Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Retrospective: Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting
In any case, the 1993 product is a simultaneously terrific and frustrating product. At the time of its release, I was just beginning a campaign set in the Realms – the last AD&D campaign I would run before more or less abandoning the game for other RPGs – so its appearance was a godsend. Though I already owned (and loved) the 1987 set, it was several years out of date, both with the current AD&D rules and with events in the setting itself, so a more substantial update than the Forgotten Realms Adventures hardback was long overdue.
Say what you will about TSR in the 1990s, but one thing the company did very well was produce boxed RPG products and this one is no different. Coming in a sturdy, deep box, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set was positively stuffed with material: a 128-page A Grand Tour of the Realms, 64-page Guide to Running the Realms, a 96-page Shadowdale book (not to be confused with the terrible adventure module of the same name), several Monstrous Compendium pages and cart-apart sheets of cards, and, of course, four large, full-color maps of the Realms. It's a truly impressive collection of softcover books and other accessories.
A Grand Tour of the Realms is the heart of the boxed set, providing an overview of the setting and its locations. It's packed with information – probably too much, to be honest – and that's both a blessing and a curse, as I'll eventually explain. When I was refereeing a Realms campaign, it was probably the book I consulted the most often. By contrast, the Guide to Running the Realms, though seemingly intended as the Dungeon Master's companion book to the setting, is much less useful. More than half of its pages are spent detailing NPCs, large and small, as well as the various deities of the setting. It's not a useless book by any means, but I rarely looked at it.
Shadowdale is better. It's a deep dive into the most famous of the Dalelands, making it a suitable starting point for a new Forgotten Realms campaign, as well as a "home base" for adventurers who want to roam the region between the Moonsea and the Sea of Fallen Stars. The Dale is described in exhaustive detail – a recurring pattern in this boxed set – with almost every location given at least a short paragraph, often more. Several of these locales even have interior maps. Finally, there's a lengthy adventure, "Beneath the Twisted Tower," for beginning characters that not only makes good use of the material already presented but could easily serve as the kick-off to an entire campaign in and around the Dales.
Combined with all the other extras included inside the box, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting is a terrific product, one that really does give the Dungeon Master nearly everything he could possibly want for starting a new campaign in Ed Greenwood's storied setting. I know I found it invaluable when I was refereeing my campaign decades ago, especially as I hadn't been keeping up with all the changes TSR wrought on the Realms during the years since the release of the original 1987 boxed set. In terms of simple utility, this is a good candidate for the best setting material TSR produced during the company's existence (though there's an embarrassment of riches to choose from).
At the same time, if you're familiar with both the original boxed set and/or Greenwood's articles about the Realms in the pages of Dragon, it's hard not to be a little frustrated by the 1993 set. I've already noted several times now how much material is found within the three included books – so much that it could be overwhelming. I understand that not everyone is put off by lots of detail and, as a longtime fan of Tékumel, I feel vaguely hypocritical for grousing about the much more modest information found in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. Still, I feel as if the nature of the Realms started to change in this era, moving away from a more open-ended, almost sandbox-y setting into something more defined and therefore less flexible, at least when compared to its roots.
A big part of that probably has to do with not merely the Time of Troubles but how many products TSR had already produced for the setting. TSR turned the Forgotten Realms into the default, baseline setting of Second Edition, which meant that it shoehorned all manner of stuff into the setting that didn't really fit with Greenwood's original depictions of it. For example, several regions were made less fantastical and more like analogs of real world cultures and historical periods. This genericized the Realms and bled it of its original flavor. That disappointed me even at the time and does so even more now.
For all that, I still have a lot of affection for this boxed set. I not only made good use of it, but it's a fine example of a style of RPG product that no one really makes anymore – a largely complete description of a setting in a single box. I know there are all sorts of reasons why such a product is no longer as feasible as it was in the early 1990s, but that doesn't change my nostalgia for it. At the end of the day, I feel the only true judge of a gaming product is how much fun it engendered in play. By that standard, I consider the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting a winner.
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
Pulp Fantasy Library: H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing (Part II)
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.
Whether that is comforting or terrifying is likely a matter of temperament. It may well be both. I do not think Lovecraft ever fully resolved this tension, even in his own mind, which makes sense, since it may be intractable. I know I feel it ever more keenly as I get older, hence the continued fascination I have with these stories and the man who struggled for most of his life trying to give shape to longing, only to discover that it cannot be satisfied, only endured.
The Articles of Dragon: "These are the Voyages of the Ginny's Delight ..."
Allow me to mention – once again – that, while fantasy is without question the genre of RPG I've spent the most time refereeing and playing, science fiction is where my heart truly lies. I sometimes think I was a fan of sci-fi from birth, because so many of my earliest memories revolve around rocket ships, aliens, and space exploration. Given that I can still vividly recall watching the handshake in space during the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Even so, I think it's important to put what follows in some context, if only to paint a better picture of the kinds of Dragon articles that captured my imagination as a young man.
"These are the voyages of the Ginny's Delight ..." by Dale L. Kemper appeared in the Areas Section of issue #96 (April 1985). A short article, consisting of probably less than a single page of text, a technical diagram, and a set of deckplans, I nevertheless got a great deal of use out of it. There are a number of reasons why this was the case, the most obvious being that the article provided new material for use with FASA's licensed Star Trek roleplaying game, a favorite of mine at the time. I was always happy to see new content for that game, especially content that was immediately useable.
That's very important to me. Then as now, I loved reading about new ideas and rules for any RPGs I enjoyed, but what really fired me up were articles whose ideas and rules filled an obvious void or otherwise gave me stuff that I needed (or felt I needed). Speculative articles or "think pieces," as we might call them today, were fun, of course, but too often they felt unmoored from play, as if the author spent more time thinking about playing than actually doing so. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but useable material will always win out over the theoretical.
In this particular case, the useable material was the titular Ginny's Delight, a custom-built 48 meter-long, 8000-ton merchantman intended as an "adventure-class" vessel for use by up to four independent traders in the Star Trek universe. Being a fan of FASA's Trader Captains and Merchant Princes supplement, this was catnip to me. At the time, I had already had some success running short, parallel Star Trek campaigns focused on non-Starfleet characters and wanted more. Because FASA was slow to provide such material, I welcomed anything more I could find.
The Ginny's Delight is small and comparatively fast, completely lacking in deflector shields but packing a photon torpedo mount that is unusual in a vessel of this size. It's also been streamlined to make atmospheric landings possible, something that's rather uncommon among the starships of the Star Trek setting. However, it makes it ideal for a small group of freelance rogues and ne'er-do-wells hoping to turn a few credits in the rough and tumble corners of the galaxy. That the article also included deckplans suitable for use with cardboard counters or miniatures only made the article even more appealing to me.
Like so many things, I had lots of plans to make use of the material in this article, but barely did so. The independent characters of my campaign already had their own ship and were quite fond of it, so there was no way they'd "trade up" to the Ginny's Delight. I eventually created a Tellarite trader and his crew who were intended to be rivals to the characters. Their ship was a variant of the one described in the article, but they only appeared once before the campaign ceased. Alas! Rereading this article brought back many fond memories of the far-off days when Star Trek was something that still inspired me and that's not a bad thing at all.
Monday, February 16, 2026
Pulp Fantasy Library: H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing (Part I)
This week’s Pulp Fantasy Library post is going to be a little different. After spending several months re-reading the stories commonly associated with H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, I wanted to gather my thoughts in one place. It’s been a long-running project and it seems to deserve a proper send-off. I should also note at the outset that I’ve lately been in a melancholy mood, which likely accounts for some of the tone of what follows, as well as its length. What I’m offering here (and in tomorrow’s conclusion) isn’t intended as a definitive statement so much as an attempt to make sense of a number of impressions that have been accumulating for a while now.
Lovecraft’s present literary reputation rests on his stories in which human beings confront the indifferent vastness of the universe and discover how little mankind matters. Alongside these, however, he wrote another kind of tale, the so-called Dreamlands stories. These fantasies unfold in strange cities and landscapes of impossible antiquity, where remote gods brood, cats are not quite what they seem, and dreamers wander. Fans of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror frequently treat these stories as merely youthful imitations of Lord Dunsany and thus diversions from his “real” work.
To be fair, there is some truth to that assessment. The Dreamlands stories do not constitute a “series” in any strict sense. They were written over the course of many years, in different moods, and for different purposes. Some are little more than exercises in stylized diction, while others are surprisingly straightforward. A few are whimsical, while several are bleak. Even Randolph Carter, the character most often associated with these tales (and with Lovecraft himself), does not appear in most of them, and the Dreamlands themselves shift in tone and detail from one story to the next.
Nevertheless, taken together, Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories do reveal a consistent set of preoccupations. They return to the same themes again and again. What gives them unity is not plot or continuity but impulse. They are, at bottom, stories about longing and about the imagination as refuge, temptation, and trap. As someone who has lived inside his own head for much of his life, I find these subjects hard to resist, which likely explains why the Dreamlands continue to exert such a pull on me, even after a lifetime of reading them.
Any discussion of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories inevitably – and rightly – turns to Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft’s fantasies adopt Dunsany’s Biblical cadence, his remote and capricious gods, his invented antiquity, and his sense that wonder and melancholy are inseparable. Stories such as “The White Ship,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” and “The Cats of Ulthar” wear their inspiration openly. They are written in a consciously archaic style, as though recited by a storyteller who has never heard of the modern world.
Lovecraft admired Dunsany’s ability to evoke vastness without the use of literary realism. Dunsany invited the reader into a realm of dream, but it's not a comforting dream. It is beautiful, yes, but also fatalistic. The gods are not moral; they are simply powerful. Mortals may glimpse wonder, but they will never possess it and there is often a price to be paid for the attempt to do so. Lovecraft borrowed much from this approach, but, even in his most Dunsanian fantasies, there are also differences. Dunsany’s distance is poetic; Lovecraft’s is metaphysical. For him, the dream is never merely a dream. It is a sign of something beyond human reach and the desire for it is not without danger.
The Dreamlands are sometimes discussed as if they were a setting in the sense of a coherent world with geography, history, and consistent detail. Lovecraft occasionally encouraged this impression. He names cities and regions, refers back to earlier stories, and returns to certain motifs, like Ulthar and its cats, the streets of Dylath-Leen, and the Plateau of Leng, to cite just a few obvious ones. Yet, despite the desires of many a fan, the Dreamlands defy cartography. Their consistency is psychological rather than geographical. The Dreamlands are not really a place so much as a condition given form – the landscape of longing.
I think this is why Randolph Carter serves as something like the Dreamlands’ "mascot." Carter is not a hero in the usual pulp fantasy sense. He does not seek treasure or power. Instead, he seeks experience, specifically, a sense of wonder that cannot be found in waking life. He wants to escape the ordinary and, in doing so, find freedom. One can see the same impulse at work in “Celephaïs.” Its protagonist, Kuranes, finds refuge only in dreams, which become more real than his impoverished waking existence. The story’s conclusion is both triumphant and tragic. Kuranes achieves a kingdom in the Dreamlands where he may rule in peace, but he does so only by abandoning the real world entirely. This is one of the governing ideas of Lovecraft’s dream stories. The Dreamlands offer salvation of a kind, but it is a salvation that demands withdrawal.
For this reason, the Dreamlands tales are sometimes treated as a gentler alternative to Lovecraft’s more well-known cosmic horror stories. They contain moments of beauty, whimsy, and even mercy. The cats of Ulthar avenge cruelty. The White Ship carries its dreamer to lands of wonder. There is, at times, a sense that the imagination, for all its dangers, can grant something the waking world cannot. Even so, I think this supposed gentleness is often overstated. The Dreamlands do not offer simple consolation. In many cases, the dreamer’s longing is both a source of wonder and a cause of ruin.
In “The White Ship,” Basil Elton sails to marvelous lands, but his desire is not satisfied. He must go further. He must reach Cathuria, the Land of Hope, which promises absolute fulfillment. Yet in pressing on beyond the Basalt Pillars of the West, he causes the ship to founder and he awakens from his dream, unfulfilled. The story’s structure is essentially moral, but its morality is existential. The lesson is not that the dream is sinful, but that longing is insatiable and that insatiability will always court disappointment.
This pattern appears in different forms throughout Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales. “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” is not a dream story in the strict sense, but it is deeply Dunsanian and shares the same fatalism. A city grows proud, destroys what it considers lesser, and is eventually consumed by forces older than its own arrogance. The story is told as a legend, but its message is quintessentially Lovecraftian: history is not progress but a cycle of forgetting and punishment. Even “The Cats of Ulthar,” one of Lovecraft’s most charming fantasies, contains a darker undercurrent. The cats are not merely fanciful. They are agents of an ancient, inhuman justice. Their mercy is conditional, their vengeance absolute. The tale is comforting only if one is on the right side of it.
This is one of the Dreamlands’ most revealing features. Even in dream, Lovecraft cannot fully imagine a universe governed by benevolence. Beauty exists, but it is fragile. Wonder exists, but it is fraught. The dreamer may glimpse transcendence, but he cannot possess it without consequence.
I've rambled on longer than I'd intended already, so I'll leave the remainder of my thoughts for the second part of this post tomorrow.
Thursday, February 12, 2026
Comedy of Errors
I've written before about what I've come to call the "high adventure and low comedy" aspects of roleplaying games. I actually think it's a topic worth exploring in greater depth and perhaps I'll do that at some point. For my present purposes, know only that I'm not talking about intentionally comedic roleplaying, which is a different matter entirely (and probably also worthy of discussion). No, what I mean here is the way that, no matter how serious one intends to be while playing, there's simply no way to ensure a session will cooperate.
In our most recent session, the characters were planning a jailbreak from a village called Cobton-on-the-Shiver. The village is home to little anthropomorphic animal-people raised to sentience by the whimsical and malign Nag-Lord. The Nag-Lord's favored minions, the crookhorns – bigger anthropomorphic goat-men – rule over and abuse the cobbins, which doesn't sit well with some of them, who have formed a resistance movement to oust them from their town. That's where the player characters came in: they were hired to rescue a rat cobbin named Hackle Kingsley from the jail (or gaol, since Dolmenwood is unrepentantly British in its sensibilities). Hackle's important to the resistance and needed to be freed before he was hanged in the town square.
The characters decided to use trickery, not outright violence. Marid, a grimalkin enchanter, suggested that he stride into town, pretending to be the executioner hired by the crookhorn's leader, Baron Fragglehorn, to deal with Hackle. After all, who better than a fairy cat to deal with a rat? Coming with Marid was Alvie Sapping, a teenaged human thief, who posed as his apprentice. Much fun was had as Marid attempted to convince the crookhorns at the jail about his credentials, eventually succeeding.
The crookhorn guard, Sergeant Scrag, led the pair to the cells, where Hackle was being held. Alvie was eventually allowed into the cell with him so that he could "measure" the cobbin for his hanging tomorrow. In actuality, he was surreptitiously unlocking the leg iron that held Hackle. Meanwhile, Marid talked to Scrag about his work, which interested the crookhorn. Scrag asked if he needed another apprentice, because he thought being an executioner would be "a lot more fun" than being a guard.
Marid saw this as a perfect opportunity to further his own ends. He told Scrag that, yes, as a matter of fact, he was in need of another apprentice. If Scrag were interested, he should enter the cell with Alvie and he would instruct him on the niceties of the job. The crookhorn was enthusiastic and did so. The young thief got Scrag to look closely at Hackle and, while he did so, he tried to stab him in the back – and failed. Needless to say, this didn't sit well with the crookhorn, who rose to attack him.
As an enchanter, Marid has access to magic powers called glamours. One of these, forgetting, causes a mortal being to forget what they had witnessed in the previous round. Thanks to Scrag's failed saving throw, he forgot the failed backstab. Whew! Alvie then positioned Scrag a second time with his back to him – and failed his backstab a second time. Scrag turned quickly and prepared to attack him, but Marid intervened once more, explaining that Alvie was just a stupid human who didn't understand that the crookhorn wasn't stealing his job. He made use of another glamour, beguilement, to ensure Scrag believed what he had just said. Thanks to a failed saving throw, he did.
Even so, the crookhorn guard still felt Alvie deserved some retribution. Marid agreed and asked them both to leave the jail cell. The grimalkin then offered Scrag his personal scepter to beat Alvie with. When he turned to leave the cell – yes, you guessed it – Alvie tried to backstab a third time and, once again, failed. Scrag was even angrier now and reached for his weapon to attack, but Marid stopped him, asking, "Don't you want to use my scepter?" When Scrag turned to take it, Alvie made a fourth backstab attack, which also failed.
From there, things devolved into a confused melee, with Alvie nearly dying and Marid having no choice but to assume his wilder form – think the Tasmanian Devil mixed with the Cheshire Cat – to take down Scrag. However, the fight attracted the attention of yet more crookhorns, which, in turn, alerted the other characters that the jailbreak had not gone as well as anticipated. Sir Clement, astride his warhorse, lance at the ready, rushed into to save them, with Fallon and Waldra following behind.
Alvie's player calculated that the likelihood of his failing four backstab attacks in a row was 0.16%, which is remarkable but not without precedent. After all, that's the nature of dice. It's also why I actually like and appreciate the mechanical "swinginess" of Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants, like Dolmenwood. This week's session, though not doubt frustrating for Alvie's player, was nevertheless a blast. With each improbable failure and Marid's quick-witted responses to distract from them, the session became more and more unintentionally humorous. The end result was a session I expect we'll all remember for some time.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Retrospective: Forgotten Realms Adventures
After spending last week’s Retrospective criticizing Shadowdale, the product intended to help transition the Forgotten Realms AD&D setting into Second Edition, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a more positive look at another release from shortly thereafter: the 1990 hardback Forgotten Realms Adventures. Written by Jeff Grubb and Ed Greenwood, the same duo behind the original 1987 Forgotten Realms boxed set, Forgotten Realms Adventures (or FRA, as my friends and I called it) functioned as a bridge between that First Edition boxed set and the newly released Second Edition rules. Unlike Shadowdale, I have far more positive associations with this book. While it isn’t without flaws, it’s better written and, more importantly, genuinely useful.
At 154 pages long, Forgotten Realms Adventures is shorter than either the Second Edition Player's Handbook or Dungeon Master's Guide, but it still feels much of a piece with them in terms of its layout, art, and graphic design. If you like that sort of presentation, with its cramped three-column text, blue highlights, and Stephen Fabian interior artwork broken up by full-color, full-page illustrations by icons of the Silver Age, like Caldwell, Easley, and Elmore, then you'll in for more of the same. If, like me, you merely tolerate it as an artifact of its era, you'll probably be less happy. (And if you actively dislike it, odds are good you never bought or played any AD&D 2e stuff to begin with.)
Content-wise, the book is, quite literally, a mixed bag. Its first chapter is devoted to updating the Realms to not merely Second Edition but also to the consequences of the Time of Troubles/Avatar Crisis. A whole post (or series of them) could probably be written about the whys and wherefores of TSR's changes to the Forgotten Realms setting (which had already been changed from Greenwood's vision in several ways), but, in the interests of brevity, I'm going to gloss over most of them here. What's most important to understand is that the aforementioned Time of Troubles involved the fall of the gods from their Outer Planar homes to the Realms, thereby throwing the setting into chaos.
That chaos was intended by TSR as cover for introducing changes to the Forgotten Realms. Some of those changes were necessitated by changes in the rules of Second Edition, while others were to make the setting more amenable to the "angry mothers from heck," who'd been plaguing the game almost since its inception. Given that, Forgotten Realms Adventures isn't a completely coherent book. It's written and presented more like one of those annual encyclopedia updates some of us probably remember from our youths. The goal here is to give players and Dungeon Masters involved in Realms campaigns with all the rules and setting information necessary to use it with the newly-released 2e – at least until the release of a natively 2e boxed setting in 1993.
That first chapter is actually pretty good in my opinion, largely delivering on the promise of Second Edition to make AD&D more flexible and receptive to setting-specific changes. So, there's discussion on how, for example, certain classes fit into the Realms and what 2e options for them should be employed. Chapter 2 expands on this approach by focusing on priests, whose powers and abilities depend heavily on the details of the setting. Those first two chapters are nearly forty pages long and, while that might seem like a lot, most of the material is only vital if you're making use of a specific character class in play. That's why I made the comparison with those old encyclopedia updates. Forgotten Realms Adventures is not a book you're meant to read cover to cover but refer to when needed.
As a setting, the Forgotten Realms is known for two things: the prevalence of magic and Ed Greenwood's love of setting detail. The bulk of the book provides both in copious amounts. Chapter 3 offers up many, many new wizard spells, while Chapter 4 describes two dozen settlements, large and small, within the setting. These descriptions include both a high-level map of the location and a key of important places and people within it. These are very useful and something I appreciated at the time, when I was refereeing a Realms campaign. Chapter 5 looks at several important secret societies within the setting and Chapter 6 looks at gems and jewelry, a topic Greenwood had previously covered in issue #72 of Dragon (April 1983).
As I said, FRA is a mixed bag of content. It's not as well presented as, say, Dragonlance Adventures, but neither is it the mess that was Greyhawk Adventures. It's not really a stand-alone book. It's clearly written for people who are already making use of the Forgotten Realms setting and who already know its ins and outs. For those people – and I was one of them – this was a good and useful addition to my AD&D library and I regularly turned to it in play. However, it has minimal to no utility for anyone else. It's completely useless as a primer to the Realms, which is almost assuredly the reason TSR decided a couple of years later to release a new and expanded boxed version of the setting (about which I'll talk next week). Of course, that was never the book's purpose and I think it unfair to judge it on that basis. Viewed as an update to an existing setting, I thought it quite decent and, even after all these years, still have considerable affection for it, warts and all.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
The Articles of Dragon: "New Jobs for Demi-humans"
I'm just a few years shy of having played, in one form or another, Dungeons & Dragons for half a century (yes, I am old). In all the years that I've played the game, there have been certain constants, chief among them being complaints about aspects of their rules that some players have found ridiculous. A very well-known example of what I'm talking about is alignment, the vocal dislike of which has been commonplace since at least the mid-1980s and probably longer. Almost as common a target for criticism are class restrictions and level limits for demihuman characters.
Personally, I've never had a problem with them and still don't, but there's no denying that no edition of the game has ever done a good job of explaining why they were included, let alone necessary. Consequently, like alignment – another poorly explained game concept – I've heard complaints about dwarves not being allowed to be paladins or elves being worse magic-users than humans for decades. I suspect Gary Gygax heard them a lot too, judging from how often these questions came up in his "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column in Dragon magazine.
For the most part, Gary was pretty adamant in his belief that D&D's implied setting was humanocentric, thereby justifying demihuman class restrictions and level limits. However, as the years wore on, he started to soften his stance, especially in the years prior to the publication of Unearthed Arcana, as he was more seriously pondering the future direction of AD&D – and by "soften," I mean he more or less capitulated on the matter entirely. Unearthed Arcana (and the articles that preceded it) more or less opened the floodgates to demihumans being able to enter most classes and achieve much higher levels in them than had previously been allowed.
The prudence of that can be debated. However, Gygax goes further in his next article on the subject. “New Jobs for Demi-humans” appeared in issue #96 of Dragon (April 1985), in which he loosens level limits for non-humans yet again, this time by tying them to high ability scores. For example, after allowing all demihumans to become clerics, he connects their maximum attainable level to their Wisdom. The higher the score, the higher the level cap. He even provides a chart laying out the precise relationship between Wisdom and maximum level, with the highest score listed as 20.
It’s possible Gygax thought he was being clever here. By reserving the highest levels for characters with extraordinary ability scores, he may have imagined he was preventing the vast majority of demihumans from ever reaching parity with humans. However, if my own experience is anything to go by, all this actually did was subtly encourage ability score inflation, something to which AD&D was already prone, thanks in part to its methods of ability score generation and its profusion of sub-classes with steep ability score requirements.
To me, this is a much worse sin than merely allowing an elf to be a ranger or a halfling to be a druid. Doing so simply expands the range of character concepts. By contrast, tying level limits to high ability scores undermines the logic that supposedly motivated level limits in the first place while simultaneously pushing players toward the very sort of min-maxing behavior that AD&D’s design otherwise tries to discourage. If you tell a player that the only way for his dwarf cleric to reach 11th level is to have an 18 Wisdom, you are no longer meaningfully limiting demihumans so much as ensuring that all dwarf clerics will eventually 18 Wisdom, one way or another.
Players being what they are respond to game mechanical incentives. They seek out every legal method of getting the desired high scores, whether rolling and rerolling until they get what they want, using the aforementioned generous generation methods, using wish spells, magic tomes, or anything else the Dungeon Master permits. The result is not a world in which humans remain the assumed norm, with demihumans as colorful exceptions. Instead, you get a world in which ability scores creep upward across the board, because the game itself makes it clear that high scores are not merely beneficial but necessary to avoid being mechanically shortchanged.
In other words, this approach doesn’t preserve the humanocentric assumptions Gygax continued to claim were his rationale. Instead, it undermines it and encourages players of demihuman characters to look for every loophole possible to achieve their ends. Most importantly, it takes what had originally been a blunt piece of design – demihumans shouldn't outshine humans – and replaces it with something far more corrosive: a system that appears to be about setting and balance, but is instead about gaming the numbers.
Needless to say, I was not a fan of this article or this part of Unearthed Arcana when it was eventually published and I'm not a fan of it now. I understand why Gygax may have felt the need to write it, but that does little to affect my feelings in a positive direction. This wasn't the first time this had happened, of course, nor would it be the last, but, in retrospect, it seems clear that we were probably lucky never to have got a Gygaxian Second Edition. I suspect it might not have liked it as much as I imagined I would have at the time.
Monday, February 9, 2026
Neither Primitive Nor Professional
I have some muddled thoughts about publishing, old school esthetics, and related matters over Grognardia Games Direct.
REPOST: Pulp Fantasy Library: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
So, naturally, I made my way to library to grab any book by Lovecraft that I could. Among those volumes was the book pictured here, a 1943 Arkham House-published collection of some of Lovecraft's tales, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Though completed in 1927, Lovecraft never submitted it for publication in his lifetime and, indeed, felt "it isn't much good," as he admitted in a letter to Wilfred Talman. Consequently, the version that appeared in 1943 was based on a largely-unedited rough draft, which may explain some of its disjointedness.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is an odd tale – "a picaresque chronicle of impossible adventures in a dreamland," as HPL himself described it in the same letter quote above. At over 40,000 words, it rivals At the Mountains of Madness in terms of length. I'd also argue that it rivals At the Mountains of Madness in terms of being one of Lovecraft's greatest – or at least, most ambitious – works. That's not an opinion everyone shares. Many critics consider The Dream-Quest to be without much merit, seeing it as yet another ape of Dunsanian fantasy without many redeeming features. I won't deny that it owes much to Lord Dunsany, as all Lovecraft's dreamlands tales do, but I think it's a mistake to see it only as yet another knock-off of the Irish writer. That's because I consider the novella to be a valedictory tale, where Lovecraft not only bids farewell to Dunsany but lays the groundwork for the next phase of his writing career.
For this tale, Lovecraft brings back his dreaming hero and alter ego, Randolph Carter, who'd appeared in three previous stories.
What follows is a record of Carter's attempts to find the "majestic sunset city" of his dreams. This quest includes visits to the Enchanted Wood, to Oriab Isle aboard a black galley, to Celephaïs, and, at last, to the Cold Waste, where Kadath lies. Along the way, he meets the rodent-like zoogs, the cats of Ulthar, ghouls, fellow dreamer King Kuranes, moon beasts, and many, many wondrous and terrifying creatures. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a veritable catalog of the beautiful and the weird, often coming so quickly, one after the other, that it's difficult to really appreciate any of them, or the care with which Lovecraft describes them. That's probably the biggest fault of the novella: it contains so much that it demands a more coherent narrative structure from which to make sense of it all. Without it, the reader is left reeling.Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.
Yet, I can forgive that, partly because I like catalogs of the beautiful and the weird, especially when drawn so artfully as Lovecraft does here. However, the ultimate reason for my forgiveness is the conclusion of the tale, when the messenger of the gods, Nyarlathotep himself, explains to Carter the true identity of the city he has seen in his dreams:
"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset, of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the glory of Salem's towers and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the setting sun.
"There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraithlike from its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.
The world of Randolph Carter's dreams is not in some faraway place, but right before him, in the familiar places he loves and has loved since his childhood. Perhaps it's because I know so much more about Lovecraft's life that I find this passage so powerfully moving, perhaps it's because I, too, feel the pull of my past and an attachment to the places of my youth or perhaps it's because I'm middle-aged and feel more keenly than ever the weight of the past, I don't know, but I consider it one of the truest things Lovecraft ever wrote and enough to earn The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath a place among the pantheon of my favorite stories."Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves and Truro's windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode Island's back country. Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last these endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.
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