Retrospective: Kafer Sourcebook

For reasons I'll explain in an upcoming series of posts, I've been thinking a lot about GDW's other science fiction roleplaying game, 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300). As I've no doubt explained on several occasions, I was, for a time, a huge fan of the game and – especially – its setting. Truth be told, I still am a fan, even though I've not played the game in almost forty years. One of the things I've always admired about the game was its commitment to a plausible and "realistic" approach to the building blocks of its setting, whether scientific, technological, or political. Unfortunately, that same commitment has also probably contributed to my inability to ever sustain a 2300AD campaign.

Emblematic of the problems I've always had with the game is, ironically, one of its best supplements, the Kafer Sourcebook. Published in 1988 and written primarily by William H. Keith, Jr, it's a deep dive into the society, culture, history, and, above all, biology of the alien Kafers, humanity's only serious interstellar rival. It is a 96-page softcover, though it feels longer, due to the sheer amount of terrific science fictional speculation packed into its chapters. Even within a product line celebrated for its world-building rigor, this book stands out for its imagination and ambition.

Remember that, when 2300AD debuted in 1986, it was pitched as the “hard science” alternative to the looser, Golden Age-inspired SF of Traveller. 2300AD's other supplements focused on Earthly politics, interstellar cartography, and the starships, among other more "grounded" topics. For all its detail, however, the line lacked a unifying extraterrestrial element, something distinctive that would shape humanity’s place in the larger galaxy. The Kafer Sourcebook was the first supplement to supply that missing anchor. It thus introduced not merely an opponent but an entire framework for understanding alien intelligence within the setting.

At a glance, the superficially insectoid Kafers fill the recognizable role of an expansionist, technologically capable adversary, the kind of civilization that might form the backbone of a future interstellar war. But the Sourcebook's treatment of the species elevates them above cliché. Their defining trait is an evolutionary system in which intelligence surges only under stress, which feels both biologically plausible and conceptually daring. In their calm state, Kafers possess little more than animal cunning. Faced with fear, danger, or uncertainty, their mental capacities accelerate rapidly, granting them the clarity and ingenuity needed to confront threats. The result is a species whose history, culture, and institutions have arisen to support continual conflict, since it's only under such stress that the Kafers' intelligence continues to increase.

This evolutionary need for conflict becomes the core organizing principle for the book. Keith uses it to explain Kafer rituals of testing and challenge, their competitive clan structure, their tendency toward authoritarian politics, and the peculiar way they approach science and technology. The chapters on physiology and psychology are particularly strong, dense with speculative xenobiology that is nevertheless readable, even compelling. The cultural chapters, meanwhile, succeed in painting the Kafers not as a hive of faceless antagonists but as a coherent civilization with internal debates, eccentricities, and historical traumas. One comes away with the sense of a genuinely alien species whose motives can be understood but never comfortably predicted.

For all its strengths, however, the Kafer Sourcebook also highlights the central challenge of the species it so creatively presents. The Kafers are genuinely difficult to use in a typical 2300AD campaign. Their hostility isn’t ideological, political, or territorial in any human sense; it is biological. Once threatened, they are almost compelled to escalate conflict, their intelligence and aggression rising in tandem. This leaves little room for negotiation, espionage, manipulation, or the many shades of diplomacy that fuel most science fiction RPG adventures. A referee who wishes to portray the Kafers accurately must accept that they are not suited to casual interaction. They are best deployed as a looming existential threat or as the fulcrum of a military campaign, rather than as participants in the varied social and exploratory scenarios that populate the rest of the setting.

That is what makes the Kafer Sourcebook and, by extension, 2300AD’s use of the Kafers so frustrating. The supplement is filled with wonderfully imaginative speculation that makes these aliens excellent antagonists, yet it offers little sense of how they might function in any capacity other than that of an implacable foe. Keith’s efforts to avoid making the Kafers one-dimensional “bad guys” by rooting their behavior in evolutionary psychology paradoxically reinforces that very one-dimensionality. A species that becomes intelligent only when threatened cannot be negotiated with, reasoned with, or engaged meaningfully outside the context of conflict. In a game line otherwise rich in politics, exploration, and cultural interplay, the Kafers remain locked into a very narrow role. The result is an alien species that is brilliantly conceived on the page but difficult to integrate into the broader possibilities the 2300AD setting seems to contain.

Mind you, this is my eternal complaint about 2300AD. It’s an extraordinarily imaginative and beautifully presented setting, one that feels right in all the ways hard science fiction should, yet it somehow ends up feeling strangely dull. Unlike Traveller, I could never quite get a handle on what GDW expected players to do with the game. Its “realism,” whether technological, cultural, or political, always seemed to work against the very things that make adventure possible. Instead of opening doors, its grounded assumptions often closed them, leaving referees to do the heavy lifting of carving out reasons for danger, mystery, or wonder.

I think hat’s the tragedy of 2300AD: a setting bursting with potential, yet one that never quite shows you how to tap into it. It’s a toolbox full of fascinating parts, but without a clear sense of what you’re meant to build.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Clerics Live by Other Rules"

Over the years, I've given the thief a lot of flak, but it's actually the cleric who fits in least well with the literary origins of D&D. The cleric looks not to pulp fantasies for its inspiration but to medieval Catholicism by way of Hammer horror films and, while I have a great fondness for the class, there's no question that it isn't a perfect fit for the world D&D implicitly describes. I'm not alone in thinking this, which is why the cleric is probably the class that gets reinvented the most (though the thief might be a close second).

Every edition of D&D has put its own stamp on the cleric, in the process rendering the class more incoherent than it was to start. Gary Gygax contributed further to this mess in his article "Clerics Live by Other Rules," which appeared in issue #92 (December 1984) of Dragon. To be fair, Gary's article is actually pretty good, but it laid the seeds for much mischief later. His intention was to suggest that individual referees, for the purposes of fleshing out their campaign settings, could change the rules under which clerics (and, by extension, druids) operate, either restricting their opportunities or expanding them (or, preferably, both).

In the article, Gygax gives an example of a sect worshiping the woodland deity Ehlonna, from his Greyhawk campaign setting. Owing to tragic events in the past, this sect operates differently than others of its kind, having a unique selection of spells, armor, and weapons, in addition to having certain ritual taboos placed upon them. Thus, for example, they're not allowed to use fire-based spells of any kind, but clerics, after proving themselves – gaining levels – can wield broadswords and druids can wear elfin chain.

Normally, I loathe this kind of stuff, in large part because I think it contributes further to the dilution of what the cleric class is – and it's already pretty diluted as it is. What makes Gygax's approach work, though, is that a) it's solidly grounded in the setting and b) he's limiting these changes to a particular sect, not establishing it as a baseline. That's how I think things like this ought to be done. Unfortunately, players (and later designers) didn't care for these nuances, instead using them as a template for "fixing" the cleric class. This led, in my opinion, to a variety of changes over the years that have rendered the cleric one of the least coherent classes, both mechanically and as an archetype. But I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority in feeling this way.

Interestingly, Gygax himself warns against taking what he wrote in this article as an official, universal change. In his concluding paragraph, he says some very sensible things:

Now when you hear someone, DM or player, mentioning something about "unknown" cleric spells or similar difficulties, don't panic. It could well be a cleverly planned campaign where difference and the unexpected are desirable -- and who can fault that?! Perhaps you might wish to try it in your own campaign, too. A cautionary word is necessary, however, for there is a problem with such variations. Unless the full and complete details of the differences are known to other DMs, they might well not wish to have clerics or druids of such nature participating in their games. This is their right, and skepticism on their part is justified. Players of these clerics and druids must be forewarned that such characters might be "one-campaign-only" adventurers who are not welcome elsewhere

It's good advice, but it's also, I think, advice rooted in an older style of play that was already on its way to dying out by the time this article was published. Campaign hopping of the sort Gary envisions was already rare in the early '80s when I was most deeply immersed in the hobby and I have a hard time imagining that it was any more widespread on the cusp of 1985. Ironically, the advent of the Net and online play make well lead to a resurgence of the Old Ways in this regard, in which case Gary's advice might well prove useful again.

REH vs CAS

At the end of last week, I asked readers whether they’d prefer that I devote this coming January to Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith, in the same way that I dedicated this past August to H.P. Lovecraft.

So far, the “contest” is remarkably close. At the moment, the Bard of Auburn holds a very narrow lead over Two-Gun Bob, but not by enough to declare the matter settled. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Both Howard and Smith are more than worthy of a full month’s attention on this blog and each brings something distinct and compelling to the table. I’d be delighted to spend January exploring either one of them and, judging from the comments and emails I’ve received so far, many of you feel the same way.

Because the vote remains so tight, I may need to turn to another method of choosing. One option I’m considering is putting the final decision to my patrons. Their support of Grognardia is direct and it seems only fair to let them weigh in when a topic inspires this much enthusiasm. If nothing else, it would be a fitting way to break the tie and ensure that the choice reflects the people who help make these month-long deep dives possible.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone who hasn’t yet commented or sent me an email to do so. Whichever way this goes, January is shaping up to be another enjoyable excursion into the history of early fantasy literature.

The Problem with Starships

The Problem with Starships by James Maliszewski

In which I once again think out loud by a vexing part of Second Edition

Read on Substack

Pulp Fantasy Library: Nyarlathotep

Like many of the early H.P. Lovecraft pieces I’ve been examining since September, “Nyarlathotep” occupies a remarkably strange position within his larger canon. First circulated in late 1920 in the November issue of The United Amateur, this brief work resists simple classification. It is neither straightforward narrative nor pure prose-poem, neither a true Dreamlands excursion nor an unambiguous exercise in cosmic horror. Instead, it unfolds like a lucid nightmare rendered with almost journalistic precision, a stark vision of societal unraveling and uncanny intrusion that foreshadows many of the motifs Lovecraft would later explore more fully.

Lovecraft himself explained that “Nyarlathotep” arose from a dream. In a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, he claimed he wrote the opening paragraph “before I fully waked,” suggesting the piece emerged almost directly from the dream-state. If we take him at his word, then the text was composed under a kind of incantatory compulsion, shaped only lightly by later revision, if at all. This immediacy distinguishes it from much of his mature fiction, which he often reworked extensively, and helps explain the breathless, uncanny atmosphere that permeates the piece.

As in many of his early works, Lovecraft was writing under the sway of powerful intellectual influences. After 1919, he immersed himself in the writings of Lord Dunsany and the Dunsanian imprint is unmistakable – the rhythmic prose, the dream-logic, the anxiety over cultural decay. At the same time, the story reflects his long-standing interests in astronomy, Egyptian antiquity, and fin-de-siècle pessimism. “Nyarlathotep” thus emerges from a convergence of impulses, from the mystical to the scientific, from the decadent to the apocalyptic, producing a work that is difficult to categorize but impossible to forget.

The piece itself presents Nyarlathotep as a wandering figure from Egypt who arrives with strange devices and demonstrations that unsettle the modern world. Crowds gather; the narrator, already alienated and uneasy, joins them. Soon the lights fail, machinery breaks down, and people drift into the streets in trances, marching into the darkness as a cosmic doom descends. This is less a story than a sensory and psychological descent. The narrative slips quietly from urban disquiet into full eschatological collapse, mirroring the disintegration of both society and the narrator’s consciousness.

Two elements in particular deserve emphasis. First, this version of Nyarlathotep is far more grounded than his later incarnation as the messenger of the Outer Gods. Here he appears almost human, a darkly charismatic prophet with a pharaonic air, demonstrating marvels that blur the line between science and sorcery. The implication is that modernity’s own tools – technology, rationality, scientific wonder – can serve as gateways to madness. Second, the masses drifting silently through the darkened city prefigure the collective irrationalities found in Lovecraft’s later fiction. More importantly, the collapse is not local but cosmic. Dreams, astronomy, machinery – all fail simultaneously. The universe itself seems to sicken.

Although “Nyarlathotep” predates Lovecraft’s fully developed Dreamlands tales, it marks a crucial step in their evolution. The action takes place in the modern world rather than in dream geography, yet nearly every aspect of it connects to his emerging dream-lore. The narrative is not a record of waking experience but a nightmare revelation, a dream so potent it bursts into daylight and overwhelms the ordinary world. This reversal is central: whereas the later Dream Cycle sends dreamers into symbolic, mythic realms, in “Nyarlathotep” it is the dream that invades the waking world, overriding reason, technology, and even cosmic order.

Stylistically, the story stands at a crossroads. Lovecraft was still under Dunsany’s spell and the imagery unmistakably reflects it. Yet, the creeping cosmic menace anticipates the hybrid mode he would perfect in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where Dunsanian fantasy interlocks with cosmic horror. Nyarlathotep himself is the clearest bridge between the modes. In Dream-Quest, he returns as a mercurial, godlike being who toys with dreamers and bends fates. The 1920 piece presents his prototype as a wandering prophet of cosmic truth whose presence signals doom. What makes the character unique in Lovecraft’s tales is precisely this dual existence. He moves freely between the Dreamlands and waking reality, linking the two in a way no other entity quite manages. “Nyarlathotep” is the moment that connection first takes shape.

The piece continues to resonate because it feels like a transmission from the edge of consciousness. It's brief, opaque, and deeply unsettling. As a document of Lovecraft’s artistic evolution, it is both important and often underappreciated. It captures the last intensity of his Dunsanian phase even as it gestures toward the cosmic immensities of the later Mythos. That tension between dream and nightmare, fantasy and cosmic dread, gives “Nyarlathotep” its lasting power. It remains one of Lovecraft’s most haunting works, not despite its ambiguity, but because of it.

January Approacheth

Back in August, I devoted the entire month on this blog to discussing H.P. Lovecraft and his legacy, under the banner of The Shadow over August. What began as an experiment turned out to be one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve undertaken on Grognardia in some time. Not only was it fun to revisit Lovecraft’s writings and influences in a focused way, but the response from readers was far more enthusiastic than I had expected. It reminded me of the value of spending a sustained period delving into a single creator whose work has shaped the hobby in so many ways.

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about doing something similar in January. Two of the other great figures associated with Weird Tales, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, were both born in that month. Each is, in his own way, a towering influence on fantasy, horror, and roleplaying games. Consequently, I would very much like to give one of them the same kind of month-long attention I gave to Lovecraft in August.

Notice I said one. For practical reasons, I can only manage one such project right at a time, however much I'd like to do both. That leaves me with a choice and, rather than make it myself, I thought it would be more fitting (and fun) to put it to you, the readers.

I’ve come up with titles that mirror the spirit of The Shadow over August and capture something of each author’s tone:

• For Robert E. Howard: The Savage Sword of January
• For Clark Ashton Smith: The Ensorcellment of January

Both possibilities appeal to me for different reasons and I would enjoy devoting a month to either writer. So, I’m asking for your help in deciding which one I should pursue. If you have a preference – Howard or Smith – please let me know in the comments. I’ll tally the responses and announce the outcome before the end of the year, as I can begin preparing for whichever choice wins out. It's a difficult choice, to be sure, and I don't think there's a wrong option. Plus, I can always devote January 2027 to whichever of the two isn't chosen for 2026.

As always, thank you for reading and for your continued enthusiasm. August’s experiment succeeded in large part because of your engagement and I’m looking forward to seeing where January takes us.

Sir Yamashiro Li Halan

I often comically lament that I spent my personal character points on the wrong abilities and skills, choosing writing over much more sought after – and profitable – skills like mapmaking or art. Dyson Logos can do both of the latter, which is why I told him that, if he weren't my friend, I'd hate him. Yesterday, while playing in the fourth session of our new Fading Suns campaign, he drew his character, Sir Yamashiro Li Halan. It's a lovely piece of art and one that does a great job of visually bringing to life this drug-addicted rake of a nobleman. 

I suggested to Dyson he give the same treatment to the other characters in the campaign, but I was only half-serious, since I know it'd be a lot of work. Still, it's amazing how helpful it can be to have portraits of characters in a campaign. The make them real in a way that mere words frequently cannot. That's why I commissioned Zhu Bajiee to produce a commemorative portrait of all the important player and non-player characters of the recently completed House of Worms campaign. It'll not only be a great memento of the campaign itself – the longest I have ever refereed – but it will also help me to recall the characters, who are really what helped keep the game going for as long as it did. 

Inquiry

Another public post over at my Patreon, one that's specifically directed at those who are already members but that might be of general interest to other regular readers (at least I hope so). 

Retrospective: The Complete Priest's Handbook

When the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons appeared in 1989, one of its implicit goals was to make the game’s classes more flexible and setting-driven. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the treatment of clerics. First Edition AD&D more or less followed the template laid down by OD&D, where the cleric was an odd hybrid of Templar, exorcist, and battlefield medic. This was a pragmatic invention designed to plug holes in early play (someone had to turn undead and heal wounds). The cleric class was thus foundational to the game, but rarely inspiring. If my experience is anything to go by, few players aspired to be a cleric and would only acquiesce to doing so because the party needed healing.

The Complete Priest’s Handbook, published in 1990, represents TSR’s most serious attempt to rethink the cleric, building on what had already been established in the 2e Player's Handbook. Written by Aaron Allston, it stands as one of the most conceptually ambitious entries in the “Complete” series, as well as one I really liked at the time of its release. The supplement's title is significant. Second Edition, you may recall, replaced the term "cleric" with "priest" as the name of the broad class category. “Cleric” became only one example within that category – a type of priest, much as the druid was another. This terminological shift heralded a new approach to divine spellcasters. Where 1e’s cleric was monolithic, 2e’s priest was varied. There could be hundreds of priestly archetypes, each distinct to its faith and overall ethos. Allston’s book took that conceptual flexibility and attempted to make it practical.

At the heart of The Complete Priest’s Handbook lies 2e’s concept of specialty priests as a flexible framework for portraying the servants of specific gods or cosmic powers. Rather than treating every priest as a lightly re-skinned version of the same armored miracle-worker, Allston provided Dungeon Masters with clear guidelines for customizing spell access, weapons, armor, granted powers, and restrictions to reflect each deity’s nature. A priest of a war god might wield swords and command battle magic, while one devoted to a god of secrets could be forbidden to fight openly but gifted with divinations and hidden knowledge. The idea had its roots in Dragonlance Adventures (1987) and the 2e Player’s Handbook, of course, but Allston expanded and refined it in meaningful ways. He demonstrated that the faiths of a campaign world should shape the rules of divine magic, not the other way around.

Much of the supplement reads less like a player’s guide than a campaign design manual. Allston encouraged DMs to think about pantheons, from who the gods are, what their worshippers are like, and how their clergy interact with worldly institutions. He presented religions as social, political, and metaphysical forces, not merely sources of spells. From here, he moves on to designing priesthoods, walking the reader through the process of defining a faith’s beliefs, organization, duties, and other details, with each choice shaping both flavor and play. Allston even made space for philosophical or non-theistic priests, who draw power from devotion to an ideal or cosmic principle. That idea was barely hinted at previously, but, in this supplement, it's offered as an unambiguous possibility (one that I embraced wholeheartedly in my Emaindor campaign from high school).

In many ways, The Complete Priest’s Handbook was TSR’s first real attempt to treat religion as a serious worldbuilding concern rather than an afterthought. The gods and their faiths were no longer just color for the background; they became engines of conflict, patronage, and adventure. The priest was not simply a healer or support character but a representative of a larger belief structure and institution. One can argue that this was always true in AD&D and perhaps it was, but, for many of us, it took books like this to make us think seriously about what that actually meant in play.

Like all entries in the “Complete” line, The Complete Priest’s Handbook included a selection of kits, optional templates meant to add flavor and specialization. Ironically, I never found most of them especially interesting. Too many represented vague social roles, like the Nobleman Priest, the Peasant Priest, and so on, rather than more distinctive archetypes like the Crusader or the Missionary. Arguably, 2e priests didn’t need kits at all. Between their spheres of magic and granted powers, the class already had plenty of built-in flexibility. However, compared to what other classes received in their "Complete" books, this section felt oddly underbaked.

What truly stands out, though, is how The Complete Priest’s Handbook reflects a broader shift in TSR’s design philosophy. Second Edition was increasingly interested in building distinct, coherent settings for AD&D. One could reasonably argue this was motivated by a desire to sell more products, but, even so, it had an intriguing creative side effect: it pushed the rules toward flexibility and world-specific interpretation. Instead of assuming a single “cleric” archetype for every world, 2e encouraged Dungeon Masters to make each campaign’s religions – and thus its priests – unique.

Of course, the book is not without its flaws. Balancing specialty priests was left largely to the DM’s discretion and the examples varied widely in quality. Allston’s approach assumed a polytheistic setting where divine diversity was the norm, leaving monotheistic or dualistic campaigns to do some extra work. Yet, these are minor quibbles compared to the book’s larger accomplishment. The Complete Priest’s Handbook encouraged DMs to shape faith to fit their worlds and, just as importantly, to let their worlds shape faith in return. For a game as rule-bound as AD&D sometimes was, that felt genuinely liberating.

For all my reservations about the "Complete" series as a whole, I still regard The Complete Priest’s Handbook as one of its true high points, a book that took a neglected class and made it central not just to the mechanics of the game but to the presentation of the setting in which it was played.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Nine Hells Revisited"

As a kid, I was endlessly fascinated by AD&D's Gygaxian cosmology of the planes of existence, especially the so-called Lower Planes, populated as they were by the baroque categories and hierarchies of devils, daemons, and demons (not to mention demodands and hordlings). For that reason, I adored Ed Greenwood's two-part series on the Nine Hells, which appeared in issues #75 and #76 of Dragon. They were, in my opinion, one of the best explorations of the Outer Planes in First Edition, not merely for the new information they presented, but also for the way Greenwood succeeded in making the Hells locales where characters might have adventures. Then and now, that's very important to me. Much as I enjoy imaginative "lore dumps," background information is always improved when it supports play. That's why, more four decades later, I still look back with affection on "The Nine Hells," Part I and II.

Apparently, I wasn't the only reader of Dragon who enjoyed those articles, because, a year later, in issue #91 (November 1984), we got "The Nine Hells Revisited." Ay 16 pages long, this article wasn't as long as Part II of the original series, but it was slightly longer than Part I, meaning it was a substantial addition of new material about the Nine Hells. I was overjoyed to see its appearance in the issue and even happier when I'd finally read it. Greenwood had once again written the kind of article I wanted more of and, while it's not quite as groundbreaking as his previous work, it was still quite memorable.

Whereas "The Nine Hells" had been a systematic presentation of the plane of ultimate Lawful Evil, focusing on each layer, its notable features, and denizens, "The Nine Hells Revisited" was more of a grab bag. For example, the article begins with a brief discussion of how mortal can "safely" deal with devils through magic, followed by the proper pronunciation of certain devils' names (important if you want to ensure your summoning rituals work properly). Then, Greenwood gives us six pages of "outcast" devils – greater devils whose offenses against one of Hell's archdevils resulted in their being removed from the plane's hierarchy and left to wander. These devils are quite interesting, because their independent status makes them great antagonists for AD&D characters of mid to high-level without necessarily involving all the legions of Hell in their schemes.

Next up is a discussion of the treasures of Hell and the unique metals to be found there. Though not especially interesting in their own right, these topics are eminently practical for adventures that take place in Hell or involve their inhabitants. Much more fascinating to me was Greenwood's discussion of mortal devil worshipers and agents and "The Lord Who Watches," Gargoth. Gargoth is another unique devil, but, unlike the ones described earlier, he is of immense power, being an exiled archdevil, who was once second only to Asmodeus in power. Exiled to the Prime Material Plane, he now pursues his own goals. Gargoth makes for a great high-level enemy and longtime readers of Dragon will appreciate Greenwood's subtle incorporation of elements of Alex Von Thorn's "The Politics of Hell," which appeared in issue #28 of the magazine (August 1979), reprinted in The Best of Dragon, Volume II.

(As an aside, Alex Von Thorn was the co-owner of a game store here in Toronto that Ed Greenwood would occasionally visit. I got to know Alex, too, and even gamed with him a few times.)

The article wraps up with discussions of the nature of devils, which is to say, how their society operates, traveling the River Styx, and a "note to the DM." The latter is interesting, because Greenwood makes it very clear that devils are very powerful beings and the Dungeon Master should take pains not to overuse them or otherwise diminish them in the minds of players. Even the weakest named devils are dangerous foes and should offer a challenge. The DM needs to keep this in mind when employing them in adventures. This is a fair point, I think, but I wonder what occasioned its inclusion in the article.

 

"The Nine Hells Revisited" was, as I said, nowhere near as revelatory to me as its two predecessor articles. Nevertheless, I found it both enjoyable and information, not to mention practical. This wasn't just background information without any utility in play. Instead, it provided the Dungeon Master with a collection of details and foes he could use to inject a little bit of the infernal into his ongoing campaign. Being a devotee of the Outer Planes in my AD&D campaign at the time, I liked this one a lot. Even now, I think it's one of the more memorable Dragon articles of its era.

The 3 Waves of the RPG Moral Panic

I've mentioned many times on this blog that, to a great extent, I owe my introduction into the hobby of roleplaying to the furor surrounding the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August 1979. Consequently, I've always had a deep interest in the history of the moral panics surrounding D&D and RPGs more generally. That's why I was intrigued when I saw that Seth Skorkowsky had released a lengthy video essay about this very topic. It's a well-presented and informative video and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this subject. Thanks to Loren Rosson for recommending it to me.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Ex Oblivione

H.P. Lovecraft’s brief prose-poem “Ex Oblivione” tends to get overlooked when readers discuss his so-called Dream Cycle and I can understand why. At scarcely two pages long, it lacks the elaborate worldbuilding of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath or the mythic resonance of "The White Ship." Yet, I think this slight, melancholy piece deserves more attention than it usually receives, if only because it reveals something essential about Lovecraft’s evolving view of dreams, escape, and, as its Latinate title suggests, oblivion.

Before turning to the piece itself, a few background details are worth noting. First and most intriguingly, “Ex Oblivione” is one of the few works Lovecraft ever published under a pseudonym, in this case Ward Phillips, a name that August Derleth would later use for his HPL stand-in in the touching story “The Lamp of Alhazred.” Second, the prose-poem first appeared in the March 1921 issue of The United Amateur, the journal of the United Amateur Press Association, an organization to which Lovecraft devoted much of his energy during the early years of his writing career. It did not receive “professional” publication until after his death, when Arkham House included it in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943).

Like several of Lovecraft’s early dream tales, “Ex Oblivione” is told by an unnamed dreamer who, weary of life, seeks a gate that will lead him beyond the bounds of waking reality. There’s a familiar texture here, with a manuscript inscribed on yellowed papyrus, a gate of bronze, and a secret known only to the dead. The language is the same high, antique diction that marks the other efforts of his Dunsanian period. On its surface, this could easily be another story of mystical adventure in the Dreamlands – except that's not what "Ex Oblivione" is at all.

Unlike his other dream narratives, this one isn’t really about wonder or discovery. Rather, it’s about release – release from life, memory, and even consciousness itself. When the dreamer finally passes through the gate, what he finds is not some transcendent realm of beauty but the ultimate nothingness that lies beyond all things. "Once it was entered, there would be no return." The peace he sought is not the peace of heaven or dream, but of extinction, the "native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour."

That conclusion gives “Ex Oblivione” a very different flavor from the rest of Lovecraft’s dream writings. Randolph Carter, for example, is nostalgic for the lost worlds of his youthful imagination. He travels through the Dreamlands not to die, but to rediscover wonder. The narrator of “Ex Oblivione,” by contrast, has no such illusions. He doesn’t seek new vistas; he seeks an end to vistas altogether. In that sense, this story marks a quiet but profound shift from romantic escapism toward the cosmic fatalism that would eventually come to define Lovecraft’s mature work.

It’s also worth remembering when Lovecraft wrote it. In 1921, he was only a few years removed from a long period of isolation and depression. In that sense, “Ex Oblivione” feels like a remnant of his earlier darker mood, a poetic expression of the same yearning for nonexistence that haunted his teenage and young adult years. The piece reads less like a story than a confession. It's a moment of weariness rendered in dream imagery. It’s the voice of someone who has dreamed too long and too deeply and has finally grown tired of even his own fantasies.

In stylistic terms, “Ex Oblivione” is still firmly rooted in Lovecraft’s early Dunsanian phase. The imagery and language would not have been out of place in The Book of Wonder. But whereas Dunsany’s dreamers usually awaken from their journeys sadder but wiser, Lovecraft’s narrator never wakes up at all. The story ends in stillness, not revelation. That’s the difference between Dunsany’s wistful mysticism and Lovecraft’s emerging materialism.

For that reason, I think it’s misleading to treat “Ex Oblivione” as simply another Dream Cycle story. It belongs to that group in imagery, perhaps, but not in spirit. Rather than celebrating the imagination, it questions whether imagination – or indeed existence itself – has any meaning at all. It’s a dream story that rejects dreaming, a meditation on escape that ends by denying even the possibility of return.

In that sense, “Ex Oblivione” stands as a bridge between Lovecraft’s early dream fantasies and his later cosmic horror. What the dreamer finds beyond the gate prefigures some of what Lovecraft’s later protagonists would confront in their own investigations, namely, a vast, impersonal universe where what peace that can be found lies only in surrender. "Ex Oblivione" is a minor work in scale, but not in theme. As an early glimpse of the fatal serenity that would come to haunt so much of Lovecraft's writing, I feel it's worth greater consideration than it typically receives.

Campaign Updates: Fading Suns

It's been a while since I last wrote a post about the three campaigns I'm currently refereeing and, while I will in due course have more information about both Dolmenwood and Barrett's Raiders, I thought I'd first take some time to fill you in on my newest campaign – Fading Suns. 

The campaign, which doesn't yet have a distinct name, has taken the spot of the recently-concluded House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign in my weekly rotation of games. Currently, there are six players, five of whom played in House of Worms, while the sixth player is a new addition – an old friend of mine who's wanted to game with me for years and only now has a spot opened up to make this possible. We're only three sessions in, but already the campaign is starting to take root, in large part, I think, because of the strength of the characters.

• Sir Yamashiro Li Halan is the nominal leader of the group, thanks to his noble birth and social standing. A minor scion of House Li Halan, Yamashiro is regarded as something of a family disgrace. Where most of his kin are solemn and devout, he is a notorious hedonist and carefree rake, more interested in pleasure than piety. Exiled from his homeworld of Rampart under the guise of a “grand tour” of the Empire, Yamashiro’s journey is meant to teach him humility and discipline. He, however, views it as an invitation to indulge his appetites and discover what delights the wider Known Worlds have to offer.
• Accompanying him is Father Kosta, an Urth Orthodox priest appointed as Yamashiro’s confessor, though the young noble shows little inclination to unburden his soul before the Pancreator. Patient and compassionate, Father Kosta relies on the former quality most of all when tending to his wayward charge. Unlike many of his brethren, he favors a gentle hand in spiritual matters, convinced that quiet persistence will, in time, reach even the most stubborn heart. He often recounts tales of his own reckless youth, when his misdeeds nearly led to his death. Only through the mercy of the Pancreator did he survive to repent and now he sees it as his sacred duty to offer that same chance of redemption to others.
• Holai liTarken is an Umo’rin counselor, one of the alien Obun’s esteemed order of diplomats and empaths. Generations ago, his family fell into debt to House Li Halan and, in repayment, vowed that one of their line would forever serve the noble family. Holai now fulfills that ancient pledge as Yamashiro’s counselor and psychic advisor. Though he often finds humanity and its baffling blend of passion and prejudice difficult to comprehend, he approaches his duties with quiet dignity and sincere devotion, striving always to guide his charge with patience and wisdom.
• Iskander Ecevit is an Engineer, a member of the vast Merchant League, one of the three great pillars that uphold the Empire, alongside the noble houses and the Universal Church of the Celestial Sun. Once a soldier, Iskander’s life was forever changed by a near-fatal injury that left him broken and dying. The Engineers saved him with their arcane technologies, rebuilding him until he became something more machine than man. Fascinated by the relics of the Second Republic and the enigmatic works of the ancient Annunaki, Iskander devotes himself to uncovering their secrets. His hard-won knowledge and mechanical prowess now serve Yamashiro well as they journey together across the Known Worlds.
• Orphos is perhaps the most enigmatic member of Yamashiro’s entourage. A blunt, sharp-tongued cynic with little respect for the nobility – and even less for the Church – he belongs to the Scravers, a guild notorious for its scavengers, smugglers, and criminals. Despite his rough edges, Orphos proves invaluable thanks to his extensive underworld connections, which open doors closed to more polite travelers. His brash manner and disregard for decorum often attract unwanted attention, but his resourcefulness and streetwise instincts more than earn his place among Yamashiro’s companions.

You'll no doubt have noticed that I've only described five characters above, despite there being six players in the campaign. That's because, owing to real life scheduling conflicts, one of the players hasn't yet been able to attend our sessions. With luck, that will change soon and the coterie of player characters will at last be complete.

The campaign opens on the world of Pandemonium. Once called Grange, it was an idyllic agricultural planet, its fertile plains and temperate skies maintained by Second Republic terraforming engines that continued to hum along for centuries after the Fall. Now, those ancient machines are faltering. The vast farmlands beyond the capital city, The Hub, are drying up, the soil turning to dust as the world slowly dies. Life on Pandemonium has thus become harsh and uncertain. Yet House Decados still clings to it, not for its dwindling crops or crumbling cities, but for what lies within its system: a second jumpgate, long dormant and shrouded in mystery. To unlock its secrets would mean power beyond measure and every major faction knows it.

For now, Sir Yamashiro and his company move carefully through the tangled web of Pandemonium’s politics, learning who truly holds influence in The Hub and where their own ambitions might best take root.

Addicted to Dreams

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to suggest that most of us who play or referee roleplaying games are readers first. Before we ever picked up polyhedral dice or scribbled on a character sheet, we had books – paperbacks with cracked spines and lurid covers, library copies borrowed and re-borrowed, pages filled with strange names, lost cities, and impossible creatures. It was through those stories that many of us first discovered the wonder of other worlds. I know I did. Long before I ever rolled a saving throw, I’d already learned what it meant to lose myself in another place, to be consumed by imagination, to live elsewhere, if only for a time.

That hunger – to be elsewhere – never really fades. It lingers in the back of the mind, calling us to dream again. It’s what drives writers to put pen to paper and referees to sketch maps or invent pantheons. It’s an act of creation born, at least in part, from dissatisfaction with the ordinary. In a way, it’s a quiet rebellion against the everyday, the only kind of rebellion a stick in the mud like me is capable of. The schoolyard and the shopping mall are all well and good, but they pale beside Moria or Melniboné. The imagination whispers, “There are other worlds than these,” and, once you’ve heard that whisper, it’s impossible not to believe it.

When I first discovered roleplaying games, what drew me in (though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time) was their invitation to take that same imaginative impulse, the one that led me to daydream in church or stare at the horizon as if something wondrous might appear and share it. Writing, for all its pleasures, is solitary, even lonely. It’s a private communion between the writer and the page. But RPGs opened the door to something altogether different, a kind of collaborative dreaming. Around the table, the game became a campfire and we were the storytellers gathered in its glow, shaping a dream together, speaking it aloud so that others could live in it too.

That’s the real magic of roleplaying. I hesitate to say that, because it can sound sentimental or pretentious, but it’s true nonetheless. Roleplaying lets us touch the same creative fire that first called us to stories: the power to imagine not just what is, but what could be. In that moment, we become co-authors of our own mythologies. The settings we build, the characters we play, even the dice we roll are all tools for bending reality toward something richer, stranger, and truer to that inner sense of wonder that first made us turn a page.

Maybe that’s the answer to the question I asked myself yesterday. Why did stuck with RPGs for all these decades when most of my childhood friends did not? I don’t keep playing out of nostalgia or habit. I keep playing because, even now, I’m still addicted to dreams. Roleplaying games give that addiction shape and fellowship. They remind me that imagination isn’t a childish escape, but one of the most human acts of all. It’s our ability to make meaning, to build worlds, to see beyond what’s immediately before us and, in doing so, to bring a little of those other worlds back with us.

In the end, that’s what the best games and the best stories both do. They invite us to live for a while in another world and then return to this one with new eyes, eyes that still, even after all these years, look to the horizon and wonder what might lie beyond.

Why I Stayed

My birthday was last week and, contrary to what I expected, it proved an occasion to look back over my life and ponder a few things. I don’t mean this in a maudlin or self-critical way. For the most part, I’m fairly content with my current existence and reasonably comfortable with my creeping senescence. Rather, I found myself thinking about the fact that, forty-six years after first discovering Dungeons & Dragons, I’m still actively involved in the hobby of roleplaying, while so many of the people with whom I first discovered it are not.

I was 10 years-old at the Christmas holidays of 1979, when I first opened the D&D Basic Set edited by J. Eric Holmes. That was the beginning of my journey. Through the end of childhood and into my early teens, roleplaying games felt like a shared discovery, something my friends and I stumbled into together, almost like finding a secret passage beneath the ordinary world. We played obsessively – after school, on weekends, and during those seemingly endless summer vacations. At the time, it would have seemed absurd to imagine any of us ever not playing. RPGs were simply what we did, eclipsing nearly every other pastime.

That shared enthusiasm didn’t last. By my mid-teens, very few of the friends with whom I’d entered the hobby were still playing. Some drifted away gradually, their interests and circumstances changing. Others dropped it abruptly, as if a curtain had fallen on that chapter of their lives. In the years that followed, careers, families, and the usual responsibilities of adulthood pulled still more away. Yet I’ve always wondered whether those explanations were truly sufficient. Many hobbies survive the transition to adulthood. In my circle of childhood friends, though, roleplaying games mostly did not.

To be fair, I eventually made other friends who shared my passion for gaming, but they were almost all people I met through the hobby, not the ones I’d grown up with. That’s why I often wonder why I stuck with it when so many others did not. I don’t believe it’s because I was more dedicated or imaginative; some of my friends were far more talented referees and players. Nor do I think the hobby itself changed in some way that pushed them out. They’d already drifted away long before the edition wars, the OSR, or any of the other developments one might offer as convenient explanations for their departures.

If I’ve come to any conclusion at all, it’s that roleplaying games continued to scratch an itch nothing else quite could. They combined the pleasures of reading, worldbuilding, problem-solving, and camaraderie into a single, strangely durable form. Even during my late high school years, when I didn’t play as often as I’d have liked, I still found myself returning to rulebooks, adventures, and setting material, much as one might return to a favorite novel or album. RPGs became part of the architecture of my inner life.

I don’t begrudge my childhood friends for having “abandoned” the hobby. Their lives simply went in other directions, as lives often do. I wouldn’t be surprised if some still remember our campaigns with fondness, even if they haven’t rolled a die in decades. Others may barely remember the details, but I remember those early days with great affection. In a very real sense, they laid the groundwork for the life I lead today. Even so, it’s hard not to wonder why I stayed immersed in this hobby while they did not.

I suspect many long-time gamers have had similar experiences. We are the ones who stayed, often without entirely meaning to. Something in roleplaying games held our attention long after the initial spark that brought us in. Perhaps that’s why so many of us older players end up blogging, designing, or running campaigns well into middle age. We’re still trying to understand what this odd pastime means to us and why it continues to matter so much after all these years.

In the end, I don’t know precisely why I stuck with RPGs when most of my childhood friends let them go. But I’m grateful I did. The hobby has given me friendships, creative outlets, and a way of thinking about the world that I doubt I would have found elsewhere. Maybe, in some small way, staying with it all these years is my way of honoring the unbridled joy we all felt around the table, back when we had no idea what we were doing and felt as if a vast, unknown world had been opened to us.

Retrospective: Conquest of the Empire

Stop me if you've heard this before: I was never a wargamer, but I liked the idea of wargames, specifically simulating a military or other conflict through the use of a board, tokens, and dice. There's just something inherently appealing to me about this, which probably explains why I've spent more than four decades trying but rarely succeeding at finding a wargame that really clicked with me. I owned and played a number of Avalon Hill and SPI games in my youth, but, with the exception of Diplomacy, I was never very good at them (and even there I was hampered by my inexplicable tendency to play Austria-Hungary).

However, in 1984, Milton Bradley released a line of games under the banner of the "Gamemaster Series" that caught my attention. The series was an experiment in bringing wargames to the mass market. Each entry in the series came in a massive, shelf-dominating box filled with lavish components and a rulebook that looked intimidating compared to more traditional boardgames like Monopoly or Risk. The series began with Axis & Allies, designed by Larry Harris, and followed swiftly with another of his creations, Conquest of the Empire.

While Axis & Allies presented World War II in game form, Conquest of the Empire did the same thing for the Roman Empire's Crisis of the Third Century. The game was a grand-scale battle for supremacy across the Mediterranean world after the death of Marcus Aurelius. It was, in every sense, a spectacle, a game whose physical components alone promised an epic experience before a single die was rolled. As a young history buff with a particular affection for Greco-Roman history, this was the game I'd been waiting for.

To appreciate Conquest of the Empire, it helps to recall what the gaming landscape looked like in the mid-1980s. The boundary between “mainstream” and “hobby” games was much starker than it is today. Wargames were, as I noted above, largely the province of companies like Avalon Hill or SPI. They were sold in specialty stores to an audience comfortable with long rulebooks and hex maps. By contrast, the Gamemaster Series was an attempt to bridge that gap by combining high production values, streamlined rules, and compelling subjects to attract both traditional hobbyists and curious outsiders like myself. 

Axis & Allies was, I gather, very successful. Certainly my friends and I enjoyed playing it and we did so often. Of course, even in the 1980s, World War II was a staple of wargames. Conquest of the Empire thus deviated just enough to be considered daring. Furthermore, its subject, the period of the Military Anarchy, was less familiar and its map of the Mediterranean world, divided into provinces and trade routes, hinted at something more intricate than the average family game. Of course, that's precisely why I loved it.

Opening Conquest of the Empire for the first time is something I cannot forget. To start, the box was enormous. Inside lay nearly four hundred molded plastic miniatures, such as legionnaires with raised shields, catapults, coins, and galleys to patrol the Mare Nostrum. There were also cities to build, roads to lay down, and an oversized, vividly illustrated board depicting the known world from Britannia in the northwest to Aegyptus in the southeast. Following the death of Marcus Aurelius, the empire teeters on the brink of chaos. Each player takes the role of a would-be emperor, commanding armies, building cities, taxing provinces, and waging war until one emerges victorious. It's a straightforward and appealing premise – especially to my teenage self.

Like Axis & Allies, the game was structured around economic management and military conquest. Provinces provided income, which could be spent to raise legions, fleets, and fortifications. Armies moved along roads or across the sea, engaging in battles resolved by simple dice rolls. Catapults were useful in sieges and galleys could ferry troops to distant shores. Victory went to the player who amassed the most wealth and territory, though, in practice, the game often ended in exhaustion or mutual ruin long before an emperor was crowned.

That said, the game was not without its flaws. Its economy could snowball rapidly, favoring whoever secured a few prosperous provinces early on. Combat could be pretty random, with legions sometimes crushed or exalted on a handful of dice. The rules for roads and taxation added an appealing Roman flavor but little in the way of meaningful choice. Players spent much of the game counting coins, rebuilding destroyed forces, and waiting for their next chance to strike. One might argue that some of this is, in fact, realistic or at least true to history, but it didn't always make for a satisfying game.

Even so, Conquest of the Empire often felt epic. Setting up the board, arranging your legions, and surveying the Mediterranean was a ritual of grandeur. It was easy to imagine oneself as a latter-day Caesar, eyeing the spoils of empire. The game rewarded patience more than finesse and spectacle more than subtlety, but it delivered a sense of scale that my friends and I found incredibly alluring. It's little wonder that I still think about this game decades later.

From what I have read, it seems that Milton Bradley’s Gamemaster Series never achieved the mainstream success the company had hoped. Axis & Allies became a perennial favorite and spawned multiple editions and spin-offs, but Conquest of the Empire eventually vanished from store shelves, remembered fondly by those of us who had the chance to play it back in the day. I suspect part of the reason was that its theme was less immediately engaging to American audiences and its rules required a level of commitment somewhat closer to Avalon Hill than to Parker Brothers.

I don't mean that as a criticism at all. I absolutely adored this game and deeply regret that my original copy was lost sometime in the '90s. Conquest of the Empire might not have achieved what Milton Bradley had hoped for it, but, for me, it was a near-perfect "middle road" between simple boardgames and the esoteric complexities of "true" wargames. If there were more games like this, I might actually play them.

Dream-Quest: Mirroring the Psyche

Here's another Dream-Quest post, though it's unfortunately restricted to patrons. Even so, I bring it to your attention, in the event that it might be of interest to regular readers of the blog.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Realistic Vital Statistics"

I am nothing if not tedious and repetitive, so, when turning to issue #91 of Dragon (November 1984), it was pretty much a given that I'd talking about the article "Realistic Vital Statistics" by Stephen Inniss. The article is a near-perfect exemplar of the Silver Age of D&D, with its concern for providing referees with the tools needed to inject "realism" into their adventures and campaigns. In this case, the author's concern is for the fact that, according to their descriptions in the Monster Manual and Players Handbook, dwarves are implausibly heavy, standing only 4 feet tall and yet weighing 150 pounds (on average). According to Mr Inniss, if one extrapolated this weight for a 6-foot tall human male, he'd weigh over 500 pounds! This, he says, violates a fundamental rule of physics – the square-cube law, which states that "the weight (or volume) of an object is proportional to the product of its linear dimensions (height, length, and width)." Using a realistic model, a 4-foot dwarf should weigh only about a third the weight listed in the AD&D books.

The article thus provides a series of tables for generating more plausible vital statistics to replace those in the Dungeon Masters Guide. For what it is, the system is pretty easy to use: the tables are clear and the variables aren't difficult to keep track of. But, ultimately, I find myself wondering why anyone would care about such a system. Mr Inniss notes that giants in D&D show no signs of appropriate adaptation to their height and (presumed) weight, meaning they're not very plausible as typically presented. Having said that, he then dismisses the concern by saying

Fortunately, their world is a magical one. They are probably supported by some permanent variant of the levitate spell, with bone-strengthening magic thrown in for good measure. Interestingly, the larger giants (storm and cloud giants), like the equally huge titans, have true levitation powers perhaps a natural extension of the talents of their lesser brethren.

It's, in my opinion, a perfectly valid solution to this "problem" of the height and weight of giants, but, if one can accept this when dealing with giants, why is the weight of dwarves an issue? Once you admit that the world is magical and therefore exempt from inconvenient physical laws that would get in the way of fantasy, where does on draw the line? Mr Inniss anticipated this line of thought and attempted to counter it.

Since this is after all a fantasy game, it might be argued that it doesn't matter how much dwarves are defined as weighing. However, it is just such realistic-looking details as a character's height and weight that make for a more willing suspension of disbelief during a game session. Otherwise, why bother with such statistics in the first place? Plausibility, or "realism" as it is sometimes called, is definitely a factor in the enjoyment of even a fantasy game; the more so where the game makes a relatively close approach to reality.

I'm far from convinced by Mr Inniss's rejoinder, but, leaving that aside, when was the last time that a character's precise weight mattered in a game? I can't recall its ever mattering in any games that I've run. Height is a little more useful, though, even there, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I ever allowed or disallowed a character action based on height. For me, knowing that a dwarf weighs 152 or merely 52 pounds is about as vital as knowing whether he has brown hair or red.

But that's just me.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Celephaïs

With October now over, Pulp Fantasy Library returns to H.P. Lovecraft and those of his tales commonly gathered under the heading of the “Dream Cycle.” Among these, few are as revealing of Lovecraft’s early imagination as “Celephaïs.”

First published in the November 1922 issue of Sonia H. Greene’s amateur journal, The Rainbow, “Celephaïs” was actually written two years earlier, during Lovecraft’s most pronounced Dunsanian phase. It is arguably the most significant of his early fantasies. A short, elegiac prose-poem that bridges the ornate reveries of Lovecraft's youth and the cosmic horror for which he would later become celebrated, it also appeared posthumously in the July 1939 issue of Weird Tales, whose cover I have reproduced here.

The story concerns a lonely Englishman living in modern London, who dreams of the city of Celephaïs, a timeless, radiant place of marble and opal beside a cerulean sea. There, he – who goes by the name Kuranes in dreams but a different one while awake – once dwelt amid golden domes and cloud-kissed towers. In waking life, however, Kuranes is destitute and forgotten, wandering the gray, joyless streets of a modern world that has lost all its color and wonder.

Lovecraft recounts how, through the use of drugs, Kuranes retreats into his dreams, striving to visit Celephaïs once again. At first, his visions are fleeting, but, as he turns to ever more potent narcotics, the distinction between waking and dreaming begins to blur. He becomes so devoted to this endeavor that he eventually loses his home and remaining wealth, becoming destitute. At the story's conclusion, his body is found lifeless, washed ashore near his ancestral home. Yet, in the Dreamlands, Kuranes reigns over Celephaïs as its chief god, eternal and unchanged.

Like “The White Ship” and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” “Celephaïs” clearly reflects Lord Dunsany’s influence on Lovecraft, both in diction and subject matter. Likewise, the yearning for a world of beauty and wonder lost to the banalities of modern life is pure Dunsany. However, Lovecraft’s version is more personal, suffused with melancholy and nostalgia rather than detached mythic grandeur. Kuranes’ longing for an idealized realm of beauty mirrors Lovecraft’s own retreat into the dreamworlds of antiquarianism, fantasy, and imagination. The city of Celephaïs embodies the Dreamlands’ central promise that, through dreams, one might escape time, decay, and the indignities of the modern age.

At its core, “Celephaïs” is a story of escape, not merely from the material world, but also from time and even mortality itself. Even so, Lovecraft seems somewhat ambivalent about this. He presents this escape as simultaneously poignant and ironic. In the end, Kuranes attains eternal kingship, but only through death; the perfect city of Celephaïs exists solely in dream and to dwell there forever is to abandon mortal life altogether.

Lovecraft would return to this theme in later works such as “The Silver Key” and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Randolph Carter, the protagonist of both, is a kindred spirit to Kuranes. He is another dreamer seeking entrance to the Dreamlands and yearning for the marvels and glories of an old remembered dream. Indeed, “Celephaïs” marks the first explicit appearance of the Dreamlands as a coherent world, populated by recurring beings, cities, and seas.

Kuranes himself would later reappear in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Kuranes as the immortal ruler of Celephaïs. From his dream-city, he warns Randolph Carter that the gods of dream are capricious and that too great a longing for lost beauty may lead to peril. His presence in that later tale underscores the double-edged nature of dreaming itself: it can preserve the past, but only by cutting the dreamer off from reality.

Stylistically, “Celephaïs” is rich with the luxuriant diction of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian phase, which can be seen in its remarkable opening paragraph: 

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experienced failed to reveal it, he sought in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

In addition to strongly suggesting an autobiographical element to his portrayal of Kuranes, this paragraph also presents the emotional core of Lovecraft’s art at the time. He is acutely aware that beauty is transient, that time destroys all, and that the imagination’s only victory over decay is the fragile, perilous one offered by dreams. It is thus no coincidence that the story opens, “In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley.” For HPL, all ideal worlds are dreams and the act of dreaming – or of creating art – is the only means by which mortals may briefly touch the eternal. "Celephaïs" thus stands as a key statement of Lovecraft’s early esthetics. In it, he reveals a yearning for the past and for permanence, expressed through the medium of bittersweet fantasy.

“Celephaïs” may lack the cosmic scope of Lovecraft’s later mythos tales, but it remains one of his most affecting works. It reveals a writer caught between the romantic longing for a vanished world and the growing realization that all beauty is fleeting. In that tension lies the germ of Lovecraft’s mature vision, where the infinite is both wondrous and terrifying and where the dream of escape becomes, paradoxically, a confrontation with the limits of human existence.

Interview: Marzio Muscedere (Part II)

Part I of this interview can be found here. 

5. Can you talk a little about the process of turning Zothique into a RPG? I'm interested not just in the game mechanical side of things but also in your experiences working with CASiana Literary Enterprises. Did you find it easy to translate Zothique into a roleplaying game?

For me, the RPG writing process usually starts the same way: with a deep dive into the source material. For Zothique, that meant going back into Clark Ashton Smith’s stories and reading them with a critical eye. Luckily, I’ve always been a note-taker when reading, highlighting passages, turns of phrase, perspective shifts, metaphors – anything that catches my attention.

So when I returned to my old CAS collections, they were already filled with highlights and margin notes (sacrilege, I know) and those became the foundation for the game. From there, I began organizing everything into categories – locations, creatures, gods, artifacts, NPCs, spells, etc. – and slowly drew the setting out piece by piece, ensuring that every element carried the same atmosphere of doom, decadence, and fatal beauty that runs through Smith’s work.

Stats come last. For me, stats always come last. I don’t fret over them. No one remembers your adventure because a creature had AC 15 instead of AC 12. Now, I’m not saying stats aren’t important – bad stats can certainly break your game – but I’m not sure they can make your game. People remember your adventures because of how they made them feel when reading and playing.

I’ve always tried to make my games feel lived in – dripping with atmosphere and history – and I don’t mean paragraphs of exposition. I mean placing items, objects, strange writings, or locations that hint at something more, something ancient, something mysterious. In my opinion, good RPGs don’t feel like they were created just to run characters through like a carnival ride or funhouse. Good RPGs feel alive and mysterious, with the weight of ages upon every item and location – steeped in secrecy and the lingering sense that others have come before.

As for working with CASiana Literary Enterprises, it has honestly been a privilege. Chris has been supportive since day one – a great guy to work with and genuinely passionate about Clark Ashton Smith’s legacy. They’ve been open, helpful, and just as excited as I am to bring Smith’s world to a new generation of readers and players. I really think people are going to like what they see.

6. Why did you decide to use Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark as the rules for your game? I know you're very familiar with DCC but why Shadowdark rather than, say, Swords & Wizardry or Old School Essentials?

I made the decision early that I would not create a new RPG system for Zothique, but rather bring existing systems into Zothique. The setting is the constant; the rules are the lens. My goal was for the world to remain entirely faithful to CAS – its geography, its gods and necromancers, its tone of grandeur and decay – while allowing players to experience it through systems they already know. That’s why each version, whether written for 5E, Dungeon Crawl Classics, or Shadowdark, is fundamentally the same world. The dice may differ, but Zothique itself does not.

Choosing those specific systems came down to both philosophy and practicality. Dungeon Crawl Classics was a natural fit – its pulp roots, Appendix N inspiration (I know, CAS doesn’t appear there… but that’s an argument for another day, lol), and focus on strange sorcery and peril align perfectly with Smith’s fiction. Plus, it is what I do. 5E made sense because it’s the most widely played system and one I know intimately from years of conversion work for Goodman Games and play. Shadowdark, on the other hand, was chosen out of the many requests for me to do so. The more I spoke of my upcoming project at cons or online, the more I was asked to bring the setting to Shadowdark. So I looked into the system – and I loved it. The aesthetic, the tension, the fast, streamlined play - I think it fits Zothique perfectly.

It’s important to note that I’m not bringing Zothique to these game systems – I’m bringing these game systems to Zothique. Regardless of which ruleset you prefer, the world itself remains the same – true to Clark Ashton Smith’s original vision. The laws of Zothique do not change, only the dice that measure them do. In short – the rules serve the setting – not the other way around.

And why stop at three systems? Because, frankly, if I didn’t, I think I’d go mad.

7. Can you talk a little more about the rules and other game mechanics of the various versions of the Zothique RPG? What's unique about them? Are there any elements you're especially proud of or think would catch the interest of old school gaming fans? 

Zothique isn’t a new RPG system – it’s a setting designed to haunt the games you already know. Built to run seamlessly with Dungeon Crawl Classics, 5E, or Shadowdark, it lets players step into Zothique without learning a new rulebook. Familiar mechanics are reskinned in the decadent tone of Clark Ashton Smith’s last continent, supported by new character classes – the Astrologer, Doomed Prince, Tomb Robber, Court Slayer, Sorcerer-Priest, and Necromancer – along with new spells, creatures, and relics. The game introduces a new mechanic – a Doom & Decadence track, a creeping mechanic of temptation and ruin that grants power only at terrible cost. In Zothique, every act of sorcery, every indulgence, and every favor from the gods exacts a price – for nothing beneath the dying sun comes without decay.

8. You're also working on an omnibus of all of the Zothique stories. What can you tell us about that? As a huge fan of Smith, who already owns his collected fiction in several versions, what does this omnibus offer that we haven't seen before? 

The Zothique Omnibus gathers the entire cycle – fifteen stories, one poem, one six-act play, and several rare fragments – in a single lavishly illustrated volume. Artist Lucas Korte brings the dying world to life with over fifteen full-page illustrations of necromantic grandeur and ruin. It’s both a perfect introduction for new readers and a definitive companion for long-time admirers of Clark Ashton Smith’s darkest creation.

9. Is there anything else you'd like to share about this project – something that you really want gamers and fans of Zothique to know about?

What I’d most like people to know is that Zothique isn’t just another fantasy world – it’s the final dream of Earth, brought to life through the words of Clark Ashton Smith. Every page of this project was written to capture that strange beauty and fatal grandeur beneath the dying sun, exactly as Smith envisioned it – decadent, dreamlike, and filled with both wonder and doom. Every rule, map, spell, and description was crafted to feel like something drawn straight from one of his stories – strange, poetic, and tragic in equal measure.

We’re only halfway through the Kickstarter and there’s still so much more to share – more art, more lore, and more glimpses into the last continent. I want to thank everyone who’s taken the time to explore the project, and especially those who’ve backed it and helped bring Zothique closer to life.

And finally, a heartfelt thank-you to you, James, for the interview and for shining a little more light into the dusk of Zothique.

Interview: Marzio Muscedere (Part I)

Even though I spent this past August writing primarily about H.P. Lovecraft and his enduring legacy, when it comes to the Big Three of Weird Tales – Robert E. Howard, HPL, and Clark Ashton Smith – it's actually Smith whom I'd select as my personal favorite. That's why, in another life, I pursued the license to produce a game based on Smith's three most interesting and well-developed settings, Hyperborea, Averoigne, and Zothique. 

Sadly, my plans came to naught, but another inhabitant of the Great White North – Marzio Muscedere – has succeeded where I did not. His company, Marz Press, is publishing an officially licensed Zothique RPG, along with a deluxe illustrated omnibus of all the stories of the Last Continent. I reached out to Marzio to learn more about him, his appreciation of CAS, and the Zothique game he is producing and he kindly agreed to answer my questions, the answers to which will appear today and tomorrow.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you first become involved in the hobby of roleplaying?

My name’s Marzio Muscedere, and I live in a land of nightmare and sorcery deep in the steaming jungles of southern Canada – well, maybe not all that, but I do live in the southernmost tip of the country.

I first got into role-playing back in 1984, when one of my best friends – and forever DM (he still is, by the way) – scored that sweet D&D red box with the Elmore cover. We were in the fourth grade and instantly hooked. We played every chance we got – hours and hours on end. Marathon sessions, campaigns that ran for years in real time. We sailed and reaved across Oerth, where we were the scourge of the Flanaess. We delved dungeons, put every creature to the sword, and hauled away every coin that glittered. I’m sure we mangled half the rules, and I couldn’t pronounce most of the words in the books, but none of that mattered.

As we grew, we tried all kinds of other RPGs between D&D campaigns – West End Star Wars, Top Secret, Rifts, Chill, Torg – you name it. Then, in my teen years, I stopped playing. Twenty-three years went by without a single die roll. Still, I never completely left the hobby. I’d haunt used bookstores, collecting old modules just to read them. Then around 2014 I stumbled onto Dungeon Crawl Classics and that reignited everything – both my love of gaming and my drive to write. Since then, I’ve had over twenty published works and started Marz Press, where I’m now running my fourth Kickstarter.

2. When did you first encounter Clark Ashton Smith? What was the first story of his that you read?

That’s a great question – and honestly, I wish I remembered exactly when it happened. My story’s probably a familiar one: I started with Conan, but back then it was all the Tor paperbacks. From there I found Lovecraft, then eventually the real Conan through the Del Rey Robert E. Howard collections. And somewhere along that path, I found the last and greatest of the Weird Tales trinity – Clark Ashton Smith – or rather, I like to think he found me.

Like the poisonous gleam of a forbidden jewel, his decadent, doom-laden prose pulled me in and never let go. And his vocabulary – I often joke around that the Canadian school system failed me – for here was a self-educated man living in a wooden cabin with no running water who knew more words than anyone I’d ever met!

As for the first story I read, it was “The Abominations of Yondo,” which I ended up using as inspiration for the adventure that won me the contest that led to a contract with Goodman Games. It’s still one of my all-time favorite CAS stories.

3. When did you first come across Zothique, and what was it about the setting that made it so appealing to you?

I really can’t pinpoint when I first came across Zothique – other than to say I discovered it later than many other sword-and-sorcery worlds. And I’m glad that I did. Experiencing Zothique as a more mature reader allowed me to appreciate it in ways I never could have when I was younger. The poetic and purple prose, the at-times perplexing vocabulary, the purposeful absence of a central protagonist, the decadent and dreamlike atmosphere, the world’s inevitable decline into oblivion – all the things that might have turned me off as a younger reader are exactly what captivated me as an adult.

Aside from all that, what makes Zothique so appealing to me is the simple fact that it’s a world at the end of time. It breaks from so many other fantasy settings by embracing fatalism over heroism. In Zothique, there are no true heroes – only doomed figures and decadent sorcerers reeling toward ruin. And unlike many other dying-earth settings, there is no trace of our modern world here – sorcery and superstition have completely supplanted science. Zothique lies in the far future, when the sun itself is dying and civilization has risen and fallen countless times. It is a place of alchemy, necromancy, and forgotten gods – equal parts sin and sorcery – where even the most powerful march toward their own inevitable doom.

I’ve also always loved how there’s an entire side of Zothique that remains just off camera – a vibrant, lived-in world intermingled with an age where corpses walk and dead gods whisper from the mouths of idols. Beyond the necromancers and ancient tombs, you can still feel the pulse of life – the bazaars and bustling marketplaces, the jewelers and innkeepers, the caravans hauling spices and silks across dying seas. There are peddlers of fine wines, traders of strange gems, and merchants and mercenaries far traveled from outer lands.

All of it persists amid the decay – a civilization both decadent and alive, teetering between the everyday and the eternal. It’s that tension, between the living world and the shadow of its own ending, that makes Zothique feel so different from other settings.

For role-players, Zothique is wonderful because it isn’t a world that grows or evolves – it is a world that erodes. This gives it endless room for imagination. Every mountain could hide a forgotten city; every desert could hold a necropolis; every sea, an uncharted isle. It’s a sandbox at the edge of time, filled with tragedy, wonder, and peril.

4. At what point did you decide to produce a roleplaying game set on Zothique?

I wanted Conan. I’ll admit it – I really wanted Goodman Games to get the Conan license so I could write a Conan RPG and adventures. But the more I thought about Conan, the more I found myself turning to Clark Ashton Smith for inspiration in the adventures I was already writing.

And then it just kind of clicked. Here was a world so different, so hauntingly beautiful – why not turn it into an RPG setting? Like most things that have real merit, it came down to creating something you truly love. Zothique is the world I want to play in, so I’m creating it.

My hope is that you’ll want to play in it too – and so far, I’m glad that there are people who do.