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.

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 Articles of Dragon: "The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games"

I strongly considered not writing a post about this particular article from issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), since I know it’s likely to stir up strong feelings and perhaps understandably so. At the same time, the guiding principle behind my revival of the Articles of Dragon series has been to focus on pieces that had a particular impact on me when I first read them, and this one – “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games” – most certainly did. Of course, if you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, that should come as no surprise.

The question of Tolkien’s influence on the creation and later development of Dungeons & Dragons is a topic to which Gary Gygax regularly returned. From nearly the moment the game appeared, Gygax denied that Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings, held any special place of honor among the many fantasy works that inspired him. He never denied having read and enjoyed The Hobbit, nor that he had borrowed certain monsters and creatures, such as orcs and halflings, from Tolkien. What he seems to have rejected was the idea that this borrowing meant D&D was primarily inspired by Tolkien, rather than being a mishmash of many different influences.

I say "seems," because I really don't know why this particular question so vexed Gygax. That he kept writing articles like this more than a decade after the first appearance of the game suggests that it somehow mattered to him. I suppose the easy explanation is ego – he simply couldn't countenance the idea that someone might think D&D's success was owed, in whole or in part, to the popularity of Tolkien's work rather than his own imagination and ingenuity. But is that what was going on? Honestly, I don't know and I'm not sure anyone else does either.

"The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games" is a strange article. For one, Gygax begins it by admitting – in the very first paragraph – that "the popularity of Professor Tolkien's fantasy works did encourage me to develop my own." This is undeniable, since the Fantasy Supplement to Chainmail directly references J.R.R. Tolkien and includes not just hobbits but orcs, balrogs, and ents among its bestiary (all of which appeared in OD&D, at least in its earliest printings). Gygax continues that "there are bits and pieces of his works reflected hazily in mine," before stating that "I believe his influence, as a whole, is minimal" [italics mine].

Gygax then recalls the many, many fantasy books and authors he read, beginning in childhood. He points particularly to Robert E. Howard's only Conan novel, Conan the Conqueror (more accurately The Hour of the Dragon) as being his first exposure to sword-and-sorcery literature. He then goes on to cite L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Abraham Merritt, and H.P. Lovecraft as also being important to developing his sense of fantasy. None of those names should come as surprise, since he highlights all of them in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. (Of more interest to me is why Jack Vance is not mentioned at all, despite Gygax's regular praise of him and his works and his role in inspiring the D&D magic system.)

With that out of the way, Gygax says he "thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit" but found The Lord of the Rings a "tedious ... allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil." Tolkien would, of course, object strenuously to that characterization of The Lord of the Rings, but we must take Gygax at his word. He claims to have found the novel's action to be slow, its magic unimpressive, and its resolution disappointing. Moreover, Tolkien drops his favorite character, Tom Bombadil, soon after introducing him, which contributed to the slowness with which he finished it (three weeks).

Gygax then goes on, rather unconvincingly in my view, to say that many of the common elements of Middle-earth and Dungeons & Dragons have common sources, like Norse mythology for dwarves, and that therefore no one should assume the game he created owed much to Tolkien. In fairness, he also admits once again that there were some things he borrowed with the intention of "capitalizing on the then-current 'craze' for Tolkien's literature." He did this in a "superficial manner," believing that, once he'd attracted these Tolkien fiends to D&D, they'd soon realize that there was only "a minute trace of the Professor's work" therein.

As I said, I really don't know what to make of all of this. On the one hand, I generally agree with Gygax that D&D's similarities to Tolkien's creations are skin-deep at best and probably included solely for the purposes of enticing Middle-earth aficionados to the game. On the other hand, the fact that Gygax kept beating this particular drum makes me wonder if he actually believed the lines he was saying. Furthermore, Gygax was never shy about admitting the debt he owed REH or Vance or Leiber, so why did the charge he was borrowed Tolkien rankle him so? It's frankly baffling to me.

The End(?) of Pulp Fantasy Library

In Grognardia's early days, one of its signature features was Pulp Fantasy Library. If you glance at the “Popular Topics and Series” box down the right-hand column, you’ll see more than 300 entries under that heading. The idea was simple: highlight the works of pulp fantasy literature that shaped not only my own imagination but, more importantly, those that shaped founders of the hobby of roleplaying. Like so much of Grognardia, Pulp Fantasy Library grew out of my conviction that you can’t really grasp the origins of RPGs without engaging the books, authors, and ideas that inspired it.

Of course, the series didn’t stay neatly confined. Over time, I pushed at its boundaries, sometimes gleefully so. I wrote not only about sword-and-sorcery or weird tales but also about science fiction, horror, comics, movies, and the occasional oddball work that defied easy categorization. I often made light of this stretching of definitions, but, in truth, I was doing something larger, namely, charting the imaginative landscape that predated and nourished the hobby. RPGs didn’t spring from nowhere, after all, and Pulp Fantasy Library was my way of mapping the soil they grew in.

The Shadow Over August reminded me of just how much I enjoyed this work. Revisiting four of Lovecraft’s stories made two things clear. First, there’s still a vast reservoir of older literature, much of it influential on RPGs, some of it simply worth reading, about which I've never written. Second, doing these posts properly is no small task. Reading (or rereading), researching context, and writing thoughtfully about them takes a great deal of time and energy, more than I can always justify with so many other projects competing for my attention these days.

Much as it might seem otherwise, Grognardia remains a hobby project and hobbies come with limits. That’s part of why I find myself asking whether Pulp Fantasy Library has already run its course and there's really no need to revive it – or perhaps is it ready for a metamorphosis of some kind? Many of the works I’d still like to tackle don’t sit comfortably within the strict “pulp fantasy” label. Maybe the time has come to evolve the series into something broader, which reflects the full range of the cultural and literary roots from which roleplaying sprang.

I haven’t made up my mind about whether or not I should return to the series and, if so, in what form or frequency. What I do know is this: I remain as fascinated by these seminal works as ever and I believe they still matter deeply to anyone who cares about where our hobby came from. The real question is whether readers share that conviction strongly enough to make it worthwhile for me to continue.

Do you want to see Pulp Fantasy Library return in some form? Is this the kind of writing you value from Grognardia? Let me know. Your responses and, frankly, your encouragement will help me decide not only the fate of Pulp Fantasy Library but also the future direction of the blog itself.

Creep, Shadow! Released

You may remember that, back in 2022, Centipede Press published a new edition of Abraham Merritt's 1932 story, Burn, Witch, Burn! that included an introduction written by yours truly. This year, they followed that up with its sort-of-sequel, Creep, Shadow!, to which I also contributed the introduction. Like its predecessor, it's a beautiful and well-made book, featuring both original dustcover and frontispiece art by Camille Alquier and interior illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay. This new edition is limited to 600 copies, so if you're interested in a copy, you'll probably need to grab one quickly from the Centipede Press website. Burn, Witch, Burn! sold out quickly and, so far as I know, it's never been reprinted. 

Here's the dustcover:

This is the credits page:

The start of a chapter, showing off a bit of Finlay artwork and the bookmark.

Finally, the signature page at the back of the book. I am dwarf among giants.

The Articles of Dragon: "Giants in the Earth"

 As I pen more posts for this series, you'll notice that many of its entries are themselves about series of articles from the pages of Dragon. I could offer a lot of explanations for this, but the simplest, I suppose, is that, with series, you know what you're getting. In theory, if you like one entry in the series, you will probably enjoy those that follow. Series provide a foundation on which to build and a format to follow that makes them attractive to both writers and readers – that's the reason this blog has so many series of its own.

Issue #59 (March 1982) introduced me to a new series of Dragon articles. Entitled "Giants in the Earth," this was an irregular feature devoted to presenting famous characters from fantasy (and occasionally science fiction) literature in terms of Dungeons & Dragons game mechanics. This particular issue included write-ups for five different characters – Poul Anderson's Sir Roger de Tourneville (by Roger E. Moore), L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea (by David Cook), Alexei Panshin's Anthony Villiers (by Andrew Dewar), Clifford Simak's Mark Cornwall and Sniveley (both by Roger E. Moore). 

At the time I first saw this article, I think I was only familiar with Sir Roger de Tourneville, having already read The High Crusade. The others were completely unknown to me and, in the case of the Simak characters, I'm embarrassed to admit, still are. Nevertheless, I found the piece fascinating for several reasons. First, almost from the moment I started playing D&D, I began to think about how best to stat up characters from myth, legend, and books. Seeing how "professional" writers did so held my interest. Second, many of the entries – even the science fiction ones! – included suggestions on introducing these characters into an ongoing D&D campaign, an idea I'd never considered before. Finally, the entries served to introduce me to authors and books I might otherwise never have encountered, just as Appendix N and Moldvay's "Inspirational Source Material" section had done.

That last one is of particular importance to me, especially nowadays, as the inspirations for fantasy roleplaying shift away from books of all kinds and more toward movies and video games. With the benefit of hindsight, one of the things that's very obvious is how much more literary fantasy was in my youth. Arguably, that's because, until comparatively recently, fantasy hadn't much penetrated the mainstream and thus there were few other ready sources for the genre. If you were interested in wizards and dragons and magic swords, books were all you had, whereas today we have a greater number of options available to us. Perhaps – and maybe I'm just being an old man again – I detect a difference in kind between the literary fantasies I grew up reading (and that inspired the founders of the hobby) and the pop culture stuff we see today.

The irony of my being introduced to "Giants in the Earth" through this issue is that it's one of the last ones published in Dragon. Though I'd eventually see some of the earlier installments, the vast majority of them were long out of my reach, their having been published long before I started playing RPGs, let alone reading the magazine. Even so, the few that I did read served the useful purpose of broadening my knowledge of fantasy and science fiction, as well as acquainting me with characters and writers who would, in time, become lifelong companions. 

Temple of Apshai's Appendix N?

Here's the opening paragraph to introduction of the user manual from 1979's Temple of Apshai. This section was reprinted verbatim in the manual to The Temple of Apshai Trilogy six years later. 

Did you grow up in the company of the Brothers Grimm, Snow White, The Red Fairy Book, The Flash Gordon serials, The Three Musketeers, the knights of the Round Table, or any of the three versions of The Thief of Baghdad? Have you read The Lord of the Rings, The Worm Ouroboros, The Incomplete Enchanter, or Conan the Conqueror? Have you ever wished you could cross swords – just for fun – with Cyrano or D'Artagnan, or stand by their sides in the chill light of dawn, awaiting the arrival of the Cardinal's Guard? Ever wondered how you'd have done against the Gorgon, the Hydra, the bane of Heorot Hall, or the bull that walks like a man? Would you have sailed with Sinbad or Captain Blood, sought passage on the ship of Ishtar, or drunk of the Well at World's End? Did Aphrodite make Paris an offer you couldn't refuse? Would you seek a red-hued maiden beneath the hurtling moons of Barsoom, or walk the glory road with "Dr. Balsamo," knowing it might be a one-way street?

Written by Jon Freeman, co-designer of the game, this paragraph is filled with literary references that it could almost be taken as the Appendix N of Temple of Apshai. I say "almost," because the paragraph is not meant to describe the specific influences upon the game itself so much as to describe the kinds of stories, books, and characters that might serve as introductions both to fantasy as a genre and to fantasy roleplaying. In that respect, it's less useful in understanding Temple of Apshai than it is in understanding what, in 1979, might have been considered the "must reads" of fantasy – and the kinds of literature that had served as the seed beds of roleplaying.

REVIEW: The Lair of the Brain Eaters

The first few years of the Old School Renaissance were marked by a renewed appreciation not just of early roleplaying games but also of the pulp fantasy stories that inspired them. This was the time when Appendix N of Gary Gygax's AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide became a frequent topic of discussion on blogs and forums, much to the satisfaction of those of us who felt a strong injection of sword-and-sorcery was the perfect antidote to what we felt was an increasingly video-gamified hobby (remember: this coincided with the release of D&D Fourth Edition) that had lost sight of its literary roots.

This is the backdrop against which many of the earliest D&D retro-clones – emulations of earlier editions – appeared, including Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Calling itself a "weird fantasy role-playing game," LotFP took seriously the goal of bringing more pulp fantasy-inspired content into fantasy gaming, especially in its adventures, which quickly gained a reputation for being, by turns, imaginative, grotesque, challenging, deadly, and prurient – among many other extravagant adjectives. 

However, as LotFP's creator, James Raggi, found his strange Muse, its adventures moved away from generic pulp fantasy scenarios of the sort one might have found in Weird Tales during the Golden Age of the pulps and toward a weirder, even more brutal version of Earth's 17th century. This new focus on historical fantasy helped LotFP distinguish itself from its fellow retro-clones, but it also, I think, narrowed its appeal somewhat, since most fantasy gamers, old school or otherwise, are looking for adventures they can easily drop into campaign settings other than Earth during the 1600s.

While I am a big fan of LotFP's pivot to historical fantasy, I miss the ahistorical strangeness of stuff like Death Frost Doom, Hammers of the God, or The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time. Consequently, when I learned about D.M. Ritzlin's The Lair of the Brain Eaters, I was intrigued. Unlike most recent LotFP releases, this adventure didn't seem to be set in the 17th century. Rather, it seemed more like something from Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age or perhaps Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea – a lurid, necromantic pulp fantasy scenario of the kind we haven't seen for LotFP in a while.

That should come as no surprise. Ritzlin is the proprietor of DMR Books, a small press dedicated "fantasy, horror, and adventure fiction in the traditions Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and other classic writers of the pulp era." Indeed, The Lair of the Brain Eaters shares its title with a short story Ritzlin wrote for the collection, Necromancy in Nilztiria. According to the author, some of the story's details have been changed (and "a great many more have been added"), so this adventure is less directly adapted and more inspired by its source. Even so, it's quite unusual by the standards of contemporary Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The adventure concerns a cult dedicated to the consumption of human brains. Called the Yoinog – supposedly an ancient term meaning "knowledge seekers" – the cult serves the necromancer Obb Nyreb, furnishing him with a fresh supply of corpses as he attempts to unravel the mysteries of Veshakul-a, the goddess of death. Nyreb and the Yoinog have established themselves in a network of caves beneath a graveyard of the city of Desazu. Unfortunately, in their zeal for graverobbing, the cult has drawn attention to their master's activities, thereby providing an opening for the player characters to involve themselves in the adventure.

The Lair of the Brain Eaters is short and to the point. The cult's cave network consists of only twenty keyed areas, with Nyreb's chambers occupying an additional nine. Most of them are described briefly, with little in the way of extraneous detail. Do not, however, mistake its comparatively spartan descriptions for a sparseness of ideas – quite the contrary. The florid prose of many adventures is often chalked up to the designer's desire to be a writer of fiction. Here, the opposite is the case: the text's concision signals that its designer is already a skilled fictioneer and understands well that less can be more.

For example, this is part of the description of a "bottomless pit": "This pit is not really bottomless, but it amused Obb Nyreb to tell the Yoinog it was, and they never doubt him." Elsewhere, a kitchen is described thusly: "Grimy pots, pans, and plates litter the floor. A cauldron large enough to contain a man sits in the center of the room, while smaller ones dangle from the ceiling." Speaking as someone whose personal style tends toward the aureate, I admire Ritzlin's ability to convey description, vital information, and mood through so few words. This approach also makes the descriptions easy to use at a glance, which is very helpful in play.

Designed for character levels 1–3, The Lair of the Brain Eaters is challenging. There are a lot of Yoinog within the caves, as well as other creatures, such as the apelike Skullfaces and mutant rats (some of which breathe fire – yes, it's a bit silly, but so what?). Fortunately, the caves contain lots of opportunities for the characters to act stealthily or otherwise use the environment to their advantage. In addition, there's a captive within who, if freed, can aid the characters in navigating the place. These factors, combined with some clever tricks and obstacles, creates a memorable locale for both exploration and combat. 

The Lair of the Brain Eaters is an inventive, evocative, and unpretentious "meat and potatoes" adventure that I'd like to see more of – from Lamentations of the Flame Princess or any other publisher. I think it'd be an especially great fit for anyone playing North Wind's Hyperborea RPG, but it'd work just as well with any other fantasy game that draws inspiration from the pulps. I really enjoyed this one.

sha-Arthan Appendix N (Part II)

In Part I of this post, I shared the four authors whose stories and settings have most influenced my development of Secrets of sha-Arthan. In this part, I'd like to share the four roleplaying games I'd single out as having played a similar role.

Empire of the Petal Throne: This one should be obvious. The mere fact that I've spent the last nine years refereeing my House of Worms campaign pretty much guaranteed EPT would be included in this list, since it's the RPG I've played the most and most consistently since my youth. However, the game shares so many elements in common with sha-Arthan – secret science fiction, ancient history, baroque societies, weird monsters – that, on some level, it'd be completely accurate to call sha-Arthan "my Tékumel." Of course, sha-Arthan isn't just that, but it owes a huge debt to Tékumel, which is one of my favorite fictional settings of all time.

Skyrealms of Jorune: This is another important secret science fiction game and one whose influence over sha-Arthan is important to acknowledge. Though I never owned, let alone played the game when it was first released, I was entranced by the ads for it that ran in the pages of Dragon magazine. Replete with the evocative artwork of Miles Teves, Jorune had a wonderfully exotic setting in the form of the titular planet, where "magic" of a sort is possible, thanks to peculiar physical laws. Likewise, its many unusual – and completely non-terrestrial – intelligent aliens and lifeforms have served as inspirations as I imagined their counterparts on sha-Arthan. Amazing stuff!

RuneQuest: Right behind Tékumel is Glorantha when it comes to my favorite fictional settings. The main things I took from RQ was its non-medieval, more Bronze Age setting and its emphasis on the importance of culture and religious cults. Indeed, the alignment system of Secrets of sha-Arthan is directly inspired by the cults of Glorantha. I've likewise borrowed a couple of other elements from the game that I thought would fit in well with the setting I was creating for my own game. Beyond that, RuneQuest impresses me with its ability to take itself seriously but not too seriously and that's something that a lesson than an old stick in the mud like me needs to be reminded of often.

Bushido: This is another RPG that stresses the importance of culture and religious beliefs and thus inspired me as I developed Secrets of sha-Arthan. While there's not much of feudal Japan's DNA in the True World, there is something of Bushido's rules in my own game, in particular those covering "downtime." Characters in Secrets of sha-Arthan can engage in training, research, intrigue, and social climbing when not traveling or exploring ancient ruins and vaults. The inclusion of these options was inspired by Bushido, which is the first game I recall having rules for these kinds of activities. While other RPGs have subsequently included them, Bushido is the game from which I first learned them.

And there you have it: the four roleplaying games whose settings and/or rules influenced me in my own work. As Picasso is reputed to have said, "Good artists borrow; great artists steal." I make no claim to being a great artist, but I thought it only right to let you know from whom I've stolen, if only so that you might be introduced to some really terrific roleplaying games well worth your time.

sha-Arthan Appendix N (Part I)

Last week, I pointed out a "problem" with Gary Gygax's Appendix N, namely, it's just a list without any explanatory apparatus, unlike its counterpart in the original RuneQuest. As I explained in that post, this is far from a damning criticism – Appendix N remains an invaluable guide to excellent fantasy and science fiction stories – but it does limit its utility in trying to understand Gygax's own thought processes as he created both D&D and AD&D. 

That's why I decided I'd do things differently in Secrets of sha-Arthan. Rather than simply include a lengthy list of all the books (and games) that had had even the tiniest influence over my own work on SoS, I'd instead present a smaller, more focused list, along with commentary on precisely what I'd taken from each source. The goal is not merely to honor my inspirations, but also to aid anyone who picks up the game in understanding where I'm coming from. 

The list, like the game itself, is still in a state of low-level flux. I've purposefully narrowed the list to just four authors, each of which wrote a series of multiple stories within those series. By keeping the list focused on those whose influence is strongest and most clear, I hope that I'll do a better job than Gygax of "showing my cards," creatively speaking. Obviously, other authors and books have inspired me, too, but their inspiration has been more limited. Rather than muddy the waters, I've stuck only with whose influence is most clear.

Burroughs, Edgar Rice: The influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs over the subsequent history of fantasy cannot be underestimated. His Barsoom novels in particular have played a huge role in establishing the broad outlines of that genre and the stories and characters that inhabit it. Everything from building a unique setting, with its own history and geography to populating it with all manner of exotic cultures and beasts to even presenting an alien vocabulary, it's all there in A Princess of Mars, a book not much read today but that I have come to love more the older I get.

In creating sha-Arthan, I often looked to Barsoom and Amtor for inspiration, particularly in my conception of the creatures that dwell upon it. Furthermore, the Ironian language is intended to be reminiscent of the Martian tongue as invented by Burroughs. I also imagine adventures in the True World to be swashbuckling affairs, filled with perilous danger, narrow escapes, and feats of derring-do, just like the delightful novels of ERB.

Smith, Clark Ashton: Of all the writers whose work graced the pages of Weird Tales during the Golden Age of the Pulps, Clark Ashton Smith remains my favorite by far. His examination of the dangers of egotism and the ever-present risk of divine punishment combine with his black humor and imaginative dreamscapes to produce some of the most inventive – and often terrifying – fiction of the first half of the 20th century. Though I am fond of all his story cycles, it's those set in Zothique, Earth's last continent untold eons in the future, that I find most compelling.

There's more than a little of Zothique in sha-Arthan. Its ancient history, selfish sorcerers, and otherworldly daimons are all directly inspired by CAS. Smith's baroque and archaic vocabulary have likewise influenced the nomenclature and general tone of my writing about the setting. Though sha-Arthan is not as dark (or darkly humorous) as Zothique, it does possess some of the latter's world-weariness,

Tierney, Richard L.: Secrets of sha-Arthan takes a lot of inspiration from the late Hellenistic and early Roman eras. That's a period of history that's always fascinated me, so that's no surprise. It's also the time period covered by the Simon of Gitta historical fantasies of Richard L. Tierney, some of whose stories I've discussed in the past.   

Tierney's stories deftly combine real world history and beliefs, particularly those relating to Gnosticism, with an unusual interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and swashbuckling adventure. This combination of elements is both unique and appealing to someone of my interests, which is why I consider the Simon of Gitta tales to be among the most important influences on my development of sha-Arthan as a RPG setting. 

Vance, Jack: Rounding out this quartet of inspirational authors is Jack Vance, creator of The Dying Earth and its sequels, all of which have, to varying degrees, influenced sha-Arthan, though the original 1950 fix-up novel remains the most important. Like Smith's Zothique stories, I've looked to Vance for ideas about ancient, forgotten history, venal wizards, and cruel, otherworldly beings. However, the single most significant idea I've taken from Vance is that of secret science fiction, which is to say, an ostensibly fantasy setting that is, beneath the surface, based on scientific (or pseudo-scientific) principles. That's a big part of sha-Arthan and its eponymous secrets. 

In Part II, I'll talk about the other roleplaying games that have influenced the development of Secrets of sha-Arthan. For obvious historical reasons, this is something Gygax could never have done. However, I've played enough RPGs over the years that there's no question they've had as much of an impact on my thoughts about sha-Arthan as has fantasy literature. Revealing just what I've taken from them is, I think, every bit as important as revealing my literary inspirations.

The Problem with Appendix N

Since its start sixteen(!) years ago this month, an overriding concern of this blog has been the literary inspirations of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly those stories and books belonging to what I call "pulp fantasy."  Though there are several reasons why this topic has been of such interest to me, the primary one remains my sense that, in the decades since its initial publication in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons has moved conceptually ever farther away from its origins in the minds of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax – and the works that inspired them.

The argument can be made, of course, that this movement was, in fact, a good thing, as it broadened the appeal of both D&D and, by extension, roleplaying games as a hobby, thereby leading to their continued success half a century later. I have no interest in disputing this point of view at the present time, not least of all because it contains quite a bit of truth. My concern has rarely been about the merits of the shift, but rather about establishing that it occurred. To do that, one needs to recognize and understand the authors and books that inspired the game in the first place.

It's fortunate, then, that Gary Gygax was quite forthcoming about his literary inspirations, providing us with several different lists of the writers and literature that he considered to have been the most immediate influences upon him in his creation of the game. The most well-known of these lists is Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. While I was not the first person to draw attention to the importance of Appendix N – Erik Mona, publisher of Paizo, springs immediately to mind as a noteworthy early advocate – it's no mere boast to suggest that Grognardia played a huge role in promoting Appendix N and its contents during the early days of the Old School Renaissance.

So successful was that promotion that discussions of Appendix N proliferated well beyond this blog, to the point where, a decade and a half later, "Appendix N fantasy" has become almost a brand unto itself. One need only look at the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games to see a high-profile example of what I mean, though I could cite many others. If nothing else, it's a testament to just how inspiring others found the authors and books that had earlier inspired Gygax. There was clearly a hunger for a different kind of fantasy beyond the endless parade of Tolkien knock-offs Terry Brooks inaugurated (and that Dragonlance formally introduced into D&D).

Yet, for all that, Appendix N suffers from a very clear problem, one that has limited its utility as a guide for understanding Dungeons & Dragons as Gary Gygax understood it: it's just a list. Gygax, unfortunately, provides no commentary on any of the authors or works included in the list, stating only that those he included "were of particular inspiration" He later emphasizes that certain authors, like Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft, among others, played a stronger role in "help[ing] to shape the form of the game." Beyond these brief remarks, Gygax says nothing else about what he found inspirational in these books and authors or why he selected them over others he chose not to include.

In addition, Appendix N is long, consisting of nearly thirty different authors and many more books. Drawing any firm conclusions about what Gygax saw in these works is not always easy, something that, in my opinion, might have been easier had the list been shorter and more focused. That's not to say it's impossible to get some sense of what Gygax liked and disliked in fantasy and how they impacted his vision for Dungeons & Dragons, but it's certainly harder than it needs to be. 

Compare Gygax's Appendix N to the one found in RuneQuest. The list is about half as long (if you exclude other RPGs cited) and every entry is annotated, albeit briefly. Reading the RQ version of Appendix N, one has a very strong sense of not only why the authors found a book inspirational, but what each book inspired in them (and, thus, in RuneQuest). As much as I love Gygax's selection of authors and works, I can't help but think that selection would have proven more useful if he'd taken the time to elaborate, if only a little, on what he liked about its entries.

I found myself thinking about this recently, because I've been pondering the possibility of including an analog to Appendix N in Secrets of sha-Arthan. Since the game has a somewhat exotic setting that deviates from the standards of vanilla fantasy, I feel it might be helpful to point to pre-existing works of fantasy and science fiction (not to mention other roleplayng games) that inspired me as I developed the setting. That's why, if I do include a list of inspirations, it'll likely be both fairly short and annotated – closer to RuneQuest's Appendix N than to Gygax's.

None of this should be taken as a repudiation of Appendix N or the works included in it as vital to understanding Dungeons & Dragons and Gary Gygax's initial vision for it. I still think there is insight to be gleaned by reading and re-reading the works of pulp fantasy included in the appendix and will continue to recommend them to anyone who asks for recommendations of fantasy worthy of their time. Nor should any of the foregoing discourage anyone from taking the time to read Howard or Leiber or Lovecraft, as doing so is time well spent and more than sufficient reward in its own right. However, with some time and perspective, I recognize that Appendix N has certain shortcomings that can make it less than adequate as a guide to "what Dungeons & Dragons is about."

Conan and the Cup of Destiny

In the summers of my childhood, there were few delights more refreshing than 7-Eleven's Slurpee – the store's carbonated frozen ice beverage. During the 1970s, when I was growing up, it was not at all uncommon for Slurpees to come in a plastic cup festooned with images of professional athletes or folkloric monsters or Wild West historical figures. In a few cases, I'd hold on to the cup, wash it out, and then re-use it. For example, I held on to a cup featuring skeletal cowboys for quite some time, simply my younger self thought it looked cool.

In 1977. 7-Eleven produced a series of Slurpee cups that featured Marvel Comics characters. This was apparently the second such series, the first having come out two years prior, but I don't recall ever seeing the original run. In '77, I wasn't much of a comics reader, but I did like Spider-Man, thanks in large part to the 1967 show that I watched in reruns at an impressionable age. Consequently, I was quite keen to get a Spider-Man Slurpee cup and visited 7-Eleven multiple times during the summer in the hope of acquiring one.

Despite my best efforts, I was never successful in this endeavor, having to content myself instead with cups featuring characters I'd never heard of before, like Namor and Nova – and Conan the Barbarian. At that time – I would have been nearly eight years old – I'd never encountered the name Conan outside the middle name of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He was completely unknown to me and I recall being very puzzled by his inclusion in a series of cups that seemed otherwise to include only illustrations of superheroes, such as my beloved Spider-Man. Because Conan meant nothing to me at the time, I didn't keep the cup and moved on to other things.

This being the summer of 1977, foremost among those other things was George Lucas's space opera, Star Wars. Like every other little boy (and quite a few little girls), I was obsessed with Star Wars, snatching up as many tie-in products with it as I could. Among those tie-in products was a Marvel comics series, initially written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Howard Chaykin. The series began by adapting the 1977 film over the course of six issues and then moved on to wholly original material whose quality varied, but which I generally liked enough that I kept reading it for several years, right up until the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980.

Most issues included an advertisement for subscriptions to Marvel comics. Though I never subscribed to any comics – I relied on the spinner rack at the local drug store – I nevertheless would glance over these ads to see what other titles Marvel had on offer. That's where I saw Conan the Barbarian once again, sometimes with an image of the mighty thewed warrior himself. Who was this guy? As before, I was baffled by his presence among so many superheroes. Mind you, I was equally baffled by the presence of Howard the Duck as well, so what did I know?

Some time later – I can't quite recall when but certainly before I was first introduced to Dungeons & Dragons in late 1979 – I stumbled across the name Conan again. This time, it was at my local library, which I visited regularly. Middle River Public Library had been my gateway to so many fantasy and science fiction books and writers, forming the basis for so many of my fondest childhood memories. One day, I took notice a spinner rack filled with white paperback books all of which bore the name CONAN in large, colorful letters. I still had no idea who Conan was or why he seemed to keep popping up, but there was he was once more. I wasn't yet ready to answer this question, as these paperbacks seemed a bit too "adult" for my tastes, judging by their moody painted covers.

My initial judgment over this Conan fellow eventually seemed confirmed when a friend of mine, on a visit to the drugstore to pick up the latest issue of Star Wars, pointed out that there were comic books for sale behind the counter, "behind the counter" being childish code, for the place where they kept those magazines. Sure enough, my friend was correct. I caught glimpse of a comic entitled Savage Sword of Conan, whose cover art reminded me quite a bit of those white paperbacks I'd seen at the library. I was now certain I'd never figure out the mystery of Conan and his connection to Marvel comics.

That's where things stood for some time. It wasn't until sometime in 1981 or thereabouts, by which point I was an older and more worldly twelve years-old that I took up any serious interest in Conan. The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide mentions the "Conan series" in Appendix N, along with its author, Robert E. Howard. Holmes also includes a mention of Howard and Moldvay's bibliography cites Howard alongside many other authors whose books I had already read and enjoyed. Furthermore, many of the older guys I knew who played D&D seem to love Howard and Conan. Maybe, I decided, it was time to finally figure out who Conan was and why he seemed to be everywhere I went. So, I went off to the library and grabbed one of those paperbacks off the spinner rack and checked it out. The rest, as they say, is history.

I mention all of this because today is the birthday of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan and many other characters who are now among the most famous and enduring literary creations of all time. It's funny to consider that I first became acquainted with both of them thanks to comic books published more than three decades after Howard's death by a company that didn't even exist at the time of his demise. I think that's a testament to just how remarkable was REH's imagination that a shy, nerdy, and prudish kid growing up in suburban Baltimore would one day come to love the products of it. So many other writers, who lived longer and wrote more, have been forgotten by history, but Howard – and Conan – live on.

Happy birthday, Bob.

Thoughts on the Occasion of Merritt's Birthday

The fine gentlemen over at DMR Books generously lent me their online soapbox on the occasion of Abraham Grace Merritt's 140th birthday yesterday. 

You can read my thoughts on the subject there.

A New Genre Itself

An overriding concern of this blog since its start are the literary precursors of Dungeons & Dragons. Believe it or not, this has often been a somewhat contentious subject, since there's plenty of conflicting evidence on the matter, not to mention a fair bit of obfuscation from the various parties involved. The subsequent history of both D&D and fantasy roleplaying games more generally, including their explosive, faddish popularity in the late '70s and early '80s, has only further muddied the waters, as other creators added their own ingredients to the imaginative chaos that Arneson and Gygax first unleashed upon the world nearly half a century ago.

Even bearing these facts in mind, there can be little doubt, I think, that Gary Gygax at least took his primary inspiration from just a handful of older writers – L. Sprague de Camp, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Abraham Merritt, Fletcher Pratt, and Jack Vance – and that his conception of the game reflects this. Despite the much-vexed question of Tolkien's influence on the game, I don't think anyone can honestly deny that Gygaxian D&D owes more to what I call "pulp fantasy" than to anything more highfalutin. One need only look at Gygax's various reading lists, culminating in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, to see this.

And yet I'm not sure that matters.

The moment Dungeons & Dragons was released into the wild – or Pandora's Box was opened, to use Greg Stafford's perfect metaphor – it was no longer the possession of any single person, including its creators. This is something Gygax himself recognized early on, even if he had his own ideas about the kind of fantasy roleplaying adventures he most enjoyed. By all accounts, the early days of the hobby were ones of wild, reckless invention, as everyone who got their hands on D&D made it their own. To some extent, this was by necessity, as the original 1974 rules were vague and unclear about just how to interpret them. It was thus an inevitability that a wide variety of mutant strains of Dungeons & Dragons would soon proliferate across the world.

At the same time, many of the game's early adopters liked the idea of D&D, but they took exception to this or that element of it. The changes they introduced to it were made, not out of ignorance of how Arneson and Gygax intended the game to played – assuming there even is such a thing in the first place – but intentionally, in order to bring the game more in line with the kind of fantasy adventures they most enjoyed. Of course, in the process of doing so, they became their own unique games – Tunnels & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne, RuneQuest, etc. – which, in turn, spawned their own "mutants," creating an entirely new ecosystem of creativity that continues to this day.

What's most interesting to me right now is that even as Gary Gygax was still in charge of the development of Dungeons & Dragons, or at least AD&D, there was plenty of variation in its presentation and content. Compare the work of David Cook, Lenard Lakofka, Lawrence Schick, and Allen Hammack to that of Gygax – or to each other. Each brings a different perspective and draws on different inspirations to present Dungeons & Dragons as he understands it (and, presumably, prefers it). What's remarkable is that, rather than undermining the game, this approach expands its reach. D&D, even as published by TSR, is a house of many mansions.

This probably explains why D&D was and continues to be the most popular and widely played RPG of all time. Being the first out the door no doubt helped, but I think it's more than that. D&D has always been a loose, reasonably flexible framework to which one can add (or subtract) whatever one requires for one's preferred style of fantasy adventures. Gygax unquestionably had his own preferences, but so too did everyone who's ever written for or played the game over the last fifty years. There is no reason that your D&D and my D&D should be the same, or even similar. Indeed, I remember a time when it was commonplace to assume every campaign was as unique as its players and referee, which is as it should be, in my opinion.

Dungeons & Dragons is a very strange game. It's one whose play can vary considerably from place to place, yet which is nevertheless completely recognizable to anyone who's even passingly familiar with the form of that play. I won't go so far as to say that no other RPG is similar in this regard, but D&D exemplifies this to a much greater extent than any other roleplaying game of which I can think. It's one of the most amazing things about D&D and I don't think it gets enough credit for it.

"When I was a little boy ..."

Pulp Fantasy Gallery: Hiero's Journey

Since this will likely be the last Pulp Fantasy Gallery post for a while, I thought I'd change things up a bit and go for something a little different this week. Sterling Lanier's 1973 novel, Hiero's Journey, is a work of post-apocalyptic science fantasy of which I am very fond. It also enjoys the unique distinction of being mentioned by name in both Gary Gygax's Appendix N and Tom Wham and Timothy Jones's foreword to the first edition of Gamma World. 

While I'll have a lot more to say about Gamma World over the course of the next week or so, right now I want to focus only on the cover illustrations to Hiero's Journey. Here's the original one, from a hardcover published by Chilton with artwork by Jack Freas. The cover would be re-used for a 1975 hardcover from Sidgwick & Jackson.

The following year, Bantam released a paperback edition as part of its "Frederik Pohl Selection" series. The cover artist is unknown.

1976 saw the arrival of yet another paperback, this time from Panther, with art by Gino D'Achille. This is the first cover that clearly depicts something from the novel. Note, too, the cover blurb invoking The Lord of the Rings, which, by this time, had become the gold standard for the broader "fantasy" genre.

Del Rey/Ballantine's 1983 edition is the one I owned as a kid. The cover is especially memorable to me, thanks to the artwork of Darrell K. Sweet. This cover would be re-used several times over the course of the next decade.

Thanks to the Science Fiction Book Club, the novel gets a new cover by Kevin Johnson in 1984.

A new Panther edition appeared in 1985, with yet another cover by Gino D'Achille, making him the only artist to illustrate the novel twice. Interestingly, his second cover looks to be a variation on the scene depicted on the 1976 edition.

Pulp Fantasy Gallery: Three Hearts and Three Lions

Poul Anderson's 1961 novel, Three Hearts and Three Lions (originally released in two parts in the September and October 1953 issues of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy) is one of the most influential fantasy tales ever written, though I imagine very few fantasy fans under the age of 50 have read it. Michael Moorcock, for example, thought very highly of it, borrowing its conception of the eternal war of Law versus Chaos for his Elric stories, which in turn influenced countless other authors. Among those was Gary Gygax, whose conception of alignment in Dungeons & Dragons – itself a remarkably influential fantasy text – derives equally from Moorock and Anderson, hence the inclusion of both authors in Appendix N to his Dungeon Masters Guide.

I was (and am) a huge fan of Poul Anderson's science fiction stories, particularly those featuring the character of Dominic Flandry, but I don't think I picked up any of his fantasy stories until sometime after I'd already started playing D&D. When I finally did so, I think it was The High Crusade that initially most impressed me. In the years since, my appreciation for Three Hearts and Three Lions has eclipsed it, especially as I came to understand its importance to the subsequent history of fantasy.

The first book edition appeared in 1961 as a hardcover from Doubleday and featured a fairly obvious cover image, though its artist is notable – Edward Gorey:

The following year, in 1962, Avon released the book in paperback, with a cover illustration by Richard Powers. This was, I believe, the edition I first encountered almost two decades later:

In 1970, Avon re-released the book with a new cover by Jeff Jones:

Just a few years later, in 1974, Sphere released a UK paperback. Patrick Woodroffe provided this cover illustration:

Later, in 1978, Berkeley released a new paperback edition, this time with art by Wayne Barlowe. 

There was a special Doubleday hardcover edition released in 1983 and made available to members of the Science Fiction Book Club. Susan Collins is the cover artist.

Rounding out the '80s is another paperback edition from Ace, this time with a cover by Carl Lundgren.