Pulp Fantasy Library: Ex Oblivione

H.P. Lovecraft’s brief prose-poem “Ex Oblivione” tends to get overlooked when readers discuss his so-called Dream Cycle and I can understand why. At scarcely two pages long, it lacks the elaborate worldbuilding of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath or the mythic resonance of "The White Ship." Yet, I think this slight, melancholy piece deserves more attention than it usually receives, if only because it reveals something essential about Lovecraft’s evolving view of dreams, escape, and, as its Latinate title suggests, oblivion.

Before turning to the piece itself, a few background details are worth noting. First and most intriguingly, “Ex Oblivione” is one of the few works Lovecraft ever published under a pseudonym, in this case Ward Phillips, a name that August Derleth would later use for his HPL stand-in in the touching story “The Lamp of Alhazred.” Second, the prose-poem first appeared in the March 1921 issue of The United Amateur, the journal of the United Amateur Press Association, an organization to which Lovecraft devoted much of his energy during the early years of his writing career. It did not receive “professional” publication until after his death, when Arkham House included it in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943).

Like several of Lovecraft’s early dream tales, “Ex Oblivione” is told by an unnamed dreamer who, weary of life, seeks a gate that will lead him beyond the bounds of waking reality. There’s a familiar texture here, with a manuscript inscribed on yellowed papyrus, a gate of bronze, and a secret known only to the dead. The language is the same high, antique diction that marks the other efforts of his Dunsanian period. On its surface, this could easily be another story of mystical adventure in the Dreamlands – except that's not what "Ex Oblivione" is at all.

Unlike his other dream narratives, this one isn’t really about wonder or discovery. Rather, it’s about release – release from life, memory, and even consciousness itself. When the dreamer finally passes through the gate, what he finds is not some transcendent realm of beauty but the ultimate nothingness that lies beyond all things. "Once it was entered, there would be no return." The peace he sought is not the peace of heaven or dream, but of extinction, the "native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour."

That conclusion gives “Ex Oblivione” a very different flavor from the rest of Lovecraft’s dream writings. Randolph Carter, for example, is nostalgic for the lost worlds of his youthful imagination. He travels through the Dreamlands not to die, but to rediscover wonder. The narrator of “Ex Oblivione,” by contrast, has no such illusions. He doesn’t seek new vistas; he seeks an end to vistas altogether. In that sense, this story marks a quiet but profound shift from romantic escapism toward the cosmic fatalism that would eventually come to define Lovecraft’s mature work.

It’s also worth remembering when Lovecraft wrote it. In 1921, he was only a few years removed from a long period of isolation and depression. In that sense, “Ex Oblivione” feels like a remnant of his earlier darker mood, a poetic expression of the same yearning for nonexistence that haunted his teenage and young adult years. The piece reads less like a story than a confession. It's a moment of weariness rendered in dream imagery. It’s the voice of someone who has dreamed too long and too deeply and has finally grown tired of even his own fantasies.

In stylistic terms, “Ex Oblivione” is still firmly rooted in Lovecraft’s early Dunsanian phase. The imagery and language would not have been out of place in The Book of Wonder. But whereas Dunsany’s dreamers usually awaken from their journeys sadder but wiser, Lovecraft’s narrator never wakes up at all. The story ends in stillness, not revelation. That’s the difference between Dunsany’s wistful mysticism and Lovecraft’s emerging materialism.

For that reason, I think it’s misleading to treat “Ex Oblivione” as simply another Dream Cycle story. It belongs to that group in imagery, perhaps, but not in spirit. Rather than celebrating the imagination, it questions whether imagination – or indeed existence itself – has any meaning at all. It’s a dream story that rejects dreaming, a meditation on escape that ends by denying even the possibility of return.

In that sense, “Ex Oblivione” stands as a bridge between Lovecraft’s early dream fantasies and his later cosmic horror. What the dreamer finds beyond the gate prefigures some of what Lovecraft’s later protagonists would confront in their own investigations, namely, a vast, impersonal universe where what peace that can be found lies only in surrender. "Ex Oblivione" is a minor work in scale, but not in theme. As an early glimpse of the fatal serenity that would come to haunt so much of Lovecraft's writing, I feel it's worth greater consideration than it typically receives.

Campaign Updates: Fading Suns

It's been a while since I last wrote a post about the three campaigns I'm currently refereeing and, while I will in due course have more information about both Dolmenwood and Barrett's Raiders, I thought I'd first take some time to fill you in on my newest campaign – Fading Suns. 

The campaign, which doesn't yet have a distinct name, has taken the spot of the recently-concluded House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign in my weekly rotation of games. Currently, there are six players, five of whom played in House of Worms, while the sixth player is a new addition – an old friend of mine who's wanted to game with me for years and only now has a spot opened up to make this possible. We're only three sessions in, but already the campaign is starting to take root, in large part, I think, because of the strength of the characters.

• Sir Yamashiro Li Halan is the nominal leader of the group, thanks to his noble birth and social standing. A minor scion of House Li Halan, Yamashiro is regarded as something of a family disgrace. Where most of his kin are solemn and devout, he is a notorious hedonist and carefree rake, more interested in pleasure than piety. Exiled from his homeworld of Rampart under the guise of a “grand tour” of the Empire, Yamashiro’s journey is meant to teach him humility and discipline. He, however, views it as an invitation to indulge his appetites and discover what delights the wider Known Worlds have to offer.
• Accompanying him is Father Kosta, an Urth Orthodox priest appointed as Yamashiro’s confessor, though the young noble shows little inclination to unburden his soul before the Pancreator. Patient and compassionate, Father Kosta relies on the former quality most of all when tending to his wayward charge. Unlike many of his brethren, he favors a gentle hand in spiritual matters, convinced that quiet persistence will, in time, reach even the most stubborn heart. He often recounts tales of his own reckless youth, when his misdeeds nearly led to his death. Only through the mercy of the Pancreator did he survive to repent and now he sees it as his sacred duty to offer that same chance of redemption to others.
• Holai liTarken is an Umo’rin counselor, one of the alien Obun’s esteemed order of diplomats and empaths. Generations ago, his family fell into debt to House Li Halan and, in repayment, vowed that one of their line would forever serve the noble family. Holai now fulfills that ancient pledge as Yamashiro’s counselor and psychic advisor. Though he often finds humanity and its baffling blend of passion and prejudice difficult to comprehend, he approaches his duties with quiet dignity and sincere devotion, striving always to guide his charge with patience and wisdom.
• Iskander Ecevit is an Engineer, a member of the vast Merchant League, one of the three great pillars that uphold the Empire, alongside the noble houses and the Universal Church of the Celestial Sun. Once a soldier, Iskander’s life was forever changed by a near-fatal injury that left him broken and dying. The Engineers saved him with their arcane technologies, rebuilding him until he became something more machine than man. Fascinated by the relics of the Second Republic and the enigmatic works of the ancient Annunaki, Iskander devotes himself to uncovering their secrets. His hard-won knowledge and mechanical prowess now serve Yamashiro well as they journey together across the Known Worlds.
• Orphos is perhaps the most enigmatic member of Yamashiro’s entourage. A blunt, sharp-tongued cynic with little respect for the nobility – and even less for the Church – he belongs to the Scravers, a guild notorious for its scavengers, smugglers, and criminals. Despite his rough edges, Orphos proves invaluable thanks to his extensive underworld connections, which open doors closed to more polite travelers. His brash manner and disregard for decorum often attract unwanted attention, but his resourcefulness and streetwise instincts more than earn his place among Yamashiro’s companions.

You'll no doubt have noticed that I've only described five characters above, despite there being six players in the campaign. That's because, owing to real life scheduling conflicts, one of the players hasn't yet been able to attend our sessions. With luck, that will change soon and the coterie of player characters will at last be complete.

The campaign opens on the world of Pandemonium. Once called Grange, it was an idyllic agricultural planet, its fertile plains and temperate skies maintained by Second Republic terraforming engines that continued to hum along for centuries after the Fall. Now, those ancient machines are faltering. The vast farmlands beyond the capital city, The Hub, are drying up, the soil turning to dust as the world slowly dies. Life on Pandemonium has thus become harsh and uncertain. Yet House Decados still clings to it, not for its dwindling crops or crumbling cities, but for what lies within its system: a second jumpgate, long dormant and shrouded in mystery. To unlock its secrets would mean power beyond measure and every major faction knows it.

For now, Sir Yamashiro and his company move carefully through the tangled web of Pandemonium’s politics, learning who truly holds influence in The Hub and where their own ambitions might best take root.

Addicted to Dreams

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to suggest that most of us who play or referee roleplaying games are readers first. Before we ever picked up polyhedral dice or scribbled on a character sheet, we had books – paperbacks with cracked spines and lurid covers, library copies borrowed and re-borrowed, pages filled with strange names, lost cities, and impossible creatures. It was through those stories that many of us first discovered the wonder of other worlds. I know I did. Long before I ever rolled a saving throw, I’d already learned what it meant to lose myself in another place, to be consumed by imagination, to live elsewhere, if only for a time.

That hunger – to be elsewhere – never really fades. It lingers in the back of the mind, calling us to dream again. It’s what drives writers to put pen to paper and referees to sketch maps or invent pantheons. It’s an act of creation born, at least in part, from dissatisfaction with the ordinary. In a way, it’s a quiet rebellion against the everyday, the only kind of rebellion a stick in the mud like me is capable of. The schoolyard and the shopping mall are all well and good, but they pale beside Moria or Melniboné. The imagination whispers, “There are other worlds than these,” and, once you’ve heard that whisper, it’s impossible not to believe it.

When I first discovered roleplaying games, what drew me in (though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time) was their invitation to take that same imaginative impulse, the one that led me to daydream in church or stare at the horizon as if something wondrous might appear and share it. Writing, for all its pleasures, is solitary, even lonely. It’s a private communion between the writer and the page. But RPGs opened the door to something altogether different, a kind of collaborative dreaming. Around the table, the game became a campfire and we were the storytellers gathered in its glow, shaping a dream together, speaking it aloud so that others could live in it too.

That’s the real magic of roleplaying. I hesitate to say that, because it can sound sentimental or pretentious, but it’s true nonetheless. Roleplaying lets us touch the same creative fire that first called us to stories: the power to imagine not just what is, but what could be. In that moment, we become co-authors of our own mythologies. The settings we build, the characters we play, even the dice we roll are all tools for bending reality toward something richer, stranger, and truer to that inner sense of wonder that first made us turn a page.

Maybe that’s the answer to the question I asked myself yesterday. Why did stuck with RPGs for all these decades when most of my childhood friends did not? I don’t keep playing out of nostalgia or habit. I keep playing because, even now, I’m still addicted to dreams. Roleplaying games give that addiction shape and fellowship. They remind me that imagination isn’t a childish escape, but one of the most human acts of all. It’s our ability to make meaning, to build worlds, to see beyond what’s immediately before us and, in doing so, to bring a little of those other worlds back with us.

In the end, that’s what the best games and the best stories both do. They invite us to live for a while in another world and then return to this one with new eyes, eyes that still, even after all these years, look to the horizon and wonder what might lie beyond.

Why I Stayed

My birthday was last week and, contrary to what I expected, it proved an occasion to look back over my life and ponder a few things. I don’t mean this in a maudlin or self-critical way. For the most part, I’m fairly content with my current existence and reasonably comfortable with my creeping senescence. Rather, I found myself thinking about the fact that, forty-six years after first discovering Dungeons & Dragons, I’m still actively involved in the hobby of roleplaying, while so many of the people with whom I first discovered it are not.

I was 10 years-old at the Christmas holidays of 1979, when I first opened the D&D Basic Set edited by J. Eric Holmes. That was the beginning of my journey. Through the end of childhood and into my early teens, roleplaying games felt like a shared discovery, something my friends and I stumbled into together, almost like finding a secret passage beneath the ordinary world. We played obsessively – after school, on weekends, and during those seemingly endless summer vacations. At the time, it would have seemed absurd to imagine any of us ever not playing. RPGs were simply what we did, eclipsing nearly every other pastime.

That shared enthusiasm didn’t last. By my mid-teens, very few of the friends with whom I’d entered the hobby were still playing. Some drifted away gradually, their interests and circumstances changing. Others dropped it abruptly, as if a curtain had fallen on that chapter of their lives. In the years that followed, careers, families, and the usual responsibilities of adulthood pulled still more away. Yet I’ve always wondered whether those explanations were truly sufficient. Many hobbies survive the transition to adulthood. In my circle of childhood friends, though, roleplaying games mostly did not.

To be fair, I eventually made other friends who shared my passion for gaming, but they were almost all people I met through the hobby, not the ones I’d grown up with. That’s why I often wonder why I stuck with it when so many others did not. I don’t believe it’s because I was more dedicated or imaginative; some of my friends were far more talented referees and players. Nor do I think the hobby itself changed in some way that pushed them out. They’d already drifted away long before the edition wars, the OSR, or any of the other developments one might offer as convenient explanations for their departures.

If I’ve come to any conclusion at all, it’s that roleplaying games continued to scratch an itch nothing else quite could. They combined the pleasures of reading, worldbuilding, problem-solving, and camaraderie into a single, strangely durable form. Even during my late high school years, when I didn’t play as often as I’d have liked, I still found myself returning to rulebooks, adventures, and setting material, much as one might return to a favorite novel or album. RPGs became part of the architecture of my inner life.

I don’t begrudge my childhood friends for having “abandoned” the hobby. Their lives simply went in other directions, as lives often do. I wouldn’t be surprised if some still remember our campaigns with fondness, even if they haven’t rolled a die in decades. Others may barely remember the details, but I remember those early days with great affection. In a very real sense, they laid the groundwork for the life I lead today. Even so, it’s hard not to wonder why I stayed immersed in this hobby while they did not.

I suspect many long-time gamers have had similar experiences. We are the ones who stayed, often without entirely meaning to. Something in roleplaying games held our attention long after the initial spark that brought us in. Perhaps that’s why so many of us older players end up blogging, designing, or running campaigns well into middle age. We’re still trying to understand what this odd pastime means to us and why it continues to matter so much after all these years.

In the end, I don’t know precisely why I stuck with RPGs when most of my childhood friends let them go. But I’m grateful I did. The hobby has given me friendships, creative outlets, and a way of thinking about the world that I doubt I would have found elsewhere. Maybe, in some small way, staying with it all these years is my way of honoring the unbridled joy we all felt around the table, back when we had no idea what we were doing and felt as if a vast, unknown world had been opened to us.

Retrospective: Conquest of the Empire

Stop me if you've heard this before: I was never a wargamer, but I liked the idea of wargames, specifically simulating a military or other conflict through the use of a board, tokens, and dice. There's just something inherently appealing to me about this, which probably explains why I've spent more than four decades trying but rarely succeeding at finding a wargame that really clicked with me. I owned and played a number of Avalon Hill and SPI games in my youth, but, with the exception of Diplomacy, I was never very good at them (and even there I was hampered by my inexplicable tendency to play Austria-Hungary).

However, in 1984, Milton Bradley released a line of games under the banner of the "Gamemaster Series" that caught my attention. The series was an experiment in bringing wargames to the mass market. Each entry in the series came in a massive, shelf-dominating box filled with lavish components and a rulebook that looked intimidating compared to more traditional boardgames like Monopoly or Risk. The series began with Axis & Allies, designed by Larry Harris, and followed swiftly with another of his creations, Conquest of the Empire.

While Axis & Allies presented World War II in game form, Conquest of the Empire did the same thing for the Roman Empire's Crisis of the Third Century. The game was a grand-scale battle for supremacy across the Mediterranean world after the death of Marcus Aurelius. It was, in every sense, a spectacle, a game whose physical components alone promised an epic experience before a single die was rolled. As a young history buff with a particular affection for Greco-Roman history, this was the game I'd been waiting for.

To appreciate Conquest of the Empire, it helps to recall what the gaming landscape looked like in the mid-1980s. The boundary between “mainstream” and “hobby” games was much starker than it is today. Wargames were, as I noted above, largely the province of companies like Avalon Hill or SPI. They were sold in specialty stores to an audience comfortable with long rulebooks and hex maps. By contrast, the Gamemaster Series was an attempt to bridge that gap by combining high production values, streamlined rules, and compelling subjects to attract both traditional hobbyists and curious outsiders like myself. 

Axis & Allies was, I gather, very successful. Certainly my friends and I enjoyed playing it and we did so often. Of course, even in the 1980s, World War II was a staple of wargames. Conquest of the Empire thus deviated just enough to be considered daring. Furthermore, its subject, the period of the Military Anarchy, was less familiar and its map of the Mediterranean world, divided into provinces and trade routes, hinted at something more intricate than the average family game. Of course, that's precisely why I loved it.

Opening Conquest of the Empire for the first time is something I cannot forget. To start, the box was enormous. Inside lay nearly four hundred molded plastic miniatures, such as legionnaires with raised shields, catapults, coins, and galleys to patrol the Mare Nostrum. There were also cities to build, roads to lay down, and an oversized, vividly illustrated board depicting the known world from Britannia in the northwest to Aegyptus in the southeast. Following the death of Marcus Aurelius, the empire teeters on the brink of chaos. Each player takes the role of a would-be emperor, commanding armies, building cities, taxing provinces, and waging war until one emerges victorious. It's a straightforward and appealing premise – especially to my teenage self.

Like Axis & Allies, the game was structured around economic management and military conquest. Provinces provided income, which could be spent to raise legions, fleets, and fortifications. Armies moved along roads or across the sea, engaging in battles resolved by simple dice rolls. Catapults were useful in sieges and galleys could ferry troops to distant shores. Victory went to the player who amassed the most wealth and territory, though, in practice, the game often ended in exhaustion or mutual ruin long before an emperor was crowned.

That said, the game was not without its flaws. Its economy could snowball rapidly, favoring whoever secured a few prosperous provinces early on. Combat could be pretty random, with legions sometimes crushed or exalted on a handful of dice. The rules for roads and taxation added an appealing Roman flavor but little in the way of meaningful choice. Players spent much of the game counting coins, rebuilding destroyed forces, and waiting for their next chance to strike. One might argue that some of this is, in fact, realistic or at least true to history, but it didn't always make for a satisfying game.

Even so, Conquest of the Empire often felt epic. Setting up the board, arranging your legions, and surveying the Mediterranean was a ritual of grandeur. It was easy to imagine oneself as a latter-day Caesar, eyeing the spoils of empire. The game rewarded patience more than finesse and spectacle more than subtlety, but it delivered a sense of scale that my friends and I found incredibly alluring. It's little wonder that I still think about this game decades later.

From what I have read, it seems that Milton Bradley’s Gamemaster Series never achieved the mainstream success the company had hoped. Axis & Allies became a perennial favorite and spawned multiple editions and spin-offs, but Conquest of the Empire eventually vanished from store shelves, remembered fondly by those of us who had the chance to play it back in the day. I suspect part of the reason was that its theme was less immediately engaging to American audiences and its rules required a level of commitment somewhat closer to Avalon Hill than to Parker Brothers.

I don't mean that as a criticism at all. I absolutely adored this game and deeply regret that my original copy was lost sometime in the '90s. Conquest of the Empire might not have achieved what Milton Bradley had hoped for it, but, for me, it was a near-perfect "middle road" between simple boardgames and the esoteric complexities of "true" wargames. If there were more games like this, I might actually play them.

Dream-Quest: Mirroring the Psyche

Here's another Dream-Quest post, though it's unfortunately restricted to patrons. Even so, I bring it to your attention, in the event that it might be of interest to regular readers of the blog.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Realistic Vital Statistics"

I am nothing if not tedious and repetitive, so, when turning to issue #91 of Dragon (November 1984), it was pretty much a given that I'd talking about the article "Realistic Vital Statistics" by Stephen Inniss. The article is a near-perfect exemplar of the Silver Age of D&D, with its concern for providing referees with the tools needed to inject "realism" into their adventures and campaigns. In this case, the author's concern is for the fact that, according to their descriptions in the Monster Manual and Players Handbook, dwarves are implausibly heavy, standing only 4 feet tall and yet weighing 150 pounds (on average). According to Mr Inniss, if one extrapolated this weight for a 6-foot tall human male, he'd weigh over 500 pounds! This, he says, violates a fundamental rule of physics – the square-cube law, which states that "the weight (or volume) of an object is proportional to the product of its linear dimensions (height, length, and width)." Using a realistic model, a 4-foot dwarf should weigh only about a third the weight listed in the AD&D books.

The article thus provides a series of tables for generating more plausible vital statistics to replace those in the Dungeon Masters Guide. For what it is, the system is pretty easy to use: the tables are clear and the variables aren't difficult to keep track of. But, ultimately, I find myself wondering why anyone would care about such a system. Mr Inniss notes that giants in D&D show no signs of appropriate adaptation to their height and (presumed) weight, meaning they're not very plausible as typically presented. Having said that, he then dismisses the concern by saying

Fortunately, their world is a magical one. They are probably supported by some permanent variant of the levitate spell, with bone-strengthening magic thrown in for good measure. Interestingly, the larger giants (storm and cloud giants), like the equally huge titans, have true levitation powers perhaps a natural extension of the talents of their lesser brethren.

It's, in my opinion, a perfectly valid solution to this "problem" of the height and weight of giants, but, if one can accept this when dealing with giants, why is the weight of dwarves an issue? Once you admit that the world is magical and therefore exempt from inconvenient physical laws that would get in the way of fantasy, where does on draw the line? Mr Inniss anticipated this line of thought and attempted to counter it.

Since this is after all a fantasy game, it might be argued that it doesn't matter how much dwarves are defined as weighing. However, it is just such realistic-looking details as a character's height and weight that make for a more willing suspension of disbelief during a game session. Otherwise, why bother with such statistics in the first place? Plausibility, or "realism" as it is sometimes called, is definitely a factor in the enjoyment of even a fantasy game; the more so where the game makes a relatively close approach to reality.

I'm far from convinced by Mr Inniss's rejoinder, but, leaving that aside, when was the last time that a character's precise weight mattered in a game? I can't recall its ever mattering in any games that I've run. Height is a little more useful, though, even there, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I ever allowed or disallowed a character action based on height. For me, knowing that a dwarf weighs 152 or merely 52 pounds is about as vital as knowing whether he has brown hair or red.

But that's just me.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Celephaïs

With October now over, Pulp Fantasy Library returns to H.P. Lovecraft and those of his tales commonly gathered under the heading of the “Dream Cycle.” Among these, few are as revealing of Lovecraft’s early imagination as “Celephaïs.”

First published in the November 1922 issue of Sonia H. Greene’s amateur journal, The Rainbow, “Celephaïs” was actually written two years earlier, during Lovecraft’s most pronounced Dunsanian phase. It is arguably the most significant of his early fantasies. A short, elegiac prose-poem that bridges the ornate reveries of Lovecraft's youth and the cosmic horror for which he would later become celebrated, it also appeared posthumously in the July 1939 issue of Weird Tales, whose cover I have reproduced here.

The story concerns a lonely Englishman living in modern London, who dreams of the city of Celephaïs, a timeless, radiant place of marble and opal beside a cerulean sea. There, he – who goes by the name Kuranes in dreams but a different one while awake – once dwelt amid golden domes and cloud-kissed towers. In waking life, however, Kuranes is destitute and forgotten, wandering the gray, joyless streets of a modern world that has lost all its color and wonder.

Lovecraft recounts how, through the use of drugs, Kuranes retreats into his dreams, striving to visit Celephaïs once again. At first, his visions are fleeting, but, as he turns to ever more potent narcotics, the distinction between waking and dreaming begins to blur. He becomes so devoted to this endeavor that he eventually loses his home and remaining wealth, becoming destitute. At the story's conclusion, his body is found lifeless, washed ashore near his ancestral home. Yet, in the Dreamlands, Kuranes reigns over Celephaïs as its chief god, eternal and unchanged.

Like “The White Ship” and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” “Celephaïs” clearly reflects Lord Dunsany’s influence on Lovecraft, both in diction and subject matter. Likewise, the yearning for a world of beauty and wonder lost to the banalities of modern life is pure Dunsany. However, Lovecraft’s version is more personal, suffused with melancholy and nostalgia rather than detached mythic grandeur. Kuranes’ longing for an idealized realm of beauty mirrors Lovecraft’s own retreat into the dreamworlds of antiquarianism, fantasy, and imagination. The city of Celephaïs embodies the Dreamlands’ central promise that, through dreams, one might escape time, decay, and the indignities of the modern age.

At its core, “Celephaïs” is a story of escape, not merely from the material world, but also from time and even mortality itself. Even so, Lovecraft seems somewhat ambivalent about this. He presents this escape as simultaneously poignant and ironic. In the end, Kuranes attains eternal kingship, but only through death; the perfect city of Celephaïs exists solely in dream and to dwell there forever is to abandon mortal life altogether.

Lovecraft would return to this theme in later works such as “The Silver Key” and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Randolph Carter, the protagonist of both, is a kindred spirit to Kuranes. He is another dreamer seeking entrance to the Dreamlands and yearning for the marvels and glories of an old remembered dream. Indeed, “Celephaïs” marks the first explicit appearance of the Dreamlands as a coherent world, populated by recurring beings, cities, and seas.

Kuranes himself would later reappear in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Kuranes as the immortal ruler of Celephaïs. From his dream-city, he warns Randolph Carter that the gods of dream are capricious and that too great a longing for lost beauty may lead to peril. His presence in that later tale underscores the double-edged nature of dreaming itself: it can preserve the past, but only by cutting the dreamer off from reality.

Stylistically, “Celephaïs” is rich with the luxuriant diction of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian phase, which can be seen in its remarkable opening paragraph: 

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experienced failed to reveal it, he sought in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

In addition to strongly suggesting an autobiographical element to his portrayal of Kuranes, this paragraph also presents the emotional core of Lovecraft’s art at the time. He is acutely aware that beauty is transient, that time destroys all, and that the imagination’s only victory over decay is the fragile, perilous one offered by dreams. It is thus no coincidence that the story opens, “In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley.” For HPL, all ideal worlds are dreams and the act of dreaming – or of creating art – is the only means by which mortals may briefly touch the eternal. "Celephaïs" thus stands as a key statement of Lovecraft’s early esthetics. In it, he reveals a yearning for the past and for permanence, expressed through the medium of bittersweet fantasy.

“Celephaïs” may lack the cosmic scope of Lovecraft’s later mythos tales, but it remains one of his most affecting works. It reveals a writer caught between the romantic longing for a vanished world and the growing realization that all beauty is fleeting. In that tension lies the germ of Lovecraft’s mature vision, where the infinite is both wondrous and terrifying and where the dream of escape becomes, paradoxically, a confrontation with the limits of human existence.

Interview: Marzio Muscedere (Part II)

Part I of this interview can be found here. 

5. Can you talk a little about the process of turning Zothique into a RPG? I'm interested not just in the game mechanical side of things but also in your experiences working with CASiana Literary Enterprises. Did you find it easy to translate Zothique into a roleplaying game?

For me, the RPG writing process usually starts the same way: with a deep dive into the source material. For Zothique, that meant going back into Clark Ashton Smith’s stories and reading them with a critical eye. Luckily, I’ve always been a note-taker when reading, highlighting passages, turns of phrase, perspective shifts, metaphors – anything that catches my attention.

So when I returned to my old CAS collections, they were already filled with highlights and margin notes (sacrilege, I know) and those became the foundation for the game. From there, I began organizing everything into categories – locations, creatures, gods, artifacts, NPCs, spells, etc. – and slowly drew the setting out piece by piece, ensuring that every element carried the same atmosphere of doom, decadence, and fatal beauty that runs through Smith’s work.

Stats come last. For me, stats always come last. I don’t fret over them. No one remembers your adventure because a creature had AC 15 instead of AC 12. Now, I’m not saying stats aren’t important – bad stats can certainly break your game – but I’m not sure they can make your game. People remember your adventures because of how they made them feel when reading and playing.

I’ve always tried to make my games feel lived in – dripping with atmosphere and history – and I don’t mean paragraphs of exposition. I mean placing items, objects, strange writings, or locations that hint at something more, something ancient, something mysterious. In my opinion, good RPGs don’t feel like they were created just to run characters through like a carnival ride or funhouse. Good RPGs feel alive and mysterious, with the weight of ages upon every item and location – steeped in secrecy and the lingering sense that others have come before.

As for working with CASiana Literary Enterprises, it has honestly been a privilege. Chris has been supportive since day one – a great guy to work with and genuinely passionate about Clark Ashton Smith’s legacy. They’ve been open, helpful, and just as excited as I am to bring Smith’s world to a new generation of readers and players. I really think people are going to like what they see.

6. Why did you decide to use Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark as the rules for your game? I know you're very familiar with DCC but why Shadowdark rather than, say, Swords & Wizardry or Old School Essentials?

I made the decision early that I would not create a new RPG system for Zothique, but rather bring existing systems into Zothique. The setting is the constant; the rules are the lens. My goal was for the world to remain entirely faithful to CAS – its geography, its gods and necromancers, its tone of grandeur and decay – while allowing players to experience it through systems they already know. That’s why each version, whether written for 5E, Dungeon Crawl Classics, or Shadowdark, is fundamentally the same world. The dice may differ, but Zothique itself does not.

Choosing those specific systems came down to both philosophy and practicality. Dungeon Crawl Classics was a natural fit – its pulp roots, Appendix N inspiration (I know, CAS doesn’t appear there… but that’s an argument for another day, lol), and focus on strange sorcery and peril align perfectly with Smith’s fiction. Plus, it is what I do. 5E made sense because it’s the most widely played system and one I know intimately from years of conversion work for Goodman Games and play. Shadowdark, on the other hand, was chosen out of the many requests for me to do so. The more I spoke of my upcoming project at cons or online, the more I was asked to bring the setting to Shadowdark. So I looked into the system – and I loved it. The aesthetic, the tension, the fast, streamlined play - I think it fits Zothique perfectly.

It’s important to note that I’m not bringing Zothique to these game systems – I’m bringing these game systems to Zothique. Regardless of which ruleset you prefer, the world itself remains the same – true to Clark Ashton Smith’s original vision. The laws of Zothique do not change, only the dice that measure them do. In short – the rules serve the setting – not the other way around.

And why stop at three systems? Because, frankly, if I didn’t, I think I’d go mad.

7. Can you talk a little more about the rules and other game mechanics of the various versions of the Zothique RPG? What's unique about them? Are there any elements you're especially proud of or think would catch the interest of old school gaming fans? 

Zothique isn’t a new RPG system – it’s a setting designed to haunt the games you already know. Built to run seamlessly with Dungeon Crawl Classics, 5E, or Shadowdark, it lets players step into Zothique without learning a new rulebook. Familiar mechanics are reskinned in the decadent tone of Clark Ashton Smith’s last continent, supported by new character classes – the Astrologer, Doomed Prince, Tomb Robber, Court Slayer, Sorcerer-Priest, and Necromancer – along with new spells, creatures, and relics. The game introduces a new mechanic – a Doom & Decadence track, a creeping mechanic of temptation and ruin that grants power only at terrible cost. In Zothique, every act of sorcery, every indulgence, and every favor from the gods exacts a price – for nothing beneath the dying sun comes without decay.

8. You're also working on an omnibus of all of the Zothique stories. What can you tell us about that? As a huge fan of Smith, who already owns his collected fiction in several versions, what does this omnibus offer that we haven't seen before? 

The Zothique Omnibus gathers the entire cycle – fifteen stories, one poem, one six-act play, and several rare fragments – in a single lavishly illustrated volume. Artist Lucas Korte brings the dying world to life with over fifteen full-page illustrations of necromantic grandeur and ruin. It’s both a perfect introduction for new readers and a definitive companion for long-time admirers of Clark Ashton Smith’s darkest creation.

9. Is there anything else you'd like to share about this project – something that you really want gamers and fans of Zothique to know about?

What I’d most like people to know is that Zothique isn’t just another fantasy world – it’s the final dream of Earth, brought to life through the words of Clark Ashton Smith. Every page of this project was written to capture that strange beauty and fatal grandeur beneath the dying sun, exactly as Smith envisioned it – decadent, dreamlike, and filled with both wonder and doom. Every rule, map, spell, and description was crafted to feel like something drawn straight from one of his stories – strange, poetic, and tragic in equal measure.

We’re only halfway through the Kickstarter and there’s still so much more to share – more art, more lore, and more glimpses into the last continent. I want to thank everyone who’s taken the time to explore the project, and especially those who’ve backed it and helped bring Zothique closer to life.

And finally, a heartfelt thank-you to you, James, for the interview and for shining a little more light into the dusk of Zothique.

Interview: Marzio Muscedere (Part I)

Even though I spent this past August writing primarily about H.P. Lovecraft and his enduring legacy, when it comes to the Big Three of Weird Tales – Robert E. Howard, HPL, and Clark Ashton Smith – it's actually Smith whom I'd select as my personal favorite. That's why, in another life, I pursued the license to produce a game based on Smith's three most interesting and well-developed settings, Hyperborea, Averoigne, and Zothique. 

Sadly, my plans came to naught, but another inhabitant of the Great White North – Marzio Muscedere – has succeeded where I did not. His company, Marz Press, is publishing an officially licensed Zothique RPG, along with a deluxe illustrated omnibus of all the stories of the Last Continent. I reached out to Marzio to learn more about him, his appreciation of CAS, and the Zothique game he is producing and he kindly agreed to answer my questions, the answers to which will appear today and tomorrow.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you first become involved in the hobby of roleplaying?

My name’s Marzio Muscedere, and I live in a land of nightmare and sorcery deep in the steaming jungles of southern Canada – well, maybe not all that, but I do live in the southernmost tip of the country.

I first got into role-playing back in 1984, when one of my best friends – and forever DM (he still is, by the way) – scored that sweet D&D red box with the Elmore cover. We were in the fourth grade and instantly hooked. We played every chance we got – hours and hours on end. Marathon sessions, campaigns that ran for years in real time. We sailed and reaved across Oerth, where we were the scourge of the Flanaess. We delved dungeons, put every creature to the sword, and hauled away every coin that glittered. I’m sure we mangled half the rules, and I couldn’t pronounce most of the words in the books, but none of that mattered.

As we grew, we tried all kinds of other RPGs between D&D campaigns – West End Star Wars, Top Secret, Rifts, Chill, Torg – you name it. Then, in my teen years, I stopped playing. Twenty-three years went by without a single die roll. Still, I never completely left the hobby. I’d haunt used bookstores, collecting old modules just to read them. Then around 2014 I stumbled onto Dungeon Crawl Classics and that reignited everything – both my love of gaming and my drive to write. Since then, I’ve had over twenty published works and started Marz Press, where I’m now running my fourth Kickstarter.

2. When did you first encounter Clark Ashton Smith? What was the first story of his that you read?

That’s a great question – and honestly, I wish I remembered exactly when it happened. My story’s probably a familiar one: I started with Conan, but back then it was all the Tor paperbacks. From there I found Lovecraft, then eventually the real Conan through the Del Rey Robert E. Howard collections. And somewhere along that path, I found the last and greatest of the Weird Tales trinity – Clark Ashton Smith – or rather, I like to think he found me.

Like the poisonous gleam of a forbidden jewel, his decadent, doom-laden prose pulled me in and never let go. And his vocabulary – I often joke around that the Canadian school system failed me – for here was a self-educated man living in a wooden cabin with no running water who knew more words than anyone I’d ever met!

As for the first story I read, it was “The Abominations of Yondo,” which I ended up using as inspiration for the adventure that won me the contest that led to a contract with Goodman Games. It’s still one of my all-time favorite CAS stories.

3. When did you first come across Zothique, and what was it about the setting that made it so appealing to you?

I really can’t pinpoint when I first came across Zothique – other than to say I discovered it later than many other sword-and-sorcery worlds. And I’m glad that I did. Experiencing Zothique as a more mature reader allowed me to appreciate it in ways I never could have when I was younger. The poetic and purple prose, the at-times perplexing vocabulary, the purposeful absence of a central protagonist, the decadent and dreamlike atmosphere, the world’s inevitable decline into oblivion – all the things that might have turned me off as a younger reader are exactly what captivated me as an adult.

Aside from all that, what makes Zothique so appealing to me is the simple fact that it’s a world at the end of time. It breaks from so many other fantasy settings by embracing fatalism over heroism. In Zothique, there are no true heroes – only doomed figures and decadent sorcerers reeling toward ruin. And unlike many other dying-earth settings, there is no trace of our modern world here – sorcery and superstition have completely supplanted science. Zothique lies in the far future, when the sun itself is dying and civilization has risen and fallen countless times. It is a place of alchemy, necromancy, and forgotten gods – equal parts sin and sorcery – where even the most powerful march toward their own inevitable doom.

I’ve also always loved how there’s an entire side of Zothique that remains just off camera – a vibrant, lived-in world intermingled with an age where corpses walk and dead gods whisper from the mouths of idols. Beyond the necromancers and ancient tombs, you can still feel the pulse of life – the bazaars and bustling marketplaces, the jewelers and innkeepers, the caravans hauling spices and silks across dying seas. There are peddlers of fine wines, traders of strange gems, and merchants and mercenaries far traveled from outer lands.

All of it persists amid the decay – a civilization both decadent and alive, teetering between the everyday and the eternal. It’s that tension, between the living world and the shadow of its own ending, that makes Zothique feel so different from other settings.

For role-players, Zothique is wonderful because it isn’t a world that grows or evolves – it is a world that erodes. This gives it endless room for imagination. Every mountain could hide a forgotten city; every desert could hold a necropolis; every sea, an uncharted isle. It’s a sandbox at the edge of time, filled with tragedy, wonder, and peril.

4. At what point did you decide to produce a roleplaying game set on Zothique?

I wanted Conan. I’ll admit it – I really wanted Goodman Games to get the Conan license so I could write a Conan RPG and adventures. But the more I thought about Conan, the more I found myself turning to Clark Ashton Smith for inspiration in the adventures I was already writing.

And then it just kind of clicked. Here was a world so different, so hauntingly beautiful – why not turn it into an RPG setting? Like most things that have real merit, it came down to creating something you truly love. Zothique is the world I want to play in, so I’m creating it.

My hope is that you’ll want to play in it too – and so far, I’m glad that there are people who do.