Reconsiderations: H.P. Lovecraft

This being the 136th anniversary of the birth of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I thought it the perfect opportunity to write another installment in my increasingly irregular Reconsiderations series. I also think it makes sense as a topic, given that, since its inception, Grognardia has focused not just on the history of roleplaying games but also on the authors and literature that inspired those games – and there are few authors who can reasonably be said to have had more of an impact on RPGs than Lovecraft.

Lovecraft is, after all, an Appendix N author and one Gygax notes as being among "the most immediate influences upon AD&D," alongside such other notables as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance. This alone demonstrates my point, but, of course, Gygax is not alone in having been an admirer of HPL. Innumerable RPG creators, both past and present, have acknowledged the role Lovecraft and his stories have played in their own creations. There's thus a good reason why, in my first ever post commemorating his birth, I called him "the father of us all."

Up until now, I've been very consistent in saying that, while I have greatly enjoyed Lovecraft's stories since I was about 12 years-old, he was never my favorites of the famed Weird Tales trinity. I would always say that, of those three authors, Clark Ashton Smith was the one I held in the highest esteem. However, over the last year my focus has shifted and I've begun to question my feelings on this matter. 

To be clear, my regard for CAS remains as immense as ever. He truly is a unique author with a unique voice. I will always chesish his stories, particularly his "dying earth" tales of Zothique, which I frequently reread both for their luxurious language and melancholy tone. That said, I have better come to appreciate how much I owe to Lovecraft.

I don't mean this simply in the obvious sense that I have read and enjoyed his stories for more than four decades, though that's certainly part of it. Nor do I mean merely that Lovecraft's influence can be found everywhere in the hobby that has occupied so much of my life. What I mean is something more personal and, until fairly recently, something to which I had never given much thought.

Last summer, at the conclusion of my The Shadow over August series, I described Lovecraft as a kindred spirit and, as the last twelve months have rolled on, I find it an ever more apt description. There are, of course, many things about Lovecraft with which I do not identify, just as there are aspects of his personality and opinions that I find objectionable or simply baffling. I have no interest in pretending otherwise, but neither do I think a man must be admirable in every respect before we can recognize something of ourselves in him. Indeed, it may be precisely because Lovecraft was such an odd and contradictory man that I increasingly find him so compelling.

Lovecraft was a bookish introvert who often seemed more comfortable with the products of imagination than with the demands of everyday life. He was deeply attached to the past, suspicious of much that passed for progress, fascinated by history and antiquity, and given to constructing elaborate imaginary worlds partly for the sheer pleasure of doing so. He maintained friendships across great distances through correspondence and took enormous pleasure in sharing ideas, stories, discoveries, and enthusiasms with an ever-growing circle of like-minded people. He was, to use a deliberately anachronistic term, a nerd. Obviously, I see a lot of myself in him.

And that may explain why my affection for Lovecraft has grown recently. When I was younger, I approached him primarily through his fiction. I judged him, quite reasonably, I think, by his fiction. Judged solely on that basis, I still think I prefer Smith. At his best, CAS possesses a command of language and an imaginative opulence that few writers of fantastic fiction have ever equaled. However, I'm no longer sure that "Which of the Weird Tales trinity wrote the stories I like best?" is the only or even the most interesting way to judge these immensely talented men.

Lovecraft's achievement extends beyond the stories themselves. He created a body of ideas that have proven extraordinarily fertile in the hands of others. More importantly, he wanted them to be fertile. He freely lent elements of his imaginary mythology to friends and correspondents, borrowed from them in return, and delighted in the resulting cross-pollination. What we now call the "Cthulhu Mythos" was never a carefully guarded intellectual property or a meticulously defined fictional setting. Rather, it was something closer to a shared sandbox of the imagination.

Seen from the perspective of roleplaying games, that aspect of Lovecraft seems especially significant. Roleplaying games are themselves exercises in shared imagination. Referees borrow ideas from books, movies, history, mythology, and one another. They then transform them, combine them, and hand them over to players, who transform them yet again through play. The results are rarely tidy and almost never attributable to a single creator. There is something remarkably Lovecraftian – though not in the cosmic horror sense, but in the creative sense – about that process.

This may be one reason his influence on roleplaying games has been so much greater than simply inspiring monsters in Dungeons & Dragons or even providing source material for Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft and his circle offered a way of creating fantastic worlds that was open, collaborative, allusive, and cumulative. For example, Smith might come up with Tsathoggua and Lovecraft would borrow him. Lovecraft, in turn, creates the Necronomicon and inspires Howard to create the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (with its German title provided by August Derleth). With every borrowing, this shared imaginary world became a little larger and a little more convincing. Anyone who has refereed a long-running roleplaying campaign will recognize this process.

That recognition has caused me to look at Lovecraft differently. For years, I think I regarded him chiefly as one of the great ancestors of the hobby, an enormously influential writer whose fingerprints could be found everywhere. I still regard him that way, of course, but increasingly I see something else as well. Lovecraft is an example of the kind of imaginative life that I myself have tried, in my own much smaller way, to live.

Lovecraft wrote because he loved writing. He read voraciously because he loved learning. He corresponded because he loved exchanging ideas with people who shared his enthusiasms. He invented worlds, histories, books, cults, and strange names because doing so delighted him. He did these things despite disappointments, financial difficulties, personal failures, and the knowledge that the wider world would likely take little notice of most of what he did. Yet, here we are, 136 years after his birth, still talking about him.

Perhaps that's what has changed most in my estimation of Lovecraft. Clark Ashton Smith may remain the pulp fantasy writer whose prose most dazzles me, while Robert E. Howard may remain the one whose best stories possess an energy few writers, even today, can match. Meanwhile, Lovecraft increasingly seems to me the one whose life of the imagination I understand best and have inadvertently emulated the most.

When I called Lovecraft "the father of us all" back in 2008, I was thinking primarily about his influence on RPGs and on the imaginative culture from which it sprang. I still think that's true. Now, though, I would add another meaning to the phrase. Lovecraft belongs to that long lineage of bookish dreamers who found the ordinary world insufficient and responded not by abandoning it but by adding to it, by creating strange countries of the imagination and inviting others to visit them. Some of those visitors then created countries of their own.

I'm one of them – as I suspect are most of the people reading this post.

Pulp Science Fiction Library: Demon Princes

The trouble with Muses is that, ultimately, they're in control, not you. As I continue to work on the second edition of Thousand Suns – the draft is now close to half complete – my mind has been wandering ever farther away from the more well-known varieties of fantasy. Of course, as I recently argued, there's still lots of overlap between these two genres and not merely in terms of content. Many of the most talented and influential writers of the past tried their hands at both and succeeded brilliantly.

A good case in point is Jack Vance. Vance is a paladin of Appendix N, being one of only a handful of writers Gary Gygax singled out as being one of the "most immediate influences" upon his vision of Dungeon & Dragons. Of course, Gygax did so for Vance's tales of the Dying Earth, whose magic system he adopted for the game, and not for his science fiction tales, of which there are a great many – indeed, far more than his fantasy stories. 

Among the most celebrated of Vance's sci-fi works is his "Demon Princes" series, the first of which, Star King, was serialized in the December 1963 and February 1964 issues of Galaxy Magazine before being published by Berkeley Books later in '64. The first three books in the five-book series appeared fairly quickly, with The Killing Machine also appearing in 1964 and The Palace of Love in 1967. The fourth and fifth books, The Face and The Book of Dreams, did not appear until more than a decade later, in 1979 and 1981 respectively, which was right around the time I first entered the hobby of roleplaying. 

However, I wouldn't take much note of any of these books until several years into my introduction to Traveller. That places it somewhere in the vicinity of 1982 or '83, depending on when it was that I first acquired Citizens of the Imperium. That supplement, along with 1001 Characters, is notable for having included Traveller stats for a selection of literary SF characters, ranging from John Carter of Mars to Slippery Jim diGriz to Dominic Flandry. At the time, I already knew many of these names from novels and stories I'd read. Others, though, were new to me and they sent me off to the local public library on a quest. 

Among those unfamiliar names would be that of Kirth Gersen. Citizens of the Imperium associates him specifically with the second book in the series, The Killing Machine, but also mentions it as part of a five-book "Demon Princes" series. To my youthful mind, "Demon Princes" didn't sound like the title for a science fiction series, so I was initially confused as to why it was included alongside more well-known pillars of SF. Likewise, I had not yet read any of Vance's space operas, so my confusion was only heightened. Fortunately for me, I eventually got around to tracking down Star King and its four sequels. I enjoyed them so much that I sought out more of Vance's science fiction and the rest is history.

The titular Demon Princes of the series are not supernatural entities by five interstellar crime bosses, against whom Gersen wishes to exact revenge for their past in bringing ruin upon his home planet. Having been trained by his grandfather for this purpose, Gersen dedicates his life to hunting down them down so that justice may be done. Each of the five novels follows his pursuit of one of these Demon Princes. Though the novels include plenty of action, one of the things that's most interesting about them – or at least is to me – is how much investigation and infiltration they include. Gersen's efforts to locate his quarry, some of whom have gone to great efforts to conceal their identities, is every bit as central to Vance's stories as is dealing with them once they've been found.

Though linked, each novel presents a largely self-contained exploration of a different world or culture, often shaped by the personality of the Demon Prince Gersen is presently seeking. Consequently, the series, like so much of Vance's oeuvre, is a picaresque adventure through strange societies with elaborate social codes and fragmented political systems where justice is personal rather than institutional. That makes Gersen’s quest more than just a hunt for enemies; it becomes an extended engagement with questions of identity, culture, and obsession in the far future, all of which play to Vance's strengths as a writer and storyteller.

Prior to writing this post, it had been decades since I last read any of the Demon Princes novels and that's a shame. Like so many of the books that inspired Traveller, they're fast-paced, pulpy adventures filled with quirky and memorable characters and equally quirky and memorable situations. They're not deep scientific speculations about a possible future and that's OK. Sometimes, you just want to read a fun, engaging novel about one man's quest to bring justice to some bad guys who deserve what's coming to them. In that respect, the Demon Princes series delivers and does so enjoyably.

The Original "Dungeon" Delver

Today marks the birthday of Abraham Merritt, an early twentieth-century writer whose work I have long championed on this blog. That advocacy sometimes feels quixotic, since Merritt is far less read today than many of his contemporaries. That’s a shame, because his distinctive contribution to fantasy deserves wider recognition. Merritt helped popularize the idea that the greatest adventures are not across oceans or among the stars, but beneath our feet.

Again and again, Merritt sends his characters downward into hidden worlds. The Moon Pool is perhaps the clearest example. What begins as a scientific expedition soon becomes a descent into a sealed subterranean realm, complete with alien rulers, strange technologies, and layered environments that must be navigated step by step. The story almost reads like a traditional dungeon expedition, with each new chamber revealing fresh dangers and deeper mysteries.

Merritt returned to this idea repeatedly. Dwellers in the Mirage takes explorers beneath the Arctic ice into a buried world populated by ancient races and quasi-divine beings. Even The Metal Monster, though set in a remote valley rather than underground, follows the same logic of a sealed environment ruled by an inhuman intelligence, structured for exploration rather than mere sightseeing. In all of these stories, Merritt treats space itself as the engine of narrative.

Of course, Merritt didn’t invent the idea of subterranean worlds, but he transformed it. Earlier writers often treated hidden realms as philosophical curiosities or lost utopias. Merritt turned them into adventure locales – layered, dangerous, and ruled by inhuman powers. Most importantly, his characters didn’t simply arrive in these places. They descended. Depth meant danger, and discovery always came at a cost.

That model proved enormously influential. You can see echoes of Merritt in later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and even Richard Shaver. More importantly, for the purposes of this blog, you can see it in Gary Gygax. In Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax placed Merritt alongside Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt as among “the most immediate influences upon AD&D.”

Why would he do that? I can’t say for certain and it’s quite possible Gygax explained his reasoning elsewhere (if so, I’d love to know where). But I can’t help suspect it has something to do with Merritt’s portrayal of underground expeditions. After all, the gameplay of classic Dungeons & Dragons looks something like this:

• Enter a ruin
• Descend level by level
• Encounter strange monsters and factions
• Recover dangerous artifacts
• Retreat to safety

That’s more or less The Moon Pool with dice.

Merritt’s real gift wasn’t tone or character, but structure. He showed how to make a location the driver of adventure. His hidden worlds are layered, ancient, and repurposed, exactly like a good dungeon. They feel inhabited, dangerous, and full of history.

Every time a referee designs a buried city, a sealed vault, or an underground empire, he's working in a tradition Merritt helped popularize. He taught readers (and later gamers) that every cave mouth might be a gateway and every descent a story waiting to happen. Even if almost no one remembers him today, that doesn’t diminish his contribution. Merritt helped shape how we imagine adventure itself. That’s a legacy worth celebrating, especially today, on the 142nd anniversary of his birth.

Invisible Titan

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, three names dominate almost any discussion I have about the foundational figures of modern fantasy, science fiction, and horror: Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. All three were central contributors to Weird Tales in the 1920s and ’30s. All three helped shape the emerging genres in profound ways. All three are still read today. And yet, their legacies are anything but equal.

Howard’s influence is obvious, visible in every barbarian hero who swings a sword against a decadent civilization. Lovecraft’s shadow falls across horror fiction, video and roleplaying games, Internet culture, and popular media more generally. Smith, by contrast, seems oddly absent. His admirers are devoted, but comparatively few writers openly cite him as an influence and his worlds have spawned no major franchises, games, or films.

Why?

The answer is not, I think, that Smith was less imaginative or accomplished than his better-known colleagues. On the contrary, his work is among the most distinctive produced during the pulp era. That's why I would argue that the very qualities that make Smith unique also make him difficult to imitate, adapt, and institutionalize. He inspired readers but not movements.

For example, Smith’s prose is unmistakable. He wrote in long, sinuous sentences thick with Latinate vocabulary, archaic constructions, and sensuous imagery. His stories are, as I have often said, more like prose poems, luxuriating in sound and rhythm as much as, if not more than, narrative. This is both his glory and his barrier. It is hard to write like Clark Ashton Smith without slipping into parody. His style is too idiosyncratic, too personal, too bound to his own esthetic sensibility to become a template others can easily adopt.

To be fair, the same danger exists with his peers. Bad pastiches of Howard and Lovecraft are legion and most attempts to imitate either man’s prose end up as caricature. The difference is not that Howard and Lovecraft are easier to imitate well, but that their styles lend themselves more readily to abstraction. One can strip them down to a handful of recognizable features and reproduce those features mechanically. The result is often parody, yes, but it is also functional.

Howard’s short sentences, violent verbs, and blunt emotionality can be reduced to a usable toolkit. Lovecraft’s catalogs of dread, his breathless escalation of adjectives, his favorite rhetorical tics (“blasphemous,” “cyclopean,” “unnamable”) are equally modular. Writers can plug these components into new stories and produce something that approximates Howard or Lovecraft, even if it lacks the originals’ power.

Smith’s language resists this sort of modularization. You cannot easily isolate a few stylistic tricks and reproduce the effect. His sentences work because of their internal music, their strange balances and cadences, their density of allusion and imagery. Remove any one element and you break the spell. What remains is either pallid imitation or outright parody. In that sense, Smith’s prose is less a toolbox than a fingerprint. You can borrow Howard’s tropes. You can borrow Lovecraft’s cosmology. But you can’t really borrow Smith’s voice, at least not without immediately revealing that it isn’t his.

Lovecraft, moreover, created something deliberately exportable: a shared mythology. The Great Old Ones, forbidden books, ancient cults, and cosmic revelations became a collaborative playground even during HPL's own lifetime. Other writers could add to it (as Smith himself did), reinterpret it, and build upon it. Over time, the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” became a franchise or shared universe long before such terms even existed.

Howard did something similar in a different way. Through Conan and his other heroes, he defined the mode of fantasy we now call sword & sorcery. Other writers could step into that mode, create their own barbarian protagonists, and feel they were participating in a recognizable tradition, even when their efforts lacked the vitality that made Howard’s work so special.

Smith did neither. His stories are scattered across multiple settings, none of which form a unified cosmology. He rarely revisited characters. There is no obvious structure inviting expansion. Each tale feels like a sealed jewel, complete in itself – beautiful, yes, but not obviously expandable. There is no “Smith Mythos” for later writers to inhabit.

Nor does Smith’s worldview encourage imitation. His stories are saturated with decay, extinction, and cosmic exhaustion. Civilizations crumble. Sorcerers damn themselves. Gods are indifferent. Death is inevitable and often absurd. Where Howard offers heroic struggle and Lovecraft offers cosmic terror, Smith offers instead cosmic indifference plus irony. The universe doesn’t care and neither should you.

Worse, Smith’s characters are often complicit in their own destruction. Their greed, curiosity, or hubris leads them to ruin, and his stories rarely provide catharsis. There is no triumph, no moral lesson, often not even a clear horror, just the quiet confirmation that everything ends. This sometimes produces powerful literature, but it is poorly suited to adventure fiction. It does not encourage sequels or heroic identification. It offers atmosphere, not aspiration.

Influence also spreads through media. Howard’s creations moved into comics, films, games, and endless pastiches. Lovecraft’s ideas found second lives in tabletop RPGs, video games, movies, and online culture. Smith has never received this treatment. There are no major film adaptations, no prominent games, no shared universe projects. His work remains largely confined to small press editions and academic appreciation. Without this secondary life, his stories remain artifacts rather than living traditions. They are read, admired, and shelved, but rarely transformed.

Perhaps the most important difference is that Smith thought of himself first and foremost as a poet. His fiction is saturated with poetic concerns. Plot is often secondary. Character is minimal. The stories exist to evoke sensation rather than to tell a tale in any conventional sense. In this way, Smith belongs less to modern genre fiction than to a lineage that includes Lord Dunsany, the French decadents, and the Symbolist poets. He is writing fantasy as an esthetic experience, not as an entertainment product. This makes his work resistant to adaptation. You cannot easily turn “The Empire of the Necromancers” into a movie or a game without losing the very thing that makes it memorable. Strip away the language and little remains but a skeletal plot (no pun intended).

None of this means Smith has had no influence at all. It is simply quieter and harder to trace. You can see echoes of Zothique in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. Moorcock’s multiverses also carry hints of Smith’s cosmic weariness. Some New Weird writers share his fascination with decay and estrangement. Heavy metal and doom metal esthetics often feel Smithian. But these are tonal resonances, not structural inheritances. Smith shapes mood, not genre.

In the end, Smith represents a road speculative fiction largely did not take. Instead of heroic adventure or shared mythologies, he offered a literature of extinction, irony, and esthetic despair. His fantasy is closer to Baudelaire than to Tolkien. That he left a lighter footprint may perhaps be fitting. His work resists institutionalization. It does not want to become a franchise. It exists simply as an artifact that is beautiful, strange – and terminal.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games"

I strongly considered not writing a post about this particular article from issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), since I know it’s likely to stir up strong feelings and perhaps understandably so. At the same time, the guiding principle behind my revival of the Articles of Dragon series has been to focus on pieces that had a particular impact on me when I first read them, and this one – “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games” – most certainly did. Of course, if you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, that should come as no surprise.

The question of Tolkien’s influence on the creation and later development of Dungeons & Dragons is a topic to which Gary Gygax regularly returned. From nearly the moment the game appeared, Gygax denied that Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings, held any special place of honor among the many fantasy works that inspired him. He never denied having read and enjoyed The Hobbit, nor that he had borrowed certain monsters and creatures, such as orcs and halflings, from Tolkien. What he seems to have rejected was the idea that this borrowing meant D&D was primarily inspired by Tolkien, rather than being a mishmash of many different influences.

I say "seems," because I really don't know why this particular question so vexed Gygax. That he kept writing articles like this more than a decade after the first appearance of the game suggests that it somehow mattered to him. I suppose the easy explanation is ego – he simply couldn't countenance the idea that someone might think D&D's success was owed, in whole or in part, to the popularity of Tolkien's work rather than his own imagination and ingenuity. But is that what was going on? Honestly, I don't know and I'm not sure anyone else does either.

"The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games" is a strange article. For one, Gygax begins it by admitting – in the very first paragraph – that "the popularity of Professor Tolkien's fantasy works did encourage me to develop my own." This is undeniable, since the Fantasy Supplement to Chainmail directly references J.R.R. Tolkien and includes not just hobbits but orcs, balrogs, and ents among its bestiary (all of which appeared in OD&D, at least in its earliest printings). Gygax continues that "there are bits and pieces of his works reflected hazily in mine," before stating that "I believe his influence, as a whole, is minimal" [italics mine].

Gygax then recalls the many, many fantasy books and authors he read, beginning in childhood. He points particularly to Robert E. Howard's only Conan novel, Conan the Conqueror (more accurately The Hour of the Dragon) as being his first exposure to sword-and-sorcery literature. He then goes on to cite L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Abraham Merritt, and H.P. Lovecraft as also being important to developing his sense of fantasy. None of those names should come as surprise, since he highlights all of them in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. (Of more interest to me is why Jack Vance is not mentioned at all, despite Gygax's regular praise of him and his works and his role in inspiring the D&D magic system.)

With that out of the way, Gygax says he "thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit" but found The Lord of the Rings a "tedious ... allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil." Tolkien would, of course, object strenuously to that characterization of The Lord of the Rings, but we must take Gygax at his word. He claims to have found the novel's action to be slow, its magic unimpressive, and its resolution disappointing. Moreover, Tolkien drops his favorite character, Tom Bombadil, soon after introducing him, which contributed to the slowness with which he finished it (three weeks).

Gygax then goes on, rather unconvincingly in my view, to say that many of the common elements of Middle-earth and Dungeons & Dragons have common sources, like Norse mythology for dwarves, and that therefore no one should assume the game he created owed much to Tolkien. In fairness, he also admits once again that there were some things he borrowed with the intention of "capitalizing on the then-current 'craze' for Tolkien's literature." He did this in a "superficial manner," believing that, once he'd attracted these Tolkien fiends to D&D, they'd soon realize that there was only "a minute trace of the Professor's work" therein.

As I said, I really don't know what to make of all of this. On the one hand, I generally agree with Gygax that D&D's similarities to Tolkien's creations are skin-deep at best and probably included solely for the purposes of enticing Middle-earth aficionados to the game. On the other hand, the fact that Gygax kept beating this particular drum makes me wonder if he actually believed the lines he was saying. Furthermore, Gygax was never shy about admitting the debt he owed REH or Vance or Leiber, so why did the charge he was borrowed Tolkien rankle him so? It's frankly baffling to me.

Retrospective: GURPS Space

When Steve Jackson Games released GURPS in 1986, it was already clear what kind of roleplaying game it wanted to be. Unlike TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons or GDW’s Traveller, GURPS didn’t offer a default setting. Instead, it presented itself as a toolkit. It was intended as a modular, universal system one could bend toward whatever genre one preferred. What gave this claim weight wasn’t its rulebook, which was necessarily broad in its content, but its supplements. Each one attempted to answer the question, "Could this generic system really handle everything from dungeon crawls to post-apocalyptic road wars?"

One of the first such supplements Steve Jackson Games released was GURPS Space (1988), co-written by William A. Barton and Steve Jackson himself. In hindsight, it feels like one of the pivotal books of the line, the one that established GURPS’s reputation as more than just a flexible rules engine. It showed how you could take a broad genre, in this case, science fiction, in all its wildly different incarnations, and provide the referee with the tools needed to create (or recreate) any SF setting he could imagine.

By the late ’80s, science fiction roleplaying was in a state of flux. Traveller (in both its classic form and the then-new MegaTraveller) was still the reigning champion of the genre, but its dominance was showing cracks. West End’s Star Wars had burst onto the scene in 1987 with cinematic flair and wide acclaim, while TSR’s Star Frontiers had quietly stalled, its last release appearing in 1985. Against this backdrop, GURPS Space (1988) offered something no other SF RPG of the period did. It didn’t compete on the basis of a single setting, canonical future history, or a familiar franchise license. Instead, it handed referees the raw materials with which to build their own universes, be they grounded hard SF colonies, two-fisted pulp romps, or baroque planetary romances in the tradition of Vance and Burroughs.

It was precisely this approach that first caught my attention. At the time, I hadn’t yet played or even read GURPS. I knew it only dimly through advertisements, probably in Challenge magazine. But when I finally encountered GURPS Space, I was enchanted. Here was a book that didn’t tell me what science fiction ought to be but instead gave me the tools to make it whatever I wanted. I bought a copy almost immediately, followed by GURPS itself, largely on the strength of this one supplement. This would have been around 1990 or ’91, just after the release of the second edition, which is why the cover you see above accompanies this post rather than the original 1988 cover.

I was not disappointed. The worldbuilding section alone struck me as one of the most useful pieces of RPG design of its era. It provided step-by-step procedures for generating star systems, planets, ecologies, and cultures that felt simultaneously playable and evocative. The alien-design rules were equally impressive, demonstrating how the flexible mechanics of GURPS could be harnessed to create a wide array of nonhuman beings, from the truly strange to the more familiar. Even the treatment of technology impressed me. By abstracting progress into “tech levels” (an idea borrowed and refined from Traveller), the book offered a simple but powerful shorthand for describing entire societies without resorting to endless lists of weapons and gadgets (though, in time, GURPS would provide those as well).

Of course, GURPS Space bore the characteristic style of the line: dry, methodical, almost textbook-like. GURPS Space was never going to win any rewards for its writing, nor did it offer the convenience of a ready-made universe. This is both a strength and a weakness. For referees seeking inspiration and tools, it was definitely a godsend. For players wanting a game they could pick up and play straight away, however, it could feel intimidating or even sterile. Of course, that was the point. GURPS Space wasn’t trying to compete with the likes of Star Wars. It was offering something entirely different: freedom. 

Taken as a whole, GURPS Space is one of the most significant supplements in the history of the line. It established the idea of GURPS as the “toolkit RPG,” a system whose real strength lay not just in its rules but in the genre handbooks that supported them. In my own case, it was the book that convinced me GURPS supplements were worth buying even if I wasn’t actively playing the game (which, truth be told, was most of the time). I wasn’t alone in this. Many referees I knew freely admitted to pillaging GURPS books for ideas and procedures to import into their homebrew campaigns. I strongly suspect Steve Jackson Games realized this and leaned into it, tailoring its supplements to appeal as much to curious referees as to dedicated GURPS players.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why GURPS Space made such an impression. It is fundamentally optimistic about exploration and the potential of alien contact, yet flexible enough to support darker, more cynical futures. It treats science fiction not as a single genre but as a sprawling field of traditions, each with its own possibilities. Above all, it captures what Steve Jackson Games was attempting to do with GURPS, namely, provide tools rather than a finished product and trust the imagination of referees and players to supply the rest.

That is ultimately why I still look back fondly GURPS Space, even though I don't play GURPS nor am I likely to do so anytime soon. Like so many of the supplements that followed in its wake, it doesn’t prescribe so much as inspire. Every table, every guideline, every suggestion is an invitation to ask questions and ponder answers. It’s not a book that hands you a ready-made campaign setting but one to spark ideas you might otherwise have not come up with on your own. In that sense, it’s less a manual than a launchpad, still capable of sending the imagination into orbit nearly four decades later.

The Articles of Dragon: "Giants in the Earth" (Issue #36)

"Giants in the Earth" was an irregular series of articles that appeared in Dragon between issues #26 (June 1979) and #61 (May 1982). Co-written by Lawrence Schick and Tom Moldvay, its purpose was to present notable characters from literature in (A)D&D terms. During its run, more than 40 characters made an appearance, running the gamut from John Carter of Mars to Maal Dweb to Reepicheep and more. While certain authors, like Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber, and their creations receive lots of attention, others show up more infrequently.

Despite his foundational importance to the literature that inspired the hobby, a character from the works of H.P. Lovecraft appears only once in "Giants in the Earth" and the choice is an odd one, at least in my opinion. The column from issue #36 (April 1980) features Richard Upton Pickman, here styled the "King of the Ghouls." Here are the game stats that accompany his description, along with a portrait that looks to me as if it was drawn by Jeff Dee (there is no credit accompanying either the article or the illustration):

There are certainly a number of things one could discuss about this write-up – feel free to do so in the comments – but, for me, what's more interesting is the accompanying description of Pickman. For example, the text states that he "wears +3 plate armor (no shield) and carries a +1 sword which is +4 versus ghoul enemies (most living creatures)." What a bizarre detail! I say that, because Pickman is presented in the article just as he is in "Pickman's Model." He's a Boston artist whose work is shunned by respectable galleries for its disturbing subject matter. Though he is now himself a ghoul, he's nevertheless a man of the 20th century, not some medieval fantasy characters. It's very odd.

Beyond that, the text presents six examples of Pickman's paintings. Each one is given a title and a magical effect if viewed. 

The first three paintings listed – "The Lesson," "Ghoul Feeding," and "Subway Accident" – are all lifted straight from "Pickman's Model," while the last three are references, either direct or indirect, to famous Lovecraft stories. I find the inclusion of "The Silver Key" notable, since protagonist of the story with which it shares a name, Randolph Carter, eventually meets Pickman in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The article also notes that each of these paintings has a saving throw versus fire of 10, suggesting that it's quite likely someone might seek to burn them in order to stop their deleterious effects.

More than halfway through The Shadow over August, it's been a bit of a struggle to find Dragon magazine articles that connect directly – or even indirectly – to H.P. Lovecraft and his legacy. I would have thought there'd be more examples of this kind of thing, especially from the period prior to 1980. As it turns out, that's not the case and I find myself wondering why ...

Thoughts on Dolmenwood

Recently, a couple of readers took note of the fact that, under the header "What I'm Refereeing" on the lefthand column of this blog, I've included Dolmenwood, published by Necrotic Gnome. However, unlike my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne and Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaigns, I've never posted about this. This is absolutely true, though the omission was not intentional – far from it, in fact, as I have nothing but praise to offer about Dolmenwood, both as a fantasy setting and as a game. Indeed, I'm really enjoying Dolmenwood and consider it one of the best "new" fantasy roleplaying games I've played in some time.

I put "new" in quotation marks, because, rules-wise, Dolmenwood's not really new. It's a very close descendant of Old School Essentials, which is itself a very close restatement of the 1981 Moldvay/Cook version of Dungeons & Dragons (or B/X, as many people call it). How does it differ from B/X, I'm sure some of you will ask? Most obviously, it has its own classes and races, some of them unique to the setting. Likewise, it uses the dreaded ascending armor class and has its own saving throw categories. There are few other small differences, mostly in terms of presentation, but, for the most part, the rules of Dolmenwood are so close to B/X (or OSE) that I don't think anyone already familiar with those – or, for that matter, almost any version of old school D&D – will have much trouble picking it up.

Where Dolmenwood shines, though, is its setting, the titular Dolmenwood, a large, tangled forest at the edge of civilization that's filled with intrigued, secrets, magic, and lots of fungi. If I were to sum up the setting in a simple phrase, it would be "fairytale fantasy," even if that doesn't quite do Dolmenwood justice. It's like a weird cross between Jack Vance's Lyonesse, Machen's The White People, and Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, with touches from Twin Peaks and The Wicker Man, among many other influences. As a place, Dolmenwood is weird and eccentric, filled equally with whimsy and terror.

A big part of what makes Dolmenwood such a dichotomous place is the lurking presence of Fairy, which is to say, the otherworldly realm of the elves and other supernatural beings, the most powerful of which were long ago cut off from the mortal world by a coalition consisting of the Duchy of Brackenwold (who rules the wood), the Pluritine Church (who serves the One True God), and the secretive people known as the Drune (who have their own agenda). Elves and fairies are no longer as common as they were in the past, but their machinations can still be felt. In particular, the Cold Prince, the lord of winter eternal, seeks ways to regain his dominion over Dolmenwood.

Of course, there are lots of contending factions within Dolmenwood – the Duchy, the Church, the fairies and their nobles, witches, the Drune, and the wicked Nag-Lord, a trickster figure who serves as a literal agent of Chaos, corrupting the land and its peoples. These factions all play roles, large and small, in ensuring that Dolmenwood is never a dull place. One of the things I've found in refereeing this campaign is that I'm never at a loss for adventure ideas, because there's so much going on in the setting. Once the characters started doing what characters do, they soon found themselves enmeshed in all sorts of plots and schemes, gaining allies and enemies in equal measure. 

Speaking of characters, there are presently four in the campaign:

• Squire (soon to be Sir) Clement of Middleditch: The big-hearted but small-brained of a minor noble sent out into the world to make something of himself (or die trying). He's presently attempting to be knighted by a fairy princess, an idea that appeals to his romantic soul, even if doing so brings with it more than a little risk.
• Alvie Sapping: A teenaged thief with a quick mind and quicker tongue. He's attached himself to Clement's retinue as a way to travel and, he hopes, make money. Alvie has an intense dislike of bards and other musicians, on account of his no-good father's having been one, which has occasionally been a source of trouble for him (and amusement for everyone else).
• Waldra Dogoode: A hunter and woodswoman, who's more comfortable in the wild spaces of Dolmenwood than in its more settled ones. She's an expert tracker and an amateur student of the many mushrooms and other fungi in the region. Her ambition is to one day produce a complete and accurate map of the entire Wood.
• Falin Cronkshaw: A breggle (goat-man) cleric, who was exiled to a small parish because of her insistence that there were in fact breggle saints whom the Church has suppressed. She now travels with her companions hoping to find evidence vindicating her theories. 

The characters are an interesting bunch and their interactions with one another and the people they meet have been among the highlights of the campaign. Thus far, they've helped a ghost reunite with his love, explored a weird series of caverns, traveled to a remote village overrun with fungus, helped an exiled elf reclaim his home, and journeyed into Fairy as part of Clement's quest for a liege. Along the way, they've seen strange sights and met many unusual people, some of whom would later become important to the unfolding events of the campaign.

Unfortunately, Dolmenwood is not yet available for sale, though it should be soon. Having supported Necrotic Gnome's crowdfunding of the game, I have access to advance copies of its three rulebooks (Player's Book, Campaign Book, and Monster Book) and several adventures. They're all very well done, beautifully laid out and illustrated, filled with ideas to spark your imagination. The Campaign Book is especially nice. In addition to discussing at length the various factions I've already mentioned, it also includes a hex-by-hex gazetteer of Dolmenwood. This makes refereeing the game quite easy, as all you need to do is find the hex where the characters currently reside (or through which they're traveling) and read the entry, which usually contains multiple places of interest, major NPCs, and adventure seeds. Truly, this book alone has made refereeing the campaign quite easy. It's a model for what a campaign book should be in my opinion.

There you have it: my brief thoughts on Dolmenwood the RPG and Dolmenwood the setting. If you have any more specific questions, ask me in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them. 

Retrospective: Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space

Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space is a guilty pleasure of mine. Written and conceived by Jeff Grubb, this overstuffed boxed set was first released in 1989, just as I was transferring between two colleges. For a lot of reasons, this was a very tumultuous time in my life and, as a result, my memories of it are very vivid, even thirty-five years later – memories that include purchasing Spelljammer from a Waldenbooks in a suburban mall and then poring over its contents for some time afterwards.

As its subtitle suggests, Spelljammer took AD&D 2e into "space," though not in the traditional scientific (or even science fictional) sense of the word. Rather, Grubb took inspiration from ancient and medieval conceptions of the cosmos, in which the stars and planets are embedded within celestial spheres made of ether. Rather than multiple nested spheres containing all the celestial bodies of a single solar system, as the ancients conceived, Grubb imagined each sphere as encompassing an entire solar system or, more to the point, an entire campaign setting, with all the spheres floating within a "sea" of flammable material called phlogiston.

Through the use of flying vessels equipped with magical "helms," it was possible for the inhabitants of worlds within one sphere to journey to worlds within another. This was the high concept of Spelljammer: the ability to travel between TSR's various campaign settings by means of magical "space" ships. It's a very clever conceit, one reminiscent not just of ancient cosmology but also of Jack Vance's Rhialto the Marvelous. In addition to facilitating transit between existing settings, Spelljammer also opened up the development of a "bridge" setting between them, namely, the larger cosmos of races, organizations, and even worlds that make regular use of space travel. 

In some respects, Spelljammer is the forerunner of both Ravenloft: Realm of Terror (1990) and Planescape (1994), two other TSR boxed campaign settings whose conceptual frameworks allowed characters from Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, Krynn, and elsewhere to adventure side by side while also exploring entirely new locales created to flesh out the bridge setting. In the case of Spelljammer, that bridge setting includes a mix of the good, the bad, and the downright weird. There's the pompous Elven Navy attempting to keep the peace, xenophobic beholders at war with themselves and everyone else, mysterious mind flayers with their nautilus ships, the spider-like neogi, and mercantile arcane, just to name a few. As presented in Spelljammer, the cosmos was positively filled with all manner of space-faring peoples – and an equally large number of space-based locales and mysteries.

Chief among these mysteries is the titular Spelljammer, an ancient – and gigantic – manta ray-shaped space vessel with an equally gigantic citadel on its back. The origins and true nature of the Spelljammer are unknown, making it the subject of many legends. It's also the destination of many a spacefaring adventurer, as the citadel on its back is reputed to hold untold magic and wealth for those bold enough to venture within. The Spelljammer is thus equal parts the Flying Dutchman of space and an old school megadungeon, which is itself a pretty good high concept.  

Of course, Spelljammer was replete with high concepts – and that's part of the problem. In an effort to be expansive and easy to use to use with any existing AD&D campaign setting, Spelljammer is something of a curate's egg. I suspect that this was due less to Jeff Grubb's own preferences and more to directives from TSR regarding the boxed set's place within their larger publishing scheme. This prevents the bridge setting from having a strong flavor of its own, which is too bad, because it contains a lot of elements that I wish had been better (or differently) developed. Instead, the whole thing has a kind of underdone quality that fails to do full justice something I still consider to be a great idea to this day.

Spelljammer straddles the line between the end of the Silver Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age of Dungeons & Dragons, which, I think, explains a lot. Like the products of the Silver Age, Spelljammer is an exemplar of the era's "fantastic realism," itself a metastasis of Gygaxian Naturalism. At the same time, Spelljammer heralds the start of AD&D's "boxed set era," when TSR cranked out new boxed campaign settings (and expansions thereof) almost on a monthly basis – a seemingly never-ending parade of good ideas not given sufficient time to germinate. There's reason why so many gamers of a certain age have such affection for this period of AD&D's development. For all of the flaws in their output, almost all of these boxed sets contained good, imaginative ideas that inspired a lot of us, Spelljammer included.  

sha-Arthan Appendix N (Part I)

Last week, I pointed out a "problem" with Gary Gygax's Appendix N, namely, it's just a list without any explanatory apparatus, unlike its counterpart in the original RuneQuest. As I explained in that post, this is far from a damning criticism – Appendix N remains an invaluable guide to excellent fantasy and science fiction stories – but it does limit its utility in trying to understand Gygax's own thought processes as he created both D&D and AD&D. 

That's why I decided I'd do things differently in Secrets of sha-Arthan. Rather than simply include a lengthy list of all the books (and games) that had had even the tiniest influence over my own work on SoS, I'd instead present a smaller, more focused list, along with commentary on precisely what I'd taken from each source. The goal is not merely to honor my inspirations, but also to aid anyone who picks up the game in understanding where I'm coming from. 

The list, like the game itself, is still in a state of low-level flux. I've purposefully narrowed the list to just four authors, each of which wrote a series of multiple stories within those series. By keeping the list focused on those whose influence is strongest and most clear, I hope that I'll do a better job than Gygax of "showing my cards," creatively speaking. Obviously, other authors and books have inspired me, too, but their inspiration has been more limited. Rather than muddy the waters, I've stuck only with whose influence is most clear.

Burroughs, Edgar Rice: The influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs over the subsequent history of fantasy cannot be underestimated. His Barsoom novels in particular have played a huge role in establishing the broad outlines of that genre and the stories and characters that inhabit it. Everything from building a unique setting, with its own history and geography to populating it with all manner of exotic cultures and beasts to even presenting an alien vocabulary, it's all there in A Princess of Mars, a book not much read today but that I have come to love more the older I get.

In creating sha-Arthan, I often looked to Barsoom and Amtor for inspiration, particularly in my conception of the creatures that dwell upon it. Furthermore, the Ironian language is intended to be reminiscent of the Martian tongue as invented by Burroughs. I also imagine adventures in the True World to be swashbuckling affairs, filled with perilous danger, narrow escapes, and feats of derring-do, just like the delightful novels of ERB.

Smith, Clark Ashton: Of all the writers whose work graced the pages of Weird Tales during the Golden Age of the Pulps, Clark Ashton Smith remains my favorite by far. His examination of the dangers of egotism and the ever-present risk of divine punishment combine with his black humor and imaginative dreamscapes to produce some of the most inventive – and often terrifying – fiction of the first half of the 20th century. Though I am fond of all his story cycles, it's those set in Zothique, Earth's last continent untold eons in the future, that I find most compelling.

There's more than a little of Zothique in sha-Arthan. Its ancient history, selfish sorcerers, and otherworldly daimons are all directly inspired by CAS. Smith's baroque and archaic vocabulary have likewise influenced the nomenclature and general tone of my writing about the setting. Though sha-Arthan is not as dark (or darkly humorous) as Zothique, it does possess some of the latter's world-weariness,

Tierney, Richard L.: Secrets of sha-Arthan takes a lot of inspiration from the late Hellenistic and early Roman eras. That's a period of history that's always fascinated me, so that's no surprise. It's also the time period covered by the Simon of Gitta historical fantasies of Richard L. Tierney, some of whose stories I've discussed in the past.   

Tierney's stories deftly combine real world history and beliefs, particularly those relating to Gnosticism, with an unusual interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and swashbuckling adventure. This combination of elements is both unique and appealing to someone of my interests, which is why I consider the Simon of Gitta tales to be among the most important influences on my development of sha-Arthan as a RPG setting. 

Vance, Jack: Rounding out this quartet of inspirational authors is Jack Vance, creator of The Dying Earth and its sequels, all of which have, to varying degrees, influenced sha-Arthan, though the original 1950 fix-up novel remains the most important. Like Smith's Zothique stories, I've looked to Vance for ideas about ancient, forgotten history, venal wizards, and cruel, otherworldly beings. However, the single most significant idea I've taken from Vance is that of secret science fiction, which is to say, an ostensibly fantasy setting that is, beneath the surface, based on scientific (or pseudo-scientific) principles. That's a big part of sha-Arthan and its eponymous secrets. 

In Part II, I'll talk about the other roleplaying games that have influenced the development of Secrets of sha-Arthan. For obvious historical reasons, this is something Gygax could never have done. However, I've played enough RPGs over the years that there's no question they've had as much of an impact on my thoughts about sha-Arthan as has fantasy literature. Revealing just what I've taken from them is, I think, every bit as important as revealing my literary inspirations.

A New Genre Itself

An overriding concern of this blog since its start are the literary precursors of Dungeons & Dragons. Believe it or not, this has often been a somewhat contentious subject, since there's plenty of conflicting evidence on the matter, not to mention a fair bit of obfuscation from the various parties involved. The subsequent history of both D&D and fantasy roleplaying games more generally, including their explosive, faddish popularity in the late '70s and early '80s, has only further muddied the waters, as other creators added their own ingredients to the imaginative chaos that Arneson and Gygax first unleashed upon the world nearly half a century ago.

Even bearing these facts in mind, there can be little doubt, I think, that Gary Gygax at least took his primary inspiration from just a handful of older writers – L. Sprague de Camp, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Abraham Merritt, Fletcher Pratt, and Jack Vance – and that his conception of the game reflects this. Despite the much-vexed question of Tolkien's influence on the game, I don't think anyone can honestly deny that Gygaxian D&D owes more to what I call "pulp fantasy" than to anything more highfalutin. One need only look at Gygax's various reading lists, culminating in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, to see this.

And yet I'm not sure that matters.

The moment Dungeons & Dragons was released into the wild – or Pandora's Box was opened, to use Greg Stafford's perfect metaphor – it was no longer the possession of any single person, including its creators. This is something Gygax himself recognized early on, even if he had his own ideas about the kind of fantasy roleplaying adventures he most enjoyed. By all accounts, the early days of the hobby were ones of wild, reckless invention, as everyone who got their hands on D&D made it their own. To some extent, this was by necessity, as the original 1974 rules were vague and unclear about just how to interpret them. It was thus an inevitability that a wide variety of mutant strains of Dungeons & Dragons would soon proliferate across the world.

At the same time, many of the game's early adopters liked the idea of D&D, but they took exception to this or that element of it. The changes they introduced to it were made, not out of ignorance of how Arneson and Gygax intended the game to played – assuming there even is such a thing in the first place – but intentionally, in order to bring the game more in line with the kind of fantasy adventures they most enjoyed. Of course, in the process of doing so, they became their own unique games – Tunnels & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne, RuneQuest, etc. – which, in turn, spawned their own "mutants," creating an entirely new ecosystem of creativity that continues to this day.

What's most interesting to me right now is that even as Gary Gygax was still in charge of the development of Dungeons & Dragons, or at least AD&D, there was plenty of variation in its presentation and content. Compare the work of David Cook, Lenard Lakofka, Lawrence Schick, and Allen Hammack to that of Gygax – or to each other. Each brings a different perspective and draws on different inspirations to present Dungeons & Dragons as he understands it (and, presumably, prefers it). What's remarkable is that, rather than undermining the game, this approach expands its reach. D&D, even as published by TSR, is a house of many mansions.

This probably explains why D&D was and continues to be the most popular and widely played RPG of all time. Being the first out the door no doubt helped, but I think it's more than that. D&D has always been a loose, reasonably flexible framework to which one can add (or subtract) whatever one requires for one's preferred style of fantasy adventures. Gygax unquestionably had his own preferences, but so too did everyone who's ever written for or played the game over the last fifty years. There is no reason that your D&D and my D&D should be the same, or even similar. Indeed, I remember a time when it was commonplace to assume every campaign was as unique as its players and referee, which is as it should be, in my opinion.

Dungeons & Dragons is a very strange game. It's one whose play can vary considerably from place to place, yet which is nevertheless completely recognizable to anyone who's even passingly familiar with the form of that play. I won't go so far as to say that no other RPG is similar in this regard, but D&D exemplifies this to a much greater extent than any other roleplaying game of which I can think. It's one of the most amazing things about D&D and I don't think it gets enough credit for it.

REVIEW: Black Sword Hack

During the nearly eight years this blog was inactive, I wasn't paying nearly as much attention to the wider old school roleplaying scene as I previously had been. Consequently, quite a number of releases, trends, and fads within this sphere completely passed me by. One of these was The Black Hack, a streamlined class-and-level RPG by David Black, whose first edition appeared in 2016. For a time, I am given to understand, The Black Hack and its design principles were much favored, leading to a proliferation of "Hacks" – Bluehack (for Holmes D&D), The Rad-Hack (Gamma World, etc.), Cthulhu Hack (Call of Cthulhu), even The Petal Hack (Empire of the Petal Throne), among many, many more.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Gamers are as prone to enthusiasms as the next person and I try not to begrudge anyone else their preferences, even if I don't share them. Still, I can't deny that the intensity of the ardor for The Black Hack put me off looking into it for some time. What can I say: I'm prone to contrariness. When I finally did read The Black Hack for myself, I found it more agreeable than I expected, despite my dislike of certain aspects of its design. That's not knock against it, of course; I generally dislike certain aspects of most games' designs. That's more or less the nature of the beast.

That's why Black Sword Hack took me by surprise. I didn't even know it existed until it showed up in my mailbox one day as a complimentary copy sent to me by its publisher, The Merry Mushmen (best known for Knock!). Written by Alexandre "Kobayashi" Jeanette, Black Sword Hack is, in his words, "a dark fantasy roleplaying game inspired (but not limited to) the works of R.E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner's Kane series, Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar and Jack Vance's Dying Earth books." Being a fan of all those writers and their pulp fantasies, that description certainly got my attention, as did the eye-catching artwork by Goran Gligović, which can be found throughout the full-color, 112-page, A5-sized, hardcover book.

The core rules of Black Sword Hack are simple. A turn is an abstract measure of time, during which time a player character may act. During a time, a character can typically take two actions, such as movement and combat. All actions are resolved by making an attribute test. The goal of a test is to roll under a character's appropriate attribute score with a d20. A roll of 1 is always a critical success, while a roll of 20 is always a critical failure. I must admit that the lower-is-better d20 roll takes some getting used to, since it runs counter to decades of experience as a player of roleplaying games, but otherwise the rules of Black Sword Hack are straightforward.

The game retains the "Usage die" from The Black Hack, but with a twist. For those unfamiliar with it, the Usage die is a way to keep track of resources that have limited quantities, like rations or arrows. Whenever a resource is used, the die is rolled and, if the result is 1 or 2, the die "degrades" to the next die type (e.g. d8 becomes d6) until d4 is reached and 1 or 2 is rolled, at which point the resource is completely depleted. Black Sword Hack does not employ the Usage die for concrete resources, but only for abstract ones, like influence, debts, etc. Further, there is the Doom die, a type of Usage die that represents "the attention of Law and Chaos" on the characters. It's rolled whenever the character critically fails and under certain other specific conditions. Once the Doom die is depleted, the character makes all his tests and damage rolls with Disadvantage (i.e. rolling two dice and taking the lowest result).

While the D&D pedigree of Black Sword Hack (and The Black Hack on which it is based) is readily apparent (STR, DEX, CON, etc.), the game is class-less, placing greater emphasis on a character's origin (barbarian, civilized, or decadent) and background (berserker, diplomat, assassin, etc.). This provides a looser mechanical framework for characters, in keeping with the wide range of possible dark fantasy settings the referee might create (more on this in a bit). Characters can also acquire "gifts" – powers of Balance, Chaos, or Law – in addition to sorcery, faerie ties, twisted science, and runic weapons. As characters gain experience, they accrue more abilities and hit points, but a high-level Black Sword Hack character is much less robust than a D&D character of similar level. Consequently, combat is much more fraught with danger, which makes sense, given its literary inspirations.

Where Black Sword Hack really shines, though, is its world building tools. Approximately half the book is devoted to the referee – more if you include its sample bestiary. The game assumes the referee will create his own setting, one dominated by the struggle between Law and Chaos, as in Moorcock and Anderson's fantasies. There are tables and examples to aid him in deciding on the nature of the struggle and how it manifests in the setting, along numerous adventure seeds, two adventure, and the sketch of an entire city. There's even a sketch of a setting, complete with a map, to show one way to make use of the world building tools.

A conceit of the referee section is that any setting the referee designs will inevitably include certain stock locales – Forbidden City, Amber Enclave, Merchant League, Northern Raiders, etc. These are not just tropes from dark fantasy fiction but perhaps also eternal archetypes that reappear throughout the multiverse. Creating a setting for Black Sword Hack involves drawing a map and placing all these locales onto it somewhere and then fleshing out the details through play and the judicious use of random tables provided in the book. It's a clever approach and one that genuinely helps guide the referee in a useful way. The same goes, I think, with the bestiary, which includes plenty of archetypal enemies – demons, cannibals, serpent people – to spark the imagination, while still providing the tools needed to create unique and original antagonists.

If Black Sword Hack has a flaw, it's its looseness. Some players and referees may find its relative lack of concern for considering every possibility, whether in the rules or its myriad settings, disappointing. If you prefer something more defined, even concrete, you're better off with other options. Black Sword Hack revels in its light, almost freeform, rules and malleable setting elements and that won't be to everyone's taste. But as someone who's come to realize that my own preferences tend toward simple, flexible rules with lots of room for filling in the details as I go, this is right up my alley. When I get around to running that Stormbringer campaign of my dreams, there's no question in my mind that I'll be using Black Sword Hack. Perhaps others will like it too.

Black Sword Hack is available directly from the Merry Mushmen website in either print or PDF form.

My Top 10 Favorite D&D Magic Items (Part II)

Part I is here. 

5. Portable Hole

One of the strengths of Dungeons & Dragons is that its conception of fantasy is quite broad, drawing not merely on the works of pulp fantasy, but also, in the words of Gary Gygax, on "countless hundreds of comic books ... [s]cience fiction, fantasy, and horror movies ... fairy tales ... books of mythology ... bestiaries ... compilations of the myths of various peoples" – and, if the portable hole is any indication, Looney Tunes cartoons as well! This is a terrific example of a magic item that is both genuinely useful and fun and I wish there were more like it in the game.

4. Wand of Wonder

I love a little bit of randomness and unpredictability in my games. The wand of wonder brings them in spades. Every time this magic item is used, percentile dice are rolled to determine which of nearly twenty different effects occur: anything from summoning a rhino (or a mouse) to a stream of 600 butterflies pouring forth to a fireball – and more. This is another fun item, one that I've enjoyed seeing used in play many, many times over the years. 

3. Ioun Stones

This is a double cheat, I suppose, since it's both a collection of related items and not original to Dungeons & Dragons, since ioun stones first appeared in the work of Jack Vance. Of course, these facts are a big part of why I so love ioun stones. Like figurines of wondrous power, the variety of the stones is a point in their favor. The same is true of their Vancian origins, since Vance is one of my favorite Appendix N authors (and Gygax's too). Consequently, I've included numerous ioun stones in my campaigns over the years and imagine I will continue to do so in the future.

2. Bag of Holding

I almost placed this in my number 1 spot, since it's one of those magic items that has appeared in nearly every D&D campaign I've run or played in since 1979. The reason I didn't is that the bag of holding is a thoroughly gamey magic item, one that exists almost entirely to circumvent a very common problem, namely, how to lug around large amounts of gold and other treasure without becoming encumbered. There's nothing wrong with that. D&D is a game, after all, but I generally like my magic items (and monsters and spells ...) to exist largely, if not solely, for setting reasons rather than game reasons. Still, this is a great and iconic magic item and deserves to be on this list.

1. Deck of Many Things

Depending on your point of view, the deck of many things is either the most entertaining magic item in all of D&D or a Killer DM's dream come true. In my opinion, it's both, at least potentially so – and that's why I've given it the top spot on my list. I can think of no other magic item that simultaneously elicits both greed and terror in players. The potential rewards for drawing a "good" card are great, as are the dangers of drawing a "bad" one. The discovery of a deck of many things in a treasure hoard is practically an adventure unto itself, as players tie themselves into knots trying to decide whether or not their characters should risk picking a card (or four). This is everything a good magic item should be – wondrous, dangerous, capricious.

White Dwarf: Issue #74

Issue #74 of White Dwarf (February 1986) sports a cover by American conic book artist, Frank Brunner, who's probably best known for his work on Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella, as well as his covers for Marvel's Savage Sword of Conan and Red Sonja. The issue also marks the point where Ian Livingstone hands over day-to-day editorial duties to Ian Marsh. Livingstone states that he is not "deserting the magazine" and will still "be keeping a benevolent eye on the progress of [his] eight-year-old love-child" in his new capacity as Editor-in-Chief. Despite his reassurances, this nevertheless feels like a turning point in the history of White Dwarf.

Case in point: the issue kicks off with "Superpower" by Bruce Hollands, which is an extensive look at the Games Workshop-published boardgame of the same name. Like the look at Warrior Knights from the previous issue, this article, while informative, nevertheless feels more like an extended advertisement for a GW product than a "real" article. That may be an unfair judgment on my part, but reading it convinced me that the oft-discussed transformation of White Dwarf into a full-on house organ of Games Workshop was not far in the future.

Countering that worry is "Open Box," which only reviewed one GW product this issue, the Call of Cthulhu scenario Night in Norway, which scores 7 out of 10. Also reviewed is Dragon Warriors and two of its supplements (The Way of Wizardry and The Elven Crystals), which collectively earn 9 out of 10. After all these years, I've still never read Dragon Warriors, which people whose opinions I respect tell me is well worth a look. The historical RuneQuest supplement Vikings gets 8 out of 10, while Oriental Adventures for AD&D receives 9 out of 10. The Pendragon Campaign, the predecessor to the well regarded The Boy King, is similarly well regarded, earning 9 out of 10. The column wraps up with a look at two different scenarios for use with FASA's Star Trek, The Outcasts and Termination 1456, both of which are judged perfect (10 out of 10). 

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" generally vexes me, but this issue's column at least looks at a few books I know and have read, like Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure series. Langford quite correctly recognizes the value of these books and of Vance more generally

The good stuff lies in Tschai's rich scents and colours, and in elaboration of style. No Vance villain would say 'I'll get you for that.' Instead: 'Low-grade assassins will drown you in cattle excrement! Twenty pariahs will drub your corpse! A cur will drag your head along the street by your tongue!'

Langford's byline reappears under "The Power of the Frog," a science fiction short story about a human junior military officer held prisoner by an alien race. Like all of Langford's previous short stories, this one is both brief and amusing. It's clear the man has talent, which is why I sometimes feel bad at the lack of interest his book review column elicits. Truthfully, I wish he had contributed more fiction to White Dwarf. 

"Terror at Trollmarsh" is an AD&D adventure for 4th–5th-level characters by Peter and Janet Vialls. I really enjoyed this one, which takes the form of a murder mystery with fantasy/horror elements. A monster is stalking the halls of Baron Uther Torgrim, killing his servants, and it's up to the players to figure out just what is really going on. While the overall concept is a standard, even clichéd one, the authors handle it well, giving the referee an interesting, well mapped out environment, an array of compelling NPCs, and a culprit with clear, understandable motives. "Terror at Trollmarsh" is nothing revolutionary, but, like all good scenarios, it gives players lots of "moving parts" with which to interact as they grapple with its central mystery.

"A Company of Wolves" by Peter Blanchard looks at lycanthropy in AD&D from both a game and folkloric perspective. The article doesn't offer much in the way of new rules mechanics, which I appreciate, focusing instead on "social" aspects of this magical curse, which is to say, how it might function in a fantasy setting, including its advantages and drawbacks. "The Hide of the Ancestor" by Chris Watson is a short RuneQuest scenario about the recovery of a relic holy to the twenty-six tribes of the Ithillian-Fane, a race of lion-centaurs. I find it oddly refreshing to read a RQ adventure set in Glorantha whose author feels comfortable enough with the setting to his own creations, like the Ithillian-Fane to it. Too often settings like Glorantha – and Tékumel and Hârn and ... – are treated as inviolable to the point that no one is even willing to play in them, lest they "do it wrong." That's nonsense in my opinion, which is why I delight in scenarios like "The Hide of the Ancestor."

"Gentlemen and Players" by Richard Edwards and Chris Elliott is nice little article about creating British characters for use with Call of Cthulhu. As its title suggests, the article focuses on the creation of "gentlemen" (or aristocratic amateurs) and "players" (professional sportsmen). "Hitting the Right Note" by Ian Berridge presents information on musical instruments, their use, and the how to learn to play them for use with AD&D. Articles like this are godsends to those whose campaigns would benefit from such fine details – and absolutely useless to those whose campaigns wouldn't. 

"Alternative Origins" by Ian Thomson is a collection of random tables for use with Games Workshop's Golden Heroes. The tables are intended to replace those presented in the game for character generation in order to produce more "convincing" heroes whose powers are an incompatible jumble. This makes good sense to me, but then I haven't looked at a copy of Golden Heroes in decades, so it's hard for me to judge how useful this article would be. Elsewhere, Joe Dever offers part three of his look at "Dioramas," accompanied by some lovely – though non-diorama – photographs of painted miniatures.

The issue also includes more "Thrud the Barbarian," a full-page "Gobbledigook," and "The Travellers," which continues its Shadows-inspired plotline. I particularly enjoyed the latter, especially this bit:

Of course, I've always been fond of the way that "The Travellers" blends Traveller-specific humor with more general lampoonery of roleplaying games, so I may be biased. In any case, it's nice to see that one of my favorite comics remains as amusing ever, even if White Dwarf as a whole looks to be on the verge of some monumental – and not entirely pleasing – changes.