Thoughts Occasioned by Castle Amber

This post is not, strictly speaking, a Retrospective, since I've already done one on Tom Moldvay's 1981 module, Castle Amber – two, actually, if you count the repost as well. Nevertheless, in honor of The Ensorcellment of January, I thought it more than appropriate to take another look at the only old school Dungeons & Dragons module to take explicit inspiration from the works of Clark Ashton Smith. While I'll endeavor not to repeat much of what I said in my original Retrospective, there will inevitably be a few points to which I'll return, though I hope I'll offer some additional insights to justify doing so.

Despite my repeatedly thinking otherwise, the name of Clark Ashton Smith does not appear anywhere in Appendix N to Gary Gygax's AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide nor does he appear in the expanded list of "favorite authors [and] inspirational sources" in his 1992 Mythus Magick bonus. On one level, it's a very odd omission, as Gygax was quite well read when it came to fantasy and science fiction literature – including lots of early pulp fantasy authors, like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, both of whom he considered "among the most immediate influences" on his conception of the game he co-created. 

The fact that Gary Gygax, of all people, could seemingly have either not known or not cared about CAS suggests that, compared to many of his literary contemporaries, he has always been, if not necessarily obscure, something of an acquired taste. Speaking even as an avowed devotee of Smith, I can’t really blame anyone who finds his mellifluous prose, sardonic demeanor, and detached misanthropy a bit much, particularly when set beside the more muscular storytelling of Howard or the raw imaginative urgency of Lovecraft. Smith demands patience and a willingness to luxuriate in language for its own sake. His stories often feel less like adventures than like jeweled relics to be contemplated from a respectful distance.

Consequently, Smith’s fiction is not easily mined for gameable elements in the way Conan’s swordplay or Lovecraft’s Mythos can be. Howard offers clear models for heroic action and conflict. Lovecraft provides a cosmology of forbidden knowledge, cults, and monsters that can be lifted almost wholesale into play. Smith, by contrast, traffics in mood, decadence, and fatalism. His stories often lack conventional heroes, hinge on ironic or poetic reversals, and end not with triumph or revelation but with extinction, transformation, or bitter resignation. These qualities make his work harder to translate into D&D and that difficulty is probably at the root of why Gygax took little notice of him. Smith does not easily become a list of monsters, spells, or magic items.

Fortunately for me, Tom Moldvay did notice him. Although I’m still not absolutely certain that it was Castle Amber that first introduced me to Smith – it may well have been Call of Cthulhu, released the same year as module X2 – I can say with certainty that it was this adventure that solidified Smith’s hold over my imagination. Castle Amber suggested that roleplaying games could evoke not just action or terror, but a sense of dreamlike estrangement and baroque melancholy. It suggested that play could feel uncanny rather than merely dangerous, strange rather than merely challenging, and that those feelings could linger long after the dice were put away.

That lingering quality is a large part of why I still love Castle Amber four decades later. It is, above all else, unsettling. On the surface, it is just another dungeon for characters of levels 3 to 6, complete with monsters, traps, and treasure. Dig a little deeper, though, and the dungeon in question reveals itself as a kind of fun house, governed less by internal logic than by a warped, almost oneiric sensibility. Its 70 keyed locations feel less like rooms in a coherent structure and more like fragments of half-remembered stories stitched together by madness and decay.

One chamber hosts a boxing match against magical constructs; another contains the lair of spellcasting spiders imported from The Isle of Dread (itself another Moldvay creation); elsewhere, there is a kennel of hellhounds. None of these elements really belong together, at least not in a naturalistic way and that disjunction might be the point. The titular Castle Amber resists easy categorization. It feels wrong in a way that is difficult to articulate, as if it obeys a set of esthetic or even metaphysical rules that the players can sense but never fully grasp. Layered on top of this is the grotesque parade of the Amber family themselves – decadent, deranged, and occasionally tragic figures who are, unsurprisingly, closer to characters out of Smith’s own stories than to standard fantasy villains.

Castle Amber thus has a very strange vibe, one that I picked up on even as a twelve-year-old. It made me uneasy in a way that very few D&D modules ever have. How much of that vibe is intentional and how much of it is something I've been projecting onto it is difficult to say, especially after so many years of reading and playing it. I assume at least some of it must have been intentional, because Moldvay was adapting elements of Smith's Averoigne stories for use with D&D and those stories have a similar ambience. 

This brings to mind another question that has longed dogged me about this module: why was this particular module was ever released. Though not a close adaptation of the Averoigne tales, it's close enough that special thanks are given to CASiana Literary Enterprises, Inc. (the estate of Smith) "for use of the Averoigne stories as inspirational material." It's unclear whether TSR acquired or sought out a license from CASiana for use of the stories or not, but, even if it didn't do so formally, Castle Amber is an unusual early example of an RPG product published by TSR explicitly derived from a pre-existing intellectual property. 

Regardless, I count Castle Amber as one of my favorite adventure modules for any edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Not only did it play a role in making me a lifelong Clark Ashton Smith fan but it also forever affected my sensibilities when it comes to fantasy and fantasy adventures. It was, for example, one of the primary inspirations behind my own The Cursed Chateau (an adventure that I am, not coincidentally, in the process of revising for re-release). It's a weird, fun, disconcerting scenario and I think it still holds up today.

The Iounians

Over at Advanced Grognardia, I've got a post in which I provide game stats and a description of a monster from my Telluria campaign setting, along with some commentary on its origins. 

REPOST: The Sorcerer of Xiccarph

In light of a recent Pulp Fantasy Library entry, I thought readers might enjoy this write-up of Clark Ashton Smith's sorcerer, Maal Dweb. The description originally appeared in the "Giants in the Earth" column appearing in issue #30 of Dragon (October 1979), written by Lawrence Schick and Tom Moldvay (though I suspect, given his love of Smith, that Moldvay was likely the author of this particular character).

Joe Doolin's Duo

The artwork that often accompanied the stories appearing in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines fascinates me. What strikes me about it is how good so much of it is. I don’t just mean in a technical sense – though that is obviously true – but also in its imaginative confidence and narrative clarity. These illustrations rarely function as mere decoration. Instead, they act as visual doorways into the story’s mood and possibilities, offering a concentrated distillation of wonder, menace, or strangeness that primes the reader before a single word is read. 

A good case in point is the single illustration included with Clark Ashton Smith's "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" from the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. Here, we see the titular Satampra Zeiros and his ill-fated companion, Tirouv Ompallios, as they stumble upon the amorphous monster guardian the temple of Tsathoggua in ruined Commoriom. If you ever wondered where Call of Cthulhu's formless spawn of Tsathoggua came from, this is the story and that depiction, by pulp artist Joe Doolin, is probably the first one ever produced. 

One of the things I find notable about the illustration above is the way the two thieves are drawn. Both are attired in generic "Ancient World" garb vaguely reminiscent of a Greek chiton or Roman tunica, complete with sandals. This is common in fantasy art of the pulp era. Many of the earliest depictions of Conan, for example, are similarly dressed, so it's not unusual. Even so, seeing them here made me wonder when it was that we first start to see more genuinely fantastical modes of dress in fantasy or sword-and-sorcery art. That might be a topic worthy of further exploration.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Tale of Satampra Zeiros

With The Ensorcellment of January now underway, I’m taking a brief hiatus from H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales to share my thoughts on four Clark Ashton Smith stories I consider particularly worthy of attention. The first of these is a story of which I am especially fond, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” which appeared in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. Whatever its other virtues – and they are many – it stands as one of the clearest early expressions of sword-and-sorcery literature. More broadly, it encapsulates many of the qualities that define what I think of as pulp fantasy at its most effective: immediacy, moral ambiguity, horror, and a palpable sense that the world is not merely indifferent to human ambition but actively hostile to it.

The tale opens with one of my favorite first sentences ever to appear in a fantasy story:

I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua, which lies neglected by the worship of man in the jungle-taken suburbs of Commoriom, that long-deserted capital of the Hyperborean rulers.

The story that follows fully earns that opening. It is a first-person account by a professional thief explaining not only how he came to lose his right hand, but how his most recent heist ended in catastrophe. Not a bad beginning! Together with his companion, Tirouv Ompallios, Zeiros ventures into Commoriom, the long-abandoned capital of Hyperborea, a place shunned even by other robbers. Rumored to be cursed and haunted by strange gods, Commoriom nonetheless promises fabulous wealth to anyone bold (or foolish) enough to plunder it. For Zeiros, that promise is irresistible.

The two thieves break into an ancient, seemingly intact temple of the elder god Tsathoggua – the toad-god’s first appearance in Smith’s fiction – where they find no jewels or gold, but instead disturb a foul, viscous substance resting within a vast bronze basin. This substance rises and assumes the form of a monstrous, many-limbed creature that hunts them through the ruins all night long. At dawn, the thieves realize they have come full circle and have returned to the temple itself. Barricading themselves inside proves useless. The creature oozes through a damaged lintel, consuming Ompallios in silence and nearly claiming Zeiros as well. He escapes only by sacrificing his right hand, surviving to record the tale as a warning.

Smith wrote “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” early in his career as a prose writer, when he was still finding his footing in the pages of Weird Tales and the story bears the clear imprint of his literary influences. Poe’s fascination with doom, confession, and inevitable consequence is evident in the framing, while the French Decadents inform the luxuriant prose and preoccupation with corruption, blasphemy, and decay. At the same time, Smith is also clearly engaging with the raw material of adventure fiction – thieves, lost cities, fabulous treasure, and sudden violence. The fusion of these elements gives the story its remarkable staying power. Even decades after first reading it, I can still vividly recall the experience.

A great deal of the story’s success lies in Smith’s choice of protagonist. Zeiros is no hero. He is greedy, cynical, and ultimately self-preserving, surviving only at the expense of his partner in crime. This perspective strips the tale of any romantic gloss and reinforces a central truth of Smith’s Hyperborea, namely, that audacity is not rewarded, only punished. For that reason, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” is more than merely a foundational sword-and-sorcery text (though it certainly is that). It represents a decisive shift away from quests, kingdoms, and moral uplift toward immediate danger and personal survival. The stakes are not cosmic salvation or political destiny, but simply whether the protagonist lives to see another day. In that respect, it is a near-perfect encapsulation of the pulp fantasy ethos.

Though he never, to my knowledge, confirmed it, I have long suspected that “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” exerted some influence on Fritz Leiber’s conception of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. These roguish protagonists, with their ill-conceived schemes and narrow escapes, feel like natural descendants of Zeiros and Ompallios. Likewise, the relationship between Smith’s two thieves – transactional, greedy, and ultimately fragile – anticipates later depictions of adventuring partnerships defined more by convenience than by trust.

For similar reasons, I strongly associate this story with old school Dungeons & Dragons. The abandoned city of Commoriom, its forbidden temple, and its inhuman guardian are all immediately recognizable elements of dungeon-based play. More importantly, the story embodies an ethos in which exploration is genuinely dangerous and curiosity often carries a terrible price. Nearly a century after its publication, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” remains a sharp and unsettling work of pulp fantasy. It reminds us that an abandoned ruin may be a trap, filled with inimical gods and lethal consequences. In doing so, the story helped establish a tradition of fantasy that values peril over heroism and survival over glory, a tradition that continues to shape the genre today.

MA 50

Sometime this year – people better informed than I will know the precise date – James M. Ward's Metamorphosis Alpha will celebrate its 50th anniversary, the original having been released in 1976. Since I'm currently refereeing a campaign using these venerable science fiction RPG rules, I've been spending a lot of time online looking for additional resources to expand and enhance them. During one of these deep dives, I discovered a piece of news from March of last year that I somehow overlooked: 

Catalyst Roleplaying Games is proud to announce that we are working with Para Bellum Consulting for a special 50th anniversary release of Metamorphosis Alpha, an enduring classic of science-fiction roleplaying. This edition will honor the spirit and ingenuity of the original edition while offering exciting updates, including modernized gameplay and greatly expanded plot options.

The announcement doesn't give a release date or indeed provide much information of any sort beyond the usual marketing spiel one expects from such things. Even so, I'm intrigued. A few years ago, Goodman Games did, I think, a superb job of supporting the original Metamorphosis Alpha with new material, some of which I plan to incorporate into my campaign. From the sounds of it, Catalyst is creating an entirely new game, which isn't quite as exciting to me, but who knows? Maybe their "honor[ing] the spirit and ingenuity of the original edition" will be more than just empty words. 

If anyone knows any more about this new version of MA, please let me know in the comments. 

A Very Real Debt

Though this blog has, since its inception nearly eighteen years ago, been a staunch advocate for recognizing and celebrating the debt Dungeons & Dragons owes to pulp fantasy literature, there can be no doubt, despite the protestations of some (including myself, from time to time), that it also owes a significant debt to J. R. R. Tolkien, born on this day in 1892. That debt is not merely a matter of surface details, such as the presence of elves, dwarves, or halflings, nor even of familiar narrative trappings like ancient evils and lost kingdoms. Rather, Tolkien’s influence runs deeper, shaping expectations about the coherence of secondary worlds, the moral weight of history, and the idea that fantasy settings might possess an internal logic and gravitas extending far beyond the immediate needs of any single adventure.

Even when early role-playing games diverged from Tolkien’s sensibilities – or, in some cases, reacted against them – they did so in dialog with a vision of fantasy he helped to define. The very act of distinguishing pulp fantasy from Tolkienian (or "high") fantasy implicitly acknowledges the latter as a point of reference. On Tolkien’s birthday, then, it seems appropriate to set aside old debates long enough to acknowledge that, however indirect or contested it may sometimes be, his influence on Dungeons & Dragons and the broader hobby is both real and enduring.

Happy birthday, Professor Tolkien!

REPOST: The Emperor of Dreams

[The original version of this post appeared more than four years ago. I thought, in light of this month's theme, that it might be worthwhile to revisit it, since the documentary I discuss really is topnotch and deserves to be more widely seen —JDM]

Immense fan though I am of both H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, when it comes to the writers of pulp fantasy, there can be no question that my favorite remains Clark Ashton Smith. Precisely why this is so is somewhat difficult to say, but, were I forced to nail it down, I would say that its a combination of Smith's incantatory language and the overwhelming sense of melancholy that pervades so much of his work. I tend toward the melancholic myself, which no doubt explains the powerful hold so many of Smith's stories exercise over my imagination. Even more powerful than that, however, is his ability to transport the reader to other worlds wholly unlike our own. Whereas both Lovecraft and Howard could be called, to varying degrees, "realists," which is to say, writers whose tales are grounded in the real world, Smith's stories are very often pure fantasies with little or no connection to mundane existence whatsoever.

Interestingly, this is a point that is also made in The Emperor of Dreams, a 2018 documentary about the life and work of the Bard of Auburn. Written and directed by Darin Coelho Spring and released through Hippocampus Press, the film is simply delightful – everything I could have hoped for in a documentary of this kind. At slightly less than two hours in length, The Emperor of Dreams is able to take its time, allowing Smith's story to unfold at its own pace rather than being rushed. There are sections devoted to every period of Smith's life, from his precocious youth to his adulthood as a pulp fantasy writer to his later life as a sculptor and doyen of the growing field of science fiction and fantasy. Watching this, one truly gets a picture of the whole of Smith's remarkable life, aided by the careful selection of still and moving photography of people and places important to him and his development as one of the great outsider artists of the 20th century.

Equally important to the success of The Emperor of Dreams are the reflections and commentaries on Smith by scholars and admirers, starting with Harlan Ellison, who credits Smith's "The City of the Singing Flame" with putting him on the path of becoming a writer. Also interviewed are Donald Sydney-Fryer, who actually met Smith; Ron Hilger, Scott Connors, and S.T. Joshi, among many others (like the psychedelic artist Skinner). Their thoughts and reminiscences about Smith are insightful and at times touching and they do much to elevate the documentary above a mere recounting of the events of Smith's life and times (however valuable that information is). The Emperor of Dreams is thus a celebration of Clark Ashton Smith and his evocations of the weird in poetry, fiction, and art more broadly.

I already knew a fair amount about Smith's life and works, but I still learned a great deal about him from this film. I knew, for example, that Smith had been a protégé of the Bohemian poet George Sterling, but I did not know that their ultimate falling out occurred as a Smith's writing "The Abominations of Yondo" which Sterling considered unworthy of his talent. Likewise, I had never heard the story of how Smith first took up sculpting or had rejected high school in favor of educating himself by reading books in the Auburn Public Library instead. The movie is filled with such details, along with stories told about him by his stepson that only add to my appreciation of the man. There's even an audio recording of Smith reciting some of his own poetry. If only there had been film footage of something similar!

If you're at all interested in Clark Ashton Smith's life, The Emperor of Dreams is well worth a watch. I somehow did not know it existed until just a few days ago, but am I ever glad that I corrected this lacuna in my education. Very good stuff!

RIP Tim Kask (1949—2025)

Multiple sources report that Tim Kask, TSR’s first full-time employee, died on December 30 at the age of 76 after a short illness. 

Although I conducted a three-part interview with Mr Kask in the early days of this blog, I would not claim to have known him personally, much less well. Our direct interactions were limited to a handful of online exchanges and one particularly memorable encounter at GameholeCon several years ago, during a late-night session of Béthorm, the Tékumel RPG, refereed by its designer and artist, Jeff Dee. For the most part, I knew Tim Kask, as so many of us did, through his work and that work was substantial. As editor of The Strategic Review and, later, the first editor of Dragon magazine, he played a crucial role in shaping the early voice and direction of the roleplaying hobby.

Kask’s passing is another reminder that time continues its steady advance and that we are increasingly losing those who helped create and sustain the hobby we enjoy today. It is for this reason that I encourage anyone who has ever loved a roleplaying game to reach out to its creators and let them know what their work has meant to you. I have done so on several occasions and those messages have invariably been met with kindness and gratitude. With the loss of yet another figure from the hobby’s formative years, it feels more important than ever to make that effort while we still can.

The Ensorcellment of January

Clark Ashton Smith occupies a peculiar and sometimes uneasy place in the history of fantasy literature. He is neither obscure nor widely celebrated, frequently cited yet rarely dwelt upon. For many readers, he exists at the margins of awareness: a friend of Lovecraft, a regular contributor to Weird Tales, a stylist whose prose is admired in quotation more often than his stories are read in full. Yet those of us who do venture deeply into his work quickly discover something far more imposing. Smith’s imagination is vast, luxuriant, and final, as though one had strayed into a world already immeasurably old, already in decline, and wholly indifferent to human ambition or consolation.

Smith was a poet before he was a fantasist and that origin is, I think, essential to understanding his work. His fiction bears the unmistakable stamp of a writer for whom language was not merely a means of conveying a narrative but a source of power and pleasure in its own right. His tales linger over sorcery, extinction, voluptuous cruelty, and the slow unraveling of civilizations that have exhausted their last illusions. Zothique’s dying earth, Hyperborea’s sardonic barbarism, and Averoigne’s sensuous medievalism are linked less by genre than by sensibility – a worldview in which beauty and horror are inseparable and where cosmic immensity inspires not only dread but a dry, almost amused fatalism. Smith’s audience has always been comparatively small, but his influence has quietly seeped into fantasy, horror, and even roleplaying games that prize atmosphere, decadence, and the poetry of ruin over straightforward heroics and tidy resolutions.

The Ensorcellment of January will be a month-long exploration of Smith’s life, work, and legacy. Like The Shadow over August before it, this series is intended neither as hagiography nor as corrective, but rather as an effort to better understand a creator whose contributions to fantasy literature are both substantial and too often overlooked. Longtime readers of this blog already know of my fondness for older, stranger currents of fantasy and horror, works shaped as much by language as by plot, by implication rather than exposition, and by a fascination with time, decay, and forgotten worlds. In that regard, Smith’s influence is widespread, even when it goes unrecognized.

Smith’s legacy, like the man himself, resists easy classification. He was a friend and correspondent of both H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, yet his sensibility remained distinctly his own. He was deeply pessimistic but never humorless, luxuriant in style yet frequently merciless in outcome. This series, therefore, aims to honor that complexity. Over the course of January, I’ll be drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources in an effort to present a clearer picture of who Clark Ashton Smith was and why his work matters within the broader history of fantasy and weird fiction.

The Ensorcellment of January is therefore less a survey or reassessment than a sustained act of attention. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be returning to Smith’s stories, poems, and letters, sometimes to analyze them and sometimes simply to admire them. I’ll share my own reflections along the way, but my central concern will be understanding why I believe Smith continues to speak so powerfully to certain sensibilities and why his work still surfaces, unexpectedly, across contemporary fantasy. This is not an attempt to rescue Smith from obscurity so much as an invitation to linger with him awhile, to listen closely to a voice that remains singular in its cadences and uncompromising in its vision. If you’re willing to slow down and let the spell take hold, I can think of no better time than the month of Clark Ashton Smith's birth for such enchantments.