Neither Primitive Nor Professional

I have some muddled thoughts about publishing, old school esthetics, and related matters over Grognardia Games Direct. 

Neither Primitive Nor Professional by James Maliszewski

Rambling Thoughts about the Esthetics of the Old School

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REPOST: Pulp Fantasy Library: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was one of the first stories by H.P. Lovecraft I ever read and it baffled me. It baffled me not because its content was difficult to understand – though it does ramble quite a bit – but because it was not at all what expected from Lovecraft. Prior to entering the hobby, I don't believe I'd ever heard his name. Once I had, many of the older fellows with whom I'd become acquainted sang his praises as an unsurpassed horror writer and a huge influence on many of gaming's early designers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Heart and Soul

A few weeks ago, one of my readers sent me a link to an old article from 2017 about the difficulties of playing Dungeons & Dragons behind bars. I can't be certain, but I probably saw this article when it was first published and I'd be surprised if many of you hadn't also seen it. It's an interesting piece of journalism on a number of levels, including its insights into how – and how much – RPGs are played in prisons. I knew this, of course. Back in the '90s, the owners of my local game store regularly sent packages of roleplaying games to a correctional facility that permitted their inmates to play them. If you think about it, this only makes sense. Convicts have a lot of time on their hands and RPGs are a great way to pass that time. In some respects, it's not too different from the amount of gaming that happens on military bases, where off-duty personnel have long stretches of downtime and limited entertainment options. 

The linked article focuses almost exclusively on the difficulties of obtaining and using dice within prisons, for the obvious reason that dice are often used for gambling and similar illicit activities. That's a genuinely fascinating topic in itself and almost worthy of a post on its own (not least because one of the solutions was the use of chits, like those in my beloved Holmes set). However, as I read the article, what struck me was that there was no clear mention of what the prisoners were using for rules. Do they have rulebooks? I assume they must, right? How else could they play D&D?

A common topic of discussion among gamers is their "desert island" RPG book, the one rulebook they'd want to have with them if they were stranded in a remote locale for an extended period of time. (Mine is The Traveller Book, by the way.)  This makes me think about a different but related topic: how necessary rulebooks really are and how I often I actually refer to them while playing. What if, instead of asking what single rulebook you'd want to have with you on a desert island, we instead ask, "What roleplaying game could you play without recourse to any rulebook?" That's a different question, but no less interesting a one. 

For myself and I suspect most people reading this, the answer is probably D&D. I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons in one form or another for more than 45 years. From the ages of 10 till 17, it was probably the activity, aside from going to school, in which I spent the most time. Consequently, the basic rules of D&D, its foundations and superstructure, if you will, are firmly embedded in my brain – so much so, in fact, that I bet I could reproduce many of its tables and charts from memory. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them that I'm not sure anyone would notice or mind. If they did, it's only because they remember the rules even better and I'd happily use their recollections to improve my own.

Again, I'll reiterate that there are many aspects of D&D, like the minute specifics of spells or monster stats, that I probably couldn't cite solely through mental recall. I don't pretend to have a photographic memory and, even if I did, all editions of D&D, even OD&D, have too many little bits and pieces for anyone to remember them all. However, I'm not sure it's necessary to do so. While playing, I think most of us kind of wing it anyway and, so long as our approximations of the rules don't deviate too much from everyone else's own doodle memories of the rules, it's generally good enough. My lifelong experience is that the specifics of the rules matter only when there's a dispute (or when playing with children, real or metaphorical).

The longer a game has been part of your life and the longer you've played it, the more it becomes something like a folk tradition rather than a set of instructions. People start to carry "the rules" around in their heads, even when those rules are "wrong," according to the text of the rulebooks. How often have you or one of your friends been surprised to discover that this or that rule didn't, according to the text, work the way you thought it did? How long were you playing D&D "wrong" in one way or another? I know I could offer many examples of rules I learned as a kid – or thought I had – and continued to do for years before someone more knowledgeable than I pointed out I was mistaken. I can't be the only one for whom this was the case.

I think this is fine. I'm not simply absolving myself for years of being mistaken about how dragon breath works in AD&D, for example. Rather, I'm saying that, at the end of the day, I don't think it matters whether you use all the game's rules and do so correctly, so long as everyone who's playing is satisfied with the results. I have zero interest in policing anyone else's fun, especially since, as I said, I make and no doubt will continue to make all sorts of errors in remembering and adjudicating rules. I don't enjoy that sort of thing and, frankly, have a hard believing that anyone does.

All of which leads me back to that desert island question I mentioned above. It’s one thing to ask what game you’d want to bring with you. However, it’s another one to ask what game you could bring with you in your head. I think that's a much more interesting question, because it speaks to the games you've played the most and that, by playing, have become a part of you. For me, I think the only answer could be Dungeons & Dragons, as it's the only RPG that is both simple enough to remember and that I've played enough over the decades that it has embedded itself deep within my soul. I'd love to have been able to say Traveller, too, but I'm not sure that's the case. 

What about you? What roleplaying game could you run almost entirely from memory without reference to any rulebooks?

Retrospective: Shadowdale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Articles of Dragon: "Into the Forgotten Realms"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of the Line

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

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

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

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

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

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Strange High House in the Mist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artwork by Joseph Doolin

The Sorcerer Departs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaming at the World's End

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

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

Zothique begins where those stories end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retrospective: Cities of Bone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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