe that’s the character where I told David… Now, like I said, I’m a real big enthusiast about naval [warfare]. Anything naval, any period. Well, David had the Skandaharians, which is the closest that Blackmoor had to navies. Because the Great Kingdom was run by Gygax and his people. So I told David, “Well, I wanna go join the Skandaharians.” And he said, “Well, how are you going to do that, Bob? Because you don’t have a boat.”

[RH] [laughs]

[BM] “Oh, well, no problem. I’ll just walk through the woods.” I did not know that there was a problem in trying to go through those woods. Those are elf woods, and those elves did not like humans. They did not want them anywhere near. Now, I had forgotten, until someone reminded me later, about how those woods work. Basically, they’re so big that you can’t go through in one day, so you would have to bed down and sleep, camp out. Well, the elves would then throw a spell on any humans who wander into the woods that take them back to where they first entered the woods, and then that’s where they would wake up. So no one ever went through the woods.

[RH] That’s pretty- that’s pretty wild.

[BM] Yeah.

[RH] The Blackmoor maps have the Skandaharians to the north?

[BM] Yes.

[RH] Is that where it was? It was north?

[BM] Yeah, yeah. And the thing is that David knew me very well. David knew all of us very well. And I have a propensity for rolling ones and twos for some reason.

[RH] [laughs] Okay.

[BM] And so this is well-known. Like, when I had commanded regiments or armies in the Strategos[-N] game, the Napoleonics campaign, my units usually did not break, because it didn’t matter how bad their morale rating was, I always rolled ones or twos so they would stand their ground. Whereas for other things I was terrible, like in combat. You needed higher numbers. So when I told David I wanted to go through the woods, well, David was always accommodating to us. “Okay, Bob, go ahead.” Because the worst that could happen is I just end up where I start.

[BM] For some reason, he gave me saving throws that were low. That is, he wanted me to roll low to beat my saving throws. And I rolled all ones. It took me like three days. I rolled all ones. I made it all the way through the woods. I joined the Skandaharians and that’s when my Skandaharian adventures started. I don’t know if you ever heard about that, but that’s getting off the track.

[RH] [laughs]

[BM] That was not Robert the Bald, because I ended up, um…I guess maybe I should explain this. At one time, Kurt Krey had a wizard that was involved in these invasions by the . . .

[RH] Egg of Coot?

[BM] Yes. And, he [Kurt] had betrayed Blackmoor at one time and had to leave. And, Kurt wanted to get back to Blackmoor.

[Quick interjection: A complete list of the Blackmoor players is on proboards. Kurt Krey is listed as “ First ever Evil Wizard PC of Blackmoor.”]

[BM] And so when I was up there, I was introduced to Kurt because I knew nothing about the history of Blackmoor. I had no idea about Kurt and what he had done. I just knew he was a wizard. And he said he wanted to get back to Blackmoor, and he wanted me to challenge the captain of the ship. By that time, I was a pretty strapped character. I mean, I had Rocs (you know, the giant birds). The captain of the ship had like three ships. And he [Kurt] thought, “Well, we can get back to Blackmoor.” And by that time, I was about ready for it so I challenged the captain. I beat him. I became the captain, the admiral, I guess, of three ships. We went down out in the Great Sea to the east and up the river to Blackmoor. By the time we got there, our adventures had been so heavy and so bad that there was only one ship left. And again, I did not know that Gertie [the Dragon] hated Skandaharians because of a previous invasion they did at Blackmoor. She [Gertie] destroyed the ship. I survived because Kurt dragged [me] ashore and then he disappeared. I ended up going into dungeons, which I consider deathtraps and I always avoid. But I needed to . . . I had level but I had no wealth or anything. So that character ended up going up. Now, that character is often conflated with Robert the Bald, but that character was a Fighting-Man. One thing about it is is we had a stable of characters. This is something that probably came out of Fight in the Skies, now called Dawn Patrol. We were fighting . . . I was part of the group of guys that were gaming with the other guys and this may be how I ended up joining with the guys, you know, Arneson and all of them, because I was gaming with Mike Carr. When you play Fight in the Skies, you have pilots that specialize in particular planes. And it’s important because the more combat you have, the more planes you shoot down, the better your skills.

[RH] Right.

[BM] And we did the same thing in Blackmoor. We realized early that diversifying was good. A party that’s all Fighting-Men, not so good especially if it’s not a very large party. And so I’d show up and [say], “Oh, uh, you guys are Fighting-Men? I’ll use my Wizard then, or I’ll use my Cleric.” And something about me is that I’ve never cared for magic. It always seemed like cheating to me. I know that’s really odd; so I was always a Fighting-Man. But at least once I showed up, [and] everyone was a Fighting-Man, and they wanted to be Fighting-Men. And I was always willing to go along with whatever, so I started a Wizard. And that Wizard was incredibly lucky for me for some reason. I mean, I just leveled up like crazy with that Wizard. So I ended up using the Wizard more often than my Fighting-Man. The Fighting-Man just kind of drifted off into oblivion. I was just the Wizard and that’s how Robert the Bald started, you know, out of necessity.

[RH] Oh, okay

[BM] Which is how an awful lot of things happen in these games: out of necessity. It’s not like we really wanted to do it or anything. It’s just this seemed like a good thing to do at the time.

[RH] Yeah, this, this is incredible. I’ve got, I’ve got two questions now. I’m, I’m looking at First Fantasy Campaign and there are two pieces of artwork in here of longships. One of them is a longship fighting with a sea monster. And the sea monster won that one, it says in the caption. And the other is a Wizard on the prow, you know, up near the dragon head of one of the ships, and he’s blasting an orc castle that they’re going by. Are, are those two of the ships from your expedition with [Kurt Krey’s] Wizard to bring him back to Blackmoor?

[BM] I don’t know.

[RH] Huh?

[BM] Could be. I mean, you know, I had very little to do with anything that David actually did beyond running Blackmoor. All the rest of it, he had his company. Jeff [Berry] can tell you everything about Adventure Games because he worked there.

[Another interjection: Bob did not seem to recognize FFC as being descriptive of Blackmoor and so he mistakes it as the product of a later company formed by Arneson in the early 1980s and sold to Flying Buffalo in 1985.]

[RH] Right.

[BM] And the only thing that I was ever involved in outside of actually playing Blackmoor was, Adventures in Fantasy, because David had asked me for a set of fighting rules, combat rules which I came up with. Now, I tend towards complicated because I’m very much ADHD, you know?

[RH] Right

[BM] I want to cover everything, and so I came up with a wonderfully complicated set of rules. And David looked at ‘em and he thanked me very much for all that work. And he used someone else’s rules, like, probably Richard Snider, I think. They collaborated on Adventures in Fantasy. Now, I have nothing anymore. I’ve given away or thrown away everything. But those rules were still around when all of a sudden I was needed as the new Game Master after David [Arneson] passed away, and I just expanded those rules. Because when you look at it, the most complicated part of any set of rules are [for] combat. And it’s easy to expand from that, especially since I was very familiar with David’s style right from the beginning and all of that. So, it was real easy for me to come up with a set of rules and run the way that David did when we first started Blackmoor. Because, you know, when I ran that first game just a month after David passed away, I wanted to honor David. That was what the whole game was about. We wanted to honor David, and we wanted to continue Blackmoor, which is — and has to be — the most continuously run campaign fantasy game in the world. But maybe any [type of] game at all, because it started in 1970 and is still being run today. And so I wanted it to honor David by going back to the roots, starting it the same way that David did. So instead of using Blackmoor rules (David’s rules) which everyone knew as D&D, I had my own rules. This is why I say everything evolves, because what I came up with evolved from what happened before, what existed before. And I went completely off the track, didn’t I?

[RH] No

[BM] Did I answer your question?

[RH] You did answer my question, and actually, I just took a deep dive into the Adventures in Fantasy combat system, so I’m very familiar with what got published. It’s intriguing to me that you had a [combat] system [that was rejected], because the one that got published is fairly complicated too.

[BM] Must not be as complicated [but] I never played with Adventures in Fantasy, so I don’t know it.

[RH] Mm-hmm.

[BM] Oh, yeah, you were asking about how . . . what I was trying to talk about is, I became involved in Adventures in Fantasy, not just with that, but, David came to me at one point and asked if he could borrow some money from me. Now, at that point, I was still single. I had a lot of money saved up. As I said, I have a [MEDICAL CONDITION], and [it is] expensive, and I had to pay that myself. There was no health plan back then. So I always saved up money, and David asked if he could borrow some money from me for Adventures in Fantasy. Now, I don’t know the whole story. Evidently I was not the first one to bankroll it. I guess someone else did. I’m not sure who, but David came to me because he wanted to keep it going. I lent him the money, and then after a while, he came back to me to ask if he could keep the money a while longer. And at that time, I was now engaged or even actually married, and my wife vetoed it. Fortunately, she’s the more capable, common sense person than I am, and she said, “No. We have a daughter, and we need the money.” So David paid me back. And that’s the most I’ve ever been involved with David . . . outside of Blackmoor.

[RH] Got it. So the Magic-User that you started playing after you left the Fighting-Man behind, I know the spell system that is described about Blackmoor was a spell point system. There was also a reference to animal, vegetable, or mineral. Do you have any recollection of how Arneson ran or allowed you to run your spells?

[BM] What do you mean, run my spells?

[RH] Were you creating the spells and submitting [them] to him for approval? Did you have a list of spells that were cribbed from CHAINMAIL? I mean, how did the spell system evolve?

[BM] Now one thing about me is I am not a creative person. I like to say I am an innovative person. That is, I will take whatever’s there and I will innovate with it. Now, the creators were actually doing the same thing, only in a much bigger scale than me. I prefer to work with what I have and do with it what I need. So I doubt very much I came up with my own spells. By that time, there was a whole list of spells, and the spells were assigned to levels. Very simple spells . . . like creating an illusion, I think, was a level one. Fireball was probably level two or level three. So, I doubt very much I created my own spells. I didn’t have to because he already had them there. And, you know, going from level one on up, like I said, I just shot up real fast. And I can’t help but wonder — because I don’t remember back then and I become easily confused — maybe that character that went through the woods and joined the Skandaharians was a Magic-User. But I don’t see how I could’ve fought the duel with the captain if I was a Magic-User.

[RH] Right.

[BM] Because they were not allowed at that time to use things like swords or whatever. So, I don’t know. I am, like, 99.99% certain that I just used the spells that were [already] created. Because new spells were being created all the time by people and by Arneson himself. You know, being added to the list. There was no need for me to create any spells. They were all there for me to use.

[RH] Did you have spell points that you had to- to use for that system, or was that memorization like we saw later with Gygax and Vancian magic?

[BM] I think the way it worked is that…If I remember right, and this was from early on, so I don’t know how Vancian everything was, but Arneson had it so that, you know, like as a level one, we were allowed so many spells in a day, basically an adventure.

[BM] Because at that time, adventures rarely lasted more than a day. You know, we’d do it, then would go home or whatever. And we’re allowed so many spells as a level one from the level one spells, you know? And then maybe one or two spells. Then when we became level two, we were allowed more spells of level one and one or two spells of level two. And then as level three, we had even more of the level one spells that we could use, more of the level two, and then one or two of the level three. And, it wasn’t just the different spells, you know? We could use any of the spells as a level one. And then as a level two, we could still use any of the spells as level one. And it wasn’t just that we had to use different spells. We could use the same spell over and over within an adventure up to the number of spells we were allowed to use of level one spells. Like if we were allowed three level one spells, we could use illusion, we could use create a weapon, but we could use three illusion spells as opposed to, say, two illusion spells and one create a weapon spell. So that’s the way it worked. As we went up in levels, we just were allowed more spells and more of each of the spells within each level. You know what I’m saying?

[RH] Yeah.

[BM] So it wasn’t like a point system for us. It was more like we had a, uh, bag of tricks or, you know-

[RH] [laughs]

[BM] like the Fighting-Man had several different weapons on him that he could decide to use.

[RH] Oh, I wanted to ask you about weapons. And thanks for the explanation on spells. But on weapons, there are — I want to say I’ve seen three or four pages of material now. One was Pete Gaylord’s Wizard. Another two of them were from Megarry and one was from might’ve been Snider. But all of them have 2D6 values for multiple weapons, like the whole shooting match, right?

[BM] Right.

[RH] Every weapon had like a 2D6 number, and it feels like that was some kinda like roll under proficiency check that you would do to attack. Is that, is that how it worked or am I, or am I off base here?

[BM] Well, I’ll explain to you how we did it.

Stay tuned for the conclusion . . .

An Interview with Bob Meyer: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3

---

Originally published on Substack on July 25, 2026.