Reconsiderations: H.P. Lovecraft

This being the 136th anniversary of the birth of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I thought it the perfect opportunity to write another installment in my increasingly irregular Reconsiderations series. I also think it makes sense as a topic, given that, since its inception, Grognardia has focused not just on the history of roleplaying games but also on the authors and literature that inspired those games – and there are few authors who can reasonably be said to have had more of an impact on RPGs than Lovecraft.

Lovecraft is, after all, an Appendix N author and one Gygax notes as being among "the most immediate influences upon AD&D," alongside such other notables as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance. This alone demonstrates my point, but, of course, Gygax is not alone in having been an admirer of HPL. Innumerable RPG creators, both past and present, have acknowledged the role Lovecraft and his stories have played in their own creations. There's thus a good reason why, in my first ever post commemorating his birth, I called him "the father of us all."

Up until now, I've been very consistent in saying that, while I have greatly enjoyed Lovecraft's stories since I was about 12 years-old, he was never my favorites of the famed Weird Tales trinity. I would always say that, of those three authors, Clark Ashton Smith was the one I held in the highest esteem. However, over the last year my focus has shifted and I've begun to question my feelings on this matter. 

To be clear, my regard for CAS remains as immense as ever. He truly is a unique author with a unique voice. I will always chesish his stories, particularly his "dying earth" tales of Zothique, which I frequently reread both for their luxurious language and melancholy tone. That said, I have better come to appreciate how much I owe to Lovecraft.

I don't mean this simply in the obvious sense that I have read and enjoyed his stories for more than four decades, though that's certainly part of it. Nor do I mean merely that Lovecraft's influence can be found everywhere in the hobby that has occupied so much of my life. What I mean is something more personal and, until fairly recently, something to which I had never given much thought.

Last summer, at the conclusion of my The Shadow over August series, I described Lovecraft as a kindred spirit and, as the last twelve months have rolled on, I find it an ever more apt description. There are, of course, many things about Lovecraft with which I do not identify, just as there are aspects of his personality and opinions that I find objectionable or simply baffling. I have no interest in pretending otherwise, but neither do I think a man must be admirable in every respect before we can recognize something of ourselves in him. Indeed, it may be precisely because Lovecraft was such an odd and contradictory man that I increasingly find him so compelling.

Lovecraft was a bookish introvert who often seemed more comfortable with the products of imagination than with the demands of everyday life. He was deeply attached to the past, suspicious of much that passed for progress, fascinated by history and antiquity, and given to constructing elaborate imaginary worlds partly for the sheer pleasure of doing so. He maintained friendships across great distances through correspondence and took enormous pleasure in sharing ideas, stories, discoveries, and enthusiasms with an ever-growing circle of like-minded people. He was, to use a deliberately anachronistic term, a nerd. Obviously, I see a lot of myself in him.

And that may explain why my affection for Lovecraft has grown recently. When I was younger, I approached him primarily through his fiction. I judged him, quite reasonably, I think, by his fiction. Judged solely on that basis, I still think I prefer Smith. At his best, CAS possesses a command of language and an imaginative opulence that few writers of fantastic fiction have ever equaled. However, I'm no longer sure that "Which of the Weird Tales trinity wrote the stories I like best?" is the only or even the most interesting way to judge these immensely talented men.

Lovecraft's achievement extends beyond the stories themselves. He created a body of ideas that have proven extraordinarily fertile in the hands of others. More importantly, he wanted them to be fertile. He freely lent elements of his imaginary mythology to friends and correspondents, borrowed from them in return, and delighted in the resulting cross-pollination. What we now call the "Cthulhu Mythos" was never a carefully guarded intellectual property or a meticulously defined fictional setting. Rather, it was something closer to a shared sandbox of the imagination.

Seen from the perspective of roleplaying games, that aspect of Lovecraft seems especially significant. Roleplaying games are themselves exercises in shared imagination. Referees borrow ideas from books, movies, history, mythology, and one another. They then transform them, combine them, and hand them over to players, who transform them yet again through play. The results are rarely tidy and almost never attributable to a single creator. There is something remarkably Lovecraftian – though not in the cosmic horror sense, but in the creative sense – about that process.

This may be one reason his influence on roleplaying games has been so much greater than simply inspiring monsters in Dungeons & Dragons or even providing source material for Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft and his circle offered a way of creating fantastic worlds that was open, collaborative, allusive, and cumulative. For example, Smith might come up with Tsathoggua and Lovecraft would borrow him. Lovecraft, in turn, creates the Necronomicon and inspires Howard to create the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (with its German title provided by August Derleth). With every borrowing, this shared imaginary world became a little larger and a little more convincing. Anyone who has refereed a long-running roleplaying campaign will recognize this process.

That recognition has caused me to look at Lovecraft differently. For years, I think I regarded him chiefly as one of the great ancestors of the hobby, an enormously influential writer whose fingerprints could be found everywhere. I still regard him that way, of course, but increasingly I see something else as well. Lovecraft is an example of the kind of imaginative life that I myself have tried, in my own much smaller way, to live.

Lovecraft wrote because he loved writing. He read voraciously because he loved learning. He corresponded because he loved exchanging ideas with people who shared his enthusiasms. He invented worlds, histories, books, cults, and strange names because doing so delighted him. He did these things despite disappointments, financial difficulties, personal failures, and the knowledge that the wider world would likely take little notice of most of what he did. Yet, here we are, 136 years after his birth, still talking about him.

Perhaps that's what has changed most in my estimation of Lovecraft. Clark Ashton Smith may remain the pulp fantasy writer whose prose most dazzles me, while Robert E. Howard may remain the one whose best stories possess an energy few writers, even today, can match. Meanwhile, Lovecraft increasingly seems to me the one whose life of the imagination I understand best and have inadvertently emulated the most.

When I called Lovecraft "the father of us all" back in 2008, I was thinking primarily about his influence on RPGs and on the imaginative culture from which it sprang. I still think that's true. Now, though, I would add another meaning to the phrase. Lovecraft belongs to that long lineage of bookish dreamers who found the ordinary world insufficient and responded not by abandoning it but by adding to it, by creating strange countries of the imagination and inviting others to visit them. Some of those visitors then created countries of their own.

I'm one of them – as I suspect are most of the people reading this post.

Reconsiderations: Death and Resurrection

Needless to say, I've been very remiss in writing new posts for this blog, even within the context of the less rigorous schedule I proposed two months ago. I wish I had a better excuse beyond "I'm busy revising Thousand Suns for a second edition," except that's the truth. In fact. I've been so busy with that that I haven't even been posting as often at Grognardia Games Direct as I have been. On the plus side, the first draft of the second edition is nearly done, so I at least having something to show for my lack of attention here. With any luck, the first draft will be completed before September and external playtesting can begin in earnest.

Today, though, I want to return to my Reconsiderations series, since the first entry in it was very well received and generated a lot of good comments. My apologies for not responding to most of them, but, well, I've already explained that my attention was – and remains – elsewhere. 

Longtime readers may recall that the Dwimmermount campaign was predicated on several things, the most important of which was that it explicitly megadungeon-centric. At the time, which is to say the early days of the Old School Renaissance, there was a widespread belief that Dungeons & Dragons was born in the megadungeon – or the "campaign dungeon," as some preferred to call it – and that any attempt to play, let alone understand, old school D&D, as we were all attempting to do, required that you run a megadungeon campaign. And so I did, because I hoped that doing so would help me better understand aspects of D&D's history and design that had eluded me when I was a callow youth.

Another important foundation of the Dwimmermount campaign – and indeed my entire philosophy of coming to grips with OD&D – was the principle that "D&D is always right." By that, I simply meant that, despite the claims of its detractors over the decades, D&D's design was not haphazard but intentional. What's there in its rulebooks is there for a reason and we'd do well to understand this before tinkering with them unduly. This is not the same thing as saying that everything that's in D&D's rules always works to our satisfaction (or even the satisfaction of its designers), only that, before casting aside something about the game you don't like, consider for a moment the possibility that that something might, in fact, be a load-bearing wall.

That's why, during that campaign, I permitted the use of the spell raise dead, even though I was philosophically opposed to it. When I say "philosophically opposed," I mean that I initially accepted the idea, common in the early OSR, that old school Dungeons & Dragons was inherently and unalterably high lethality, with characters dying left and right. "Fantasy fucking Vietnam" was how it was sometimes described. Likewise, the renewed emphasis on pulp fantasy – strongly championed on this blog – was seen as requiring a style of play in which death was both omnipresent and permanent. 

Consequently, I wanted to embrace this ethos in the Dwimmermount campaign, but doing so contradicted "D&D is always right," so I, with some reluctance, allowed the use of raise dead. I vividly remember that there was some disappointment, among my readers that I'd "caved" on this point, since I'd previously written about my discomfort with the spell and how I felt it ran counter to the "mood" I was trying to bring to the Dwimmermount campaign. Even so, I permitted it, because the rules did and, as I already said repeatedly, I wanted wrestle with OD&D on its own terms – and, from the beginning, Dungeons & Dragons has had a spell that enabled the restoration of characters to life.

I adopted a similar mindsight when I refereeing my decade-plus Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, House of Worms. Because its underlying rules so closely mirror those of OD&D, EPT also includes several means to bring back the dead, including a spell accessible to player characters. During the course of the campaign, only one player character ever died – Aíthfo hiZnáyu – but he did so twice, which is certainly an unusual distinction! I permitted it, because the rules allowed it and also because the other players, knowing this, chose to make an effort to resurrect Aíthfo, in the process creating some very memorable adventures in Tékumel.

Still, I remained somewhat sheepish about all of this. My innate sense of consistency ensured I'd try to play by the principle ("D&D is always right") I'd laid down at the start of the Dwimmermount campaign, but I did so through gritted teeth. On some level, I shared the disappointment of readers who felt I'd "wimped out" by allowing the use of raise dead. Dwimmermount was, as I've noted, born out of my love of pulp fantasy of a particular kind that did not include easy resurrection in this fashion. Was I betraying its inspirations by being so casual about its use? At the time, I thought so. Even a few years ago, I groused about my decision.

Recently, though, I've come to accept my decision without any reservations. I've come to realize that I did the right thing in both cases by allowing the resurrections. My feeling increasingly is that there's altogether too much whining about how, on the one hand, "save-or-die is unfair" or "level drain is cruel" and, on the other hand, "healing is too commonplace" and "life restoration should be harder, if not impossible." My way of thinking nowadays is that these two extremes – which, to be fair, most players don't espouse – are mirror images of one another, each being founded in not taking Dungeons & Dragons as it is and has been from the beginning and instead substituting a different game in its place. 

That's not a unique sin; I'm as guilty of it as anyone. However, with the benefit of some distance, I've come to realize that many common complaints about D&D (or any roleplaying game) come from a failure in looking at the game design as a whole and instead fixating on only some of its parts. Is save-or-die really unfair? In a game where there are innumerable means of returning a character to life, I don't think so. In most cases, death in Dungeons & Dragons is just a setback and the rules provide a myriad of means by which to overcome it. Why not accept that?

That's more or less where I am right now on the question of death and resurrection in D&D and its derivatives and descendants.

Where I Am

More reconsiderations posts are in the offing, probably next week, but, as has been the case since the end of April, I remain hard at work on completing the first draft of the upcoming second edition of my science fiction roleplaying game, Thousand Suns. My goal was to complete the entire draft by the end of June and, while I'll fall somewhat short of that, I'm still very confident that all of the player-focused chapters and quite a bit more will be done by that date. I've been sharing these drafts with my patrons and a few internal playtesters in advance of a larger playtest that probably will occur later this year, once the drafts are even more polished.

Needless to say, my focus on getting Thousand Suns done continues to occupy most of my writing time. However, I am posting more regular over at Grognardia Games Direct (and at Patreon too), so, if you're impatient for new writing from me, those are the places to visit. That said, there will be new posts coming here in the future, though their schedule is harder to predict. Grognardia may be winding down, but we're still a long way from anything truly final. I'll try to keep everyone up to date as things become more clear.

Thanks!

Reconsiderations: Old School

Believe it or not, at the very dawn of what came to be called the Old School Renaissance, there was a lot of handwringing, both within its ranks and outside them, over just what was meant by the term "old school." 

Now, I don't recall when I first heard the term applied either to Dungeons & Dragons specifically or to roleplaying games more generally, nor can I pinpoint its precise origin. I have a vague recollection that it was one of those things that was spontaneously generated on the pre-social media Internet in the late '90s or early 2000s, but, as I said, I can't be certain. Regardless, I am pretty sure that the term predated the OSR by some years and generally meant something roughly equivalent to "D&D/RPG from the 70's and/or '80s," with some degree of fuzziness around the edges, both temporally and conceptually.

A lot of people assume that the Old School Renaissance was simply a reaction to the excesses of late 3e and I think there's much truth in this. In my own case, unhappiness with the state of Third Edition played a big role, which is ironic, since 3e had brought me back to Dungeons & Dragons in the first place after having largely abandoned the game several years prior. However, I suspect the roots of the OSR go back even farther, into the dying days of TSR, when AD&D Second Edition was itself a bloated and incoherent mess of a game. Some might stretch things even farther back, looking at the rise of "narrative" and "storytelling" games in the '90s as important data points.

I mention all of this simply as background to what will be my first reconsiderations post. Given the wide range of topics that I'll likely be covering as I write this series, I thought it useful to begin with something very basic and indeed foundational. I also thought it an important subject, because, in the eighteen years since I started this blog, my perspective on this matter have become clearer, if not necessarily different from what I have previously written. In the past, I might have been more circumspect in how I defined "old school" and what I understood it to mean, now I feel as if I have a more solid sense of things.

For me, "old school" is, paradoxically, a modern term. It's obviously not a term anyone "back in the day" would have used to describe D&D or any other RPG, for the simple reason that "old school" is a comparative term, one that depends on time having passed and there being multiple iterations of a game to compare to one another. "Old school" is, therefore, a retrospective category, one invented after the fact to identify certain common features, assumptions, and practices associated with the hobby's earlier years. Like all such categories, it is necessarily imperfect. The people who created and played these games in the 1970s and '80s did not think of themselves as participating in an "old school" style of play; they were simply playing roleplaying games as they understood them.

This is one reason why I have always thought the "R" in OSR stood for "renaissance." A renaissance is not a simple return to the past. It's an attempt to recover something from the past that is believed to possess enduring value, even though the very act of recovery inevitably reshapes it. The artists and scholars of the Renaissance did not recreate the art and ideals of Classical Antiquity they so admired. Neither did the Protestant Reformers did not restore the primitive Christianity they felt had become obscured under centuries of accretions. Both were instances of later generations looking backward for inspiration while simultaneously creating something new, whether they intended to do so or not.

That's also true of the OSR. Whatever else it may have been, the Old School Renaissance was never merely an exercise in preservation. Certainly, there were those whose chief concern was keeping older games alive and accessible. Without their efforts, many important texts and traditions might well have disappeared. Yet, from its earliest days, the OSR was also a creative movement. The proliferation of retro-clones, house rules, and entirely new games inspired by older ones quite quickly made that abundantly clear. Even when its devotees claimed to be "returning" to the roots of the hobby, they were doing so from a historical vantage point that could not help but influence – and, occasionally, distort – their understanding of those roots.

That's why I would argue that the category of "old school" only emerged because the hobby had changed. Certain features of earlier roleplaying games and styles of play came to be seen as distinctive precisely because they were no longer taken for granted. I think this helps explain why debates over the meaning of "old school" were (and remain) so contentious. The term refers neither to a specific type of rules nor to a particular historical period. Rather, it points toward a collection of loosely related ideas, assumptions, and practices drawn from the hobby's formative decades. Different people naturally emphasize different elements of that inheritance. Some focus on rules, while others focus on adventure design, campaign structure, referee authority, player agency, or any number of other factors. None of these perspectives is wholly wrong, because "old school" is itself a modern effort to make sense of a diverse and often contradictory past.

That's why nowadays, when I speak of "old school," I do not mean a museum piece or a slavish recreation of how roleplaying games were played in 1977, 1982, or any other year. Neither do I mean a particular game, edition, or collection of mechanics. Rather, I mean a tradition of play, one that took shape during the hobby's formative decades and whose characteristic assumptions can still be discerned beneath the considerable diversity of the games now associated with it.

Those assumptions are precisely what I mean by "old school." They have less to do with descending armor class, race-as-class, or any other rules idiosyncrasy than with a particular understanding of the relationship between players, referees, characters, and settings. They concern what roleplaying games are for, how they are meant to be played, and what kinds of experiences they are best suited to provide. The details will necessarily vary from game to game and table to table, but I think there is nevertheless a coherent thread running through them. It is that thread, rather than any single rules system or historical period, that I now understand to have been the true subject of the Old School Renaissance (and, by extension, this blog).

Reconsiderations

Toward the end of his life, St Augustine began a project called in Latin the Retractationes. Often mistranslated as "retractions," the title actually is closer in meaning to "reconsiderations" or "revisions," because, in its two parts, Augustine looks back on his extensive writings and comments on the ways in which he'd erred, was unclear, or had otherwise failed to get his point across to the reader. Often, this was due to his excessive use of rhetoric in the heat of a theological dispute, of which he had taken part in many. Consequently, the Retractationes is an important document in better understanding what Augustine actually thought rather than what others mistakenly understood him to be thinking.

I was reminded of the Retractationes during my recent trip. Eight and a half hours in a plane each way gives a man a lot of time to kill and I did so by rereading Peter Brown's 1967 biography of Augustine. While Brown doesn't devote many pages to the Retractationes, his discussion of them nevertheless sparked a thought in my own head: what if, as I wind down Grognardia as a regularly updated blog, I revisit some of my own posts with an eye toward better explaining myself? Like Augustine, many of my most widely read and discussed posts, are tinged with overheated rhetoric that gives a false – or at least skewed – impression of what I actually think about a number of topic important to roleplaying games and their history.

In some cases, even my original posts had elements of self-explanation, because I've always been keenly aware of just how fraught conversation by blog can be. The written word is obviously great. However, it often lacks the nuance provided by verbal intonation, facial expressions, and other aspects of embodied speech, any one of which can help make meaning more obvious. A lot of times, my posts include elements of sarcasm and hyperbole that I know is present, but that doesn't always come through in bare text, distorting my points. I remember well that I was often deemed a "fundamentalist" in the early days of the Old School Renaissance for my strong stances about this or that and that always baffled me.  I realize now that some of that misunderstanding was a result of imprecision in my original posts.

That's why, over the coming weeks and months, you'll see a series of Reconsiderations posts in which I look back on both individual posts and larger topics I've discussed on this blog in the past, with an eye toward correcting misconceptions about my opinions, as well as, where necessary, indicating how my thoughts may have changed since I first wrote them. I hope this will prove an interesting series and generate some discussion. I also hope it'll be a good capstone to Grognardia as a whole.