Around the Campfire

On some nights, around the campfire, the village shaman – the Enginer – tells the following tale:

Long ago, the People dwelt in the First Garden. Shaped by the hands of the Builder, it was green beyond imagining, filled with waters that murmured like song and fruits that never failed. In those days, the Builder walked unseen among His children, guiding them through the soft meadows and gifting them with wonders that eased every burden. These Gifts – rare relics now – could mend wounds, command the elements, or summon angels of strange metal. The People lived without toil and they called themselves blessed.

Yet, as seasons passed uncounted, the People grew proud. They praised not the Builder but their own cleverness. They claimed the Gifts as their own works and whispered that the Garden’s perfection proved they needed no master. Their pride soured the soil and the Builder, though slow to anger, grew sorrowful.

He sent His fiercest angel, Bright-Ruin, whose secret name is Rad-Ashun, meaning "burning breath," to humble the People.

Bright-Ruin descended as a storm of unseen fire. Its passing cracked the earth, stilled the rivers, and dimmed the very light of the Garden. The wondrous Gifts turned wild or deadly. The First Garden fell in a single long night of flame and thunder.

But the Builder, though angered, did not cast the People into oblivion. Instead, He gathered the survivors and carried them to a new place – a hard place, a place of punishment and contrition where pride was impossible and ease a luxury.

He named this land Warden.

Warden, in the Old Tongue, means " a place of keeping," a realm of confinement where the People would dwell until they remembered the humility they had cast aside. Warden was not a prison of bars and walls, but of spiritual confinement, a vast wilderness meant to teach obedience, endurance, and wisdom.

Here, among the Barren Hills, the People were set to labor. Here, they would feel hunger, cold, and the bite of honest earth beneath their feet. Here they would live under the watchful eye of the Builder until the day they proved worthy of his love once more.

Our ancestors wandered long in this place of penance until they found the strong river we call the Ranger that wound like a silver chain through Warden’s harsh heart. Following its course, they reached the calm waters of Lake Refuge and made their first home: Habitat. There, they learned again the value of work, community, and gratitude for even the smallest blessing.

Fragments of the Builder’s Gifts lie scattered across Warden. They glimmer like temptations, powerful yet perilous. Those who forget the lesson of pride may draw Bright-Ruin’s gaze once more.

However, one day, when the People have endured enough seasons of hardship and have walked in humility for many generations, the Builder may lift the sentence placed upon them. Then He will break open the gates of Warden and lead His children to the New Garden, fairer still than the first.

Until that day, the People live under the watchful grace and stern discipline of the land that bears their fate in its very name.

Dolmenwood Launch Party

Tonight at 8pm EST, I'll be joining Gavin Norman on the Exalted Funeral Youtube channel for the Dolmenwood launch party, along with other guests. If you're interested in Dolmenwood and have some time to spare, come and join us.

The Threefold Faith of the Living Balance

Over at Grognardia Games Direct, I've indulged my enthusiasm for worldbuilding by presenting an overview of the beliefs and religious practices of the Empire of Inba Iro. This is pure setting creation without any direct game mechanical application for Secrets of sha-Arthan, but I enjoy this kind of thing and thought some of my readers might too.

The Threefold Faith of the Living Balance by James Maliszewski

The Religion of Inba Iro under the Chomachto

Read on Substack

Mapping the Blogosphere

Although I was already following this project, yesterday a number of friends, readers, and patrons pointed out its latest development, which is really quite fascinating. The blogger Elmcat put in a lot of effort to map out the tabletop RPG blog scene in the form of a graph that shows "nodes" and "edges" – the web of connections (in the form of links) between blogs and their posts. The resulting map, shown above, is very impressive and genuinely interesting for the way it shows the distinct ecosystems that exist within the larger blogosphere, as well as the relative influence a blog has through its posts and links in and out.

The image above is a combined map, depicting the RPG blogosphere from 2003, when the first gaming blog appeared, to the present day. Consequently, it's not representative of our present moment, which looks like this:

As you can see, the 2025 map is a lot less cluttered, owing to the fact that there a lot fewer active blogs and blogs, in general, are not nearly as widely read as they were prior to the rise of social media. Even so, there are still quite a large number of blogs out there and, though their influence is waning, they continue to generate discussions (and arguments) within that portion of the RPG hobby that reads them.

Elmcat's map is an amazing piece of work. If you go to it, you can sort it by year, from 2003 to 2025, and zoom in to view it more closely. This enables you to see the name of each node, which is to say, each blog and its connections to other blogs. I find that feature the most remarkable thing about the map, since it visually represents the distinct "scenes" within the hobby and how closely (or not) they are to one another. 

Likewise, the relative influence of each node is apparent by its size and color, with influential blogs being bigger and darker in color. In case you're wondering, the big orangish-red node in both of the above maps is Grognardia. Here's a zoomed in version of the first map, the one that covers all years between 2003 and 2025

Aside from the gratification of knowing that, despite it all, this blog retains a place of prominence within its corner of the RPG blogosphere, it's great to see the names of so many of the great OSR blogs of yore, many of which are now defunct. 

Zooming in on Grognardia's solar system in the 2025 version of the map is interesting, too, but for a completely different reason – so many of today's most prominent blogs are unfamiliar to me. Mind you, I don't read as widely online as I used to, tending mainly to my own little garden, but, even so, seeing what the big and influential blogs are nowadays was genuinely eye-opening. It's a reminder that I probably need to devote more time to reading and interacting with the wider hobby again, something I haven't really attempted since the First Age of Grognardia. I suspect it might do me some good.

In any case, I highly recommend you take a peek at Elmcat's blog post, which is a stunning piece of work. This is the kind of stuff we used to see more of in the past and I want to support and promote it when we see it again. 

The End of Grognardia

The End of Grognardia by James Maliszewski

How's That for a Clickbait Title?

Read on Substack

Retrospective: Lost Tomb of Martek

Despite my well known gripes about the lasting impact of Tracy Hickman on the development of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (and, by extension, all roleplaying games), I nevertheless have a genuine affection for his "Desert of Desolation" trilogy. To some extent, it's probably a consequence of a childhood fascination with all things ancient Egyptian. The Egyptians competed with the Romans in my young imagination for the most thoroughly compelling ancient civilization, a place they still hold to this day. 

For that reason, I purchased Pharaoh as soon as I could a copy back in 1982 and still consider module I3 a pretty good adventure even today. Its immediate sequel, Oasis of the White Palm, is nowhere near as good, even if it does contain a number of memorable – and imaginative – elements. Lost Tomb of Martek, the final module in the series, carries forward many of the virtues and vices of its predecessors, while also magnifying them to such a degree that module I5 almost feels like it belongs to a different series entirely. It is grandiose, whimsical, and often overwrought, an adventure that stretches AD&D into forms it had not explored at the time.

Lost Tomb of Martek appeared near the end of D&D’s Golden Age, a period when TSR was openly experimenting with what its adventures could be. The company had not yet settled into the strongly narrative, almost novel-like structure that would crystallize in Dragonlance, but the trajectory was already visible. In this sense, Lost Tomb of Martek occupies a fascinating middle ground. It gestures toward the story-driven design that was soon to dominate TSR’s output, yet it avoids the worst excesses of that approach. Like the other installments in the “Desert of Desolation” trilogy, this one is still very much a transitional work.

Lost Tomb of Martek brings together the threads laid down in Pharaoh and Oasis of the White Palm, both of which seeded the legend of Martek, the wizard who foresaw the release of a powerful efreeti and prepared the means for its defeat. With the three Star Gems already in hand, the characters must cross the Skysea, an expanse of fused glass requiring a cloudskate, to reach Martek’s tomb and his Sphere of Power. Once they arrive, however, the adventure’s focus shifts unevenly. The first portion features the quarrelsome descendants of trapped paladins and thieves, a tonal misstep at odds with the overall self-seriousness of the module. Worse still, the scenario introduces three NPC thieves who can steal the Star Gems and force the party into a prolonged (and tedious) chase.

The adventure’s structural weaknesses become most evident once the adventure segues into a scavenger hunt across three disparate magical locales. Each site is imaginative, but only the Mobius Tower translates that imagination into compelling play. The other two are rich in concept yet mechanically thin, offering little beyond random encounters or single-solution puzzles. The result is an adventure overflowing with inventive imagery but frustratingly light on satisfying gameplay, especially when measured against the modules that preceded it. Even the polished presentation, including Martek’s climactic resurrection and the excellent maps and art, cannot fully mask an ambition that consistently outstrips its execution.

That same ambition is also responsible for many of the module’s deeper flaws. The adventure is so tightly scripted that player action routinely suffers. Characters are expected to follow a predetermined sequence of events, activating artifacts and triggering scenes exactly on cue. Inevitably, the players become spectators to a story already decided rather than adventurers shaping their own course. Even the most imaginative settings lose some of their wonder when the only viable path forward is the one Hickman has laid out in advance.

Yet, for all these shortcomings, Lost Tomb of Martek remains strangely compelling. It stands as an artifact of a transitional moment in RPG design, just before a more rigid orthodoxy narrowed expectations about what a published module should be. Its flaws are the flaws of exuberance, not cynicism. Hickman’s heavy-handed guidance stems from a genuine desire to present something like a fantasy epic in RPG form. However flawed the execution, his sincerity is unmistakable.

Perhaps age has softened me, but I cannot bring myself to dislike the module. I would not choose to run it today, yet it contains ideas worth salvaging. Its locations, artifacts, and encounters could all reward a referee willing to reshape them into a more open-ended framework. Even the plot, for all its railroading, could be retooled into a looser, more player-driven experience with modest effort. One could, of course, invent entirely new material instead but, in the interest of being constructive, I think Lost Tomb of Martek offers just enough to make it worth the effort.

The Die Is Cast

Last week, I mentioned that, with the Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign now ended, the group and I would need to make a decision about what to play next. I offered the players four (and a half) options: Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha, Secrets of sha-Arthan, Thousand Suns, and Urheim. As you can probably tell from the accompanying illustration, they chose Metamorphosis Alpha, which, I must admit, surprised me a little bit – not unhappily so, since I look forward to playing it, but I didn't think it would be as popular a choice as it turned out to be.

So, starting next week, we'll be playing one of the oldest RPGs and the first science fiction one ever published. It's also a game I've never refereed before, though I did play in a MA campaign some years ago, so this will be a learning experience for me too. That said, I've thought a lot about the game over the years and have a number of ideas to draw upon. Whether they'll survive contact with the players only time will tell, but I'm keen to see how this unfolds.

Like OD&D and Empire of the Petal Throne, Metamorphosis Alpha is mechanically somewhat sparse, with lots of lacunae and inconsistencies, as we discovered yesterday while trying to generate characters. That's fine. Part of my enjoyment of playing older games is figuring out how to make its unclear and often incomplete rules work in a way that make sense for our campaign. I rather expect that, after a few sessions, our version of MA will develop its own set of house rules and rules interpretations, as all good campaigns do. That's as it should be in my opinion.

Right now, my only worry, if that's the word, about this choice of game is whether Metamorphosis Alpha is capable of sustaining a long campaign. One of the players asked me how long I intended to run MA and I answered, "As long as I can – like all my campaigns." Barrett's Raiders lasted just shy of four years. The Riphaeus Sector Traveller campaign before it lasted slightly less long. And, of course, House of Worms lasted more than a decade. In each case, I didn't expect the campaign would last as long as it did, but I hoped they'd continue indefinitely. That's my preference when it comes to roleplaying, because I feel that, in general, these games are best enjoyed as long form entertainment. 

I mentioned this to my players yesterday and they were unconcerned. If Metamorphosis Alpha doesn't last more than a few months, that's OK. It'll be a nice palate cleanser after Barrett's Raiders and we can always take up a different game later. They have no expectations that we'll still be playing this a year from now, let alone five or ten years from now. They're just happy to be roleplaying with friends each week, which I think is a wise perspective. Still, after the phenomenal longevity of House of Worms, I must confess there's a part of me that wonders whether any campaign I do afterwards will ever measure up. That, as my players reminded me, isn't the way to view this, but I do nonetheless. 

In any case, I'm now about to embark on yet another new campaign and I can't help but wonder if it will take root and flourish or not. Regardless, I'll write about it periodically here, starting next week with a discussion of its first session. Until then!

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "The Making of a Milieu"

When I think of under-appreciated writers from the hobby, one of the names that comes immediately to mind is Arthur Collins. Collins wrote a number of articles in Dragon that I adored, because they seemed to provide the kind of detail and immersion that the Silver Age craved while still being firmly rooted in Golden Age obsessions. They offered a kind of via media between the two eras of D&D and, as such, greatly appealed to me during my teen years, when I wasn't ready to abandon the kinds of games I played as a younger person, but still hoped for something "deeper" than "mere" dungeon crawls. Plus, Collins was a good writer: clear and easy to understand but not simplistic, either in style or content. He wasn't a hugely prolific author – perhaps two dozen articles or fewer – but his stuff was almost always of great interest to me.

Of all the articles Collins wrote, the one that most affected me was "The Making of a Milieu," which appeared in issue #93 (January 1985). Its subtitle was "How to start a world and keep it turning." The article is basically a lengthy discussion of how to build not just a campaign setting but a campaign itself, which is to say, how to kick things off in such a way as to ensure that play continues for months or years afterward. Nowadays, a lot of what Collins wrote might be considered old hat, but, back in 1985, it was nothing short of revelatory, at least to me.

Up until that point, I'd largely run my campaigns either in my beloved World of Greyhawk setting or else in some nebulous, vaguely defined setting. In neither case did I give much thought to "the Big Picture." And by "the Big Picture," I don't mean a plan or a script for the players to follow in their adventures. Rather, I mean only some notion of how all the various pieces of the setting interrelate and how they might be used to serve my purposes as a referee. Prior to reading this article, my campaigns were just random collections of "stuff that happened" somewhere and that was usually good enough.

By 1985, though, I started to think it wasn't good enough. I'd become so thoroughly immersed in fantasy literature, especially of the Interminable Series of Ponderous Tomes variety and I wanted my campaigns and settings to mirror that. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 1985 also marked the beginning of the period during which I actually played less and less. I went to a different high school than all my neighborhood friends and I became distracted by other things. But I was still as interested in D&D as ever and devoting my time to world building seemed an adequate substitute for actually playing the game.

Collins gave me lots of food for thought about how to build a setting, stuff that kept me thinking and creating for years to come. For example, he suggested creating several maps of the campaign area, each one depicting the area at a different point in history. In this way, names and settlements can be altered to reflect the rise and fall of empires, the migrations of people, and other such events. So I spent a lot of time at the library making photocopies of a blank map of my new, original campaign setting – the first I'd ever come up with – and then adding details to it, so that I eventually amassed a lot of information in pictorial form about how the setting evolved over the centuries. It was a fairly simple thing but quite effective and it gave me a lot of pleasure as a teenager.

These days, I'd never go to even the meager lengths Collins suggested in planning out a campaign or its setting. I'm much more of a seat-of-the-pants kind of guy; indeed, I embrace it as the best way to play the game. At the same time, I retain a great deal of fondness for this article, in large part because it broke me of certain other bad habits, namely my dependence on published material for ideas. As Collins so aptly put it at the conclusion of his article:

When I began playing the AD&D game six years ago, there were very few playing aids on the market of the type that are now so abundant. There was no WORLD OF GREYHAWK Fantasy Setting, no Hârn, and very few canned modules in print. Very nearly all of our adventuring had to come out of our own heads. And I still think that's fantasy gaming at its best. I now meet players, especially young ones, who think that, in order to play the AD&D game or some other such activity, they must invest megabucks in someone else's ideas. It shocks many of them when I suggest that it's more fun to make it up yourself.

Alas for them! No canned module, no playing aid, no set of rules, no list of NPCs can quite become your very own. As enjoyable and thought-provoking as all the published material may be, it is a poor substitute for creating your own campaign milieu, designing your own castles, and exercising your own brain. Creativity is what the game is about. It would be a shame if the success of fantasy gaming contributed to the stifling of creativity in its own enthusiastic adherents.

I was one of those young players about whom Collins speaks, at least to some degree, which is why I owe the man a debt of thanks. I may no longer build a campaign the way he suggests in this article. However, that I build my own at all is in large part a result of what he says in it.

The Ensorcellment of January

Though the initial response to my post about whether to devote the month of January to either Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith was muddled, in the days since, CAS has pulled decisively ahead – so much so that I now feel I can declare him the winner. That means that January 2026 will be The Ensorcellment of January, just as this past August was The Shadow over August. 

Like The Shadow over August, this series will consist of daily discussions of the life, legacy, and influence of the Bard of Auburn over subsequent fantasy, science fiction, and horror, with special attention paid to what roleplaying games owe to him and his works. Naturally, there'll be Pulp Fantasy Library posts featuring Smith stories I've not yet covered on Grognardia, but I also plan posts on many other topics, with at least some of them consisting of original CAS-inspired game content. 

Also like The Shadow over August, my plans for The Ensorcellment of January are not intended to be exhaustive, much less scholarly. They will follow my own interests and whims, shaped now and then by reader feedback. My aim is simple: to help the least well known of the Big Three of Weird Tales claim a larger share of the attention he justly deserves. I hope you’ll join me in January as we journey beneath Zothique’s dying sun, wander the haunted ruins of Averoigne, and trek across sorcerer-haunted realm of Hyperborea – all in celebration of Clark Ashton Smith and the strange, decadent brilliance of his imagination.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Quest of Iranon

Though written in 1921, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Quest of Iranon” did not see publication until nearly fifteen years later, when it appeared in the July/August 1935 issue of The Galleon, an amateur journal edited by Lloyd Arthur Eschbach. The Galleon was a general literary magazine rather than one devoted to fantasy or horror, but Eschbach admired Lovecraft’s work and solicited contributions from him. Two pieces ultimately appeared in its pages: “The Quest of Iranon” and Sonnet XXX from Fungi from Yuggoth. “Iranon” would later reach a wider audience through its posthumous reprinting in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales.

The tale is often grouped with Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories, though whether it actually belongs in that cycle is, as always, open to interpretation. The text contains nods to the Land of Lomar from “Polaris” and to Sarnath from “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” both of which seem to evoke Earth’s distant prehistory. Yet the tone, themes, and geography of Iranon’s wanderings feel more like the ethereal borderlands that characterize the Dream Cycle – unless, of course, they don’t. The story offers just enough overlap, contradiction, and outright mystery that one can never be entirely certain whether Iranon exists in the world of dreams, the world before history, or some shifting place in between. In any case, as I said, it's long been included in collection of Dreamlands tales and I don't intend to argue against that inclusion om this post.

The story concerns a golden-haired youth, the titular Iranon, who wanders into the city of Teloth, claiming to be a prince of the wondrous city of Aira and delights in singing songs of its beauty. The dour people of Teloth have no patience for such things and, when Iranon is ordered to abandon his art and apprentice to a cobbler, he departs instead. A poor boy named Romnod, stirred by Iranon’s tales, joins him, hoping that the famed city of Oonai might in fact be Aira under a new name. The pair travel for years, Romnod aging into adulthood while Iranon remains unchanging, only to discover that Oonai is not Aira after all. Though the people of Oonai at first adore Iranon’s songs, their enthusiasm fades as the years pass and even Romnod declines into drunkenness and eventually dies.

Alone again, Iranon resumes his search and eventually meets an old shepherd who remembers a ragged boy from his youth, a boy who fancied himself a prince of an imaginary city called Aira. With this revelation, Iranon’s eternal youth evaporates. Aged and broken by the truth, he wanders into the quicksands and sinks beneath them, his dream of Aira dying with him.

Like many of Lovecraft’s early stories shaped by his admiration for Lord Dunsany, “The Quest of Iranon” is steeped in wistful sentiment and a yearning for idealized realms that may never have existed. Its tone is far removed from the cosmic horror of his later period. Instead, it dwells on melancholy, nostalgia, and the precariousness of a life built upon inner visions. From the outset, the story establishes a tension between dream and reality. Iranon’s exquisite inner world is richer and more beautiful than the austere cities he wanders through, yet it is also fragile, sustained only by his unwavering belief in its truth. As his companion Romnod ages while Iranon remains unchanged, the narrative dramatizes the slow erosion of idealism through time, setting the stage for the final revelation that Iranon’s princely past is not a forgotten truth but a self-created dream.

The geography of the tale reinforces this psychological dimension. Cities that honor beauty and song flourish; those indifferent or hostile to imagination appear bleak or decayed. In this way, the story aligns closely with Dunsany’s dream-fantasies, where landscapes mirror the inner states of their wanderers. Yet its final turn, where the imaginative life collapses under the weight of empirical reality, is unmistakably Lovecraftian. What begins as a Dunsanian reverie ends as a meditation on the limits of dream and the painful boundary between creative imagination and self-deception.

It's no surprise, then, that "The Quest of Iranon" includes sentiments Lovecraft expressed in his letters, where he frequently contrasted the world of dreams with the world of reality. While any reductive biographical interpretation should be avoided, Iranon’s proud retreat into an imagined past parallels Lovecraft’s own youthful romanticism and his reliance on dream life as a refuge from his mundane existence, which was at that time beginning the slow downward trajectory it would retain for the remainder of his life. The story is likewise notable for its use of time. The decades-long chronology of Iranon's journeys is atypical for the Dreamlands tales and suggests an early experiment in using duration as an emotional device, one representing the slow wearing-down of fantasy by the passage of years.

Structurally simple and lacking the metaphysical vastness of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, “The Quest of Iranon” nevertheless remains one of Lovecraft’s clearest statements on the cost of clinging to esthetic illusion. Its conclusion, depicting an imagined identity collapsing in the face of reality, functions as a grim inversion of the usual Dreamlands arc. Instead of a mortal ascending into dream, dream descends (or degenerates) into mortal truth.

“The Quest of Iranon” is thus another important transitional work. It captures the final phase of Lovecraft’s imitation of Dunsany, anticipates his later fascination with identity dissolution, and offers insight into how he grappled with themes of artistic aspiration and personal mythmaking. The story’s quiet tragedy is not merely Iranon’s but reflects Lovecraft’s own evolving understanding of the limits and possibilities of the imaginative life and how he (and his reader) might come to terms with it.