Awe-ful

There is a particular kind of emotion that, in my experience, is easily forgotten in our world of algorithms and explanations but that once held a central place in human experience. I’m speaking of awe, not merely in its diluted modern sense, but in its original meaning: a mixture of wonder and fear in the face of something vast, strange, and beyond human comprehension. It’s a feeling that borders on the religious and it is the lifeblood of the weird and the uncanny.

H.P. Lovecraft understood this, perhaps better than most writers of the last hundred years. Through his work, he attempted to refine the weird tale it into a kind of secular mysticism, in which the cosmos itself becomes the site of both revelation and terror. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, he famously wrote that 

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” 

However, Lovecraft’s best stories do more than simply terrify. They evoke awe in its fullest sense, what he elsewhere calls a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.” When he describes beings whose very geometry defies human perception or ancient truths that shatter the minds of those who grasp them, he is evoking something far deeper than mere fright. He is pointing toward the sublime.

Sigmund Freud distinguished between the "uncanny" and the "familiar," noting how the former is not simply the unknown, but the strangely known, the familiar made alien. Lovecraft seized on this psychological dissonance and expanded it to include the entire cosmos. His monsters are not just unknowable; they are that which we once knew in some long-buried dream of pre-human memory. The sense of uncanny recognition is part of the horror. It is this effect, more than mere violence or gore, that marks the best weird fiction.

Of course, horror is only part of the equation. What often goes unspoken is how beautiful the weird can be. The shimmering city of the Elder Things beneath the ice of Antarctica; the dream-haunted vistas of Kadath; the mind-transcending journey of Randolph Carter through the stars. These are not scenes of mere terror. They are awe-inspiring in the truest sense – sublime and strange, but also profoundly glorious. Lovecraft understood that what we call horror and what we call wonder are not always distinct categories. The numinous is a threshold. The emotion it provokes may be colored by fear, reverence, or ecstasy or some combination of the three.

Naturally, this brings me to roleplaying games.

When I think back to my earliest experiences with RPGs, what strikes me most is how often they trafficked in awe. I'm not talking about desperate combats or puzzles to be solved, but fleeting and fragile moments when the game evoked something stranger and deeper. A mysterious door that could not be opened. A statue with eyes that seemed to follow you. A creature whose motives and nature eluded simple categorization. In those moments, even the purple prose of boxed text or the improvisations of a teenaged Dungeon Master could occasionally brush up against the ineffable. 

This is, I think, one of the great potentials of the roleplaying medium: its ability to resurrect feelings that modern life has largely anesthetized, like wonder before the uncanny. These feelings are not mere tropes to be mined, but modes of perception, ways of seeing the world as something deeper and more alive with meaning and strangeness.

Lovecraft feared the loss of these feelings in modernity. It's ironic that he is most famous for his fiction, because Supernatural Horror in Literature, an essay of literary criticism, is undeniably one of his greatest works. There, he laments the triumph of the merely rational in fiction and calls for a return to cosmic awe, a feeling that transcends individual psychology and touches something vast and impersonal. He believed that the weird tale could restore "the stimulation of wonder and fancy." It's no surprise, then, that his own work (and the many games it inspired) have done exactly that for generations of readers and players.

Perhaps that is the true function of the weird tale (or the weird game): to break through the crust of the mundane and let in something ancient, fearful, and magnificent. Weird tales remind us that the universe is, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine and that, in the face of that strangeness, we are still capable of awe.

Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts by James Maliszewski

In Which I Begin to Doubt Myself

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Retrospective: Call of Cthulhu

"Didn't James already do a Retrospective on Call of Cthulhu?" After four hundred posts in this series – this one is, in fact, the four hundredth – you would understandably think that, but it's not true. As I've discovered in the process of choosing the contents of my Grognardia anthologies, I didn't start writing Retrospective posts until September 17, 2008 and, even then, those posts didn't become consistent, weekly features of the blog for a while longer. 

Now, I did write a post – my first one on the subject – about Call of Cthulhu on October 31, 2008 that definitely has something of a Retrospective vibe about it. Indeed, I regularly link to that post as a kind of substitute for the fact that, even after all these years, I'd still never written a Retrospective on CoC, despite my immense affection for the game, which I consider among the greatest and most influential games and game designs in the history of the hobby.

Since I'm now nearly halfway through my The Shadow over August series honoring the memory of H.P. Lovecraft, I thought now might be the perfect time to rectify this very old oversight on my part. However, since my original post from 2008, "A Game for Grown-Ups," already covers much of the ground I'd usually cover in a Retrospective post, I've decided that this one will instead focus on a different aspect of Call of Cthulhu, namely, its place in the history of the hobby.

When the game first appeared in 1981, it was unlike anything that had come before it. Published by Chaosium and designed by Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis, it was the first fully realized horror role-playing game. There had, of course, been fantasy games with horrific elements before it. Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, had more than its share of shambling undead and sanity-blasting monsters, but Call of Cthulhu was the first to make horror not merely an atmospheric seasoning but the whole meal. In doing so, it did more than simply introduce a new genre to the RPG marketplace; it reframed what a role-playing game could be.

The significance of being first is hard to overstate. By 1981, science fiction, post-apocalypse, superheroes, and espionage each had their own dedicated RPGs, often more than one. Horror, however, remained conspicuously absent, perhaps because many assumed its central emotion, fear, couldn’t be easily conjured at the table. Petersen’s ingenious solution was not to frighten the players directly, but to have them role-play fear. Dread emerged from the slow unravelling of an investigator’s mind, the accumulation of forbidden knowledge, and the grim realization that the forces at work could never be overcome in the usual, heroic way.

This approach has since become the template for almost all horror games, even when they are self-consciously attempting to distance themselves from it. Just Alfred North Whitehead famously called Western philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato, the same can be said of Call of Cthulhu's place in the realm of horror RPGs. The sanity mechanic, the emphasis on investigation over combat, and the focus on player knowledge versus character fragility all flowed from Petersen’s design choices in Call of Cthulhu. Nearly every horror RPG since has grappled with or responded to this foundation.

For Chaosium, Call of Cthulhu was similarly transformative. Before 1981, the company was best known for RuneQuest and its Glorantha setting, along with Basic Role-Playing, the streamlined system that powered it. These were critical successes but niche compared to the behemoth that was TSR. Call of Cthulhu changed the equation, thanks to its much wider appeal. By the mid-1980s, Call of Cthulhu was outselling everything else Chaosium produced and it became the company’s flagship line for decades. In many respects, Call of Cthulhu was Chaosium in the public mind and arguably is still the game most closely associated with the company.

It’s telling that Chaosium survived rough patches in its history largely because Call of Cthulhu never went out of print. Where other RPGs waxed and waned in popularity, CoC had a steady, international audience. Indeed, its scenarios and campaigns became not just supplements but cultural touchstones in RPG history. Many are considered landmarks whose influence extends far beyond their original audience, much like Call of Cthulhu itself. Looking back, the game’s influence is visible everywhere. Here are just a few that occur to me:

Dungeons & Dragons modules before 1981 were largely site-based adventures. By contrast, CoC’s scenarios pioneered investigation-driven play, where clues, interviews, and research were central. This structure seeped back into other genres, shaping how adventures were written.

Though frequently imitated, few mechanics have been as thematically perfect as CoC’s sanity rules, which track not just the erosion of mental stability but the cost of knowing too much. It’s become almost impossible to design a horror RPG without addressing the question: what’s your version of this mechanic?

Translations of CoC played a huge role in spreading RPGs worldwide, especially in countries where Lovecraft’s stories already had a foothold. In France, Japan, and elsewhere, it rather than, say, Dungeons & Dragons was often the gateway RPG.

More than four decades later, Call of Cthulhu is not merely Chaosium’s flagship; it is "the Dungeons & Dragons of horror gaming." It has become the lingua franca of the genre, the common framework through which players, Keepers, and designers alike approach tales of the uncanny and the unknown. It remains the benchmark for how to adapt a literary source faithfully without becoming a prisoner to it, preserving the essence of Lovecraft’s cosmic dread while evolving into a style of play all its own.

Like D&D, it has been endlessly imitated, parodied, expanded upon, and reimagined, yet the original endures – still recognizably itself and still drawing new players into its orbit. For many, it is not simply a horror RPG; it is the horror RPG, the game against which all others are measured. As long as players gather to face ancient secrets and watch their fragile investigators descend into madness, Call of Cthulhu will remain the universal tongue of tabletop terror.

"Lovecraft was not a good writer."

It’s a commonplace criticism of H.P. Lovecraft that his writing is overwrought and I can certainly understand why one might say so. His style is undeniably dense with adjectives, studded with archaisms, and includes unusual words like "eldritch" and "cyclopean" to cite just two obvious examples. These are old indictments. In a 1945 essay appearing in The New Yorker, the American literary critic, Edmund Wilson stated plainly 

"Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe's is only one of many sad signs that almost nobody any more pays real attention to writing."

Many modern readers, including some who otherwise enjoy horror fiction, more or less agree with Wilson's judgment. On some level, there's more than a little truth to it, but I also think Wilson missed something essential about what Lovecraft was trying to do.

Certainly, Lovecraft’s prose is not plain. He does not describe a crumbling house or the whisper of wind through dead trees with, say, Hemingway’s economy. Instead, he piles on adjectives like charms against something too large and too old to be named. This is not accidental. Lovecraft was not a bad stylist. He was a purposeful one, even if he was not always a successful one. Any faults of his prose are, I believe, the byproduct of its ambition.

One of Lovecraft’s core preoccupations was with the limits of human understanding. His protagonists, whether scholars, scientists, or dreamers are nearly always brought to a precipice – of history, of knowledge, of space or time – beyond which lies something that cannot be fully grasped by the human mind. The horror in Lovecraft's stories is not simply monstrous; it is ontological. His stories revolve around experiences that are, by definition, indescribable. Despite this, they must be described, for the very simple reason that fiction requires language.

Faced with this paradox, Lovecraft responded in a way that makes perfect sense: he embraced inadequacy. His style is not polished to clarity but instead embraces excess. His adjectives are cumulative, not precise. His use of antiquated words is not an attempt at faux-scholarly authority, but a deliberate effort to suggest a register of experience outside the ordinary. The result is not always readable in the conventional sense, but it is evocative and that is the point.

In this way, Lovecraft’s prose functions almost like glossolalia or automatic writing. It does not persuade or explain. It reaches instead for effect. Its baroque qualities are not the product of ignorance or even bad taste, but of desperation. They're an attempt to use every available tool to conjure a feeling of cosmic awe or creeping dread. The occasional absurdity of his style, like the much-mocked “indescribable” things described at length, should not obscure the sincerity and power of his attempt.

One might say that Lovecraft was not writing about the weird so much as trying to write weirdly, if you can see the distinction. His stories are often most effective when read not for their literal content but for their cumulative mood, the way one might listen to a dissonant piece of music not to understand something, but to feel something. That he sometimes failed in this attempt is obvious. That he failed interestingly – and at times succeeded brilliantly – is equally so.

This does not mean that all criticisms of his prose are misplaced. Even Lovecraft himself was aware of his stylistic excesses and, in his letters, often laments them. However, to dismiss his writing as “bad” in some generic sense is to misunderstand both what he was trying to do and how radical it really was. His style was not an obstacle to his cosmicism. Rather, it was cosmicism writ large, trembling with adjectives and echoing with the voices of unnamable things.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Cthulhu Mythos Revisited" and "A Rebuttal to 'The Cthulhu Mythos Revisited'"

Having already broken the original intent of this series by highlighting Dragon magazine articles I never read during their initial publication simply because of their Lovecraftian content, I'm going to do so again, this time by discussing two articles in a single post. In this case, I think it can be more than justified for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the "articles" in question are actually letters to the editor and, therefore, comparatively short. Secondly, the two letters are in dialog with one another, as well as with the "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column I discussed last week. Discussing both of them here thus makes a great deal of sense.

The first letter by self-proclaimed "High Priest of the Great Old Ones," Gerald Guinn, appears in issue #14 (July 1978). It's mostly a nitpicky – and inaccurate – criticism of the Kuntz and Holmes presentation of the Mythos in D&D terms. I say "inaccurate," because Mr Guinn, despite being "an avid fan of Lovecraft," seems to have imbibed more than a little of the Derlethian Kool-Aid when it comes to his understanding of HPL's creation (and I say this as someone who unironically appreciates Derleth's contributions). His complaints, by and large, boil down to deviating from Derleth's interpretations of Lovecraft.

For example, Guinn repeats the un-Lovecraftian idea that the Elder Gods "defeated" the Great Old Ones, as well as making dubious genealogical ("Cthulhu, first spawn of Yog-Sothoth") and elemental connections ("Hastur ... is the KING OF AIR !!!!!!!") that have no basis in HPL's own texts. In some cases, I'm not even certain I can pin these errors on Derleth, who, for all his faults, never seemed to have suggested that Nyarlathotep was a Great Old One or an offspring of Azathoth. Neither did Derleth make Ubbo-Sathla "the center of the universe." 

This is all very "inside baseball" stuff, but I find it very interesting. If nothing else, it's a reminder of just how obsessive nerds can be about getting the "facts" of fictional settings correct – and how much effort they'll put into demonstrating their superior knowledge of those facts. It's also a reminder of the extent to which not just Derleth but other post-Lovecraftian authors proved influential in fans' understanding of the Mythos. Much like Robert E. Howard's Conan, whose popular conception was largely colored by the pastiches of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, Lovecraft was similarly misunderstood well into the 1970s. Most of Guinn's objections stem, in my opinion, from such misunderstandings, including his taking issue with the D&D stats of Hastur, Cthugha, and so on.

Rather than dwell on how many hit points a shoggoth should have, I want to turn to the second letter, which appeared in issue #16 (July 1978). Written by J. Eric Holmes, it's intended as an answer to Gerlad Guinn's critique of the original article. Holmes starts, amusing enough, by stating that "When one gets into religious controversy the first thing one discovers is that the scriptures themselves are self-contradictory and subject to varying interpretations." It's a funny line, but also an apt one, as dissecting just what Lovecraft meant or intended is a kind of exegesis. I've often felt that, as the practice of traditional religion has declined, many people have turned to pop culture as a replacement. 

Whether my thesis is true or not, Holmes quickly gets to the heart of the issue: the "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column he and Rob Kuntz wrote "draws most heavily from Lovecraft's own works" rather than those of HPL's friends and imitators. This is a perfectly valid rebuttal and no more need be said on the matter. Even leaving aside the errors Guinn makes in his original critiques, which Holmes addresses individually, the larger point still stands, namely, that Kuntz and Holmes wrote their descriptions with Lovecraft in mind and no one else. To continue Holmes's earlier religious analogy, he prefers a textualist reading of the Mythos over any other.

One can, of course, agree or disagree with this approach, but I think it's a defensible one. In general, my own preferences when it comes to this specific question is fairly close to that of Holmes. At the same time, I think it's equally defensible to include a wider range of source material in conceiving of the Mythos. How wide a range is an equally important question. From its first edition, Call of Cthulhu, for example, has included a fairly broad range of sources – just look at the creatures in its bestiary – and that rarely raises any comment from gamers. On the other hand, I don't begrudge anyone who draws the line at one place or another, so long as he can articulate why and to what purpose.

These kinds of debates are fascinating to me. Lovecraft himself hoped his ideas and concepts, his monsters and alien gods would be picked up and used by other writers, each of whom would add his own wrinkles to the growing tapestry of what we now call the Mythos. He did not care that this would introduce contradictions and confusion, because that's the nature of a real mythology. The only thing I suspect he'd have objected to is the claim that there was one and only one "true" version that everyone else must accept. He wasn't founding a dogmatic religion but creating a smorgasbord of elements from which his fellow authors could pick and choose as they wished. In that respect, I think he'd probably be delighted at how broadly disseminated his ideas have since become, even if he might not like some of the specific uses to which they've been put.

Why Thousand Suns?

Here's another post over at Grognardia Games Direct that would benefit from more eyes. I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who've never picked up or played Thousand Suns, since one of the goals of the second edition is to attract new players who might otherwise have never considered it.

Why Thousand Suns? by James Maliszewski

An Attempt at a Sales Pitch

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Of Periwigs and Pallid Masks

Virgil Finlay's depiction of Lovecraft as an 18th century gentleman

Since its initial publication in 1981, the default setting of Call of Cthulhu has been the 1920s, reflecting the decade in which many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories take place. Over the years, however, Chaosium has greatly expanded the scope of the game through a variety of alternate historical settings. Beginning with Cthulhu Now in 1987, these supplements have offered Keepers and players the chance to explore the Mythos in different cultural and technological contexts, each one shedding new light on Lovecraftian horror by viewing it through a fresh historical lens. These settings reveal how the themes of cosmic dread and forbidden knowledge persist across the centuries.

Yet one historical period remains conspicuously absent: colonial America. To the best of my knowledge, Chaosium has never released a full supplement set in 17th- or 18th-century British North America. That strikes me as a peculiar omission, especially given Lovecraft’s own lifelong fascination with the 18th century. Lovecraft spoke often and fondly of the colonial era, which he regarded as the last bastion of esthetic and intellectual refinement before the coarsening of the modern world. His affection for 18th-century diction, architecture, and worldview was not mere antiquarianism. It was, in his mind, a form of temporal displacement. In a letter, Lovecraft wrote:

"I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. ... Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries

His disdain for the Revolution and American independence from Britain was equally unambiguous. In another letter, he declared:

“When my grandfather told me of the American Revolution, I shocked everyone by adopting a dissenting view ... Grover Cleveland was grandpa's ruler, but Her Majesty, Victoria, Queen of Great Britain & Ireland & Empress of India commanded my allegiance. 'God Save the Queen!' was a stock phrase of mine.”

When others rose to honor The Star-Spangled Banner, Lovecraft would famously remain seated or, in some cases, sing “To Anacreon in Heaven,” the 18th-century drinking song whose melody Francis Scott Key had used as the basis for his poem, later adopted as the U.S. national anthem.

More than a personal affectation, Lovecraft’s British colonial sympathies run deep in his fiction. His only novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I discussed in my earlier post today, is perhaps the clearest example of what I am talking about, but it's far from the only one. In Dreams in the Witch House, for example, the 18th-century witch Keziah Mason enters into a pact with Nyarlathotep and survives (at least in some form) into the modern age. The Shunned House delves into the lingering corruption left behind by late 17th century Huguenot émigrés to Rhode Island. Over and over, Lovecraft imagines New England not simply as a place with a long history, but as a place haunted by its own past of Puritan zealotry, pre-Christian beliefs, and unsettling imports from the Old World.

With that in mind, I began to toy with the idea back in the 1990s of writing a Call of Cthulhu supplement set in 18th-century British America. To be clear, I don't mean Revolutionary America. As I've already noted, Lovecraft had little patience for the mythology of 1776. What intrigued him (and me) was the world just before that rupture, when Boston remained loyal to the Crown, when the frontier still loomed dark and unknown, and when superstition and science existed in uneasy proximity. It’s a setting steeped in ambiguity, where the Enlightenment had only just begun to push back the shadows and had not yet succeeded.

Beyond Lovecraft’s own writings, there’s ample real-world history to inspire such a setting. The Salem witch trials, with their mix of religious hysteria and communal fear; the First Great Awakening, with its itinerant preachers stirring up visions of damnation; the beliefs of cunning folk in rural hamlets; and the syncretic spiritual traditions that arose from the cross-pollination of Europe, America, and Africa. All offer rich material for investigators to explore. The coast is dotted with smugglers' coves, abandoned forts, and plague ships quarantined offshore. Whispered rumors persist of forgotten Norse ruins in the north, ancient earthworks in the Ohio Valley, and strange lights dancing over the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In my own early drafts, I imagined that investigators might include skeptical physicians educated in Edinburgh, disgraced ministers fleeing scandal, or agents of the Crown sent to look into troubling reports from the hinterlands. They might chase whispers of beings haunting the Green Mountains or discover ruins whose builders are unknown to any tribe or settler. A frontier printer might find references in colonial pamphlets to the Sussex Manuscript or a Dutch merchant in Albany might acquire a fragment of a tablet whose script matches that of no known human tongue.

One of the things that initially drew me to this idea was the clarity of the colonial setting. It offers fewer technological conveniences, fewer societal safety nets, and fewer distractions, all of which I felt heighten the tension and sense of isolation. Even so, the setting is anything but simplistic. The early 18th century was a period when science, superstition, and theology all vied for dominance in the human mind. A figure like Emanuel Swedenborg, for example, could be taken seriously not only as a scientist and engineer but also as a visionary who conversed with spirits. That intellectual ambiguity suits the Mythos perfectly. What better era than this to imagine the slow, dreadful replacement of the Puritan conception of God with something darker and utterly indifferent to mankind?

As I said, I never got very far in developing the supplement, mostly because I became absorbed in another, related idea for Call of Cthulhu (more on that in a future post). However, I still think about it from time to time. Given Chaosium’s longstanding embrace of historical settings, I remain surprised that colonial America has yet to claim its rightful place among them. If nothing else, such a setting would offer a subtle tribute to Lovecraft’s own longing for an age of powdered wigs, flintlocks, and candlelight.

Were I not already neck-deep in other projects, I might be tempted to take the idea up again. Perhaps one day I will, assuming, of course, that some other industrious soul doesn’t beat me to it ...

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Of all the stories H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote, only one can rightly be called a novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Completed in 1927 in a burst of activity following his return to Providence after having lived in New York, the manuscript remained unpublished until 1941 (four years after Lovecraft’s death) when it appeared in Weird Tales in an abridged form over two issues. (The full version would appear two years later in 1943.) Lovecraft never revised it and in letters he dismissed it as “a cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism” 

Yet, as is often the case with Lovecraft’s self-criticisms, his judgment was harsher than that of his readers. The very traits he found embarrassing, such as the novel's patient accumulation of historical detail, its period flavor, and its deeply rooted New England setting, are precisely what give it lasting appeal. A rare hybrid of Gothic horror and weird fiction, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward seems to me to owe as much to Poe and the 19th-century ghost story as to the cosmicism of Lovecraft’s later Mythos yarns. Indeed, no less a critic than S.T. Joshi considers The Case of Charles Dexter Ward "among the most carefully wrought fictions in Lovecraft's entire corpus."

The story opens with the puzzling disappearance of the titular character, who is a studious young man from Providence, Rhode Island. Ward is in an asylum to which he'd been committed after a disturbing change in his personality. Once merely eccentric in his love for history, he has recently become withdrawn, secretive, and obsessed with the occult, especially the life of his great-great-great grandfather, Joseph Curwen, a wealthy 18th-century merchant rumored to have been a necromancer. Curwen’s shadowy history of graverobbing, alchemical experiments, and whispered dealings with otherworldly beings ended, at least in official accounts, when Providence citizens raided his estate in 1771. However, no body was ever conclusively identified.

As Ward’s historical research deepens, he discovers Curwen’s letters, records, and formulas. He then begins retracing his ancestor’s steps. His studies turn to experimentation and strange lights, voices, and even disappearances unsettle Providence. Ward’s physical appearance subtly shifts, while his speech adopts 18th-century patterns and his manner grows cold and predatory. Those close to him, most notably his family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett, suspect that Ward is no longer entirely himself. 

Their fears prove justified. In a hidden laboratory and a network of tunnels beneath the city, Ward revives the dead to extract ancient knowledge, making use of the “essential saltes [sic]” of long-buried figures. The truth then emerges that, through these same rites, Curwen himself has returned and assumed the identity of his descendant, whom he murders. Thus, it is not Ward but a reborn Joseph Curwen who is responsible for recent events.

In the end, Willett confronts the necromancer masquerading as Ward in the asylum. Using an incantation from Curwen’s own notes, Willett defeats him, reducing him to a "thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust." This is the Call of Cthulhu RPG's spell, resurrection, employed in reverse. Willett then shields the family from the full truth, calling it a case of madness, but the evidence of Curwen’s return and the scale of his occult dealings, suggest something far older and more terrible than mere insanity.

Lovecraft frames The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a tale of the gradual unearthing of secrets, rich with colonial history and a sense that the past is never truly gone. It is not only a story of necromancy, but also a meditation on ancestral legacy. Consequently, the narrative builds slowly through. old letters, newspaper clippings, genealogical charts, and the reasoned observations of Willett, a man of science forced to confront the unscientific. As the pieces fall into place, the reader shares Willett’s growing conviction that the past is not inert but a living, active, and indeed malevolent presence.

I find it tempting to wonder if the novel isn’t, in some oblique way, Lovecraft turning his gaze inward. Ward is, after all, an antiquarian from Providence, enamored of the past to the point of losing himself in it, a description that could fit Lovecraft himself. Ward’s fate, consumed and supplanted by his own ancestor, reads almost like a dark warning about what happens when one’s obsession with bygone ages ceases to be an intellectual pursuit and becomes an act of resurrection. Perhaps Lovecraft, consciously or not, was toying with the idea that his own retreat into colonial history and musty archives carried, if not such lurid dangers, at least the risk of being overwhelmed by the very past he adored.

Lovecraft himself dismissed the book as a stylistic failure, but this may have been more a reflection of his perfectionism than of the work’s real value. In retrospect, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward stands as one of his best efforts, blending historical mystery, Gothic atmosphere, and supernatural horror into a single, sustained vision. In my opinion, the novel’s enduring appeal lies in its rich evocation of Providence’s past and its slow, inexorable unmasking of ancestral evil. Here, Lovecraft married his antiquarian obsessions to a fully realized narrative arc, creating a tale that is at once intimate in its focus and cosmic in its implications, a rare fusion that continues to reward rereading nearly a century after it was written.

Special Delivery

Last month, I mentioned Barrows & Borderlands, a new old school RPG created by Matthew Tapp. A couple of days ago, my copy of the 4-volume boxed set arrived in the mail and I was so impressed with it that I wanted to show it off. Here's the front of the OD&D-inspired woodgrain boxed set.

 Here's the side of the box.

This is a shot of the open box, with all four of its integral volumes: Men & Mutants, Psychics & Sorcerers, Horrors & Treasure, and The Underworlds & Borderlands Adventures. 

I have not yet had a chance to delve deeply into the books yet, but what I have seen so far has really impressed me, all the more so, because, as I mentioned previously, Matthew and the players in his campaign are all much younger than the usual cohort for old school roleplaying games. It's really heartening to see the spirit of the old days is still very much alive, even among people less than half my age. 

I'll have more to say about B&B in the days to come. 

Interview: Sean McCoy

My next interview for the The Shadow over August is Sean McCoy, creator of the roleplaying game, Mothership. Mothership is a sci-fi horror game in the tradition of movies like Alien, The Thing, and Event Horizon, all of which clearly show a Lovecraftian influence. Consequently, I reached out to Sean and he kindly agreed to answer my questions not just about Lovecraft but also about Mothership and what it has to offer fans of science fiction and horror RPGs.

1. To what extent was H.P. Lovecraft an influence on Mothership? Were there specific stories or concepts you feel that directly or indirectly shaped the game’s tone or mechanics?

One of my best friends got into Lovecraft when we were in high school. It went completely over my head. But through him I got into Call of Cthulhu. It’s still one of the scariest RPG memories I’ve ever had. That and the idea that your characters could be on this downward spiral rather than becoming more powerful really appealed to me. 

Stories that Lovecraft influenced have had a larger impact on me: Berserk, The Mist, The King in Yellow, Thomas Ligotti, Clark Ashton Smith, The Thing, Annihilation, Amnesia: Dark Descent, Hellboy, Providence, Half-Life, Junji Ito, Event Horizon. At the Mountains of Madness — particularly the manga adaptation by Gou Tanabe — always looms large in my mind. 

2. Lovecraft famously emphasized fear of the unknown and mankind’s insignificance in the cosmos. Did you translate those themes into the actual play experience of Mothership and, if so, how?

That’s a big part of what we’re trying to do. We didn’t want Mothership to feel like a fun romp around the galaxy with talking aliens or knowable alien civilizations like in Star Wars or Mass Effect. We wanted space to feel like a lonely desert highway to nowhere. A lot of this comes down to how we choose what modules we write. 

3. The Stress and Panic mechanics in Mothership are central to the game. Are these meant to evoke the classic Lovecraftian “descent into madness” or did you have something different in mind?

No, by the time Mothership arrived on the scene, Call of Cthulhu had already staked its claim to that territory. And the whole like “person go cuckoo” vibe isn’t our thing. Nearly everyone now openly struggles with their mental health and that’s a positive thing. More people seek help and get treatment. We wanted to find those breaking points where someone snaps because of the immense pressure they’re under. In 1e we moved away from more clinical language when we described panic for exactly this reason. 

4. In Lovecraft's own stories, the protagonists rarely “win." They survive, if they’re lucky. How do you balance that kind of grim narrative tone with the needs of an enjoyable RPG session?

We call it "Survive, Solve, Save: Pick Two." Survive the ordeal. Solve the mystery. Save the day. I think some of it is about your play culture. DCC has players reveling in death due to their awesome funnels and their general 70s airbrushed van aesthetic. Over time, we’re building up a library of more mundane adventures. Ones that are stressful but not necessarily interacting with cosmic horror every week. Additionally, we’re trying to encourage wardens to take a longer view of campaigns. Putting months or years between adventures rather than the typical adventuring day from D&D. 

5. Do you see the derelict ship or space station in a Mothership scenario as an extension of the haunted house or ruined temple in Lovecraft's fiction?

Yeah, I’m obsessed with abandoned and forgotten places but my touchstone for that is largely D&D. Ruined architecture, cold case mysteries, “what happened here?” These questions are always at the forefront of my mind. With At the Mountains of Madness, this forgotten ancient civilization is fascinating to me. Particularly if it transforms your idea of your place in the universe. This is a theme we’re going to explore soon in an upcoming module (tentatively titled Word of God). 

6. How do you view Mothership’s place in the broader tradition of “weird science fiction”? Are there other weird authors beyond Lovecraft you see as inspirations?

The big one for me is Brian Evenson. One of my absolutely favorite authors. His story. "The Dust," in the collection A Collapse of Horses is the closest thing to a direct inspiration for Mothership outside of the Alien franchise. Evenson is a superb author, just so much fun to read. We’re now commissioning our own short fiction and comics for our Megadamage magazine from authors like Patrick Loveland, Anthony Herrera, and Nick Grant, so we hope to be contributing more to weird fiction tradition soon. 

7. Lovecraft’s work often implies a kind of cosmic fatalism – that knowledge brings ruin, that humanity is a passing accident. Does Mothership share that worldview or do you see room for resistance or even hope?

In Mothership, player characters rarely defeat the big evil. But often they live to fight another day or they step the tide another day. They keep back the darkness another day. And even if they perish, someone else will pick up the distress signal or the message or the captains log and continue the work. I don’t view it as hopeless and nihilistic. I look at it like the great work of transforming your life or others is a work for many people across time and space working together whether they know it or not. Which to me is profoundly hopeful. 

8. What are the unique challenges of presenting horror in an RPG context, where players can make choices, derail scenarios, and joke around at the table? Can you keep the tone intact or is that not even a concern?

To us it’s not much of a concern. Whether a player gets scared at the table is so far out of our control that we don’t even think about it. People will joke around and order pizza and look up rules and none of that is conducive to getting scared. That being said, “where is the horror?” is a common refrain among our development team. We want to allow for the possibility that an encounter can be scary, if the group is in the mood, but we make it clear in our Warden’s Operations Manual, that this isn’t some bar to clear in order to have a successful game. Fun is our only bar. 

9. Are there any lessons you’ve taken from Lovecraft, positive or negative, about how to portray horror in an interactive medium?

So, Lovecraft’s horror is deeply personal, reflecting his worst qualities and odious worldview. His racism and xenophobia, eugenics, fear of the city, he’s just the worst. It’s a reminder that when we’re talking about our fears we’re talking about a really core part of who we are. So, for me as a writer that often means thinking about the things I am deeply afraid of and shining a light on them. 

Story Isn't the Enemy

Among the many shibboleths of the Old School Renaissance, few are as enduring as the rejection of "story," "plot," and "narrative" in roleplaying games. These terms are often treated like contaminants, indicators that something has gone awry in a campaign or adventure. Speak of "story" without the usual ritual denunciations and you're liable to be accused of abandoning the principles of old school play.

I understand where this aversion comes from. Since the earliest days of this blog, I've often shared it. At the same time, I don't believe stories have no place in roleplaying games. However, like many others, my earliest experience as a roleplayer were from a time when attempts to inject "story," – by which I mean a deliberate, authorial structure of rising and falling action, dramatic turning points, and satisfying resolutions – were usually ham-fisted at best and outright railroads at worst.

There’s a reason why one of Grognardia’s most widely read (and most frequently argued about) posts is “How Dragonlance Ruined Everything.” The post touched a nerve because it spoke to something many of us experienced firsthand: modules and campaigns that confused narrative structure with narrative control. These were adventures where the outcomes were preordained, its dramatic beats carefully plotted, and the players expected to play along rather than play through. The referee, in such cases, became less an impartial adjudicator and more a frustrated novelist trying to drag the player characters through a plot that offered very little in the way of choice. Unsurprisingly, this left a bad taste in the mouths of those who cherished the open-ended freedom of the early days.

But here’s the thing: an emergent story is still story.

Take my House of Worms campaign for Empire of the Petal Throne. More than a decade of weekly play has produced a very detailed chronicle of events, consisting of actions taken, choices made, consequences endured, victories won, and, occasionally, defeats suffered. None of this was plotted out in advance. Most of it arose organically, through the interaction of player decisions, random tables, misread intentions, and lucky – or bad – rolls. Yet, looking back, I can trace arcs and patterns. I can recount the rise and fall of rivalries and the strange twists of fate that brought certain aspects of the campaign to greater prominence while others dropped away. I can talk about betrayals and reconciliations, discoveries and reversals. That’s a story. It may not be a tidy one. It may not resolve neatly – but it's a story nonetheless.

Too often, I think certain strands of OSR thought fails to acknowledge this and I don't exclude myself from this criticism. In rejecting plotted stories, we too quickly rejected the very idea of story itself. However, stories don’t have to be plotted. They don’t have to follow the Hero’s Journey. They don’t even need to have a central protagonist. They can simply emerge from play, from the piling up of decisions and consequences, the unpredictable results of dice rolls, and the slow evolution of characters over time. This is, in my view, one of the greatest strengths of the hobby.

Likewise, many classic modules – yes, even old school ones – contain what we might call a plot, even if it's implicit or only lightly sketched. A fortress inhabited by giants who've been raiding civilized lands is not just a list of rooms and monsters. It's a framework for conflict, danger, and mystery. It implies certain questions and challenges: Who are these giants? What do they want? Why are they raiding the lands of Men? These questions don’t force a narrative, but they do provide the raw material out of which one might grow. A good adventure isn’t inert; it suggests motion and consequence, even if it doesn’t prescribe them.

That’s where I think the OSR’s kneejerk hostility to “story” often goes astray. It’s an understandable overreaction, but an overreaction nonetheless. It’s shaped by the bad experiences of railroads, boxed text, and scripted scenes. However, in pushing back against those things, we risk throwing out something valuable. If we mistake any form of narrative structure for narrative imposition, we blind ourselves to one of the most powerful and rewarding aspects of roleplaying: the ability to discover a story in play, rather than impose one from above.

The truth is that most open-ended, player-driven campaigns do produce stories. Often, they’re some of the most compelling stories in gaming, precisely because no one saw them coming. They're not crafted to deliver a message or to hit emotional beats on cue. They arise naturally, shaped by the decisions of players and the impartial logic of dice. We should be able to recognize that without fear. Story isn’t the enemy; control is. Let the dice decide, let the players choose and the story will take care of itself.

Suspense

Thanks to a reader, I was delighted to learn that H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" had been adapted into a 30-minute radio drama on Suspense. The adaptation, which premiered on November 1, 1945, is an abridged version of the tale told in an unconventional way but it's not unfaithful to HPL's original. It's also notable for its casting of Ronald Colman in the role of Dr Henry Armitage. It's worth a listen if you've got half an hour.

The Dream-Quest of the Old School Renaissance

Earlier this week, in the first entry of the (temporarily?) revived Pulp Fantasy Library series, I wrote about H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key.” Though that short story isn't at all what one might regard as a horror tale, there's nevertheless a moment that haunts me. The protagonist, Randolph Carter, now middle-aged, has discovered that he can no longer dream. He can no longer reach the realms that once filled his youthful sleep with wonder. The real world, with its routines, explanations, and disappointments, has closed in around him. What’s terrifying here isn’t what lies beyond the stars, but what no longer lies within: imagination itself.

For Lovecraft, this was personal. As I explained in my earlier post, “The Silver Key” is an introspective tale of memory, longing, and the slow death of the inner life. The titular key is not just a magical object, but a symbol of return to dreams, to possibility, to the boundless interiority of childhood. Carter finds it in the attic of his boyhood home, tucked away like some forgotten relic. Using it, he travels not only in space but in time, becoming his ten-year-old self again and vanishing into the Dreamlands. "The Silver Key" is, therefore, a story of reclaiming something lost and, Lovecraft suggests, essential. That’s what makes it resonate with me now in a way it didn’t when I first read it as a younger man. Reading it now, as old age creeps up on me with soft and silent feet, I see that the tale speaks to a hunger that fantasy can sometimes feed – a hunger not simply for escape, but for restoration.

Lovecraft wasn’t the only writer of his era to feel this way. Robert E. Howard, his friend and correspondent, also saw the modern world as a spiritual prison. In a letter to Lovecraft, he lamented “this machine age” and its failure to nourish the soul. He believed that many young people yearned for freedom because the world offered so little of it. That yearning animated nearly all of his fiction. Conan the Cimmerian is, if nothing else, free: untamed, unruled, and untouched by the slow death of civilization.

This yearning for freedom crops up in all kinds of unexpected places. You see it in the eyes of motorcyclists when they talk about the road. You taste it in absurdly spicy food meant not to please the palate but to make one feel something. You glimpse it in the half-forgotten dream of space travel or in the stubborn refusal of children to abandon wonder for pragmatism. You also feel it keenly and powerfully in tabletop roleplaying games.

For many of us, RPGs have been a kind of silver key. They’ve opened doors not just to fictional worlds, but to parts of ourselves we feared we’d lost. They’ve let us imagine lives not defined by careers, schedules, or the slow grind of adult compromise. The best roleplaying games recapture something of childhood’s wild creativity, when anything was possible and the laws of reality were made to be bent or broken – when the world could be made anew with a pencil, some dice, and shared imagination.

This connection between fantasy, freedom, and dreams isn’t just thematic but structural. The earliest roleplaying games were dreamlike in their very design. Their dungeons weren’t architectural blueprints; they were symbolic landscapes, more like the underworlds of myth than the ruins of history. Secret doors, teleporting rooms, talking statues, and pools of acid weren’t practical features. They were emblems of mystery, transformation, and risk. They didn’t simulate the world; they enchanted it.

I don’t think this weirdness was an accident. It was a kind of cartography, mapping inner spaces and personal mythologies. Playing D&D in my youth didn’t just feel like being part of a game. It felt like connecting to a hidden tradition, something esoteric and half-occult. It wasn't a gnosis passed from master to pupil but rather photocopies shared in schoolyards and cluttered hobby shops. It was chaotic, yes, but in that chaos lay the promise: you can go anywhere and do anything.

Even if we didn’t fully understand it at the time, I think that’s what many of us in the early days of the Old School Renaissance were trying to reclaim. We wanted not merely older rules, but older visions. We remembered when RPGs weren’t yet respectable. We remembered when they still felt like artifacts from another world, scrawled by strange hands. We remembered when they allowed us to believe, even if for just a few hours, that we could step outside the cage of the everyday, before the world dictated to us what was real and what was merely fantasy.

I do not believe that fantasy, properly understood, is an escape from reality. No, it is an escape to something deeper. It is a return, a recovery, a dream re-entered with eyes open and soul intact. In that sense, every gaming table is an attic and every set of dice a silver key. Whether we’re mapping dungeons, slaying dragons, or simply pretending to be someone else for a while, we are all, in our own way, Randolph Carter, standing once again before the cave in the woods, ready to step through.

Notes from the Margins

Notes from the Margins by James Maliszewski

Sample Introductions from Volume 1 of the Grognardia Anthology

Read on Substack

Retrospective: Alone Against the Wendigo

I've mentioned before that I'm really quite fascinated by the concept of solo roleplaying games and solitaire adventures. I don't have a lot of experience with either of them, aside from my teenage forays into the Fighting Fantasy and related series. From what I understand, they've made a big comeback since the late unpleasantness, so much so, in fact, that quite a few RPGs now include explicit rules for playing the game alone. 

Consequently, I missed out entirely on Chaosium's forays into this genre back in the early to mid-1980s, starting with SoloQuest for RuneQuest in 1982. A few years later, the company decided to expand the experiment to include Call of Cthulhu. Given that most Lovecraft stories typically involve a single protagonist, this makes the concept of a solitaire adventure very well suited to its source material, at least in principle.

Published in 1985, Alone Against the Wendigo is the first of two solitaire adventures for Call of Cthulhu. Written by Glen Rahman, perhaps best known for the fantasy boardgame, Divine Right, which he co-designed with his brother, Kenneth, the scenario puts the player takes in the role of Dr L. C. Nadelmann. Nadelmann's initials can stand for either Lawrence Christian or Laura Christine, depending on whether the player wishes to play a man or a woman. Dr Nadelmann is a Miskatonic University anthropologist leading a six-person expedition into the Canadian wilderness to investigate tales concerning a monstrous being, the Wendigo. The adventure begins with the assembling of the expedition and the journey northward into the wilds of Northern Ontario, a place of vast snow-covered forests, ancient legends, and unsettling silence. As the days progress, the expedition begins to unravel. Strange noises are heard in the night. Members disappear. The weather turns deadly. In the growing cold and fear, the line between reality and madness begins to blur. Ultimately, Nadelmann must survive not only the physical dangers of the wilderness but also unravel the truth about the Wendigo, an entity tied to cannibalism, madness, and the insatiable hunger of the void.

Like all solitaire adventures, Alone Against the Wendigo sought to provide an experience of playing a RPG, in this case Call of Cthulhu, to players who didn’t have regular gaming groups. How well it succeeded in this is difficult to say objectively. My own experience with solo adventures is that they're really their own thing, distinct both from traditional adventures and from literature, even though their format draws from both. In the case of this particular scenario, which I played through in preparation for this post, I would say that it does an adequate job of conveying a mix of isolation, existential dread, and Mythos-inflected horror. Its remote, frozen wilderness setting does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of tone, creating a believable and menacing backdrop that mirrors the psychological disintegration of the player.

Like every solitaire adventure with which I am familiar, Alone Against the Wendigo consists of a series of numbered paragraphs that the player navigates in response to choice and the results of dice rolls. Some of the latter are skill rolls (e.g. "Try a Psychology roll. If you succeed, go to –27–; if you fail, go to –29–."), but some are simply random (e.g. "Roll a die; even go to –4–; odd, go to –5–."). This gives the scenario a decent amount of replayability, with branching narratives, multiple choices, outcomes, and side paths. Different decisions, like what gear to bring, how to interact with team members, where to explore, not to mention the aforementioned dice rolls, can thus radically alter the experience. In that respect, I think Alone Against the Wendigo is pretty good.

The adventure's integration of Call of Cthulhu mechanics, like skill and Sanity rolls are handled with a fair degree of elegance. Playing through the scenario still feels like you're playing Call of Cthulhu rather than some inferior imitation of it. That's an impressive feat in itself and I appreciate the care with which the rules were employed here. To be fair, Call of Cthulhu is a pretty mechanically simple game, especially when compared to, say, RuneQuest, but, even so, I think Rahman did a solid job here in translating its gameplay to a solo environment.

Aside from the inevitable limitations of the solitaire format – no game book, no matter how lengthy, could provide for every possibility available in face-to-face play – the main problems with Alone Against the Wendigo, in my opinion, are its underdeveloped NPCs. While all of the expedition members accompanying Dr Nadelmann have distinct roles, few are given much personality or depth, certainly not enough to make their loss (or survival) truly arresting. Again, that's perhaps an inevitable limitation of its format, but, for me at least, I felt it much more keenly than the limited array of choices in many circumstances.

That said, I like Alone Against the Wendigo for its ambition, if nothing else. As the first solo Call of Cthulhu scenario, it deserves credit not only for innovation but for capturing some of the spirit of Lovecraftian horror in a new and accessible format. Despite falling short of its mark in many ways, it demonstrated that horror roleplaying could be a solitary, introspective experience rather than being a group exercise in monster hunting. In that respect, I think it's much truer to its source material than many Call of Cthulhu adventures, even well-loved ones, are. Viewed from that perspective, I can't judge it too harshly. 

Among the Weirdos

Something I find myself reflecting on more and more as I grow older is just how odd so many of the people I gamed with in my youth were. I mean that in the best possible sense. Back in the late '70s and early '80s, there weren't as many organized outlets for people with niche interests as there are nowadays. If you were into, say, The Lord of the Rings or Star Trek – or if you liked history or mythology or miniature soldiers or even if you read books no one else in your school had heard of, there just weren’t many places you could go to find like-minded souls.

Because of that, my early memories of entering the hobby are filled with eccentrics and enthusiasts, each one weird in his own particular way. I remember, for example, a guy who constantly insisted that "there was no such thing as a 'broadsword' during the Middle Ages." I already told you about Bob. And then there was me, who spent his spare time obsessing over ancient alphabets and cobbling together imaginary languages for the fun of it. Somehow, we all got along – or at least, we all put up with each other long enough to play D&D or Traveller or whatever.

It’s hard to overstate how formative that was for me. For example, I was introduced to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard by older roleplayers I met at Strategy & Fantasy World. I would listen to people talk about chanbara films, Napoleonic tactics, and Norse mythology, all while hanging out in game stores and at library games days. I was introduced to a lot of different things simply because the then-new hobby of roleplaying attracted a very wide group of players with varied interests and everyone congregated in the same places.

As I've said repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, we didn’t always get along. In fact, we argued and, sometimes, we seemed to barely speak the same language. However, in those days, I often had no choice but to associate with people outside my immediate circle of comfort and taste and, because of that, I learned things. More than that, I grew.

Phil Dutré recently summed this up perfectly:

It’s also telling that gaming-at-large has become largely siloed and compartmentalized. In the 70s/80s/even 90s wargaming/roleplaying/boardgaming was still considered one big hobby (with a lot of crossovers), and one naturally came into contact with all sorts of people interested in various angles.

These days roleplayers and wargamers and board gamers almost seem to be different breeds, barely knowing of each other’s hobbies, let alone spending time with one another. My point is that, by having nowhere else to go, the early hobby brought together a lot of us weirdos and we learned stuff from each other. As I explained above, I was introduced to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard through these people, just as I shared my love of ancient alphabets and languages, while others shared their love of history, mythology, philosophy, etc. I am literally the man I am today because I had no choice but to hang out with people I might otherwise not have. Today, I feel as if too many gamers self-select for people just like themselves in the narrowest senses. That's a shame, because having to learn to get along with people very different is a great way to improve oneself.

I wonder if part of the magic of the early hobby as I experienced it was precisely this unexpected mixing of oddballs. Even in the early 1980s, there simply wasn’t enough critical mass to allow subgroups to splinter off and form their own tightly curated communities. You couldn’t just find “your people” and ignore everyone else. You had to sit down with whoever showed up. The result was often volatile but also suffused with creative ferment. It was a fertile space where ideas, interests, and personalities collided, bearing strange fruit.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not advocating for forced conviviality. The hobby is broader now and that’s a probably good thing in some respects. However, I do think something was lost when we all retreated to our own silos. When roleplayers stopped hanging out with wargamers and video gamers forgot that tabletop roleplaying even existed and when people began treating the games they play as lifestyle brands rather than as shared endeavors. 

When we stopped being weird together.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons"

In honor of The Shadow over August, I thought I'd do something a little different with my weekly "The Articles of Dragon" series. Instead of continuing to highlight articles that I remember or that made a strong impression on me – good or bad – from my youth, I'm instead going to spend this month focusing on Dragon articles that touch upon H.P. Lovecraft, his Cthulhu Mythos, or related topics. Interestingly, nearly all these articles come from before I was even involved in the hobby, let alone reading Dragon regularly. While I can't say for certain why that might be, I have a theory that I'll discuss later in this post.

The "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column is nowadays associated with Gary Gygax, but its first three appearances (starting with issue #11 in December 1977) were penned by Rob Kuntz. Furthermore, the second of these initial columns, entitled "The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons," is, in fact, largely the work of J. Eric Holmes with additions by Kuntz. In his brief introduction to the article, Kuntz explains that the material is intended to be "compatible with Dungeons & Dragons Supplement IV 'Gods, Demigods & Heroes'." It's also meant to satisfy both "Lovecraft enthusiasts" and those "not familiar with the Cthulhu cycle."

From the beginning, it's immediately clear that, despite its title, much of what follows in the article is not authentically Lovecraftian but owes more to August Derleth's idiosyncratic interpretation of HPL's work. For example:

The Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos are completely evil and often times chaotic. They were banished or sealed away by the Elder Gods.  

Now is not the time to relitigate the case of Lovecraft v. Derleth, which is a much more complex and nuanced discussion than many people, myself included, have often made it out to be. However, I bring this up simply to provide context for what follows. In February 1978, when issue #12 of Dragon appeared, Lovecraft scholarship was, much like that of Robert E. Howard, still in very much in its infancy, with the popular conceptions of both writers and their literary output still very much in the thrall of pasticheurs like Derleth, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, etc. With that in mind, we can look at the article itself.

Holmes describes "only Lovecraft's major gods," namely, Azathoth, Cthulhu, Hastur, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Cthugha, Ithaqua, Yig, and Yog-Sothoth. These selections clearly show the influence of Derleth, who was very keen on Hastur, Ithaqua, and Cthugha, the last two of which were his own inventions. Each god is given an armor class, move, and hit points, along with magic, fighter, and psionic ability. I find these statistics really fascinating, as they're somewhat unimpressive by the standards of later editions of D&D, but were considered exceptionally powerful by the standards of OD&D, for which they were written. Cthulhu, for example, has only AC 2 and 200hp and fights like a 15th-level fighter.

Also described in the article are Byakhee, Deep Ones, the Great Race, the Old Ones, Mi-Go, and Shaggoths [sic]. They're described in the same way as the gods, using the same game statsistics. What I found interesting here is that Holmes suggests the Byakhee are more potent opponents than the Shoggoths, something my post-Call of Cthulhu brain wouldn't have concluded. From the vantage point of the present, that's what makes this article so fascinating: it's an artifact from a time before Chaosium's RPG was published and helped to popularize not just Lovecraft's creations but a particular interpretation of them. This article is an alternate presentation of those creations and, even if I disagree with parts of it, I appreciate its uniqueness.

Obviously, this article was published before 1980's Deities & Demigods, whose early printings included a different presentation of the Cthulhu Mythos. As a kid, my copy of the book was one of the later printings that didn't include this chapter (or that of Moorcock's Melnibonéan Mythos) and indeed I didn't even notice its absence until I was in college. My roommate has a copy of one of the early printings and I was flabbergasted when I saw its extra chapters. The saga of the inclusion and removal of the Cthulhu and Melnibonéan material from the DDG is well known, I think, so I won't repeat it here. However, I wonder if it left a sufficiently bad taste in TSR's mouth that Dragon would thereafter include almost no Lovecraft-related material in its pages for years after the event.

Hugh Rankin and "The Silver Key"

Though the covers of Weird Tales are usually more well remembered by history (for obvious reasons), it should be remembered that most of the stories published within the Unique Magazine had at least one accompanying illustration. So it is with H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key," which featured this piece of artwork by Hugh Rankin.

Rankin provided illustrations for dozens of stories during the 1920s and '30s, including many by Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Perhaps his most significant one may be one from "Pickman's Model," depicting a ghoul.

I can't say with absolute certainty that this is the first ever depiction of one of Lovecraft's ghouls in a publication, but I suspect that it is. That alone makes Rankin worthy of remembrance. 

(I feel compelled to add Lovecraft's own drawing of a ghoul, which he drew in 1934, years after the publication of "Pickman's Model." I find it strangely charming.)

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Silver Key

First published in January 1929 issue of Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key” is an often overlooked but, in my opinion, important piece of his fiction. The story suffers in comparison to many of his more famous tales, because it contains no monstrous revelations, no ancient alien deities, no creeping madness. Instead, this is a deeply introspective and melancholic tale that straddles the line between fantasy and philosophical memoir. It’s a story less about horror and more about a different kind of loss: the loss of imagination, wonder, and a child's capacity to dream. These are topics that mean a great deal to me, as anyone who's read this blog for any length of time must know.

The story's protagonist is Lovecraft’s recurring alter ego, Randolph Carter, now a man in his forties and burdened by years of disillusionment. In his youth, Carter had access to other realms through dreams of “strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas." Alas, adulthood robbed him of that power. Now, “custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions.”

The crisis presented in "The Silver Key" is not merely fictional. Lovecraft was himself approaching 40 when he wrote the story. The 1920s had been a difficult decade for him. His marriage had collapsed, his brief sojourn in New York had ended in unhappiness and homesickness, and he had returned, somewhat defeated, to his beloved Providence. He had always found himself at odds with the modern world, disliking its commercialism and crudity, but the pace of change at that time seemed to him to have quickened. Lovecraft longed ever more for an idealized past, both personal and cultural, as a means to escape his dreary present. In “The Silver Key,” he gives poetic form to that longing.

What ultimately restores Carter’s access to the dream realms is the discovery of a literal silver key, hidden in the attic of his home. The key is a relic of youth, tied to his earliest experiences of fantasy. Using it, Carter is able to travel not merely through space or even into dreams, but into his own past. He once again becomes his younger self, at the age of ten, standing before a mysterious cave in the wooded hills outside of Arkham. The story ends with the suggestion that Carter has vanished from the adult world entirely, returning to his own youth, thereby regaining his ability to dream once more.

There is little action in “The Silver Key.” Much of the story is instead given over to philosophical reflection and autobiographical lament. It can thus be challenging reading for those expecting the grotesque thrills of Lovecraft's more well-known and celebrated tales. However, for those already familiar with his life and mind, "The Silver Key" may perhaps be his most revealing story. He wrote it not merely as fiction, but as a statement of belief:

“They had changed him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic is moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him to find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.”

The longing for hidden marvels, for the “twilight realms” just beyond the veil of waking life runs through all of Lovecraft’s fiction, but rarely had he expressed it so directly or so wistfully. “The Silver Key” is not about terror, but about the creeping desolation of rationality untempered by wonder.

When I was younger, I didn't hold this particular story in very high esteem. However, as I trudge toward old age, I judge it much more favorably. I suspect that those attuned to the imaginative currents that run between early fantasy fiction and tabletop roleplaying games will likewise find that “The Silver Key” offers a potent metaphor. It is the story of a character who finds that the rules of the real world no longer satisfy him. So, he uses an inherited tool (a “key,” in the broadest sense) to reenter a realm where those rules don’t apply. It is a dream-quest, but one that begins not with a map or a monster, but with memory and imagination.

This story, and its sequel “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” also serves to bind together the stories of Lovecraft’s so-called Dream Cycle and his broader cosmic mythos, turning Carter’s spiritual journey into something vaster and stranger. On its own, though, “The Silver Key” remains more intimate and perhaps more affecting. In it, Lovecraft invites the reader to consider that fantasy is not merely an escape but also a return, a recovery of something we all once possessed and may yet reclaim, if only we can remember the way.