Spellbooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The art of making something from nothing.

The art of words.

The art of magic.

Dragonlance at the End of the World

One of many things that doesn't always come through in my campaign update posts are the little moments of roleplaying and character development that are, for me anyway, why I continue to participate in this hobby after so many decades. Reading those posts and the supplementary ones that draw attention to larger developments within them, one might well think the Big Stuff is all that matters to me. Of course, the Big Stuff does matter to me, especially in my House of Worms and Barrett's Raiders campaigns, where political, social, and religious struggles are important drivers of the action. Even so, it's the characters who matter most to me. They are, after all, the means by which my wonderful players interact with the situations I set before them and I appreciate the added texture they can add to the game world.

An amusing case in point is Corporal Wayne "Rocketman" Schweyk. Rocketman was originally a back-up character, introduced during the unit's time in the Free City of Kraków. All the players had a back-up character, both to fill out the unit's complement, but also as insurance in case one of the "main" characters died in combat or through some other means. Rocketman, as his name suggests, had been part of a Multiple Launch Rocket System crew during the earlier stages of the Twilight War. He eventually found his way to the Free City and became part of a group of displaced American soldiers there, some of whom joined the Raiders when they fled Kraków and its Machiavellian politics. 

As a character, Rocketman has several defining characteristics. Most obviously, he likes rockets, missiles, grenade launchers, mortars, and similar weaponry. Second, he is a good driver and always volunteers to drive one of the unit's vehicles. Finally, he's an avid reader of Dragonlance novels and makes an effort to seek out new sources of them whenever it's practical. Now that the Raiders are back in the USA, this is a fair bit easier than it was in Poland. Recently, Rocketman has begun to branch out. He's expressed an interest in Forgotten Realms novels, too, a few of which he was able to obtain in trade from soldiers stationed at Fort Lee.

On the one hand, this bit of characterization is a joke, making fun of just how many of these novels TSR published throughout the '80s and '90s – and there were a lot of them. We looked into the matter and, assuming that, in the timeline of Barrett's Raiders, TSR stopped producing new Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels at the end of 1997, shortly after the first Soviet nuclear strikes against America, there'd still be just shy of 100 Dragonlance novels and a little less than 80 Forgotten Realms novels. As I said, there really were a lot of these novels, but, from what I understand, they sold very, very well, outshining even the gaming material on which they were based. Talk about brandification!

On the other hand, little details like help a character to come alive. They help set him apart from his comrades and often serve as motivations for what the character does. In the case of Rocketman, he really does spend time talking to other soldiers, learning if any of them shares his interest in fantasy novels and whether there's library or other potential source for more of them. Further, his interest helps ground the campaign in its time and place. Barrett's Raiders is presently set in December 2000 in an alternate timeline that diverged at least as far back as 1985, if not earlier. Seeing as we're a quarter century removed from its chronological date and in a different reality altogether, these small reminders have proven useful.

From time to time, I should probably devote more posts to stuff like this. I've repeatedly said that the success and longevity of my various campaigns is, in large part, due to my players, who have created some really fun and memorable characters. They're one of the things that keep me engaged week after week. Shining the spotlight on some of them might prove helpful or at least interesting to readers as well.

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.

Retrospective: Q Manual

After seeing that advertisement for the James Bond 007 RPG, I found myself thinking about it, something I hadn't done in quite some time. I've been a fan of the espionage genre since I was quite young, influenced at least in part by my affection for the early James Bond films. Consequently, when the roleplaying game was released in 1983, I was an early adopter and had a great deal of fun with it.

One of the things that really set James Bond 007 apart from its competition, like Top Secret. was its remarkably elegant and thematically consistent design. Much of that is probably owed to the efforts of its lead designer, Gerard Christopher Klug, who seems to have had a rare talent for mechanical innovation in service to genre emulation. I adored James Bond 007 for its action resolution and chase systems, as well as its emphasis on style as well as substance. It was a really tight, inspiring design.

Since I've already written a Retrospective post about the game itself, I thought a good way to return to discussing James Bond 007 would be through the Q Manual, published the same year as the core rules. Subtitled The Illustrated Guide to the World's Finest Armory (not a misspelling; the 007 RPG used American spellings throughout), the book conjured images of white-coated technicians, deadly attaché cases, and Roger Moore raising an eyebrow as Desmond Llewelyn stammers his way through the latest miracle of British engineering. That’s exactly what the Q Manual delivers: an in-universe catalog of gadgets, vehicles, and weapons straight from the MI6 labs, lovingly detailed and immaculately presented.

The book takes the form of a “field guide” issued to agents of the British Secret Service, complete with an introduction by Q himself and dossiers on the equipment available to operatives in the field. That this fiction is maintained throughout the book is no small achievement. One of the many things that sets James Bond 007 apart from other spy RPG is the importance given to tone and presentation. The Q Manual, written Greg Gorden, leans hard into this, turning what could have been a dry list of gear into a flavorful extension of the world of the game. 

One of the most striking things about the supplement is its production values. Victory Games, being a subsidiary of Avalon Hill, inherited that company's penchant for clean layouts and effective use of art and typography. The illustrations in The Q Manual are clear, reminiscent of technical drawings, which only enhances the feeling that one is paging through a genuine intelligence dossier rather than a gaming supplement. Even the typefaces and formatting choices reinforce the conceit, giving it a restrained, professional look that stands apart from the appearance of most other RPG books of that era.

Mechanically, the Q Manual provides complete game statistics for each item, compatible with the system presented in the basic game rulebook. Everything from the iconic Walther PPK to rocket-firing cigarettes is detailed with both practical and, at times, tongue-in-cheek commentary. In this way, the book acts as both a mechanical expansion and a setting book, grounding its fantastical gadgets in a consistent rules framework while reinforcing the tone and flavor of the Bond universe. It’s a great example of rules and presentation working hand in glove.

Of course, all of this is just another way the Q Manual reinforces what makes the James Bond 007 RPG so special: its commitment to genre fidelity. Like the best RPG supplements, it doesn’t merely tack on new rules or equipment. Instead, it deepens the player’s immersion in the world of the game, reminding him that this is a game about style, daring, and cool-headed efficiency in the face of over-the-top supervillainy. Every gadget and vehicle included serves not just a mechanical purpose, but an esthetic one, enabling players to act (and feel) like true agents of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Re-reading it now, more than forty years later, I was struck by the book’s clarity of purpose and sincerity. It does not wink at the audience nor lapse into self-parody, as even the later Bond films would sometimes do. Instead, it treats the world of Bond as one worthy of exploration and emulation, not as camp, but as aspirational fantasy. I think that's a key to why both this supplement and the entire James Bond 007 game line were favorites of mine. 

No supplement is perfect. Like the game itself, the Q Manual assumes a particular flavor of "espionage" – clean, glamorous, and British to its core. There is little room here for the messy realities of the Cold War or the moral ambiguities of Le Carré. But this is James Bond, not Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The Q Manual knows what it is and does it exceptionally well. Honestly, that's what I love about it, even now. It captures a particular fantasy of espionage and invites you to step into it, martini in hand and mission dossier at the ready. It's refreshing to revisit something so joyfully committed to the escapism it's offering.

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. 

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."

Live or Die: The Choice is Yours!

The Sagard the Barbarian gamebooks are interesting artifacts from the mid-1980s. Co-authored by Gary Gygax and Flint Dille, the series consisted of four books published between 1985 and 1986 by Pocket Books in the USA and Corgi in the UK.

There are two aspects of these books that continue to intrigue me. The first is that they were released not by TSR by "mainstream" publisher(s). The '85 to '86 period coincides with Gygax's Cent-Jours, when he briefly seized control of TSR once again before his departure in October 1986. At the time, TSR was a mess on every level, so I can't help but wonder if the decision to publish these books outside of TSR is reflective of the chaos at the company. On the other hand, I also find myself wondering whether Gygax did this as an insurance policy against the demise of TSR, which was a very real possibility at the time. By publishing them elsewhere, he could safeguard his remuneration in a way he might not have been able to had TSR published them.

The other aspect of the Sagard books that's notable is that, in the first two, they're explicitly set within the World of Greyhawk. The later books, however, shift away from having any clear Greyhawk connections. This is somewhat similar to what happened to Gygax's Gord the Rogue series, whose final volumes were published after he left TSR through his new company, New Infinities. Those later volumes take place in a palimpsest version Greyhawk, with many names changed for legal reasons having to do with the terms of his departure. For this reason, I have a strange fascination with these late Gygax works, if only to ponder how they might have fit into his overall oeuvre had events not gone as they did in 1986.

The Inspirations of Gamma World

Based on the comments to the second part of my recent post on My Top 10 Non-D&D RPGs, my opinion that Gamma World should be viewed more as an example of the "dying earth" fantasy genre than as an example of straight-up post-apocalyptic science fiction was well received. This got me to thinking a bit more about Gamma World and its inspirations. While I suspect I'll dig more deeply into this in future posts, for the moment I wanted to present what editors Tom Wham and Timothy Jones had to say on this matter.

In their May 21, 1978 foreword to the first edition of the game, they write:

Drawing inspiration from such works as The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss, Starman's Son by Andre Norton, Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier, and Ralph Bakshi's animated feature film Wizards, the referee of a GAMMA WORLD campaign fleshes out the game, adding any details he or she deems necessary, and thereby creating a unique world in which day-to-day survival is in doubt. The rules are flexible enough to allow for a variety of approaches to the game – anything from strictly "hard" science-fiction attention to physical probabilities to a free-flowing Bakshian combination of science-fiction and fantasy.

What's apparent from this section of the foreword is that, as written, Gamma World was intended to be a fairly open-ended set of rules without a specific feel beyond whatever the referee introduced into his own campaign. In this respect, it's not unlike Dungeons & Dragons (and indeed most other early RPGs). The explicit inspirations mentioned above are eclectic, though none of them strike me as particularly "hard science fiction." The fact that every edition of the game that I ever owned (1st through 3rd) called itself a science fantasy game is telling.

Still, I think this is a topic worthy of further discussion. I believe there is more going here than is popularly imagined. If nothing else, it'll be yet more grist for my delving into the literary origins of roleplaying games.

Experience a Legend

Despite my well-known dislike of the way that the Dragonlance series changed AD&D (and roleplaying), the fact is that I actually looked forward to the appearance of the first Weis and Hickman novel in November 1984. As a TSR fanboy, I dutifully bought it, along with its two sequels, though, in retrospect, it's difficult to say exactly why. I suspect the sheer novelty of a "D&D novel" – Quag Keep doesn't really count in my estimation – was enough to inflame my interest. 

I had just turned fifteen at the time and Dungeons & Dragons meant a lot to me. I suppose I saw the advent of the Dragonlance novels as some kind of validation of all the time, energy, and love I poured into this rather odd pastime. From the vantage point of middle age, it's mildly embarrassing, but adolescent enthusiasms often are. 

Wild, Fanciful, and Often Trippy

I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to suggest that the covers of science fiction and fantasy novels have gotten much less imaginative over the years. By the mid-1980s, the writing was already on the wall and the wild, fanciful, and often trippy covers that simultaneously attracted and frightened me as a kid were on the way out, to be replaced by an endless parade of Michael Whelan, Darrell K. Sweet, and their imitators. This is no knock against Whelan, who's a great artist, but there is a certain predictability to even his best work that I frequently find disappointing. Come to think of it, predictability might well be the defining characteristic of post-1970s SF and fantasy art, itself a reflection of the mainstreaming and commodification of these genres. (Cue my inevitable dig at much of the oeuvre of Larry Elmore.)

Science fiction and fantasy were still (relatively) fringe interests in the 1960s and '70s and the artwork from the period reflects that. Take a look at these three different covers to the paperback releases of Michael Moorcock's The Stealer of Souls, starting with the Lancer edition of 1967:

I have a certain fondness for this cover, because my local public library still had a copy of the book on one of its spinner racks, where I first saw it. Jack Gaughan, best known for his work on the unauthorized US printings of The Lords of the Rings, is the artist of this piece, depicting Elric in battle against the reptilian demon Quaolnargn, summoned by Theleb K'aarna as part of a plan to separate the Melnibonéan from Stormbringer, while the spectral visage of (I assume) Yishana watches. 

The 1968 Mayflower edition took a completely different tack:

Bob Haberfield, who'd go on to do the covers of many more Elric novels, is responsible for this one, which is a terrific example of the kinds of covers I remember well from my youth. Unlike Gaughan's Lancer cover, this one has no obvious connection to anything that occurs in the novelette. That's pretty much par for the course in the late '60s and throughout the 1970s.

Finally, there's another Lancer edition, this time from 1973.

This piece is by Jeff Jones, who had an extensive career as a comics illustrator and I think that shows in the cover. I'm not entirely sure what it depicts, though my guess is that it might be the naval assault on Imrryr from The Dreaming City, with the monster being a Melnibonéan dragon. In any case, it's a very dynamic piece that grabs the attention, which is exactly what the covers of science fiction and fantasy covers used to do. 

Wyst: Alastor 1716

Though Jack Vance is probably best known among fans of roleplaying games for his works of fantasy, such as his The Dying Earth and its sequels, his works of science fiction are every bit as remarkable, filled with the same memorable characters, imaginative locales, and wild reversals of fortune that are the hallmarks of his long career as a writer.  

During the 1970s, Vance wrote three science fiction novels set in an area of human-colonized space known as the Alastor Cluster. The third of these, Wyst: Alastor 1716, follows the travels of a restless young man who enters and wins an art contest, the prize for which gives him a round-trip ticket to any world in the Cluster he chooses, along with some spending money. The young man chooses Wyst, whose society is governed by the philosophy of "egalism" that decrees that every person is equal to every other – with somewhat predictable results. Like so many of Vance's works, Wyst is thus equal parts adventure story and satire.

I mention this all because Sword Fish Islands, the company behind the excellent Hot Springs Island, has published an illustrated, fine press version of Wyst: Alastor 1716 in cooperation with Spatterlight Press, which preserves and promotes Jack Vance's literary legacy. Sword Fish Islands very kindly asked me to write the afterword to this edition, which touches on, among other things, the role Vance's stories played in inspiring many of the earliest creators of roleplaying games, particularly Gary Gygax.

If you're a fan of well made, limited editions of classic literature, you might find this lovely new edition of Wyst to your liking.  

Speaking of Burn, Witch, Burn!

As some of you may recall, I was asked by Centipede Press to write the introduction to a new edition of Abraham Merritt's Burn, Witch, Burn! The book was recently released in a limited print run and almost immediately sold out, which is unfortunate, because it's a lovely piece of work that I'd have been proud to have on my bookshelf, even if I hadn't been involved in its creation.

Here's the cover and spine of the book. Not visible is the silk bookmark.

This is the table of contents, featuring some of the terrific, original artwork by Dan Rempel.

Of course, no edition of a work by Merritt would be complete without illustrations by Virgil Finlay, an artist from whom Merritt commissioned more than a thousand pieces during his lifetime.

Though the limited edition of the book is sold out, Centipede Press is planning to produce a reprint in the future. When it's available for sale, I'll make an announcement here, since I think it would definitely be of interest to many readers.

Retrospective: Sugarcane Island

It's funny the memories that stick with you, even after so many decades. When I was in the third grade, my teacher invited a public librarian to come and visit our classroom. The purpose of his visit was twofold. First, he wanted to encourage us to come to our local library to get library cards (I needed no encouragement in this regard, having been an avid visitor of public libraries since I was quite young). Second, he wanted to share with us some books that he thought we might like. I cannot recall most of the books the librarian recommended to us on that day, but one still stands out: Sugarcane Island by Edward Packard.

Context is important here. The librarian's visit probably took place in the spring of 1978. At that time, no one had ever heard of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. That famous series didn't even come into existence until 1979, shortly before I first encountered the D&D Basic Set. Consequently, when the librarian described Sugarcane Island as a book in which I, the reader was the main character (or words to that effect), I was simultaneously baffled and intrigued. I'd never heard of a book like that and my eight year-old brain initially struggled to understand what he meant. It was only after he'd read a portion of it to us and allowed our class – by majority vote! – to decide which choices to make in the unfolding narrative that intrigue won out over bafflement. I had to read this book for myself.

I eventually was able to snag a copy of Sugarcane Island at the library, along with Deadwood City, another proto-CYOA book by the same author. The premise of Sugarcane Island is that the reader is an assistant to a scientist on an expedition to the Galapagos Islands made famous in the English-speaking world by the voyage of Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle. The ship on which you are traveling encounters a bad storm during the night, resulting in your being washed overboard. When you wake up the next morning, you find yourself on the beach of a strange island, the only distinguishing feature being the sugarcane that grows nearby, hence the title of the book.

The "story" of Sugarcane Island is thus one first of survival – you must locate food, water, and shelter – and then of discovery and escape. Your choices determine where you go and what find on the island and that alone was intoxicating to me as a child. I'd never read a book that allowed me to decide where the protagonist went and what he did. That alone was enough to get me to read through it several times in the span of a single day, making different choices each time, trying to see what the "best" course of action was. That was the real appeal of Sugarcane Island for me: it was like a game. 

Eventually, though, I found the limited choices and occasionally arbitrary nature of outcomes to be frustrating. The book's promise of open-endedness was somewhat illusory and it quickly became clear that Packard had decided in advance that there were "right" and "wrong" decisions. That's perfectly understandable, of course, given the inherent limitations of a printed book. Indeed, that's one of the difficulties of all Choose Your Own Adventure Books and their modern descendants, such as computer RPGs: there's simply no practical way to consider every possible choice. Sure, the author can include the most obvious choices and options and, for most readers, that's probably enough. But what if you want to do something unexpected or even downright weird? In that case, you're out of luck.

As I believe I've mentioned elsewhere, I was not a big reader of Choose Your Own Adventure books (aside from the excellent Fighting Fantasy books). To a great extent, this is simply a factor of history: most of the volumes released under that banner didn't come out until after the time I was already playing roleplaying games and they paled in comparison to the fun I had playing D&D or Gamma World. At the same time, it's not incorrect to say that Sugarcane Island paved the way for my eventual embrace of RPGs. In a very real sense, this book made me aware of a desire I didn't even know I had, namely, to determine the choices a protagonist makes in an unfolding story. That Sugarcane Island failed to satisfy that desire fully is no knock against it, which was (and is) a genuinely groundbreaking children's book. I'm very grateful to that nameless librarian who visited my school more than four decades ago. Without him, who knows whether I'd ever have become involved in this hobby that still gives me so much joy more than four decades later?

Burn, Witch, Burn!

The wheels of publishing turn slowly. Nevertheless, the Centipede Press edition of the classic Abraham Merritt story, Burn, Witch, Burn! to which I contributed an introduction will be making its appearance sometime next month. Like all Centipede Press books, this will be limited edition of only a few hundred copies, but I have no doubt it'll be a gorgeous one. When I have more specific information to share about the book, I'll write another post about it.

The Dungeons of Kollchap

Quite some time ago, a reader very kindly sent me a couple of books to read, one of which was Butterfield, Parker, and Honigmann's What is Dungeons & Dragons? After I'd read it all those years ago, I'd intended to write several posts about its contents, but never did so, unfortunately. Recently, while doing some cleaning, I came across the book again, which includes the sample dungeon map below.

The Dungeon of Kollchap, as it is called, is described in some detail in the book. Each room gets a paragraph or two, along with game stats (which appear based on the Tom Moldvay D&D Basic Rules). There's even a new monster type, "an animated humanoid, made of red-coloured stone," called a Rockman. 

All in all, the Dungeon of Kollchap is nothing special but then it's not really supposed to be. Its purpose is to illustrate the principles of dungeon design, the subject of the chapter of the book in which it appears. In this respect, it's more than adequate, with a few charming features, like a female halfling NPC named Rosa Dobbit, and a rhyming statue that answers questions put to it so long as they contain twelve or fewer words. As I said, nothing world shattering, but I have a fondness for "beginner" dungeons, especially those intended for illustrative purposes like this one. 

Alternate Covers

I have a fascination with the cover art of fantasy and science fiction novels from decades past, particularly the 1960s and '70s, which are, to my mind, a Golden Age for the medium. Relatedly, I also have a keen interest in alternate covers, such as those produced for publication in other markets. In some cases, the alternate versions are better than the originals, while in others they're much worse. A good example of both is M.A.R. Barker's first novel of Tékumel, The Man of Gold, whose original cover was painted by the incomparable Michael Whelan. 

Like most of Whelan's work, it's a gorgeous piece of work. Unfortunately, it has almost nothing to do with the content of the novel itself. Interestingly, when the novel was released in the United Kingdom, it featured a completely different cover.

This cover is only slightly more accurate. Its version of the titular Man of God is at least gives a better impression of its true nature, even if the details aren't spot on. That's much more than can be said of the German cover art.

Whatever flaws Whelan's cover had, it was at least attractive. This illustration not only depicts nothing in the novel, it's also quite unattractive. On the plus side, I find the German title amusing.

Do you have any examples of alternate covers you find similarly interesting (or baffling)?

The Dungeon Master

Since I've been writing a bit about the so-called "steam tunnels incident" that, in August 1979, first brought Dungeons & Dragons and, by extension, all roleplaying games to wide public consciousness (if not actual knowledge), I thought I'd turn today to another book related to the subject, this time much more directly. The Dungeon Master is a 1984 book written by William Dear, a Texas-based private investigator. Dear, who's been involved in a number of high profile cases over the years, was employed by the parents of James Dallas Egbert III to locate their son, after he disappeared from Michigan State University. The Dungeon Master is Dear's account of his investigation and what he discovered.

Dear – who is still alive, as of this writing – is a flamboyant figure, the very model of what one might imagine upon hearing the words "private investigator." He is fond, for example, of having his picture taken while holding a firearm and his writing is prone to bombastic self-promotion. Nevertheless, what comes through in reading this book is that, despite his foibles, he actually cared a great deal about the fate of Egbert and genuinely sought to understand him and his situation in order to find out what had happened to him. 

It's precisely for this reason that Dear became interested in Dungeons & Dragons and publicly opined that perhaps the then-new game might have played a role in Egbert's mysterious disappearance. As it turned out – and as Dear makes clear in this book – it didn't, but, by the time The Dungeon Master was published, four years after Egbert committed suicide, the damage had already been done. In the public mind, not only was D&D forever associated with this tragic event but it was also deemed "weird," "deviant," and "dangerous," among many more unsavory adjectives. Gary Gygax was still fielding questions about the game's supposed danger to impressionable young people in 1985, which frankly boggles my mind.

One of the most interesting parts of The Dungeon Master, particularly in hindsight, is the chapter where Dear recounts his first experience playing D&D for himself, in an attempt to understand Egbert's attraction to it. Lord Kilgore excerpts a large section of the chapter on his blog, a small portion of which I reproduce here:

My Dungeon Master and his friend arrived promptly at 2 P.M., as agreed. I’d had only two hours’ sleep, but I’d manage to shower and shave and put on fresh clothes and I felt wide awake. For reasons I can’t explain, I tingled with anticipation and curiosity. 

I didn’t know what to expect from my dungeon master. Would he show up in a Merlin costume, with a funny pointed cap and star: emblazoned all around? Would he be dressed as some authority figure, an all-knowing wizard or a god? I knew he would have complete control over the circumstances of the fantasy adventure on which was about to embark. I knew he would be absolutely fair, siding neither with me nor with the monsters I would face; he was an arbiter of the strictest impartiality, and his decisions were final. Would he com dressed in the robes of an eminent jurist? 

He came dressed in sweater and jeans and scuffed tennis shoes. He might have been Jack Armstrong, so open, friendly, and Midwest- fresh did he seem. His friend, a good-looking Mexican-American sophomore who might have been an athlete, was named Louis. The three of us gravitated to the table and sat around it, and I explained again that I had never played Dungeons & Dragons.

It's a very odd passage for a couple of reasons that strike me immediately. First, Dear once again seems have it in his head that D&D players wear costumes while they play, something I have never observed in real life, outside a handful of convention games and in those cases I'm pretty sure it was intended humorously. Second, the atmosphere of mystery and awe Dear attributes not just to D&D but to the dungeon master is odd. Having been a referee of many games over the years, I can't say anyone has ever viewed me with the reverence Dear evinces in these paragraphs. I suppose I have to remind myself that Dear, as he admits, "had never played Dungeons & Dragons" and so had little idea what to expect from it. His attitude was probably not helped by the pompous title of dungeon master for the game's referee, one I've long felt was a bit silly (mind you, I feel the same way about Call of Cthulhu's "Keeper of Arcane Lore").

The Dungeon Master has lots of flaws, both as a "true crime" book and as a recounting of the events of August 1979 and subsequently, but it's nevertheless an important document from a time that, to me anyway, seems a million years away from the present. "The past is a foreign country," as they say and it never seems more so to me than when I reflect on the bafflement and fear with which roleplaying games were greeted in some segments of society. In my own life, I only ever encountered a single adult who harbored any worries about RPGs; most adults I knew, including my own parents, looked on games like D&D beneficently and even encouraged my friends and I in our newfound obsession. In retrospect, I'm incredibly grateful for that, considering the many boons this hobby has showered upon me during my life.

Hobgoblin

Rona Jaffe's 1981 novel, Mazes and Monsters, is probably the best known example of a book using roleplaying games as the basis for its plot, in large part because of the television movie based on it. However, it was far from the only instance of such a book. Another one, published the same year, is John Coyne's Hobgoblin. Unlike Mazes and Monsters, which I have still never read, Hobgoblin is a book with which I am quite familiar. My father was an avid reader both of fiction and non-fiction; I remember he would check out huge numbers of books from the library every few weeks and spent most of his spare time reading. Occasionally, he'd recommend something he'd read to me and we'd talk about the book once I'd had the chance to read it too. 

In the case of Hobgoblin, our discussions began when he asked me if I'd ever heard of Brian Boru. At the time, I hadn't and he told me that he was supposed to be an ancient Irish king. He was also the name of a roleplaying game character in a novel he was reading. Hearing this piqued my interest and, after he'd finished reading it, he gave me the book to me so that I could see for myself. 

Hobgoblin is not a great book by any means, but it'd be unfair to Coyne to lump it with Mazes and Monsters. Unlike Jaffe, whose story is as sensationalist as it is absurd, Coyne is telling a different kind of tale, a weird coming-of-age horror novel in which roleplaying is not seen as dangerous so much as childish. There's a strong suggestion in Hobgoblin that roleplaying is an emotional retreat, an unwillingness to "grow up" and come to terms with the sometimes harsh realities of life. Its protagonist, Scott Gardiner, is an intelligent but awkward teenage boy whose father has recently died and who has moved with his mother to a rural upstate New York far from the city where he spent most of his life. Already an avid player of the titular RPG, Hobgoblin, he becomes even more obsessed with it, to the point where he begins to see monsters from the game around his new home.

The book is silly and lurid at times – it's a horror novel, after all – but, unlike Mazes and Monsters, I don't get the impression that Coyne had it in for roleplaying games. In fact, the game of Hobgoblin, to the extent we get any sense of it at all, seems vaguely plausible as a real game, in part because it's steeped in Irish mythology and folklore, which lends it a certain verisimilitude. Nevertheless, the rules of the game are still a bizarre mishmash of elements, with a board, cards, dice, and miniature figures. I doubt Coyne had ever played D&D when he wrote the book and his descriptions of the game strike me as the kind of thing an outsider might well say after a fairly cursory investigation into the subject. Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter, because Hobgoblin isn't actually about roleplaying games. Its imaginary RPG is more a metaphor than a plot device.

Thinking about Hobgoblin is another reminder of just how revolutionary roleplaying games seemed in the late 1970s and early '80s. From the vantage point of 2021, when RPGs and RPG-like entertainments are not only ubiquitous but in fact form a sizable portion of all pastimes, it can be difficult to understand what all the fuss – and worry – was about. Even having lived through those times, it's often hard to remember the sheer newness of the concept. RuneQuest famously contains a dedication to Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax for having "opened Pandora's box," which, I think, recognizes the effect that roleplaying really did have one the wider culture. I say it all the time: RPGs changed the world. It's little wonder that people at the time might react with a combination of fear and curiosity upon first encountering them.

A Dangerous Game

Yesterday's post about the steam tunnels incident conjured up another memory, that of the 1982 television movie, Mazes and Monsters, starring a young Tom Hanks and based on the execrable novel of the same name by Rona Jaffe. I dimly recall watching this when it was first broadcast and being baffled by it – not because it lent credence to those who wanted to paint fantasy roleplaying games in a negative light but because it was clear no one involved in this film had the slightest understanding of what RPGs were actually like. Honestly, Jack Chick's Dark Dungeons more accurately presents roleplaying games than Mazes and Monsters did, which is just sad. Mind you, most media portrayals of roleplaying, even today, have very little to do with the hobby in which I've been involved for the last forty years. One would think, after all this time, that someone who'd actually played a RPG might be involved in a movie or TV show and help ensure that the details were right. 

A guy can dream, right?

Spinner Rack Memories

The most magical place I've ever visited was the Middle River Public Library in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. As a child, I must have gone to the library every couple of days, looking for new books on dinosaurs and planets and frogs, three subjects very near and dear to my heart. I learned to write my name – no mean feat! – specifically so that I could get my very own library card. Though small, the Middle River Library had a surprisingly good collection of books that appealed to me. It was here, for example, that I first came across EC Comics and H.P. Lovecraft and these early experiences left me with a lifelong love of horror in all its forms.

Because the library was small and thus had limited space for shelves, there were spinner racks all over the place. Generally, the racks were used for small and light volumes, like magazines, comics, and paperback books. In the 1970s, when I was a child, fantasy and science fiction were much more likely to be published as paperbacks than as hardcovers. Consequently, these spinner racks abounded in books of this sort, a significant portion of which were originally printed in the 1960s, during the explosion in interest in these genres. I spent a great deal of time at those spinner racks, turning them slowly to admire their covers and sometimes grabbing a few books to take home with me.

Even now, more than four decades later, I can remember vividly the covers of some of the books I saw there, so long ago. Perhaps the most memorable were the Lancer/Ace Conan collections edited by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. With one exception, these collections were all published between 1967 and 1971 and contained a mix of Robert E. Howard's original stories – mostly in altered form, unfortunately – and pastiches by other authors intended to fill in the "gaps" in the chronology of Conan's life. Frank Frazetta provided the cover illustrations for most of these collections, some of which are forever burned into my memory.

I know I grabbed a few of them, like Conan of Cimmeria and Conan the Adventurer, solely on the strength of their covers alone. I have only dim recollections of the actual contents of these collections; I must confess that it took me several more years before I developed a fondness for Conan or REH. Even so, it was a beginning, a first foray into the world of sword-and-sorcery, and it probably contributed to my eventual deep dive into the genre during my teen years. There's a lot to criticize about the Lancer collections on the editorial side – my feelings about De Camp in particular are not positive – but there's no denying that, along with Marvel's comics, they introduced a lot of people, myself included, to the Hyborian Age. I'm very grateful for that introduction