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

The Hidden Masters of Pulp Fantasy

One of the regular series for which this blog was once known is Pulp Fantasy Library, in which I highlighted individual fantasy and science fiction stories I felt had been influential, directly or indirectly, on the development of the hobby of roleplaying. The series eventually grew to more than three hundred entries and taught me a great deal in the process of writing it. However, it also required considerable effort and often received little reader engagement, so I brought it to a quiet close in 2023. I sometimes consider reviving it in a modified form, but I’ve yet to find the right approach. Still, I keep thinking about these early works of fantasy, which is what led to this post.

From the vantage point of the first quarter (!) of the twenty-first century, it’s all too easy to forget just how strange fantasy and science fiction once were – not merely in their imaginative content but in the intellectual and spiritual traditions from which they drew. We tend to think of early speculative fiction as arising primarily from a matrix of adventure tales, scientific romances, and classical mythology. However, another powerful and often overlooked influence is the world of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other esoteric traditions. These weren’t mere fads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they were serious systems of belief for many, including a surprising number of the authors who helped lay the foundations of what we now call genre fiction.

Even more fascinating is how many once-occult concepts have since become commonplaces of fantasy and science fiction, like astral projection, past lives, lost advanced civilizations, invisible planes of existence, and cosmic cycles of spiritual evolution, to name just a few obvious ones. These weren’t originally the products of scientific or rationalist speculation. They were occult doctrines, often articulated with the structure and certainty of any other religion. Early speculative fiction served as a powerful conduit for these ideas, transmitting them into the cultural imagination.

Take, for instance, astral projection, which recurs throughout pulp fantasy and science fiction. In Theosophy, this is the “etheric body” or “etheric double” leaving the physical body to traverse the astral plane. In fiction, this idea becomes John Carter’s unexplained voyage to Barsoom in A Princess of Mars, where his body remains behind on Earth while his spirit is transported to another world by sheer force of will. Burroughs never offers a scientific explanation for the phenomenon nor did he need to do so. His readers would likely have recognized the trope from already extant popular occult literature.

Similarly, reincarnation and karma, central tenets of Theosophy and many forms of Eastern-influenced Spiritualism, appear in the works of authors like Talbot Mundy, whose protagonists sometimes recall past lives in ancient empires. The same is true of many tales penned by Abraham Merritt. In The Star Rover, Jack London tells the story of a prisoner who escapes his unjust physical confinement by entering trance states that allow him to access a series of former incarnations. This isn’t merely a fictional conceit; it reflects a specific metaphysical worldview in which human identity unfolds across many lifetimes, a view that gained traction during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even readers who didn’t share this worldview would nevertheless have been familiar with it.

William Hope Hodgson is another fascinating case. He blends arcane science with mystical speculation in his "Carnacki the Ghost-Finder" stories, which feature protective sigils, vibrational zones, and references to the "Outer Circle," a realm inhabited by malevolent entities existing just beyond human perception. All of these ideas draw heavily on contemporary occultism. His novel The Night Land, a work of science fantasy more than horror, is set on a dying Earth haunted by monstrous spiritual forces and saturated with the oppressive weight of cosmic time. It echoes Theosophical doctrines of vast evolutionary cycles and the occult preoccupation with psychic resistance to spiritual evil.

Marie Corelli (born Mary Mackay), once one of the most popular authors in the English-speaking world, is now rarely read. Her novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, for example, blends Spiritualist belief with melodrama and science fictional concepts, such as portraying electricity as a bridge between the material and spiritual realms. She directly influenced writers like H. Rider Haggard and even Arthur Machen, both of whom in turn shaped the subsequent development of fantasy. Even Edward Bulwer-Lytton, now best known for the infamous incipit “It was a dark and stormy night,” was a serious student of esoteric lore. His novel Zanoni depicts an immortal Chaldean adept who achieves transcendence through secret knowledge, an early example of the “hidden masters” who would later become a staple of Theosophy.

Which, of course, brings us to Theosophy itself, which had perhaps the most lasting and far-reaching impact on the development of both esoteric thought and fantasy. Founded in the 1870s by the Russian-born mystic, Helena Blavatsky, Theosophy combined elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Neoplatonism, and esoteric Christianity into a vast occult cosmology. Through books, journals, and lectures, it promoted a view of the universe in which mankind was but one phase in an immense spiritual drama, involving lost continents, ascended masters, and ancient wisdom. These ideas found fertile ground in genre fiction. The controversial “Shaver Mystery” stories published in Amazing Stories in the mid to late 1940s and purportedly based on true events involve ancient subterranean races like the evil Deros (which itself served as an inspiration to Gary Gygax). Shaver's stories read like Theosophy blended with pulp sensationalism.

Even Clark Ashton Smith, whom regular readers will know is my favorite of the Weird Tales trio, drew on esoteric themes. Ideas like cyclical time, forgotten civilizations, and arcane knowledge recur throughout his work. His Zothique cycle, set on the last continent of a dying Earth, reflects the Theosophical notion of a future “seventh root race” and the eventual exhaustion of history.

Against this background, H.P. Lovecraft stands out, not because he rejected religion in general (though he did), but because he specifically targeted Spiritualism and occultism. He was deeply familiar with the claims of mediums, astrologers, and Theosophists and dismissed them with open contempt. In his correspondence, he regularly mocks the “credulous” who place faith in séances, reincarnation, and similar beliefs. At the behest of Harry Houdini, Lovecraft even collaborated on a book titled The Cancer of Superstition, intended as a wholesale debunking of Spiritualist claims. The book was never completed due to Houdini’s sudden death in 1926.

Despite this, Lovecraft’s stories are filled with forbidden books, lost knowledge, and ancient alien races whose truths are too terrible for the human mind to bear. In this way, Lovecraft doesn’t discard the tropes of occult literature – he inverts them. Where Theosophy promised spiritual enlightenment and cosmic unity, Lovecraft offers only madness, degeneration, and a universe that is not merely indifferent but actively hostile to notions of human significance. His “gods” are not hidden masters but incomprehensible and uncaring forces. Structurally, however, he preserves much of the occult worldview: a hidden reality lurks behind the surface of things, accessible only to initiates – scholars, madmen, and cultists. Lovecraft didn’t reject that structure; he twisted it and filled it with dread.

All of this makes it remarkable just how thoroughly modern fantasy and science fiction still bear the imprint of these early occult influences. Astral travel, alternate planes, soul transference, hidden masters, and cosmic cycles remain staples of the genres. They’re treated today as neutral, even secular, tropes of worldbuilding, even though their origins are anything but secular. They are spiritual, mystical, and often explicitly religious in intent.

My purpose in this post isn't to diminish these genres or to reduce their works to a list of influences. Nor am I offering an invitation to embrace the esoteric as literal truth. Instead, I'm reminding everyone of just how permeable the boundary between belief and imagination has always been and how fantasy, in particular, has long served as a vessel for metaphysical speculation, even when dressed in the garb of swords and sorcery or rocket ships and ray guns. Perhaps this is one of the reasons these genres endure: they don’t merely entertain; they echo the ancient human desire to find meaning in a world that so often seems devoid of it.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The White People

Were there not already over two hundred entries in the Pulp Fantasy Library series, I might consider re-naming it to something a bit broader, since, strictly speaking, not all of the works I cover in it can be called "pulp fantasy," even by a liberal definition of the term. That's particularly true of many of those written in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, which transcend narrow literary categories, despite being foundational to later genres that, in turn, influenced the creators of the first roleplaying games. 

The tales of Arthur Machen are good examples of what I'm talking about, particularly "The White People," which first appeared in 1904 in the pages of Horlick's Magazine but was much more widely read in the 1906 anthology of his fiction, The House of Souls. H.P. Lovecraft famously judged the story second only to Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" in the annals of weird fiction and there can be little doubt that it exercised a powerful influence over his imagination. He called it

"a triumph of skilful selectiveness and restraint, [which] accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent childish prattle … less famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but definitely finer in atmosphere and general artistic value … a dimly disquieting chronicle."

It's easy to understand why HPL felt so strongly about it. "The White People" begins a prologue in which two men – Cotgrave and Ambrose – engage in a rambling discussion about the nature of morality and sin. Ambrose, a theologian by training, suggests that saints and sinners are not all that different from one another. His argument is that, while most people "are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures [who] … muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and inner sense of things," saints and sinners are like in experiencing "ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life." Ambrose adds that both saints and sinners were rare, especially nowadays.

The materialism of the age, which has done a good deal to suppress sanctity, has done perhaps more to suppress evil. We find the earth so very comfortable that we have no inclination either for ascents or descents. 

To some extent. Ambrose is voicing Machen's own opinion, or something close to it. He a possessed a strong streak of Christian mysticism that was nevertheless joined to a deep interest in paganism, the occult, and Hermeticism, as well as an earthy sensuality. I bring this up to point out that Machen is a difficult writer to pigeonhole and stories like "The White People" reflect a similar ambiguity.

Eventually, the discussion between Cotgrave and Ambrose reaches an impasse, with Cotgrave demanding "a concrete example" of it from his interlocutor. It's at this point that the story begins in earnest, as Ambrose hands him a "green pocket-book" with a faded binding. Ambrose explains that he :knew the girl who wrote this" and that, once he has read it, Cotgrave "will see how it illustrates the talk we have to-night."

But for a short epilogue, the remainder of "The White People" consists of the contents of the Green Book (as it is called in the text), which is more than two dozen uninterrupted pages of hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness writing – "a Lovecraft plot told by James Joyce," in the words of S.T. Joshi. Ostensibly the diary of a girl "thirteen, nearly fourteen," this section describes the unnamed girl's "very singular adventure" about a year after the death of her mother. On that day, which she afterwards called White Day, the girl went for a walk in the countryside, as she had many times before.

I walked a new way, and a little brook led me into a new country, but I tore my frock getting through some of the difficult places, as the way was through many bushes, and beneath the low branches of trees, and up thorny thickets on the halls, and by dark woods full of creeping thorns. And it was a long, long way. It seemed as if I was going on for ever and ever, and I had to creep by a place like a tunnel where a brook must have been, but all the water had dried up, and the floor was rocky, and the bushed had grown overhead till they met, so that it was quite dark.

I think the section quoted above gives a good sense of the style of the Green Book, whose text is written as nearly a single, pages-long paragraph, filled with run-on sentences and dizzying imagery. As a result, the reader is sometimes left wondering precisely what is happening, a situation made worse by the diarist's omissions and circuitous way of describing sights and events that she herself does not seem to comprehend fully. 

During her peregrinations in the woods, the girl sees many strange things – weirdly shaped rocks, stunted trees, shadowy shapes – before finding a valley containing a stream whose water "tasted like bright, yellow wine" and made her giddy. The place reminded her of a memory from when she was very small and her mother was still alive. Her nurse had taken her out and into the forest, where the nurse had met a tall man. The nurse then left her alone beneath a tree, while she and the man went off together deeper into the woods. While she was alone, the girl "two wonderful white people [who] … began to play and dance and sing." 

One was a beautiful lady with kind dark eyes, and a grave face, and long black hair, and she smiled such a sad strange smile at the other, who laughed and came with her. They played together, and danced round and round the pool, and they sang a song till I feel asleep.

Her nurse tried to tell the girl she had been dreaming, "but I knew I hadn't," she says. The nurse then makes her promise not to say a word about what she had seen or she "should be thrown into the black pit." The girl never forgot what she saw, which is why she remembered them on White Day. Frightened – but also enchanted – by what she saw, the girl finds her way back home and is determined to find out more about all she had experienced.

Exactly what the Green Book recounts in "The White People" is unclear. The confusing narrative seems to suggest that the girl who wrote it is being initiated into some sort of secret society or cult, one that has contact with another realm or reality inhabited by the eponymous White People. But who and what are the White People? Are they ghosts? Fairies? Something else entirely? Machen does not elaborate, leaving a great deal to the reader's imagination. This is a technique that Lovecraft used often in his own stories and is likely device her learned – or at least honed – after reading Machen. 

Like many weird tales, "The White People" is a large an exercise in evoking mood and feeling rather than in presenting a clear or coherent plot. Due to the way it's written, the reader is never sure of what is being described, let alone how he is supposed to take it. For some, this might prove frustrating, while for others, it contributes to its success. Until recently, I'd been somewhat indifferent to the tale, but, lately, after reading it aloud, I found it much more captivating and powerful. It's definitely an acquired taste and I cannot blame anyone for being unmoved by it, even as I have come to appreciate it more fully and understand why it was so well regarded in the early 20th century.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Great God Pan

I think it likely that H.P. Lovecraft, who thought very highly of Arthur Machen's 1894 novella, The Great God Pan, would object to my including it among the "pulp fantasies" I highlight in this series each week. Like Lovecraft, Machen, a Welsh writer known for his decadent, mystical worldview, did not consider his writings mere entertainments but rather expressions of his own unique philosophy. Unlike many, I don't consider the term "pulp fantasy" derogatory, since I use the term very broadly to describe works of the imagination intended for a mass audience that draw on eclectic sources for their own inspiration. Some pulp fantasies are undoubtedly mere entertainments (again, not a criticism), while others, such as the works of Lovecraft and Howard, can be appreciated as more. The Great God Pan certainly falls into the latter category.

That Machen should exert should a powerful influence over Lovecraft (who praises him profusely in his Supernatural Horror in Literature) is no surprise. The two men shared a great deal, perhaps chief among them being the "scientific" grounding of their weird tales. That is, both Lovecraft and Machen shared the belief that, far from liberating mankind from fear, science would in fact make him ever more aware of just how terrifying the cosmos actually was. It is this theme (among others) that The Great God Pan uses as its foundation and develops to remarkable effect.

The story begins as two men, Raymond and Clarke, discuss upcoming brain surgery to be performed on a young woman named Mary. Raymond wishes to perform the surgery in order to vindicate his theories about the universe:

"Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras, dreams in a career,' beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another's eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan."

The surgery goes off as Raymond intends and the consequences, though tragic for Mary, are exactly as he expected:

"She will awake in five minutes." Raymond was still perfectly cool. "There is nothing more to be done; we can only wait."

The minutes passed slowly; they could hear a slow, heavy, ticking. There was an old clock in the passage. Clarke felt sick and faint; his knees shook beneath him, he could hardly stand.

Suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long-drawn sigh, and suddenly did the colour that had vanished return to the girl's cheeks, and suddenly her eyes opened. Clarke quailed before them. They shone with an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight, and Clarke rushed forward, as she fell shrieking to the floor.

Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary's bedside. She was lying wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly.

The story then picks up years later, as several young men are dying under mysterious circumstances. The only connection between these deaths is that all of the men is a young woman named Helen Vaugh, who is described as "at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on." One need not read the story to know that the prelude to The Great God Pan, involving the surgery done to poor Mary, and the later events involving Helen Vaughn are also connected, but I won't say here the nature of that connection, for fear of lessening the impact of the tale.

What's impresses me still is that, even though the central mystery of the story is one we have likely seen before, given how often Machen is pastiched (mainly through the influence of Lovecraft, who himself took more than a few cues from his older contemporary), it still possesses great power. Like Lovecraft, Machen has a tendency toward unnecessarily complex constructions, purple prose, and somewhat flat characters, but his ideas are so vibrant that they overcome all these flaws. Reading The Great God Pan is an unsettling experience and I wish I could say precisely why. As I said, the story, though original, even scandalous, in its time, has been copied so often in the last century or more that one would think it would no longer pack much punch -- and yet it does. If you've never read it before, I recommend doing so; I'll be curious to hear if anyone else finds it as disturbing as I do.