The Original "Dungeon" Delver

Today marks the birthday of Abraham Merritt, an early twentieth-century writer whose work I have long championed on this blog. That advocacy sometimes feels quixotic, since Merritt is far less read today than many of his contemporaries. That’s a shame, because his distinctive contribution to fantasy deserves wider recognition. Merritt helped popularize the idea that the greatest adventures are not across oceans or among the stars, but beneath our feet.

Again and again, Merritt sends his characters downward into hidden worlds. The Moon Pool is perhaps the clearest example. What begins as a scientific expedition soon becomes a descent into a sealed subterranean realm, complete with alien rulers, strange technologies, and layered environments that must be navigated step by step. The story almost reads like a traditional dungeon expedition, with each new chamber revealing fresh dangers and deeper mysteries.

Merritt returned to this idea repeatedly. Dwellers in the Mirage takes explorers beneath the Arctic ice into a buried world populated by ancient races and quasi-divine beings. Even The Metal Monster, though set in a remote valley rather than underground, follows the same logic of a sealed environment ruled by an inhuman intelligence, structured for exploration rather than mere sightseeing. In all of these stories, Merritt treats space itself as the engine of narrative.

Of course, Merritt didn’t invent the idea of subterranean worlds, but he transformed it. Earlier writers often treated hidden realms as philosophical curiosities or lost utopias. Merritt turned them into adventure locales – layered, dangerous, and ruled by inhuman powers. Most importantly, his characters didn’t simply arrive in these places. They descended. Depth meant danger, and discovery always came at a cost.

That model proved enormously influential. You can see echoes of Merritt in later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and even Richard Shaver. More importantly, for the purposes of this blog, you can see it in Gary Gygax. In Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax placed Merritt alongside Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt as among “the most immediate influences upon AD&D.”

Why would he do that? I can’t say for certain and it’s quite possible Gygax explained his reasoning elsewhere (if so, I’d love to know where). But I can’t help suspect it has something to do with Merritt’s portrayal of underground expeditions. After all, the gameplay of classic Dungeons & Dragons looks something like this:

• Enter a ruin
• Descend level by level
• Encounter strange monsters and factions
• Recover dangerous artifacts
• Retreat to safety

That’s more or less The Moon Pool with dice.

Merritt’s real gift wasn’t tone or character, but structure. He showed how to make a location the driver of adventure. His hidden worlds are layered, ancient, and repurposed, exactly like a good dungeon. They feel inhabited, dangerous, and full of history.

Every time a referee designs a buried city, a sealed vault, or an underground empire, he's working in a tradition Merritt helped popularize. He taught readers (and later gamers) that every cave mouth might be a gateway and every descent a story waiting to happen. Even if almost no one remembers him today, that doesn’t diminish his contribution. Merritt helped shape how we imagine adventure itself. That’s a legacy worth celebrating, especially today, on the 142nd anniversary of his birth.