Spellbooks

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the occult and esoteric roots of early science fiction and fantasy. The response to that post was enthusiastic, which got me thinking that perhaps it’s time I returned to writing more regularly about fantasy literature. Not long after, I happened to watch an old television episode in which a character mused that a writer’s deepest desire is to affect others with his words. That line stuck with me. Something about it lodged in my thoughts and, when paired with my recent reflections, stirred up an old connection I’ve often found fascinating: that the word grimoire, meaning a book of spells, as every D&D player knows, is merely a corrupted form of the word grammar. This, perhaps inevitably, led me to think of Alan Moore.

Now, Alan Moore has long had a reputation for being, let us say, an eccentric. From his decision to worship an obscure Roman snake god to his renunciation of the comic industry that made him famous, Moore has never shied away from holding – and expressing – unusual opinions. Among his more intriguing ones is the notion that writing is a form of magic. This is not a metaphor, at least not entirely. Moore has argued, quite seriously, that the act of writing, of using symbols to influence the thoughts and emotions of others across time and space, is indistinguishable from what the Ancients understood as sorcery.

Strange though it is, I must admit there’s something compelling about this idea. Even if one doesn’t share Moore’s larger worldview, as I do not, it’s hard to deny that writing can have a powerful effect on the human mind. Through the arrangement of words alone, a writer can make his readers laugh, weep, tremble, or dream. He can transport us to faraway lands, real or imagined, and introduce us to people we’ve never met but whose lives we come to care about deeply. In a very real sense, writing is a kind of conjuring, one that requires no candles or pentagrams, only ink and paper (or a keyboard and computer nowadays).

Consider, for example, the word spell. In modern English, it refers not only to an act of magic but also to the construction of words. To spell something is to put its letters in the correct order. Both meanings trace back to the same Old English root, spellian, meaning to speak or to tell a story. Similarly, as I alluded to above, the word grimoire originally refereed in Old French to a book of Latin grammar and only later came to mean a book of magic, in part because of its obscurity to later generations who no longer studied or understood Latin. Similarly, during the Middle Ages, the word grammar (or gramarye) was used as a synonym for occult knowledge. To be “learned in grammar,” meaning to be a sorcerer, is found in both Spenser and Tennyson, to cite two famous literary examples.  

My mind continued to dwell on these and related thoughts. Like many gamers my age, my first experiences with the hobby were less like reading an instruction manual and more like poring over an ancient tome whose true meaning was just out of reach. For example, Gary Gygax's AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide is notorious for its impenetrability in places. It's dense, baroque, and often bafflingly arranged – but it's also weirdly compelling. When I first encountered it, sometime in 1980, it felt charged in a way I could scarcely articulate at the time. Its pages were filled with the promise of discovery and, yes, even power, if only I could fully unlock its secrets.

The parallels with magic are not hard to see. A rulebook, especially one from those bygone days, isn’t just a guide to playing a game. It’s a grimoire, a book of hidden knowledge that, when properly understood, allows one to reshape the world. In the case of an RPG, that world is imaginary but no less real in the moment of play. The referee becomes a kind of conjurer, invoking the words of the text and combining them with his own imagination to create something new. Dice are his ritual tools. The rulebook is his spellbook. A well-loved module might as well be a scroll, its battered pages whispering of dungeons never fully explored and treasures never claimed.

I can still remember the first time I cracked open the D&D Basic Rulebook edited by J. Eric Holmes. I had just turned ten years-old a couple of months prior and, try as I might, I didn’t entirely understand what I was looking at. Nevertheless, the effect was immediate. The words, the terse descriptions and evocative names, the crude dungeon map at the back, all hinted at something larger, something just beyond my grasp. It was like standing at the edge of a forest and seeing strange lights flicker between the trees. I didn’t need to know everything to feel the pull. The rulebook was already working its magic.

That’s the heart of it, I think. The magic doesn’t reside solely in the words themselves, but in what they evoke and the spaces they open in the reader’s mind. A good RPG rulebook doesn’t just tell you how to play; it helps you see something, to imagine people and places and situations that didn’t exist before. It grants you the ability to summon worlds. That’s no small thing. When I look back on the early designers of RPGs, there's a real sense in which the word "magician" is apt to describe them. Their words conjured entire settings, systems, and styles of play that still persist decades later. Through their books, they reached into the minds of people across the world and sparked curiosity, wonder, and creativity. They transmitted dreams, wrapped in game mechanics and monster stats.

To this day, when I pick up an old TSR module or GDW product, I feel a flicker of that same enchantment. By today's standards, their production values may be modest and the prose often obscure, but their spells still work. That probably explains why I've never left this hobby behind, as so many of my childhood friends did. There’s something undeniably magical about it, something that goes beyond nostalgia. These books are more than just artifacts of a bygone era. They’re vessels of imaginative power and those who wrote them were, knowingly or not, practitioners of the oldest art of all.

The art of making something from nothing.

The art of words.

The art of magic.