Retrospective: Shadowdale

Since I alluded in yesterday’s post to a shift in how TSR approached the Forgotten Realms, it seems worthwhile to examine the point at which that shift became unmistakable: Shadowdale, the 1989 AD&D module by Ed Greenwood. The first of three linked adventures intended to usher the setting into Second Edition, Shadowdale also served to advance the “Time of Troubles” metaplot through which TSR fundamentally reshaped the Realms. Lest anyone think otherwise, let state at the outset that, as an adventure, Shadowdale is deeply flawed. As a historical artifact, however, it is far more compelling, marking a decisive change in how the Forgotten Realms was framed and understood, both by TSR and its audience.

In many respects, Shadowdale is not really an adventure module at all, at least not in the sense that term had traditionally been understood. Rather than presenting a locale to be explored or a problem to be solved, Shadowdale instead serves primarily as a vehicle for presenting unfolding setting events over which the player characters have no control. Certainly, the characters are present during moments of great importance, like the fall of the gods to Toril or the assault on Shadowdale by the Zhentarim, but their role is largely one of observation. Outcomes are predetermined, major NPCs dominate the action, and the larger flow of events proceeds regardless of player choice. The module reads less like an invitation to adventure than as a dramatization of a story someone else has already decided.

This represents a sharp departure from earlier presentations of the Forgotten Realms. In the version of the Realms seen in Greenwood’s many Dragon articles, the 1987 campaign set, and its early supplements, the Realms functioned as a richly detailed backdrop rather than an unfolding narrative. History was largely static, providing a deep reservoir of implications, ruins, and grudges for Dungeon Masters to draw upon. Even powerful NPCs, such as the much-derided Elminster, were framed less as protagonists than as fixtures of the setting. They were figures with their own agendas, but not the only drivers of action within the setting. There was still plenty of scope for the player characters to leave their marks on the world.

Shadowdale signals a shift away from that understanding. With the Time of Troubles, the Realms acquired a timeline with canonical turning points and inevitable outcomes. The fall and return of the gods is more than a bit of background; it's a story to be told and told in a particular way. The module establishes that such events will happen whether or not the players intervene, as well as that future products will assume they have happened exactly as written. In doing so, it subtly but decisively shifts ownership of the setting away from DMs and players and toward the publisher.

This is not simply a matter of railroading, though Shadowdale certainly does that. The deeper issue is one of priority. The module is designed to support novels, sourcebooks, and future adventures rather than to stand on its own as a flexible piece of play material to inspire. The prominence of NPCs makes sense in this context, because they are central to TSR's narrative of the Realms, but their dominance leaves little room for the player characters to matter in any meaningful way. At best, the PCs can assist, but, more often, they will simply, as I said above, observe.

I believe it would be deeply unfair to lay all of this at Ed Greenwood's feet. In retrospect, Shadowdale reads less like an expression of his original conception of the Forgotten Realms than like a compromise between that earlier vision and TSR’s late-80s priorities. Greenwood’s affection for his NPCs and his fondness for intricate lore were always present, but earlier Realms material generally kept these elements in the background. Here, under the pressure to launch Second Edition with a bang and to synchronize the setting with an ever-expanding range of novels, those tendencies are brought to the fore. The result is a Realms that feels less like a setting to be explored and more like a story to be witnessed.

Shadowdale and its sequels offer little opportunity for meaningful choice, improvisation, or emergent play. Encounters are often structured to showcase NPC competence rather than to test player ingenuity. Deviating from the expected course of events is not merely difficult but implicitly discouraged, as doing so threatens the integrity of the metaplot the module exists to establish. This is admittedly not new territory. TSR had been down this path already with Dragonlance, but here it feels even more jarring, at least to me, perhaps because Krynn only ever existed as a vehicle for storytelling whereas the Forgotten Realms was intended as something more open.

For all these shortcomings and more, Shadowdale is nevertheless important. Its influence was profound and long-lasting. It set the template for how the Forgotten Realms would be handled throughout much of the Second Edition era. For players and DMs who enjoyed that approach, the module represented an exciting moment of transformation. For others, especially those of us who valued the older conception of the Realms as a flexible sandbox, it marks the beginning of an estrangement that would only deepen in the years to come.

Seen in retrospect, Shadowdale is, therefore, best understood as a turning point rather than as a mediocre adventure. It is the moment when the Forgotten Realms decisively stopped being merely a place where adventures happened and became, instead, a stage for stories to be told. Whether that change constitutes progress or decline is ultimately a matter of taste. What is beyond dispute is that, after Shadowdale, the Realms would never quite be the same again.

The Articles of Dragon: "Into the Forgotten Realms"

I may be mistaken in this, but I don't believe I've ever featured an adventure in any of my previous entries in The Articles of Dragon series. If I am correct, then that's unfortunate in a certain respect, as Ed Greenwood's "Into the Forgotten Realms," which first appeared in issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), isn't a very good adventure – or, more charitably, it isn't a particularly notable adventure, except in one way: it's the very first published scenario set in the Realms. That alone is why I’ve chosen to write about it today and why I still remember it more than forty years later.

Now, I know that for many fans of old school Dungeons & Dragons, the Realms are every bit as anathema as Krynn and I can't completely fault them for that opinion, though I don't share it. I'm an unrepentant booster of the Realms or at least the Realms as they were in the pages of Dragon and in the days before the Time of Troubles did irreparable damage to Greenwood's original vision. (Yes, yes, I know TSR made lots of changes to the setting from the very beginning, but there's still a clear dividing line between the Realms before 1989 and after.)

I'd been reading about the Forgotten Realms through Greenwood's many articles since "Pages from the Mages" appeared in the very first issue of Dragon I ever owned. I enjoyed them for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was their feigned depth. Greenwood sprinkled all his articles with the names of rulers and battles, references to gods and monsters, and allusions to historical events without ever explaining them in depth. He gave the impression that his setting was both broad and deep, filled with detail on which he could draw for his engaging articles. Greenwood's occasional references to his home campaign were similarly intriguing and I often found myself wanting to know more about it.

This is why "Into the Forgotten Realms," for all its flaws as an adventure, was so compelling to me. Here, at last. Greenwood was showing us something a bit more practical, if that's the word, something that showed off how he used all this lore he'd accumulated over the years. We got to see a little bit of the ruined School of Wizardry within haunted Myth Drannor, not to mention a glimpse of the politics of the Dalelands. It wasn't a lot, to be sure, but it was enough of a taste that I felt like I'd been given some additional insight into the Realms as an AD&D setting rather than as fodder for magazine articles. This was the Forgotten Realms as she was played, so to speak, and that was no small thing to my fifteen year-old self.

As I said, the adventure itself is nothing amazing. It's basically just a dungeon crawl through a magical ruin filled with monsters and traps – pretty basic stuff, all things considered. Furthermore, the adventure was originally written for an AD&D tournament held at GenCon XVII (August 1984) and so suffers from some of the same sins as many tournament modules, such as limited scope and a contrived starting situation. None of these bothered me at the time, since a great many of TSR's official modules had the same problems and I'd learned how to adapt them easily enough. 

In truth, the appeal of "Into the Forgotten Realms" wasn't its potential use as a scenario anyway; it was what more it told me about Ed Greenwood's setting. In that, it did not disappoint. Though the focus was on room descriptions, there were enough tidbits scattered throughout that I was satisfied. In addition to historical information about Myth Drannor, there are other fascinating details, such as the suggestion, for example, that spells named for characters associated with the Greyhawk setting (e.g. Bigby, Tenser, etc.) don't exist in the Realms. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a huge difference, to be sure, but it's enough of one that I took note of it.

That's why "Into the Forgotten Realms" made an impression on me: it gave some concrete examples of how Ed Greenwood used the setting he created and how he tried to make it feel just a little bit unique. Whether anyone else enjoyed it as much as I did, I can't say for certain. However, TSR did reprint it in the 1987 boxed set under the title "Lashan's Fall," so I can only assume I'm not alone in liking it. Regardless, by the criteria established when I relaunched this series a year and a half ago, it definitely qualifies as worthy of discussion.

End of the Line

Recently, several readers sent me a link to this article, heralding the possible demise of mass market paperback books, a format near and dear to me as someone whose introduction to fantasy, science fiction, and horror during the 1970s and '80s was, in large part, facilitated by it. I read the piece with a mixture of resignation and sadness, not because the news was especially surprising, but because it confirmed something I’d felt for some time, namely, that this particular way of encountering books (and being shaped by them) is quietly slipping out of the world.

Now, the mass market paperbacks I remember were never glamorous. Their paper was cheap and their bindings fragile. I suppose you could say that they were disposable and yet that very disposability was part of its appeal. These were books meant to be carried, loaned, lost, rediscovered, and reread until they quite literally fell apart. They could easily fit into your back pocket, coat pocket, backpack, or even inside an RPG box. These were the books I saw on spinner racks in libraries, drugstores, and supermarkets, offering strange worlds and exciting stories for the low, low price of $1.95. What a bargain!

More than that, though, the mass market paperback was an engine of cultural transmission. Entire genres flourished because they could circulate so widely and cheaply. The lurid covers, the cramped type, the promise of adventure or terror compressed into a few inches of shelf space all contributed to their success. They also shaped expectations and tastes. Through them, I learned how to browse, how to take chances, and, contrary to conventional wisdom, how to judge a book by its cover. The format also encouraged promiscuous reading. Today, I'd grab a sword-and-sorcery novel, tomorrow a horror anthology, and later a space opera with ideas far bigger than its physical dimensions.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but this saddens me. To lose the mass market paperback seems to me not simply to lose a format. It's also to lose a set of habits and experiences tied to it, like casual discovery, which played a huge role in the youthful development of my tastes. Trade paperbacks and hardcovers are finer physical artifacts and digital books, though I personally loathe them, are indeed convenient, but none of these quite replaces the humble paperback’s role as a quiet conspirator, introducing new authors and ideas into as many hands as possible.

If this is indeed the end of the mass market paperback format, then let it be said that it did its work so well that it became invisible. The mass market paperback asked for little and gave a great deal in return. For many of us of a certain age, it was not merely a way of reading but the way we learned to love reading. Its passing marks the end of an era, not just in publishing, but perhaps in how new readers are made. It's another quiet reminder that I am old and the world that made me is rapidly receding into the distance. 

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Strange High House in the Mist

H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist” is a restrained yet quietly affecting tale, often grouped with his Dunsanian or Dreamlands stories. This is understandable, as the story shares with them a preoccupation with mood, suggestion, and the power of longing rather than with overt horror. Instead, it focuses on reverie and yearning, centered on an encounter with something ancient, beautiful, and meaningful that lies just beyond the reach of modern life. In this respect, the story offers a glimpse of Lovecraft’s wistful and elegiac sensibilities, one that is simultaneously at odds with and supportive of the horror stories for which he is better known.

First published in the October 1931 issue of Weird Tales, the story is set in Kingsport, Lovecraft’s fictionalized version of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Kingsport is a location to which he returned repeatedly as a symbol of the old New England (and, by extension, the old world) he so revered. The seaside town is portrayed as steeped in age and wonder. Here, the past is never entirely absent but lingers just beneath the surface of everyday life. In this particular case, that past takes the form of a strange house perched impossibly high on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The house is visible only at certain times, half-lost in mist, and the townsfolk are reluctant to learn more about it.

“The Strange High House in the Mist” reflects, in part, HPL's increasing preoccupation with the erosion of the strange and wondrous. Industrial modernity, the rise of mass society, and the perceived loss of continuity with the past weighed heavily on his imagination. In many of his stories from this time, these anxieties are transmuted into horror, with ancient survivals revealing humanity’s insignificance in an uncaring cosmos. In this tale, however, the same concerns are expressed through melancholy and yearning rather than terror.

The protagonist, Thomas Olney, is a philosopher vacationing in Kingsport. He is immediately captivated by the sight of the house on the cliff and feels an almost instinctive pull toward it. Driven by curiosity, Olney ascends the cliff and discovers that the house is indeed a peculiar locale.

When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as grey as the rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky white of the seaward vapours. And he perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eye panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could see nothing below but the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff’s edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reached save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.

Inside, he is welcomed by a bearded man who "seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder mysteries." The encounter is striking because it lacks the menace one might expect. The man is dignified and reflective, speaking of distant times and forgotten wonders. Olney’s visit is brief, but it has an effect on him, as we shall see. What he experiences is not forbidden knowledge in the usual Lovecraftian sense, but a momentary awakening to another manner of understanding the world.

Consequently, Olney leaves house a changed man – but not quite for the better. He does not remember what he saw in the house nor does he recall what he discussed with its lone inhabitant. In some sense, both real and metaphorical, he is no longer the same person who climbed the pinnacle and entered the house full of curiosity and wonder.

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness, the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow, and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination.

There is fear present in this story, but it's the fear not of cosmic annihilation or human insignificance, but of loss, specifically, the loss of imagination and curiosity, a perennial concern of Lovecraft. The tragedy is not that wonders such as the house are dangerous, but that the desire for such wonders is vanishing, driven away by unthinking skepticism and the structure of modern life.

In this respect, the story shares a great deal with “The White Ship,” “Celephaïs,” and “The Silver Key,” though I think it's more firmly anchored in something akin to the "real world." Rather than transporting its protagonist to a dream realm, the tale suggests that wonder lies just out of sight but still visible to those who seek for it. Of course, not everyone who does so will find his longing satisfied and, as in the case of Thomas Olney, the opposite might occur. 

Though it is easy to see why some readers classify the story among Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales, it seems more accurate to view it as occupying a middle ground between his early, explicitly Dunsanian fantasies and his later, more austere and uncompromising cosmic horror. The unease it generates does not arise from revelations about what lies beyond humanity, but from an awareness of what humanity may have already abandoned. The true loss is not safety or sanity, but memory, imagination, and continuity with the past. 

Artwork by Joseph Doolin

The Sorcerer Departs

I pass… but in this lone and crumbling tower,
Builded against the burrowing seas of chaos,
My volumes and my philtres shall abide:
Poisons more dear than any mithridate,
And spells far sweeter than the speech of love…
Half-shapen dooms shall slumber in my vaults
And in my volumes cryptic runes that shall
Outblast the pestilence, outgnaw the worm
When loosed by alien wizards on strange years
Under the blackened moon and paling sun.

—fragment of an unfinished poem by Clark Ashton Smith (Spring, 1944)

As The Ensorcellment of January draws to a close, I find myself with a sense of unfinished business. Unlike last year’s The Shadow Over August, this series proved more difficult to bring into focus and I can’t quite shake the feeling that I did not do as good a job with it as Clark Ashton Smith deserves. I think that speaks to the particular challenge Smith presents as a subject. His work is less immediately graspable than Lovecraft’s, less defined by a single mythos or set of ideas, and more rooted in atmosphere, language, and sensibility. Smith’s influence is more easily felt rather imitated, which makes it harder to point to clean lines of descent, especially in something like roleplaying games.

I would be less than honest, too, if I didn’t acknowledge that this January has been a more distracted one than I had anticipated. An unexpected family matter demanded time and attention, inevitably affecting not just this series but all my projects over the past few weeks. Such things have a way of reshaping one’s plans, even when one would prefer otherwise. If The Ensorcellment of January sometimes felt less cohesive and expansive than I had originally hoped, the reasons lie as much there as anywhere else.

Still, I hope the series has had some value. If it has prompted even a few readers to seek out Smith’s stories or poems or to look again at familiar fantasy and science fiction through the lens of his luxuriant imagination, then it has served its intended purpose. Clark Ashton Smith remains one of the great wellsprings of the fantastic, a writer whose visions of decadence, desolation, and dark wonder continue to resonate in subtle but enduring ways.

Naturally, the end of this series does not spell the end of Smith's appearances on Grognardia. His influence on fantasy, weird fiction, and the hobby of roleplaying games is too deep and too strange to be confined to a single month. If, as I suspect, The Ensorcellment of January has fallen short of fully doing his unique genius justice, perhaps that is only fitting. Smith, after all, cannot easily be contained and that, in no small part, is why I return to him and his works again and again. I hope more of you will now do the same.

Gaming at the World's End

Some of you may recall that, back in November, I did a two-part interview with Marzio Muscedere about his upcoming roleplaying game based on Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique setting. Since I dedicated this month to CAS and his works, I approached Marz to do a short guest post on a topic related to Smith and roleplaying and he kindly offered up the following, which I am pleased to share with you.

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Most fantasy settings are about beginnings — the rise of kingdoms, the forging of alliances, the defeat of looming evils to save a still vibrant and hopeful world.

Zothique begins where those stories end.

Zothique is the far future, where the world we know is gone, drowned and buried by time. What remains is a final continent filled with ancient cities, decadent courts, fading cults, and scholars poring over scraps of maddening lore. It is a place where necromancers converse with the dead in shadowed tombs, while besotted rulers cling to ceremony as their palaces crumble to ruin around them.

For gamers accustomed to the default assumption that adventurers will, in some fashion, make the world better, Zothique offers a stark alternative — nothing is getting better. Empires are not being forged. They are rotting in place. Gods do not promise salvation — they are distant and cruel. Sorcery does not herald progress — it invites doom and corruption.

For players, this creates a different kind of motivation. Characters may find themselves searching for meaning, wealth, forbidden knowledge, or fleeting power in the world’s final gasp. Their goals are immediate and personal, steeped in wonder and doom. They explore not to save the world, but to plunder the secrets of a forgotten past. They make bargains with demons and devils not because they believe in salvation, but because they want something — anything — before the dimming sun finally fails.

For game masters, this is exactly what sword-and-sorcery and old-school gaming was made for. Dangerous magic is not an exception but the norm. Exploration is everywhere, whether it’s a tomb, a crumbling dungeon, a cursed city, or a half-forgotten cult clinging to its last rites.

Zothique reminds us that a fantasy RPG can be intimate, fatalistic, and strange without losing its power. It trades grand destiny for atmosphere, epic salvation for personal risk, and shining heroism for decadent desperation.

In Zothique, the question is not whether the world can be saved.

Only what your characters will do before the light finally fades.

Retrospective: Cities of Bone

I've mentioned before my affection for the Al-Qadim line for Second Edition AD&D. Though not without flaws, I thought it did a better job of translating its source material into Dungeons & Dragons terms than did Oriental Adventures (which I also like). One of the reasons I feel this way is that Al-Qadim leaned very heavily into the fantastical rather any attempt at historical Arabia. That was a choice I appreciated then and still do now and one I often wished Oriental Adventures had embraced to the same extent.

This approach is especially evident in the boxed supplement, Cities of Bone. Until I read a comment to last week's Retrospective, I'd almost forgotten about it. Though I owned the original Arabian Adventures book, I wasn't a devoted follower of the line and only picked a select number of its supplements. This was one of them and, though I never made use of it in play, I enjoyed reading it. I hope that's not damning Cities of Bone with faint praise, because that wasn't my intention. Certainly, the only real metric by which to judge a RPG supplement or adventure is how useful it is in play, but there are often products, like this one, that are nevertheless inspirational. 

In this case, that inspiration comes from subject matter very near and dear to my heart: ancient ruins, undead, and necromancy, subject matter that was also of great interest to Clark Ashton Smith. That's the real reason I am looking back on Cities of Bone: there are bits of it that feel like they could easily have been drawn directly from the works of the Bard of Auburn. That's not to say that they were, at least not directly, but I'm inclined to agree with last week's commenters that there's a broadly Smithian vibe to the whole thing. It's fitting, too, since Smith earliest works of fiction, written when he was an adolescent, had Arabian or Orientalist settings. 

Written by Steven Kurtz and released in 1994, during TSR’s final flourish of lavish boxed sets, Cities of Bone appeared after previous supplements had already established Al-Qadim's Zakhara setting as a land of bustling bazaars, glittering genie courts, and swashbuckling adventure. Against that backdrop, Cities of Bone stands out precisely because it turns away from the living world and toward the titular ruins of ancient kingdoms – and those who both dwell within them and would despoil their buried treasures for their own benefit.

Cities of Bone included a 64-page adventure book, a 32-page campaign guide, and an additional 8-page supplement, as well as the usual maps, handouts, and loose accessory sheets that could be found in all TSR's boxed sets of the era. I can't deny that, for all my complaints about this era, the boxed sets it produced were often beautifully presented. There's a strange joy in opening them up and goggling at all the stuff TSR managed to pack inside. That's true here as well, double so, because Al-Qadim products have these faux gilt pages and striking arabesque decorations. 

What I remember most about Cities of Bone was the way it handled the ruins it presents. Rather than being generic dungeon crawls transplanted into the desert, they're rooted in the historical, cultural, and religious context of Zakhara. Likewise, some of the undead encountered within them are tragic figures, bound by oaths, regrets, or unfinished duties rather than simple malevolence. Many scenarios hinge on moral and ethical choices, such as how to treat the dead, how to honor the past, how to balance the lure of wealth with the demands of propriety and faith. It's an unusual approach, one that's subtly at odds with uncritical tomb robbing that D&D implicitly espouses. 

I call Cities of Bone a "supplement," but it's really more of a grab-bag of locations, NPCs, and scenarios intended to be used however the Dungeon Master wants. In a sense, they support – no pun intended – sandbox play, as the characters wander about the Land of Fate and encounter these ruins to explore. Some of the scenarios are short and largely inconsequential, while others are longer. By far, "Court of the Necromancers" is the best of the bunch and clearly seems to be channeling Clark Ashton Smith's "Empire of the Necromancers" – not that that's a bad thing!

All of which is to say that Cities of Bone is far from a must-have supplement, but there’s still enough stuff in it that I was glad to have been reminded I even owned it in the first place. I like ruins; I like the undead. There’s plenty of both here, along with some nice maps and snippets of history that help to give everything an extra overlay of… something. Mood? Atmosphere, maybe? A sense that these places were once alive and important and are now only half-remembered, half-understood, waiting to be misused or disturbed by characters who don’t fully grasp what they’re poking at.

As a whole, Cities of Bone is definitely a product of its time. It's uneven and occasionally frustrating, but also oddly earnest in its ambitions. It’s not polished enough to recommend without reservation, nor is it inspired enough that I'd recommend anyone seek it out. However, referees who enjoy plundering older supplements for ideas, imagery, and the occasional spark of inspiration, would find it has its uses. I myself can easily imagine lifting things from it and then weaving them into something of my own. In that sense, Cities of Bone succeeds in the modest way many such supplements do.

The Family Tree of the Gods

Fanzines are of particular importance to the history and development of roleplaying games and have, in recent years, enjoyed a welcome resurgence. RPG fanzines were themselves modeled on the earlier ’zines of science fiction fandom. Beginning in the 1930s, these amateur magazines helped popularize the then-new genres of science fiction and fantasy (the distinction between them being a later and largely arbitrary development). Much like the pulp magazines of the same era, early fanzines offer a treasure trove of insight into the tastes, debates, and creative energies of their communities. They capture ideas in motion, as well as passionate – and often acrimonious – arguments played out in print. I take strange comfort in the fact that the nerds of nearly a century ago were no more temperate in their enthusiasm than are their 21st century descendants.

Another way in which those old fanzines strangely mirror contemporary trends is that, much like the Internet today, they enabled fans to interact directly, albeit more slowly, with writers and artists whose work they admired. For example, The Acolyte, a fanzine edited by Francis Towner Laney from 1942 to 1946, often included contributions from members of the Lovecraft Circle, such as Donald Wandrei (co-founder of Arkham House) and Clark Ashton Smith. Though there are many issues of The Acolyte that are worthy of examination, issue #7 (Summer 1944) includes an interesting contribution from Smith.

Entitled "The Family Tree of the Gods," it's a transcript of part of a letter sent by CAS to Robert H. Barlow a decade earlier. In that letter, Smith lays out the genealogy of some of the Elder Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos and how they relate to some of his own creations, most notably Tsathoggua.

From what I have gathered, this family tree is intended as an addition/expansion/correction to one that Lovecraft created in a letter to James F. Morton in April 1933. That one seems to have been a joke, a bit of tongue in cheek genealogy that purported to show HPL's own lineage from Azathoth on down through Nyarlathotep to the present day. Here's a reproduction of that family tree:

As you can see, there are points of disagreement between the two genealogies that cannot easily be reconciled. That’s not really a problem, however, since I doubt that either Lovecraft or Smith intended these schemes to be definitive, let alone reliable. They function more as evocative gestures than as firm statements of "canon." Of course, some of their disciples and fans felt otherwise, seizing upon every stray detail and treating it as holy writ, as overzealous fans have been wont to do for as long as fandom has existed. Being prone to this sort of activity myself, I can hardly censure them too harshly. Even so, I can’t help but feel that attempts at encyclopedic categorization miss the point of Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothothery entirely – hardly the first time fans have tried to pin down something that was meant to remain elusive and unsettling.

I present this material mostly as evidence of the ways Lovecraft and especially Smith interacted with fans and correspondents, engaging their enthusiasm while never fully surrendering the essential ambiguity of their creations. These genealogies reveal a kind of playful negotiation between creator and audience, where hints are offered, contradictions are allowed to stand, and the resulting uncertainty becomes a feature rather than a flaw. In that sense, the disagreements themselves are more revealing than any tidy reconciliation could ever be.

The Ranine

Over at Advanced Grognardia, I've got another post in which I provide game stats and a description of a monster from my Telluria campaign setting, along with some commentary on its origins. 

Smith's Most Well-Known Creation

Artwork by Clark Ashton Smith

I've already touched on the fact that, compared to his contemporaries, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the overt influence of Clark Ashton Smith on later writers is minimal and I stand by that assessment. I would, however, like to point out an obvious exception to this: the deity Tsathoggua. Unlike nearly everything else CAS created in his weird tales, Tsathoggua not only reappeared multiple times within his own story cycles but was also used by some of his colleagues in theirs. Indeed, the first time the name Tsathoggua appears in print is not in one of Smith's stories but in Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness."

In that story, Tsathoggua is mentioned three times, mostly in passing, as part of a litany of other ancient beings, like Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath. However, one of these mentions not only describes him but associates him with CAS:

It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came – you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.

Klarkash-Ton is, obviously, Smith and "the Commoriom myth-cycle" is then-unpublished "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros," which had been written in 1929 but not published until a few months after "The Whisperer in Darkness." We must remember that the writers in the Weird Tales circle regularly discussed and shared drafts of their work with one another, which is how HPL beat Smith to the punch when it came to introducing his own creation.

When "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" was published, Smith talks a bit more about Tsathoggua by reference to one of his idols:

He was very squat and pot-bellied, his head was more like a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with an imitation of short fur, giving somehow a vague sensation of both the bat and the sloth. His sleepy lids were half-lowered over his globular eyes; the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth.

Smith would go on mention Tsathoggua several more times in his Hyperborean stories, as well as in his Averoigne stories, where the god appears under the variant name Sodagui. From these other stories, we learn that Tsathoggua – also known as Zhothaqquah – once dwelled on the planet Cykranosh, which we call Saturn, where "some of [his] relatives were still resident ... and were worshipped by its peoples." His relatives include his "uncle," having the unpronounceable name of Hziulquoigmnzhah, about which I'll have a little more to say in an upcoming post.

From "The Seven Geases," we find out that, after having from Saturn "in years immediately foIlowing the Earth's creation," Tsathoggua slept in a secret cave beneath Mount Voormithadreth. That story describes him as having "great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad." This particular story is interesting, because Tsathoggua not only appears in the flesh but actually speaks, carrying on a brief conversation with its unfortunate protagonist, Ralibar Vooz. We also learn that the god enjoys blood sacrifices offered to him by his worshipers.

I can't help but wonder why it was that Tsathoggua, of all of Smith's creations, should be the one that Lovecraft (and, apparently, Robert E. Howard, though the story in question was never completed during his lifetime) should find compelling enough to include in his own stories, if only by reference. I don't really have any theories to offer, since, as fond as I am of Tsathoggua, he's nothing truly notable about him. Perhaps Lovecraft and others simply liked the sound of his name. Whatever the reason, I think it's unquestionably the case that Tsathoggua is Smith's most well-known creation.