Pulp Fantasy Library: H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing (Part I)

This week’s Pulp Fantasy Library post is going to be a little different. After spending several months re-reading the stories commonly associated with H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, I wanted to gather my thoughts in one place. It’s been a long-running project and it seems to deserve a proper send-off. I should also note at the outset that I’ve lately been in a melancholy mood, which likely accounts for some of the tone of what follows, as well as its length. What I’m offering here (and in tomorrow’s conclusion) isn’t intended as a definitive statement so much as an attempt to make sense of a number of impressions that have been accumulating for a while now.

Lovecraft’s present literary reputation rests on his stories in which human beings confront the indifferent vastness of the universe and discover how little mankind matters. Alongside these, however, he wrote another kind of tale, the so-called Dreamlands stories. These fantasies unfold in strange cities and landscapes of impossible antiquity, where remote gods brood, cats are not quite what they seem, and dreamers wander. Fans of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror frequently treat these stories as merely youthful imitations of Lord Dunsany and thus diversions from his “real” work.

To be fair, there is some truth to that assessment. The Dreamlands stories do not constitute a “series” in any strict sense. They were written over the course of many years, in different moods, and for different purposes. Some are little more than exercises in stylized diction, while others are surprisingly straightforward. A few are whimsical, while several are bleak. Even Randolph Carter, the character most often associated with these tales (and with Lovecraft himself), does not appear in most of them, and the Dreamlands themselves shift in tone and detail from one story to the next.

Nevertheless, taken together, Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories do reveal a consistent set of preoccupations. They return to the same themes again and again. What gives them unity is not plot or continuity but impulse. They are, at bottom, stories about longing and about the imagination as refuge, temptation, and trap. As someone who has lived inside his own head for much of his life, I find these subjects hard to resist, which likely explains why the Dreamlands continue to exert such a pull on me, even after a lifetime of reading them.

Any discussion of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories inevitably – and rightly – turns to Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft’s fantasies adopt Dunsany’s Biblical cadence, his remote and capricious gods, his invented antiquity, and his sense that wonder and melancholy are inseparable. Stories such as “The White Ship,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” and “The Cats of Ulthar” wear their inspiration openly. They are written in a consciously archaic style, as though recited by a storyteller who has never heard of the modern world.

Lovecraft admired Dunsany’s ability to evoke vastness without the use of literary realism. Dunsany invited the reader into a realm of dream, but it's not a comforting dream. It is beautiful, yes, but also fatalistic. The gods are not moral; they are simply powerful. Mortals may glimpse wonder, but they will never possess it and there is often a price to be paid for the attempt to do so. Lovecraft borrowed much from this approach, but, even in his most Dunsanian fantasies, there are also differences. Dunsany’s distance is poetic; Lovecraft’s is metaphysical. For him, the dream is never merely a dream. It is a sign of something beyond human reach and the desire for it is not without danger.

The Dreamlands are sometimes discussed as if they were a setting in the sense of a coherent world with geography, history, and consistent detail. Lovecraft occasionally encouraged this impression. He names cities and regions, refers back to earlier stories, and returns to certain motifs, like Ulthar and its cats, the streets of Dylath-Leen, and the Plateau of Leng, to cite just a few obvious ones. Yet, despite the desires of many a fan, the Dreamlands defy cartography. Their consistency is psychological rather than geographical. The Dreamlands are not really a place so much as a condition given form – the landscape of longing.

I think this is why Randolph Carter serves as something like the Dreamlands’ "mascot." Carter is not a hero in the usual pulp fantasy sense. He does not seek treasure or power. Instead, he seeks experience, specifically, a sense of wonder that cannot be found in waking life. He wants to escape the ordinary and, in doing so, find freedom. One can see the same impulse at work in “Celephaïs.” Its protagonist, Kuranes, finds refuge only in dreams, which become more real than his impoverished waking existence. The story’s conclusion is both triumphant and tragic. Kuranes achieves a kingdom in the Dreamlands where he may rule in peace, but he does so only by abandoning the real world entirely. This is one of the governing ideas of Lovecraft’s dream stories. The Dreamlands offer salvation of a kind, but it is a salvation that demands withdrawal.

For this reason, the Dreamlands tales are sometimes treated as a gentler alternative to Lovecraft’s more well-known cosmic horror stories. They contain moments of beauty, whimsy, and even mercy. The cats of Ulthar avenge cruelty. The White Ship carries its dreamer to lands of wonder. There is, at times, a sense that the imagination, for all its dangers, can grant something the waking world cannot. Even so, I think this supposed gentleness is often overstated. The Dreamlands do not offer simple consolation. In many cases, the dreamer’s longing is both a source of wonder and a cause of ruin.

In “The White Ship,” Basil Elton sails to marvelous lands, but his desire is not satisfied. He must go further. He must reach Cathuria, the Land of Hope, which promises absolute fulfillment. Yet in pressing on beyond the Basalt Pillars of the West, he causes the ship to founder and he awakens from his dream, unfulfilled. The story’s structure is essentially moral, but its morality is existential. The lesson is not that the dream is sinful, but that longing is insatiable and that insatiability will always court disappointment.

This pattern appears in different forms throughout Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales. “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” is not a dream story in the strict sense, but it is deeply Dunsanian and shares the same fatalism. A city grows proud, destroys what it considers lesser, and is eventually consumed by forces older than its own arrogance. The story is told as a legend, but its message is quintessentially Lovecraftian: history is not progress but a cycle of forgetting and punishment. Even “The Cats of Ulthar,” one of Lovecraft’s most charming fantasies, contains a darker undercurrent. The cats are not merely fanciful. They are agents of an ancient, inhuman justice. Their mercy is conditional, their vengeance absolute. The tale is comforting only if one is on the right side of it.

This is one of the Dreamlands’ most revealing features. Even in dream, Lovecraft cannot fully imagine a universe governed by benevolence. Beauty exists, but it is fragile. Wonder exists, but it is fraught. The dreamer may glimpse transcendence, but he cannot possess it without consequence.

I've rambled on longer than I'd intended already, so I'll leave the remainder of my thoughts for the second part of this post tomorrow.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Celephaïs

With October now over, Pulp Fantasy Library returns to H.P. Lovecraft and those of his tales commonly gathered under the heading of the “Dream Cycle.” Among these, few are as revealing of Lovecraft’s early imagination as “Celephaïs.”

First published in the November 1922 issue of Sonia H. Greene’s amateur journal, The Rainbow, “Celephaïs” was actually written two years earlier, during Lovecraft’s most pronounced Dunsanian phase. It is arguably the most significant of his early fantasies. A short, elegiac prose-poem that bridges the ornate reveries of Lovecraft's youth and the cosmic horror for which he would later become celebrated, it also appeared posthumously in the July 1939 issue of Weird Tales, whose cover I have reproduced here.

The story concerns a lonely Englishman living in modern London, who dreams of the city of Celephaïs, a timeless, radiant place of marble and opal beside a cerulean sea. There, he – who goes by the name Kuranes in dreams but a different one while awake – once dwelt amid golden domes and cloud-kissed towers. In waking life, however, Kuranes is destitute and forgotten, wandering the gray, joyless streets of a modern world that has lost all its color and wonder.

Lovecraft recounts how, through the use of drugs, Kuranes retreats into his dreams, striving to visit Celephaïs once again. At first, his visions are fleeting, but, as he turns to ever more potent narcotics, the distinction between waking and dreaming begins to blur. He becomes so devoted to this endeavor that he eventually loses his home and remaining wealth, becoming destitute. At the story's conclusion, his body is found lifeless, washed ashore near his ancestral home. Yet, in the Dreamlands, Kuranes reigns over Celephaïs as its chief god, eternal and unchanged.

Like “The White Ship” and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” “Celephaïs” clearly reflects Lord Dunsany’s influence on Lovecraft, both in diction and subject matter. Likewise, the yearning for a world of beauty and wonder lost to the banalities of modern life is pure Dunsany. However, Lovecraft’s version is more personal, suffused with melancholy and nostalgia rather than detached mythic grandeur. Kuranes’ longing for an idealized realm of beauty mirrors Lovecraft’s own retreat into the dreamworlds of antiquarianism, fantasy, and imagination. The city of Celephaïs embodies the Dreamlands’ central promise that, through dreams, one might escape time, decay, and the indignities of the modern age.

At its core, “Celephaïs” is a story of escape, not merely from the material world, but also from time and even mortality itself. Even so, Lovecraft seems somewhat ambivalent about this. He presents this escape as simultaneously poignant and ironic. In the end, Kuranes attains eternal kingship, but only through death; the perfect city of Celephaïs exists solely in dream and to dwell there forever is to abandon mortal life altogether.

Lovecraft would return to this theme in later works such as “The Silver Key” and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Randolph Carter, the protagonist of both, is a kindred spirit to Kuranes. He is another dreamer seeking entrance to the Dreamlands and yearning for the marvels and glories of an old remembered dream. Indeed, “Celephaïs” marks the first explicit appearance of the Dreamlands as a coherent world, populated by recurring beings, cities, and seas.

Kuranes himself would later reappear in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Kuranes as the immortal ruler of Celephaïs. From his dream-city, he warns Randolph Carter that the gods of dream are capricious and that too great a longing for lost beauty may lead to peril. His presence in that later tale underscores the double-edged nature of dreaming itself: it can preserve the past, but only by cutting the dreamer off from reality.

Stylistically, “Celephaïs” is rich with the luxuriant diction of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian phase, which can be seen in its remarkable opening paragraph: 

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experienced failed to reveal it, he sought in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

In addition to strongly suggesting an autobiographical element to his portrayal of Kuranes, this paragraph also presents the emotional core of Lovecraft’s art at the time. He is acutely aware that beauty is transient, that time destroys all, and that the imagination’s only victory over decay is the fragile, perilous one offered by dreams. It is thus no coincidence that the story opens, “In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley.” For HPL, all ideal worlds are dreams and the act of dreaming – or of creating art – is the only means by which mortals may briefly touch the eternal. "Celephaïs" thus stands as a key statement of Lovecraft’s early esthetics. In it, he reveals a yearning for the past and for permanence, expressed through the medium of bittersweet fantasy.

“Celephaïs” may lack the cosmic scope of Lovecraft’s later mythos tales, but it remains one of his most affecting works. It reveals a writer caught between the romantic longing for a vanished world and the growing realization that all beauty is fleeting. In that tension lies the germ of Lovecraft’s mature vision, where the infinite is both wondrous and terrifying and where the dream of escape becomes, paradoxically, a confrontation with the limits of human existence.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Cats of Ulthar

H.P. Lovecraft wrote "The Cats of Ulthar" in June 1920, during one of the most productive phases of his early career, when he was experimenting with short, dreamlike tales heavily influenced by the work of Lord Dunsany. First published in the November 1920 issue of the amateur press journal Tryout, the story would later appear twice in the pages of Weird Tales (February 1926 and February 1933) before being issued as a standalone booklet in 1935. At fewer than 1,500 words, it is a very brief piece — more a vignette than a fully developed narrative — and yet it has become one of Lovecraft’s most frequently anthologized works. Its enduring presence in print is due in part to Lovecraft’s own fondness for the tale, which he often cited as one of his favorites and perhaps also because it captures something essential about a side of his imagination that is often overshadowed by his more famous tales of cosmic horror.

The plot of "The Cats of Ulthar" is simple and deliberately has the structure and cadence of a folk tale. In the town of Ulthar, cats begin to vanish under mysterious circumstances, victims of a reclusive old couple notorious for their cruelty toward animals. Into this setting comes a caravan of strange wanderers, among them an orphan boy devoted to his beloved kitten. When the kitten disappears, the boy calls upon the gods in words no one can understand. That night, the cats of Ulthar gather together and descend upon the couple’s home. By morning, the cottage is silent and empty save for a few disturbing remains. From that day forward, the town passes a law forbidding the killing of cats.

Like much of Lovecraft’s early fiction, "The Cats of Ulthar" is written in a consciously archaic style, marked by inverted syntax and pseudo-antique diction. At this stage of his career, Lovecraft was still in the process of developing his literary voice and Dunsany’s influence is strongly felt. The story’s moralistic, almost didactic structure, culminating in the decree against harming cats, further aligns it with the traditions of myth and fairy tale. At the same time, it is suffused with the dreamlike atmosphere that Lovecraft favored during this period. This is one reason why it is typically grouped among the so-called “Dream Cycle” stories, even though, like "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," there is some suggestion that Ulthar exists (or once existed) in the “real world” rather than exclusively within the fantastical Dreamlands. 

Thematically, the story is significant for several reasons. First and most obviously, it reflects Lovecraft’s lifelong affection for cats, a sentiment he expressed frequently in his letters and which surfaces elsewhere in his fiction, most notably in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where cats play a crucial and even heroic role. More interesting, perhaps, is the way the story conceives of justice. Here, retribution is not the work of human laws or courts but of a higher, more mysterious order. The orphan boy’s prayer, the caravan’s enigmatic presence, and the cats’ nocturnal vengeance all suggest a universe in which moral balance is maintained, if not always through means we would recognize or understand. This vision stands in marked contrast to the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft’s later, more famous works. It hints at an earlier, more mythic conception of the universe, one that is mysterious and at times unsettling, but not entirely devoid of meaning or order.

Whether or not one accepts the idea of a unified Dream Cycle, "The Cats of Ulthar" is clearly part of a cluster of Dunsanian tales within Lovecraft’s canon. Ulthar itself recurs in later works, including "The Other Gods" and the aforementioned Dream-Quest, helping to establish the geography and texture of the Dreamlands. It also exemplifies the fairy tale-like qualities of these stories, where magic is subtle but ever-present, and where human (or feline) societies live according to strange but deeply meaningful laws. For readers familiar only with Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror, "The Cats of Ulthar" reveals a very different side of him, one that looks backward to myth and legend rather than forward to existential terror.

It is remarkable that a story so short and seemingly slight should cast such a long shadow over Lovecraft’s body of work. Its endurance speaks to its charm, simplicity, and the clarity with which it expresses a key facet of Lovecraft’s creative vision. More than just a curiosity, "The Cats of Ulthar" is an early signpost pointing toward the Dreamlands as a realm of myth and mystery, not to mention an excellent starting point for readers who wish to explore the breadth of Lovecraft’s imagination beyond the tentacled clichés for which he is now best known.

REPOST: Pulp Fantasy Library: The Doom That Came to Sarnath

The early part of H.P. Lovectaft's literary career is marked by the influence of the Anglo-Irish author, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, better known to posterity simply as Lord Dunsany. Between 1905 and 1919, Dunsany wrote numerous short stories that are set in a fictional world, Pegāna, with its own imaginary history and geography. These stories laid much of the groundwork for the evolution of the nascent genre of fantasy into what we know today (without which the hobby of roleplaying would likely not have been possible). 

Nowadays, Lovecraft's Dunsanian period tends to be overlooked, particularly by those enamored of his later, more famous tales of the "Cthulhu Mythos" (itself a term never employed by HPL himself). To the extent that these earlier stories are remembered, they're often mistakenly taken to be part of his "Dream Cycle." To some extent, Lovecraft himself is to blame for this misapprehension, because of the allusions and references he makes to his Dunsanian tales in works like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Likewise, Lovecraft's admirers have, as ardent fans so often do, attempted to impose upon his canon clear divisions whereby a work belongs in one category or another, despite the evidence that Lovecraft himself was far less rigid in his own thinking.

"The Doom That Came to Sarnath" is a good example of this phenomenon. Originally published in the June 1920 issue of the amateur fiction periodical, The Scot, the story was widely reprinted after Lovecraft's death, starting with the June 1938 issue of Weird Tales. Since I was unable to find an image of the issue of The Scot in which it premiered to accompany this post, I opted instead for the terrific cover of the 1971 Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition, painted by Gervasio Gallardo. My own introduction to the story came in the 1982 Del Rey collection of the same name with a cover by Michael Whelan, but I think I like the Gallardo version better.

The story begins in a way that makes clear Lovecraft's intentions:

There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.

As I read it, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" is a myth or legend coming down to us from the distant past, as Lovecraft implies immediately thereafter:

It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the grey stone city of Ib, which was old as the lake itself, and peopled with beings not pleasing to behold. 

The story is filled with phrases like "when the world was young" that suggest to me at least that the reader isn't to understand the tale he tells as taking place in an imaginary or dream land but instead in the ancient and forgotten past of our own world, though, as we shall soon see, the matter is not cut and dried. Regardless, Lovecraft establishes that the beings of Ib were "in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it" and "they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice." One of the reasons I chose the cover above is because it features Gallardo's interpretation of what the beings of Ib looked like. 

In time, men to the land of Mnar and founded the city of Sarnath. They marveled at the sight of the beings Ib.

But with their marvelling was mixed hate, for they thought it not meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk. Nor did they like the strange sculptures upon the grey monoliths of Ib, for those sculptures were terrible with great antiquity. Why the beings and the sculptures lingered so late in the world, even until the coming of men, none can tell; unless it was because the land of Mnar is very still, and remote from most other lands both of waking and of dream.

The hatred of the men of Sarnath grew and, in time, resulted in a war in which all of the beings of Ib were slain and their "queer bodies [pushed] into the lake with long spears, because they did not wish to touch them." The men of Sarnath likewise toppled the monoliths of Ib and cast them into the lake. The only evidence of Ib the men kept was

the sea-green stone idol chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young warriors took back with them to Sarnath as a symbol of conquest over the old gods and beings of Ib, and a sign of leadership in Mnar.

The men placed the idol in one of their own temples, but, on the following night, 

a terrible thing must have happened, for weird lights were seen over the lake, and in the morning the people found the idol gone, and the high-priest Taran-Ish lying dead, as from some fear unspeakable. And before he died, Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shaky strokes the sign of DOOM.

The story's titular doom does not come quickly and Lovecraft spends the remainder of the story describing the next thousand years of Sarnath's history, as it grows in power – and pride – within the land of Mnar, eventually becoming the capital of a mighty empire founded on hate and greed. Lovecraft presents these facts in a way that seemingly implies admiration of Sarnath and its glory, but it soon becomes clear that this is a mask for condemnation of its excesses and, by the end, Sarnath and its people pay the price for their past sins.

To call "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" a morality tale is probably simplistic. At the same time, Lovecraft is not at all subtle in his connecting the destruction of Ib with the later doom that befalls Sarnath. In any case, the story is luxuriously written, redolent with adjective-laden description that reminds a bit of Clark Ashton Smith, though utterly lacking in his black humor. Its almost Biblical rhythms and cadences practically demand that the story be read aloud. In the grand scheme of things, it's one of Lovecraft's minor works but it's nevertheless a successful one for which I have a strange affection.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The White Ship

Last week, I mentioned that there's no clear consensus on which of H.P. Lovecraft's stories belong to his Dream Cycle – or indeed whether there even is such a thing at all. For his part, HPL typically referred to these works as his "Dunsanian fantasies" or something similar, reflecting the powerful influence of Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany on his imagination when he wrote most of them. Lovecraft likewise never used the term "Dreamlands" in any of his published writing or private letters, though I don't personally think he would have objected to the coinage, given his admiration for Poe, whose famous poem "Dream-Land" (sometimes styled "Dreamland") surely echoes in the background.

As I revisit these tales, I’ve tried to approach them with fresh eyes, setting aside, so far as possible, the layers of commentary, interpretation, and fan speculation that have built up over the decades. Those perspectives have their value, but I believe it’s essential to start with what Lovecraft actually wrote, not simply with what others have written about it. That’s not always easy, of course, but I note it here both to frame what I hope to do in this and future posts and to remind myself to follow through on that commitment.

Of all H.P. Lovecraft’s early, Dunsanian works, "The White Ship" is among the most overtly dreamlike. First published in the November 1919 issue of The United Amateur and later reprinted in the March 1927 issue of Weird Tales, it's narrated by a lighthouse keeper named Basil Elton. The story recounts Elton's voyage aboard a mysterious vessel crewed by a silent bearded man clad in white. Almost from the start, the tale announces its allegorical, fable-like nature, as Elton steps away from the familiar world of his lighthouse and embarks on a journey through seas that lead to fantastical realms, each embodying some abstract or moral quality. For example, he visits the Land of Zar (of beautiful but fleeting wonders), Thalarion (city of endless delights, haunted by madness), and others, before attempting to reach “the Land of Hope,” Cathuria, which lies beyond the Basalt Pillars of the West. The ship founders during its attempt to reach this forbidden land and Elton awakens back at his post, the beacon light having failed and a wrecked vessel lying on the rocks below.

Read on its own, "The White Ship" presents itself as a straightforward moral parable in the manner of Lord Dunsany. Its sequence of exotic realms, each more allegorical than the last, recalls the mythic procession of The Gods of Pegāna or the ornate wonders of A Dreamer’s Tales. Lovecraft’s imagination here leans heavily on lush description and dream-logic, crafting a narrative that feels more like an allegory than an adventure. Yet the story is not simply a dream. The framing device, with Basil Elton awakening at his lighthouse to discover a shipwreck on the rocks below, suggests that the voyage may have had real consequences – or at least that its reality cannot be easily dismissed. That ambiguity is central to the story’s effect and it helps explain why later readers and commentators so readily considered it part of the Dream Cycle.

More importantly, "The White Ship" contains clear anticipations of the themes and techniques that would define Lovecraft’s those later tales. The notion of voyaging into unseen realms, of lands lying just beyond the horizon of imagination, and of the ceaseless longing for a beauty that can never be fully attained all point forward to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Basil Elton, like Randolph Carter after him, is not merely a dreamer but a figure alienated from ordinary life, dissatisfied with its limits, and compelled toward something more. In this way, the story functions as a prototype that's less developed than Lovecraft’s mature dream literature, but unmistakably the seedbed from which it grew.

Within the larger body of Lovecraft’s work, "The White Ship" occupies a liminal position. It predates the full flowering of his Dunsanian/Dreamlands stories, but its imagery and themes resonate strongly with those later tales. The forbidden allure of Thalarion, for instance, parallels the dangerous temptations Carter faces in his quest, while the longing for Cathuria foreshadows Carter’s pursuit of Kadath. Even the story’s framing device – of waking to find the dream has ended in loss – mirrors the bittersweet conclusion of The Dream-Quest. For these reasons, while it is not often remembered, I feel as if "The White Ship" is essential for understanding the eventual evolution of  Lovecraft's fantasies.

In the end, "The White Ship" reveals a young Lovecraft still testing the boundaries of his imagination, experimenting with form, theme, and tone under the spell of Dunsany. It may not possess the philosophical depth of his later meditations on dream and memory nor the grandeur of his most ambitious fantasies, but it nevertheless contains the seeds of both. What it offers instead is an early glimpse of the author reaching beyond the mundane world toward something larger, stranger, and more beautiful than ordinary life can provide. For that reason, it rewards rereading, not only for its ornate imagery, but also for the insight it provides into Lovecraft’s growth as a dreamer and as a writer.

Lovecraft the Fantasist

When most people think of H.P. Lovecraft, I imagine most of them think of cosmic horror, with its visions of an indifferent universe, ancient alien gods, and humanity’s fragile place within the vast gulfs of space and time. They're not wrong to make that connection. After all, it’s the foundation of HPL's reputation and the source of his continued influence.

However, it’s only one side of him.

Alongside "The Call of Cthulhu" and At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft also wrote tales that are not horror at all but fantasy adventures after the fashion of Lord Dunsany or The Arabian Nights. These are the stories of the so-called "Dream Cycle" – "The White Ship," "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," "The Cats of Ulthar," and, of course, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, as well as many more. 

These stories are not about terror and despair but about journeys, quests, and the exploration of strange lands. Lovecraft's recurring literary alter ego, Randolph Carter, sails with merchants from far ports, climbs mountains to speak with gods, and braves enchanted cities. He is, in every sense, a pulp fantasy protagonist, however much his adventures unfold in dream. Likewise, Basil Elton, the protagonist of "The White Ship," travels to exotic islands “where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten.” It is less a tale of horror than a fantastical voyage into the unknown, reminiscent of the voyages of Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts.

Viewed in this light, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath looks very much like a full-fledged fantasy quest. Carter’s journey is replete with allies and adversaries, strange locales, and even battles. At one point, he sails “past the basalt pillars of the West,” at another he becomes entangled in the politics of Ulthar and the ghouls beneath the earth. His is a perilous but wondrous quest:

“Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to the Cold Waste where Unknown Kadath veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.”

It is difficult to read such passages and not see the outlines of a RPG adventure. Here are dangers, quests, treasures, and mysteries aplenty – all the standard ingredients of fantasy roleplaying, simply flavored with Lovecraft’s dreamlike melancholy.

Even Lovecraft’s shorter dream tales carry the same sense of fantasy adventure. In "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," we hear of an ancient city destroyed for its hubris, a lost civilization waiting to be explored by bold wanderers. In "The Cats of Ulthar," a law is established through the agency of uncanny allies, reminding us of the strange but binding rules that often govern a mythic setting. These are not horror stories in the usual sense at all but fragments of a larger imagined world, glimpses into a fantasy setting that could be as rich as Howard's Hyborian Age or Tolkien's Middle-earth.

Despite having certain similar trappings, like swords, sorcery, and epic struggles, Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales have a somewhat softer focus. There are more quests and voyages than outright battles, more enchantment and peril rather than the struggle between good and evil. Where Howard’s Hyborian Age shows readers a world of raw survival and Tolkien’s Middle-earth a world of moral conflict, the Dreamlands are realms of longing, beauty, and half-remembered wonder. HPL's heroes rarely slay monsters to claim kingdoms. More often, they seek hidden truths, forbidden cities, or the distant gods of Earth.

Even so, there are similarities, too. Like Howard, Lovecraft peopled the Dreamlands with decadent civilizations, perilous sorceries, and monstrous foes. Like Tolkien, he gives us a secondary world with its own geography, history, and laws. The difference is perhaps one of emphasis. Howard’s heroes carve their fates with the sword, Tolkien’s with the burden of virtue, and Lovecraft’s with the dreamer’s restless desire to glimpse what lies just beyond the horizon.

It’s easy to imagine a roleplaying campaign shaped by these differences. A Dreamlands campaign would not be about conquering kingdoms like Conan, or saving the world like Frodo, but about exploration, discovery, and the pursuit of strange and beautiful mysteries. Characters would bargain with cats, ally with ghouls, cross seas to forgotten isles, and climb into the heavens in search of Kadath. Victory would mean glimpsing the ineffable, not necessarily surviving with treasure in hand.

Lovecraft the horror writer gets plenty of attention. Lovecraft the fantasist deserves some, too.

Interview: Geoffrey McKinney

The release of Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa, an imaginary fifth supplement to OD&D, in 2008 caused quite a stir at the time – so much that I devoted four posts to reviewing it on this blog. What set Carcosa apart was its singular vision of old school fantasy roleplaying seen through the lens of an idiosyncratic interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft. Since I was already devoting the entirety of this month to HPL and his legacy, I thought it might be interesting to ask McKinney a few questions about Lovecraft, Carcosa, and roleplaying games. 

1. What first drew you to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and how did they shape your vision for Carcosa?

In the spring of 1980, I bought the D&D Basic Set (with the rule book edited by Dr. Holmes and with module B2) and the Monster Manual, and I started playing D&D with some friends who had already been playing for a few months. In the second half of August 1980, I had enough money to buy the Players Handbook, but when I got to the toy store, I decided to instead buy the brand-new Deities & Demigods Cyclopedia (DDG). The Cthulhu Mythos section melted my 10-year-old brain. The gloppy Erol Otus illustrations are still my favorite Mythos illustrations of all, and his Shub-Niggurath is one of the best D&D illustrations of any sort.

The dark, mysterious text accompanying Otus’s art deepened my fascination. In fact, the sixth word of the first sentence left me unsure whether the Mythos was a 20th-century creation or whether some unhealthy ancient men actually believed in and worshiped these beings: “The Cthulhu Mythos was first revealed in a group of related stories by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft.”

The six pages of the Cthulhu Mythos immediately seeped into our D&D games, adding a generous helping of Cthulhoid gods and monsters; dark magics to conjure, dominate, and banish them; and human sacrifice.

Carcosa is basically D&D seen through the lens of “DDG’s Cthulhu Mythos, all the time”.

2. In what ways do you see Carcosa as diverging from Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, and in what ways do you think it reinforces it?

Carcosa is definitely the version of the Cthulhu Mythos presented in Deities & Demigods, and as such does not strive to be “true” to Lovecraft’s stories. Carcosa is pulpy, sword & sorcery D&D fun. Sure, the setting is dark and bleak, but you can (for example) blow Cthulhu away with technetium pulse cannons rather than cower and hide.

3. You incorporate many of the Great Old Ones and other Mythos entities. Did you approach these beings differently from how Chaosium might?

All the monsters in Carcosa were taken from the 1974 D&D game, inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos section of Deities & Demigods, or they crawled out of the dark corners of my own imagination. I have never played Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, so I am not familiar enough with it to compare it with Carcosa.

4. The setting of Carcosa feels like a fusion of Lovecraft, planetary romance, and pulp science fiction. Do you think Lovecraft’s legacy fits naturally into that blend, or did you have to reshape it?

I like to refer to Carcosa as “weird science-fantasy”. Virtually everything in it grew from the seeds in the Cthulhu Mythos section of Deities & Demigods. Carcosa’s psionics sprang from DDG’s description of the Great Race. Carcosa’s high-tech grew from DDG’s descriptions of the Primordial Ones and of the Great Race. Of course, Lovecraft’s “The Shadow out of Time” and At the Mountains of Madness include these elements. I would not say I reshaped Lovecraft’s legacy but rather fleshed it out.

5. Do you think there is room for wonder in Lovecraft’s cosmos or is everything inevitably tainted by dread? Does Carcosa reflect that?

There is definitely room for wonder in Lovecraft’s cosmos, particularly when looked at through Dunsany’s Pegana and some of his other early tales. My own favorite of my books is the Carcosa module, The Mountains of Dream. I tried to infuse it with that Dunsanian/Lovecraftian sense of wonder and awe.

6. In traditional D&D, magic is a tool. In Carcosa, it is a moral and metaphysical hazard. How much of that came from Lovecraft, and how much from your own take on sorcery?

At risk of sounding like a broken record, it came from the Cthulhu Mythos section of Deities & Demigods. Of DDG’s seventeen pantheons, only the gods of the Cthulhu pantheon are unanimous in demanding human sacrifice (DDG, pp. 136-137). Couple that with DDG’s description on page 48 of the spells contained in the Necronomicon. For example, “It would appear that spells are given for summoning all of the Old Ones and their minions, and some spells for their control and dismissal, although these latter are not always effective. The spells are very long and complicated, and not entirely comprehensible without long study and research.” Carcosa’s sorcery attempts to flesh out these four paragraphs from DDG.

7. How did you approach the balance between evoking Lovecraftian horror and making a setting that is actually playable and engaging at the table?

The gods, monsters, sorcery, and setting itself of Carcosa evoke Lovecraftian horror just by existing. The player characters can arm themselves with advanced technology and/or with sorcery and psionics to lay waste to the blasphemous abominations that are practically everywhere on Carcosa. It is not about being afraid of Cthulhu and his ilk. Instead, the player characters can strive to amass enough might and firepower that Cthulhu and everything else becomes afraid of them.

8. Would you ever consider returning to Carcosa or Lovecraftian themes in a future project or is that ground you feel you have already covered?

Generally speaking, every time a DM puts something such as purple worms, black puddings, mind flayers, Juiblex, Kuo-Toans, gibbering mouthers, slaadi, etc. into his campaign, he is injecting some good old Lovecraftian horror into his game. As for me writing additional Carcosa books, that is out of my hands. If the Muses sing to me again the dark songs of Carcosa, then yes. We must wait and see what implacable Fate decrees for the future.

9. Have your thoughts on Lovecraft’s work or worldview changed over the years?

I have read and re-read Lovecraft since the early 1990s. While I enjoy his works as much as ever, I have come to agree with Lovecraft that his four favorite authors (Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James) are even better. I highly recommend the following:

by Lord Dunsany:

• The Gods of Pegana
• Time and the Gods
• The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories
• A Dreamer’s Tales
• The King of Elfland’s Daughter

by Arthur Machen:

• “The Great God Pan”
• “The Inmost Light”
• “The Shining Pyramid”
• The Three Impostors
• “The Red Hand”
• The Hill of Dreams
• “Ornaments in Jade”
• “The Great Return”

by M. R. James:

• Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
• More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
• A Thin Ghost and Others
• A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories

by Algernon Blackwood:

A great many of his weird stories, preeminent of which are:

• “The Willows”
• “The Wendigo”
• Incredible Adventures

A (Very) Partial Pictorial History of Gnolls

There's no use in fighting it. You'll be seeing more entries in what has inadvertently become a series for a few more weeks at least, perhaps longer. After last week's post on bugbears, which are a uniquely D&D monstrous humanoid, I knew I'd have to turn to gnolls this week, as they, too, are unique to the game. Perhaps I should clarify that a little. There is no precedent, mythological or literary, for the spelling "gnoll." However, the spelling "gnole" appears in "How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles" from Lord Dunsany's 1912 short story collection, The Book of Wonder (as well as in Margaret St. Clair's "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles"). 

There can be no doubt that Dunsany's story served as the seeds for the gnolls of D&D. In their description in Book 1 of OD&D, gnolls are described as "a cross between Gnomes and Trolls (. . . perhaps, Lord Sunsany [sic] did not really make it all that clear." The original short story contains no description of the titular creature, leaving Gygax to advance his theory of gnolls being a weird hybrid monster. Artist Greg Bell interprets them thusly:

Sometime in the three years between their first appearance in OD&D (1974) and the publication of the Monster Manual (1977), someone at TSR decided that gnolls were, in fact, "low intelligence beings like hyena-men." That's how they're described in J. Eric Holmes's Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which is where I first encountered them, courtesy of this delightful illustration by Tom Wham:

Meanwhile, the Monster Manual itself, published the same year, gives us this illustration by Dave Sutherland.

The Monster Manual also includes another Sutherland gnoll-related piece, this time of Yeenoghu, the demon lord of gnolls. To my eyes, Yeenoghu looks a lot more hyena-like than does the illustration above, but, even so, they're still broadly similar.

Speaking of Yeenoghu, he reappears in the pages of Deities & Demigods, this time depicted by Dave LaForce. I've always found this version of the demon lord a bit goofy. I'm not sure if it's his grin or the strangeness of the arm that holds his infamous triple flail. 

The AD&D Monster Cards sets are a good source of unusual takes on many monsters and that's especially so in the case of gnolls. Artist Harry Quinn depicts them in a way that, to my eyes, looks decidedly feline. To anyone familiar with the weird phylogenetics of hyenas, that's inappropriate, but it still feels off somehow. Perhaps it's simply the weight of all the previous depictions that makes me think so. In any case, Quinn's version of the gnoll is quite distinctive.

The 2e Monstrous Compendium features what is probably the most hyena-like of all versions of the gnoll, courtesy of James Holloway.

Tony DiTerlizzi provides an even more hyena-like version of the gnoll in the Monstrous Manual, right down the spots on its fur. 

I feel like I have probably overlooked some illustrations of gnolls from the TSR era of D&D, but, if so, they must be fairly obscure, as these are the only ones I could easily find in my collection. What's most notable about the ones I did find is how closely they hew to the post-OD&D notion that gnolls are hyena-men. I'd chalk up most of the differences to artist skill and choice rather than a fundamental disagreement about this fact. In this respect, they're quite similar to bugbears, another distinctly D&D monster whose look stayed largely the same during TSR's stewardship of Dungeons & Dragons.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Doom That Came to Sarnath

The early part of H.P. Lovectaft's literary career is marked by the influence of the Anglo-Irish author, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, better known to posterity simply as Lord Dunsany. Between 1905 and 1919, Dunsany wrote numerous short stories that are set in a fictional world, Pegāna, with its own imaginary history and geography. These stories laid much of the groundwork for the evolution of the nascent genre of fantasy into what we know today (without which the hobby of roleplaying would likely not have been possible). 

Nowadays, Lovecraft's Dunsanian period tends to be overlooked, particularly by those enamored of his later, more famous tales of the "Cthulhu Mythos" (itself a term never employed by HPL himself). To the extent that these earlier stories are remembered, they're often mistakenly taken to be part of his "Dream Cycle." To some extent, Lovecraft himself is to blame for this misapprehension, because of the allusions and references he makes to his Dunsanian tales in works like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Likewise, Lovecraft's admirers have, as ardent fans so often do, attempted to impose upon his canon clear divisions whereby a work belongs in one category or another, despite the evidence that Lovecraft himself was far less rigid in his own thinking.

"The Doom That Came to Sarnath" is a good example of this phenomenon. Originally published in the June 1920 issue of the amateur fiction periodical, The Scot, the story was widely reprinted after Lovecraft's death, starting with the June 1938 issue of Weird Tales. Since I was unable to find an image of the issue of The Scot in which it premiered to accompany this post, I opted instead for the terrific cover of the 1971 Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition, painted by Gervasio Gallardo. My own introduction to the story came in the 1982 Del Rey collection of the same name with a cover by Michael Whelan, but I think I like the Gallardo version better.

The story begins in a way that makes clear Lovecraft's intentions:

There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.

As I read it, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" is a myth or legend coming down to us from the distant past, as Lovecraft implies immediately thereafter:

It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the grey stone city of Ib, which was old as the lake itself, and peopled with beings not pleasing to behold. 

The story is filled with phrases like "when the world was young" that suggest to me at least that the reader isn't to understand the tale he tells as taking place in an imaginary or dream land but instead in the ancient and forgotten past of our own world, though, as we shall soon see, the matter is not cut and dried. Regardless, Lovecraft establishes that the beings of Ib were "in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it" and "they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice." One of the reasons I chose the cover above is because it features Gallardo's interpretation of what the beings of Ib looked like. 

In time, men to the land of Mnar and founded the city of Sarnath. They marveled at the sight of the beings Ib.

But with their marvelling was mixed hate, for they thought it not meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk. Nor did they like the strange sculptures upon the grey monoliths of Ib, for those sculptures were terrible with great antiquity. Why the beings and the sculptures lingered so late in the world, even until the coming of men, none can tell; unless it was because the land of Mnar is very still, and remote from most other lands both of waking and of dream.

The hatred of the men of Sarnath grew and, in time, resulted in a war in which all of the beings of Ib were slain and their "queer bodies [pushed] into the lake with long spears, because they did not wish to touch them." The men of Sarnath likewise toppled the monoliths of Ib and cast them into the lake. The only evidence of Ib the men kept was

the sea-green stone idol chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young warriors took back with them to Sarnath as a symbol of conquest over the old gods and beings of Ib, and a sign of leadership in Mnar.

The men placed the idol in one of their own temples, but, on the following night, 

a terrible thing must have happened, for weird lights were seen over the lake, and in the morning the people found the idol gone, and the high-priest Taran-Ish lying dead, as from some fear unspeakable. And before he died, Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shaky strokes the sign of DOOM.

The story's titular doom does not come quickly and Lovecraft spends the remainder of the story describing the next thousand years of Sarnath's history, as it grows in power – and pride – within the land of Mnar, eventually becoming the capital of a mighty empire founded on hate and greed. Lovecraft presents these facts in a way that seemingly implies admiration of Sarnath and its glory, but it soon becomes clear that this is a mask for condemnation of its excesses and, by the end, Sarnath and its people pay the price for their past sins.

To call "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" a morality tale is probably simplistic. At the same time, Lovecraft is not at all subtle in his connecting the destruction of Ib with the later doom that befalls Sarnath. In any case, the story is luxuriously written, redolent with adjective-laden description that reminds a bit of Clark Ashton Smith, though utterly lacking in his black humor. Its almost Biblical rhythms and cadences practically demand that the story be read aloud. In the grand scheme of things, it's one of Lovecraft's minor works but it's nevertheless a successful one for which I have a strange affection.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth

Were I to be so bold as to enumerate the commonest elements of fantasy literature, magic swords would almost certainly appear near the top of the list. Whether it be Excalibur, Hrunting, Tizona, or Durendal from myth or Orcrist, Graywand, Stormbringer, or Terminus Est from literature, fantasy tales, particularly those of the sort that most strongly influenced the creation of D&D and other roleplaying games, are replete with named and enchanted weapons. 

I thought about their prevalence the other day as I re-read "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" (hereafter "Sacnoth") by Lord Dunsany. Originally published in the 1908 collection entitled The Sword of Welleran, "Sacnoth" presents the reader with a rural village called Allathurion, whose people lived in peace with "all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood," as well as "among themselves and between them and their lord, Lorendiac." Despite this,

there was trouble in Allathurion, for of an evening fell dreams were wont to come slipping through the tree trunks and into the peaceful village; and they assumed dominion of men's minds and led them in watches of the night through the cindery plains of Hell. 

The village magician "made spells against those fell dreams; yet still the dreams came flitting through the trees." Consequently, "men grew afraid of sleep … And they grew worn and pale, some through the want of rest, and others from fear of the things they saw on the cindery plains of Hell." Deeply concerned by this, the magician retired to his tower to cast spells to uncover the source of the nightmares that held Allathurion and its people in its grip.

In time, he came to know that

the dreams were from Gaznak … the greatest magician among the spaces of the stars. And he read to the people out of the Book of Magicians, which tells the comings of the comet and foretells his coming again. And he told them how Gaznak rides upon the comet, and how he visits Earth once in every two hundred and thirty years, and makes for himself a vast, invincible fortress and sends out dreams to feed on the minds of men, and may never be vanquished but by the sword Sacnoth.

 This is the first mention of the titular sword in the story, which we soon learn has not yet been wrought, "for it lies as yet in the hide of Tharagavverug, protecting his spine." Tharagvverug is 

the dragon-crocodile who haunts the Northern marshes and ravages the homesteads by their marge. And the hide of his back is of steel, and his under parts are of iron; but along the midst of his back, over his spine, there lies a narrow strip of unearthly steel. The strip of steel is Sacnoth, and it may be neither cleft nor molten, and there is nothing in the world that may avail to break it, not even leave a scratch upon its surface. It is of the length of a good sword, and of the breadth thereof. 

Leothric, son of the villagers' lord, offers to slay Tharagvverug so that he might acquire Sacnoth and use it to defeat Gaznak and end his depredations upon the village of Allathurion.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the slaying of the dragon-crocodile would take up the bulk of the story. In point of fact, Leothric's quest to defeat Tharagvverug and obtain the sword Sacnoth goes entirely according to plan and therefore ends quite quickly. This certainly surprised me, because the slaying of a dragon – or a similarly dangerous monster – is the basis for a great many classical fantasy stories. That Dunsany reduced the slaying of Tharagvverug to the prolog of the larger story of defeating Gaznak is a bold move and is part of why it stands out, even within Dunsany's larger body of work.

"Sacnoth" is also beautifully written and a joy to read. Dunsany's command of language is remarkable, drawing on both Greek poetry and the Bible in its lyricism. Unlike, for example, Lovecraft, who admired and was influenced by his work, Dunsany somehow manages to evoke a mythic past without recourse to archaism or pedantry. For that reason, it's a story that practically demands to be read aloud and I think one's enjoyment of it would be increased if it were. Regardless, I highly recommend "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth." It's readily available online and not very long. Like me, I suspect you'll not only enjoy it, you'll want to read more of Dunsany's tales.  

(And, as a largely unrelated aside, Sacnoth is the name for an important world within GDW's Third Imperium setting for Traveller. I think I encountered the name through this game long before I ever read the story from which it comes.)

Alternate Humanoids

Today's Pulp Fantasy Library featured monsters called "gnoles" which were first referenced in a short story by Lord Dunsany. Though Gary Gygax gave different answers at different times, OD&D's entry on gnolls nevertheless makes reference to Dunsany, implying that the Anglo-Irish author was the ultimate inspiration for these antagonistic humanoids. 

Dunsany doesn't describe his gnoles in any detail, leaving it to the imagination of his readers. Consequently, the entry for gnolls in Volume I of OD&D theorizes that they are a "cross between Gnomes and Trolls," despite the fact it later states that the gnoll king's bodyguards "fight as Trolls but lack regenerative power." There's no suggestion whatsoever of their being hyena-headed, something I don't believe appears prior to the publication of the Monster Manual (though, as always, feel free to correct me in the comments if I am mistaken).

This relative lack of detail extends to all the monstrous humanoids in the game. Other than being small and poorly adapted to daylight, for example, neither goblins nor kobolds receive any detail. Orcs and hogoblins are not much different. Greyhawk gives us bugbears and says they are "great hairy goblin-giants" with a "shambling gait," but is otherwise silent on the matter of their appearance (though there is a genuinely compelling depiction of them on the inside back cover that features a jack-o-lantern as a head).

Why mention all of this? I've talked before about my unhappiness with the enervating self-referentiality of Dungeons & Dragons. This is a feature of all editions of the game after OD&D and necessarily so, since they all build on one another (with the possible exception of the much-hated 4e which, for all its manifest faults, did genuinely try to break free of the shackles of the past). When I first read the Holmes Basic Set or even the Monster Manual, this was all fresh and imaginative and it powerfully seized my imagination – as you would expect, given its novelty to me. 

With time, though, it's inevitable that I wouldn't feel quite as enthusiastic about the standard presentation of monstrous humanoids in the game. So I find myself returning to OD&D and using what little it presents as the basis for my own interpretations of these enemies. As I further develop Urheim, I'll share what I've come up with here. My goal is twofold: to imagine unique versions of classic monsters that convey the distinct flavor of my campaign setting and to show that this cane be done without the need for mechanical changes. That is, even if, for example, my take on orcs or kobolds is different from the received D&D version, it will still be mechanically compatible with the one everyone already knows. I don't want to create a new game, just show how the existing game can be used in (I hope) imaginative new ways.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles

If I had to pick the most obscure author listed in Appendix N, Margaret St. Clair would almost certainly be whom I'd choose. Despite the fact that she wrote at least two books that had an influence on Gygax – The Sign of the Labrys and The Shadow People – I think it's safe to say that very few players of Dungeons & Dragons have ever heard her name, let alone read one of her stories. 

I can't fault anyone for not having heard of St. Clair. I'm fairly certain I'd never encountered her name prior to seeing it in the Dungeon Masters Guide and, even then, finding an actual book with her byline wasn't easy. Why she is largely unknown is a mystery to me. If I had to guess, it's that she broke into the pulp scene during the late 1940s, which was after the golden age of the pulps that is now so familiar and celebrated. If so, it's ironic, as St. Clair's writing is very much in keeping with the ideas and themes of her more acclaimed colleagues. 

A case in point is her short story, "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles." Written under the pseudonym of Idris Seabright, the story originally appeared in the October 1951 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (which also featured stories by Richard Mattheson, Alfred Bester, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt). The gnoles of the title are a reference to a short story from Lord Dunsany's The Book of Wonder, "How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles." Dunsany's tale is ostensibly about how the titular character, a professional burglar, attempts to steal from the monstrous gnoles – and it is – but it's also a satirical meditation on capitalism and monsters.

St. Clair's own short story is not a sequel or continuation of Dunsany's tale but I'd say that one's enjoyment of it is increased by familiarity with its predecessor. Both explore similar themes and do so in humorous ways. The difference, in my opinion, is that "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" is much darker, even horrific, than Dunsany's narrative and it's precisely for that reason that I find it so memorable. The story begins thusly:

The gnoles have a bad reputation, and Mortensen was quite aware of this. But he reasoned, correctly enough, that cordage must be something for which the gnoles had a long unsatisfied want, and he saw no reason why he should not be the one to sell to them. What a triumph such a sale would be! The district sales manager might single out Mortensen for special mention at the annual sales-force dinner. It would help his sales quota enormously. And, after all, it was none of his business what the gnoles used cordage for.

From the very beginning, the tone of the story is clear and St. Clair takes full advantage of this breezy, almost light-hearted spirit, drawing the reader to conclude that this will be a fun little piece utterly lacking in punch. Mortensen, his Manual of Modern Salesmanship in hand as his guide, continues toward his intended goal.

The gnoles live on the very edge of Terra Cognita, on the far side of a wood which all authorities unite in describing as dubious. Their house is narrow and high, in architecture a blend of Victorian Gothic and Swiss chalet. Though the house needs paint, it is kept in good repair. Thither on Thursday morning, sample case in hand, Mortensen took his way.

No path leads to the house of the gnoles, and it is always dark in the dubious wood. But Mortensen, remembering what he had learned at his mother's knee concerning the odor of gnoles, found the house quite easily. For a moment he stood hesitating before it. His lips moved as he repeated, "Good morning. I have come to supply your cordage requirements," to himself. The words were the beginning of his sales talk. Then he went up and rapped on the door.

It's at this point that the story slowly begins to make a turn toward horror, but the turn is so slow, so subtle that the reader might not notice it at first. On the surface, not much has changed. Mortensen proceeds to greet the gnoles, enter the home, and make his sales pitch without taking any heed of the danger into which he has thrown himself. Yet, things are most definitely not what they seem and St. Clair masterfully conveys this switch from the fanciful to the dreadful with assurance. The story's final paragraph is indeed shuddersome and further demonstration, if such were needed, of St. Clair's skill as a writer.

As an aside, roleplayers might well wonder whether the D&D gnoll in any way derives from either Dunsany or St. Clair. There is no clear answer for, although OD&D Volume II makes reference to Lord Dunsany (or "Sunsany" in the actual text) in the entry for gnolls, Dunsany does not describe them in any detail. St. Clair offers a little more but what she says does not comport in any way with the AD&D-derived idea that gnolls are hynea-headed humanoids. Further, Gygax's original description stated that they were "a cross between Gnomes and Trolls," whatever that means. For my part, I like the fact that the description of OD&D's gnolls are so vague and encourage referees to decide for themselves what these monsters look like.