Over at Advanced Grognardia, I've got another post in which I provide game stats and a description of "monsters" from my Telluria campaign setting, along with some commentary on their origins. I've been writing a number of these posts over the past few months and it's been fun revisiting some of my early work and sharing insights into their creative origins.
I'm on record as disliking the general approach to religion and gods Dungeons & Dragons has taken since the beginning. I've always found it weirdly reductive and, for lack of a better word, "game-y." Certainly, I can understand that a more nuanced and complex approach probably wouldn't have sold many books, but I still can't help but think D&D deserved better than what we got in Deities & Demigods. I suspect this is a minority opinion, but it's not one without precedent in the annals of the hobby.
With this as background, I think you can easily guess my reaction to Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column from issue #97 of Dragon (March 1985). Entitled "Deities and Their Faithful," it's very close to the Platonic ideal of what I don't want in a discussion of the gods in the context of fantasy roleplaying games. In it, Gygax introduces a new set of game mechanics intended to quantify a deity's power on a particular plane of existence, as well as provide some (very rough) guidelines on divine favor and disfavor. Even taken as an example of Gygax "thinking out loud," the article is a mess.
Gygax begins by stating gods' power "comes from those who believe in them." He suggests this idea is not a new one, having been "put forth often by others, whether seriously or as a device for literature." I cannot be certain this is the first time this idea appears in connection with D&D, but, even if it's not, having Gygax's name associated with it lends it a great deal of weight. I do know that, by the time the Planescape campaign setting was released almost a decade later, this line of thinking was uncontroversial, even commonplace. I think it's fine in certain contexts, though it's still a weirdly rationalist approach to the subject of belief.
In any case, Gygax proposes that a god's hit points derive from the number of his believers at a ratio of 1:1000. That is, for every 1000 believers, the god has 1hp on a certain plane. Thus, a god with 400hp must have 400,000 believers. Further, a god's "power points" – a new concept for "the stuff from which all deities of the same alignment draw to use their spell-like powers, issue and enforce commands, and perform other abilities they may have" – has the same ratio but only for believers of the same alignment. Thus, a Lawful Neutral believer of a Lawful Good god contributes only to the god's hit points, not his power points. Gygax adds that level/hit dice also plays a role here. A believer of 2nd level is worth twice as much as one of only 1st level, while one of 3rd level is worth three times as much, and so on. Clerics (and only clerics) are worth twice as much on top of everything else, so, for example, a 15th-level cleric is worth 30 points.
The article doesn't go into any detail about the nature of power points, so it's a very abstract way of quantifying a given deity's power. However, Gygax does note that, since gods derive power from believers of the same alignment, this is the reason alignment is so important – and why the gods look with disfavor on those who change alignment, since it literally takes power away from them. I can see how this sort of metaphysical set-up might have interesting consequences in certain kinds of settings, but I'm not sure it's a good model for most, where the relationship between gods and mortals isn't so nakedly mechanistic.
I mentioned in my earlier post today that there was a Marvel comics adaptation of "The Thing on the Roof" in issue #3 of Chamber of Chills (March 1973), scripted by Roy Thomas (of Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan fame, among many others) and drawn by Frank Brunner. Here's the cover – and, no, nothing like this happens in either the story or the adaptation.
Because I'd devoted the first month of the year to Clark Ashton Smith rather than to his colleague and fellow January baby, Robert E. Howard, I thought a good way to solve my immediate problem was to find one of his stories I'd never covered before. REH was a prolific writer and, while his tales of Conan and Solomon Kane are probably his best and most well-known, there's still a wealth of options to choose from, especially if I wanted something a little off the beaten path. That's when I remembered "The Thing on the Roof."
Originally published in the February 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Thing on the Roof" is a horror story in the vein of Lovecraft's tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I first came across it in the early '90s in an anthology of Howard's horror fiction edited by David Drake and then, later, encountered an adaptation of it from an early '70s Marvel comic book (Chamber of Chills issue #3). Compared to, say, "Pigeons from Hell," which is likely the most celebrated of Howard's horror yarns, "The Thing on the Roof" is a much more modest affair, but it's still interesting nonetheless, if only for its slightly different take on "Lovecraftian" subject matter.
The story itself is quite short and fairly straightforward. Its unnamed narrator is a scholar and book collector. He is unexpectedly approached by his academic rival, Tussmann, who offers to publicly retract his previous aspersions on his work in exchange for help obtaining the rare 1839 “black book” edition of Friedrich von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. Tussmann has become obsessed with a passage describing a remote “Temple of the Toad” in Honduras, where a mummy wearing a toad-shaped red jewel supposedly guards a hidden treasure and believes only the 1839 edition contains a full description of the temple. After months of effort, the narrator secures a copy and Tussmann confirms that the original text contains crucial details omitted from later editions. Claiming firsthand knowledge of the temple from a previous expedition, Tussmann then departs for Central America determined to recover the treasure of the temple, convinced that the jewel is, in fact, a key to a store of gold concealed beneath the altar.
Some of you may recall that, shortly after I resumed blogging in the late Summer of 2020, I began a public project – the Urheim megadungeon. Though the posts relating to it were well received, I eventually lost interest in continuing it, largely because I wasn't running Urheim. Instead, it was a purely theoretical pursuit, an attempt to do what I had hoped to do with Dwimmermount. Because I was doing it without any intention of making use of it, I didn't feel a connection to the megadungeon and abandoned it.
Recently, though, an opportunity to correct this has arisen. The Metamorphosis Alpha campaign I began last year is on hold, owing to the departure of a couple of players for several months. That led to some discussions with the remaining players, who felt it might be worthwhile to play something else until the absent players returned. When one of them admitted that he had never played a megadungeon-based campaign, the conclusion was obvious: I should referee one for him and, rather than returning to Dwimmermount, I would pick up Urheim where I left off.
For this campaign, I'll be using Old-School Essentials as its base, modified with some house rules I've assembled over the years. The house rules bring it closer to OD&D + Supplements – what I have, in the past, referred to as D&D 0.75 – which is my preferred version of the game. It's closer to the simplicity of pure LBB-only OD&D while also possessing more of the flavor of AD&D that I think a lot of people have as the default frame for conceiving of Dungeons & Dragons. Also included in my house rules are some unique races like the Gargantuas and unique classes like the beggar.
Of course, what really excites me about this is the opportunity to continue my development of Urheim in the context of actual play. While I don't think it's absolutely necessary that every piece of game writing must arise out of regular campaign play, I do think that writing that does is generally better and more vital. This is, I think, especially so in the case of megadungeons, which are generally so large that the only way to build them is a couple of steps ahead of the player characters – or so I have come to believe (perhaps I'll write about that in another post).
Last week, I wrote briefly about events in my ongoing Dolmenwood campaign – which, strangely, still doesn't have a name – and the way those events brought humor to the fore. Today, I wanted to look at a slightly different aspect of the campaign: the ways in which I have changed the "official" setting and made it my own. To be clear, Dolmenwood's setting, the eponymous Dolmenwood itself, is very broadly drawn. Even though its amazing Campaign Book is over 450 pages long, most of the detail it provides is pretty sketchy, leaving lots of room for individual creativity. (To be even clearer: about 275 pages of the Campaign Book is devoted to one-page hex descriptions from which the referee can improvise. Dolmenwood is not Tékumel or Glorantha when it comes to source material.)
As I mentioned before, the characters are currently operating in and around Cobton-on-the-Shiver, a strange little village nestled in the Valley of Wise Beasts that's home to the Cobbins, small anthropomorphic animal-people given sentience by the nine-legged chaos godling known as the Nag-Lord – or Atanuwë to those who worship him, which the Cobbins do. The Nag-Lord is, for all intents in purposes, a Lovecraftian eldritch horror, equal parts Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathotep. The Nag-Lord has is responsible for the creation of both the Crookhorn goat-men and the Cobbins, both of whom revere it as the Lord of Creation.
Atanuwë created the Cobbins as a lark, a dark joke. After all, what's more amusing than a bunch of talking, clothes-wearing, tea-drinking animal-people out of Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Grahame who worship and adore a hideous abomination like itself? While there are a few Cobbins who seek to throw off the yoke of the Nag-Lord and his Crookhorns, the vast majority of them do not. They're content to go about their usual business – fishing, sailing little boats, smoking pipes, etc. – because it's the only thing they know and the way it's always been.
This becomes increasingly clear in Lovecraft’s later dream tales, where the Dreamlands grow darker and more overtly connected to his cosmic horror. The Plateau of Leng, for example, belongs to both realms. It appears first as a dreamlike landscape of cold and mystery, but later becomes a threshold to something far more alien. Likewise, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the messenger of the Outer Gods, enters the Dreamlands not as a jarring intrusion but as a natural inhabitant of that realm. All of this suggests that the Dreamlands are not an escape from the Mythos. They are instead another way of approaching it. Dreaming is not a refuge from cosmic indifference, merely a different form of it.
“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” is often treated as the key to understanding Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories and with good reason. It is his most expansive narrative set there, consisting of a long episodic journey in which Randolph Carter travels across the dream world in search of the “sunset city” he has seen in visions. Carter believes the gods have stolen this city from him and he seeks to confront them and reclaim it.
On the surface, the story is a fairly typical fantasy quest. Carter journeys from place to place, encounters strange beings, bargains with ghouls, is saved by cats, and eventually reaches the cold, forbidding heights of Kadath. The Dreamlands are presented here in perhaps their fullest form, populated by both familiar names and new terrors. Yet a careful reading reveals that, despite outward appearances, this is not a tale of heroic adventure at all. Carter is not seeking to restore order or defeat evil. He seeks only personal fulfillment. He believes that somewhere in the Dreamlands there is a Beauty that will satisfy his longing.
Nyarlathotep’s revelation at the end of the tale is one of Lovecraft’s most moving statements about the imagination. Carter’s sunset city is not something stolen by the gods. It is something he already possesses, namely, his own memory, transformed by dream into something seemingly unattainable. The gods have not taken his desire from him; his desire has taken him away from himself. This is no mere literary twist. Indeed, it could be read as the thesis statement of Lovecraft’s dream tales as a whole. The dreamer’s longing is not truly directed outward toward some distant paradise. It is directed inward, toward something irrecoverable, like childhood, innocence, or the first encounter with wonder.
This is why the dream tales cannot end in triumph. Even when the dreamer finds what he seeks, he cannot keep it. The Dreamlands can offer wonder, but they cannot resolve longing. They can only intensify it, often to the point of existential suffering.
One reason I find these stories so attractive is that they represent Lovecraft’s most sustained attempt to write against modernity. In his horror fiction, modernity is presented as a thin veneer over ancient terror. Science and progress do not protect man; they merely reveal how little control he has. In the Dreamlands, by contrast, modernity is not terrifying so much as impoverished. The dreamer flees the modern world because it cannot satisfy his imagination. Lovecraft’s narrators frequently describe contemporary life as gray, repetitive, and spiritually barren. The Dreamlands, by contrast, are filled with ancient streets, mysterious temples, forgotten gods, and landscapes untouched by industry. They are not simply exotic. They are pre-modern in the most Romantic sense, a world where the past is not history but present.
This is not an incidental feature but a central one. The Dreamlands tales are fueled by a profound dissatisfaction with the contemporary world and a longing for something older, richer, and more enchanted. The irony, of course, is that Lovecraft does not ultimately believe such enchantment can be recovered. The Dreamlands are not a return to the past. They are a fantastical counterfeit of it and, as such, ultimately unsatisfying. This is why so many of the most powerful moments in these stories are tinged with melancholy. Even at their most wondrous, they carry the sense that the dreamer is pursuing something that cannot last.
If Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories have a unifying subject, it is the imagination itself, not merely its power or necessity, but also its danger. These stories are not truly escapist. They do not reassure the reader that there is a better world waiting just beyond the wall of sleep. Instead, they explore the cost of wanting such a world. The suffering dreamers experience in these tales reveals the limits of the human condition. Dreams can show beauty but cannot grant permanence. They can open doors but cannot change the fundamental indifference of the universe. They can provide refuge, but only by separating the dreamer from everything else.
For that reason, I do not think Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories can be separated cleanly from his cosmic horror. They are another side of the same coin, one Lovecraft continued to flip throughout his life. Both bodies of work are concerned with the human desire for meaning, beauty, and transcendence in a universe that does not promise any of these things.
The Dreamlands tales do, however, allow Lovecraft to approach this concern through longing rather than terror. They are the literature of yearning rather than dread, even if their conclusions are not so different. The dreamer may travel far, meet gods, and glimpse wonders beyond imagining. In the end, though, he remains what he always was – a fragile consciousness, haunted by desire and unable to hold what he most wants.
