Seeking a Quote

Now, my memory may be playing tricks on me -- it happens when you get older -- but I recall having read an article by Gygax, perhaps an early "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column, where he mentions that the assumed audience of D&D was college age or older. Does anyone else remember this? If so, can you tell me in what issue of The Dragon it appeared?

Thanks in advance.

REVIEW: Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks

Nearly everything I review on this blog is a product for use with roleplaying games. When I discuss books, they're almost always genre fiction that relate to gaming in some way, generally having served as inspiration either to myself or to the founders of our shared hobby. I can't recall ever having reviewed a non-fiction work before, but I'm sure someone with a better memory than myself will quickly remind me if I'm mistaken on this score. Consequently, the present review is somewhat unique, which is only fitting because Ethan Gilsdorf's Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is a unique book.

I'll admit that I was initially skeptical of this book, which is subtitled "An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms." Past experience with books and articles in which the author reminisces about his youthful adventures as a roleplayer are typically suffused with shame and self-loathing and imply, if not outright state, that escapism is unhealthy and unbefitting "normal" people, among whom the author, of course, numbers himself. Gilsdorf does nothing of the kind. Indeed, despite its provocative title, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is anything but an exposé about the dangers of roleplaying and related hobbies but rather a surprisingly affecting memoir, travel journal, and cultural analysis of the imaginary realms in which so many of us dwell.

Gilsdorf begins with a prolog in which he takes the reader back to 1979, when he was initiated into the world of roleplaying games. What's interesting is how similar Gilsdorf's entry into the hobby is to my own. He was a little older -- 12 as opposed to 10 -- and started a few months before me -- summer rather than winter -- but he learned from the same rulebook as I (the Holmes "Blue Book"). He even played with a guy named J.P., just as I did. Reading all this immediately warmed me to Gilsdorf; he was clearly "one of us." Unlike a lot of writers who reflect back on their "D&D days," Gilsdorf either actually remembered lots of little details, such as the fact that a wight deals 1-4 points of damage with a successful hit, or at least bothered to check his facts beforehand. That may seem a small thing, but I assure you it's not and it speaks volumes about the seriousness of the author.

While the surface details of Gilsdorf's early experiences with gaming are similar to my own, the deeper reality he lays bare in the prolog is not. A year before he discovered roleplaying, Gilsdorf's mother suffered a brain aneurysm that turned her into "the Kitchen Dragon," who endured "crippling left-side paralysis, massive changes in behavior and personality, and dangerous bouts of epilepsy." Previously a "free-spirited" and vibrant woman, Sara Gilsdorf, whom the author calls "the center of my world," was now "shifty, sickly, needy, deformed, antisocial, frustrated, volatile, closed to the world." The appearance of "the Momster," as the author also called her, forever changed his childhood and created a need for escape -- an escape that roleplaying games provided.

Like many people who played RPGs back in the 70s and 80s, Gilsdorf eventually moved on, however, despite the solace the hobby had offered during his difficult teen years:

Dungeons & Dragons began to die for me when, during my senior year in high school, 1983, I had my first kiss. My then-girlfriend's highly realistic look and feel banished those fantasy leather-clad busty she-warriors for good. That first love was serious. With something else to do on Friday nights, and a female creature to do it with, I played D&D less and less often. High school led to other kingdoms, such as college, sex, beer, cars, jobs, travel, and heartbreak. The D&D gang dispersed from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania, New York, Chicago, and Alaska. I left those dreamy medieval worlds behind and mostly forgot about my role-playing years. They dissipated and the netherworld released its grip, like a wizard dispelling a curse. I let my D&D obsession fade -- not because my longing to role-play had ceased, but because, perhaps, I sensed I was through with childish things. I had gone on one adventure too many. If D&D was a rite of passage, then I had passed through the dungeon to become a young man.

The release of The Lord of the Rings movies starting in 2002 reignited Gilsdorf's mad love of fantasy. Then, one Christmas, he visited his father's home, looking to collect some of his possessions, and he discovers a twenty-five pound camping cooler, inside of which was "a stack of mold-ridden game boxes, notebooks, and books" -- his D&D paraphernalia. Comparing it to the One Ring, Gilsdorf suggests that his old gaming gear "want[ed] to be found" and, while he resisted delving too deeply into his old stuff for a while, he eventually acquiesced. Now 40 years old -- older than his mother was when she was struck by the aneurysm -- midlife was starting him in the face and it frightened him.

I had the sense that the D&D gear would somehow solve the riddle of who I was, where I had come from, and why I still needed imaginary realms. And maybe help me understand what I still had left to accomplish.

The contents of the blue cooler had saved me once. Could they save me again?

This is the beginning of Gilsdorf's "epic quest," as he investigates "21st century geekdom," from Tolkien fanatics to MMO players to medieval re-enactors and more. The author travels across North America (to Wisconsin for GenCon and Georgia for a LARP), Europe (to France where a castle is being built according to medieval techniques), and New Zealand (where he met Peter Jackson), and places in-between, as he explores the breadth and depth of contemporary fantasy and science fiction fandom. Along the way, he meets and interviews many people, each of whom offers him more food for thought on his own personal quest to discover who he is and why fantasy has proved such an important aspect of his own life.

Breezily written but moving at times, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is a memoir that avoids being either self-indulgent or preachy, both of which are very real dangers in books of this sort. Gilsdorf offers no definitive answers to many of the questions he raises, but he does offer plenty to think about, particularly if, like him, you'd "devoted so much mental energy to a world that didn't exist ..." If the book has a flaw, it's that it can be meandering at times, feeling more like a random collection of thoughts and impressions than anything genuinely coherent, but, as I just stated, that's the nature of the beast. Gilsdorf isn't trying to advance a philosophy or a cause with this book, except perhaps that, as Tolkien reminded us, escapism can be a powerful good in one's life. It certainly was in Gilsdorf's and I can say the same of mine.

That may seem to be a fairly jejune point, but, given the popular portrayal of fantasy fans, it's nevertheless a needed one. Interestingly, it's a point that Dr. J. Eric Holmes made in his earlier Fantasy Role Playing Games, where he answers the question, "Are They Crazy?" in reference to roleplayers. Far from being injurious to one's mental health, Holmes argues, fantasy probably contributes to it positively, a truth I doubt anyone reading this blog would dispute. Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks drives this point home with plenty of examples, as Gilsdorf speaks not to "freaks" or "geeks" but to real people with real lives that are enriched through their indulgence in fantasies of one type of another. I enjoyed this book immensely and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to others for whom fantasy is a lifelong love.

Dwellers Art

While I'm on a high from happy memories of Dwellers of the Forbidden City, here's an evocative piece by Jim Roslof from the module. It certainly has a very Conan-esque flair to it, don't you think?

Retrospective: Dwellers of the Forbidden City

Despite the fact that David Cook's 1981 adventure, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, is one of my favorite D&D modules of all time, if not my actual favorite, I've never done a retrospective post on it. I did use the module previously as the centerpiece for my early ruminations of location-based adventures, but I don't think that post did the module full justice. Today's post is thus a partial attempt to make up for that fact.

Though parts of what would become Dwellers of the Forbidden City were used in the official AD&D tournament at Origins 1980, module I1 doesn't include a scoring sheet and referees are halfheartedly encouraged to design their own if they choose to use it in a tournament fashion. The module also conspicuously lacks the tournament "vibe" of other early modules, lacking both a precise, straightforward goal or a high density of combat/trap encounters intended to test the mettle of the players, instead opting for a more open-ended, exploratory style. In that respect, I1 might be an exemplar of the "Electrum Age" that marked a shift in the style and content of adventures from the earlier Golden Age, a shift some cheer and others decry.

Ostensibly, Dwellers of the Forbidden City is about the characters, in the employ of merchant leaders, seeking to put an end to raids on caravans passing through a remote jungle locale. However, once pointed in the right direction, the characters soon discover that there's more going on in the jungle than mere caravan raids, as they stumble across the mysterious Forbidden City, a lost city that recalls Robert E. Howard's Conan yarns -- no surprise given David Cook has admitted that the City was inspired by "Red Nails." Though getting to the Forbidden City is an adventure in itself, with multiple means to enter it and lots of potential allies and enemies along the way, it is within the City (a version of whose map is reproduced below, thanks to Lord Kilgore) that the real adventure begins.

As can see from the map, the Forbidden City is large and located within a canyon and thus isolated from the rest of the jungle. It is a world unto itself, one that operates according to the whims of its inhabitants, chief of whom are the yuan-ti snake men, who make their debut appearance in this module. In my younger days, I used this module innumerable times with several different groups of people, including some I barely knew. What's interesting is how similar the experience was right up until the point where the characters enter the Forbidden City. From that point on, nearly every group did something different, with quite a few completing forgetting their original mission and focusing instead on exploring the Forbidden City and its strange inhabitants.

Dwellers of the Forbidden City is only 28 pages long, so it's necessarily brief when it comes to describing its titular locale. Yet, that never bothered me. Indeed, I think it's probably one of the great strengths of the module and the reason I was able to use it so often: it was easy to make and remake the City to suit my present needs, whatever they were. My personal preference for modules these days are ones that fire my imagination; they give me the bare bones details I need to get started but they don't weigh me down with extraneous details that either get in the way or easily forget in the heat of play. Far from needing, in the words of James Wyatt, "more detail, more fleshed-out quests, and another hundred pages or so," module I1 is almost exactly the right length. Anything more than what it includes would, I think, have lessened its spartan appeal for me.

Re-reading Dwellers of the Forbidden City in preparation for this post brought back a lot of memories, all happy ones. I could recount many tales of adventures past, but those in the Forbidden City are among the most vibrant nearly 30 years after the fact. I remember well when Morgan Just and his stalwart companions braved this place, doing battle with the yuan-ti, the tasloi, and the bullywugs united under King Groak. I remember too my expansions of the City, using the adventure seeds Cook includes at the end -- the under-city warrens filled with ghouls and demons, the vampire orchid-men, the Black Brotherhood, and time travel to the days when the City was at its decadent height. This was a module I literally played to pieces; my original copy of the booklet fell apart from so much use and its maps were smudged and stains from similar service. With the possible exception of The Isle of Dread -- another David Cook module -- I'm hard pressed to think of a module that more powerfully engaged my imagination and showed me what a powerful game D&D could be.

The Split Class

Lately, for reasons unknown even to myself, I've been re-reading Unearthed Arcana, one of the last things TSR published under Gary Gygax's byline. I'm on record as disliking it, feeling that it's a product of AD&D's creative decadence, a rococo gilding of the lily that ultimately lent credibility to many of the design decisions made in 2e. But I don't mean this post to be one about what's wrong with Unearthed Arcana but rather something that I think is right about it, or at least that might be right about it.

In this book, Gygax introduces not a new sub-class of the Thief but rather a "split class," the Thief-Acrobat. According to the text, a split class is a "specialist" thief who "leaves off all practices which increase his or her manual dexterity and begins a regimen of physical exercise in order to build coordination, muscle tone, and balance." Thieves who wish to do this must be at least 5th level and possess Strength 15 and Dexterity 16. If those requirements are met, the thief in question ceases to improve his pick pockets, open locks, find traps, and remove traps abilities (and never gains read magic) in exchange for gaining new abilities such as tumbling, tightrope walking, and high jumping. In most other respects, he remains like a normal, non-specialist thief.

What's immediately interesting to me nowadays is how similar in some ways the Thief-Acrobat is to the original conception of the paladin, which was more of a specialist fighting man than a distinct class -- meet certain requirements and you gain new abilities at the expense of others. It's an approach I've been tempted to employ in my Dwimmermount campaign, even though, to date, I've never allowed any classes beyond the cleric, fighting man, magic-user, and thief. Interestingly, this is similar to the approach Frank Mentzer adopted in his own revision of the D&D rules and one of the bits I most like about that rules set. Of course, the Thief-Acrobat is somewhat different, because it uses a different XP table than does the standard thief, a design decision that's defensible but I personally dislike, as it muddies the distinction between a split class and a sub-class.

Still, I find myself attracted to the idea of the split class as a means to create character class "specialties" without having to go the route of introducing whole sub-classes, some of which -- the druid and illusionist come immediately to mind -- involve significant rules additions. Time permitting, I may tinker with the notion of a few OD&D-style split classes and present them here for discussion. I think the split class is one of the more genuinely innovative ideas to be found within Unearthed Arcana and it's a shame it wasn't embraced more broadly in the subsequent history of the game. There may well be a reason why that's the case, but I need to explore this idea a bit more before I can decide my opinion on the matter.

In Commemoratione Omnium Fidelium Defunctorum

Fidelium, Deus, omnium conditor et redemptor: animabus famulorum, famularumque tuarum remissione cunctorum tribue peccatorum; ut indulgentiam, quam semper optaverunt, piis supplicationibus consequantur: Qui vivis.

Transitional Technologies and RPGs

As I was walking my children to school this morning, my daughter, as she so sometimes does, said, "Dad, can I ask you a weird question?" In her parlance, "weird" refers to something about which she's heard, typically from her friends, whose existence she doubts. Several of my daughter's friends are well known confabulators who regale their schoolmates with tales of this or that they heard from their "cousin's friend's uncle, who lives in Europe." Over the years, my daughter has developed a healthy skepticism of such tales, but, every so often, she hears a story that sounds plausible enough that she thinks it might be true but wants to confirm it. For good or for ill, I'm usually the person to whom she turns for such confirmation. 

This morning, the weird question concerned a mysterious device known as a "walkman." Apparently, it was her teacher, not her friends, who mentioned this arcane piece of technology and my daughter had never heard of such a thing. After chuckling for a moment, I explained to her that a walkman was "the iPod of the '80s," explaining further that, in the decade before she was born, it was the stupid gadget to which people spent an inordinate amount of time attached. Back then, you couldn't walk down the street or ride the subway without looking around and noticing that everyone seemed to be wearing a headset attached to a walkman. After explaining a little more, my daughter correctly surmised that the walkman disappeared once MP3 players of various sorts arrived on the scene, since they were smaller, didn't need a cassette tape, and can store even more music on them. 

There are a lot of once-popular technologies about which my daughter will only ever know through history books or the memories of older people, much in the same way she knows about, say, the Cold War. What's interesting to me is that, for all the differences between my parents' generation and my own, in most respects, the technological environments in which we both grew up is remarkably similar. True, television became widespread while my parents were still children but they were very young -- young enough that they remember radio dramas as "something only old people listened to." Conversely, personal computing, which became mainstream during my youth, only really took off in a big way near the end of my high school years, late enough that I can still clearly remember -- and occasionally pine for -- the days before it was expected that every home contained at least one, if not several, PCs. 

My daughter, on the other hand, can't even imagine a world before the widespread use of the Internet, let alone one without multiple computers in every home. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, in thinking about my daughter's question, I began to wonder if perhaps the tabletop RPG is a lot like the walkman -- a transitional technology. A lot of the guys I grew up playing D&D with in the late 70s and early 80s are still interested in fantasy, but they get their fix nowadays through computer games. For people interested primarily in exciting combats in a fantasy environment, computer games can be quite compelling. Likewise, if what you're after is a well-crafted "choose your own adventure" story with your character as the star, there are plenty of electronic RPGs that fit the bill. Heck, Bioware has made themselves very successful by providing such things. Granted, both types of video games (generally) lack the interactivity of tabletop RPGs, but, judging by the success and mainstream acceptance of video games, one has to wonder whether that level of involvement is something that most people actually want of something calling itself a "roleplaying game." 

I'm not sure how seriously I mean this, but the fact remains that video games today are both far more mainstream and exhibit far more staying power than RPGs ever did, even in their heyday. Video games aren't a fad; they're a permanent part of the entertainment landscape and they're getting better and better at providing the kinds of experiences most people seem to want from them. Sure, I find them largely unsatisfying compared to a face-to-face tabletop campaign, as I suspect most of the readers of this blog do too, but we're outliers. For most people, playing a tabletop RPG rather than a video game would be like still using a walkman when they can use a MP3 player: it's a superseded technology. 

None of this is to suggest that tabletop RPGs are doomed. I've never believed that and nothing in recent years has changed my feelings on the matter. I do think, though, that anyone who dreams of a return to the glory days of the 80s is doing just that -- dreaming. It's always possible that we might catch another fad wave in the future, but all fads have expiry dates and a year or three as the object of popular culture's fickle affections likely won't change the fact that tabletop roleplaying is an esoteric and peculiar hobby, one that will hold even less appeal to the mass market as the years wear on. I'm fine with that myself, but then I'm old enough to know what I like, mainstream popularity be damned. So long as I continue to derive pleasure from tabletop roleplaying, what difference does it makes if most people would rather do something else?

"La Sangre es La Vida"

Since I'm the parent who stays at home on Halloween to dispense candy to the neighborhood children, I often find myself in need of something to do during the lulls between the doorbell rings. Because that happens often enough, I can't do anything that demands too much attention, like reading, so the solution I came to is that Halloween night is perfect for watching movies -- horror-themed ones, naturally.

Last night I decided to pop in the second DVD in Universal Dracula set, which contains the Spanish language version of the film, made contemporaneously with the English language one, using the same sets. In the earliest days of film, Hollywood would just dub their movies into other languages for overseas distribution, but, as the industry became more sophisticated, it was common practice to concurrently make several versions of the same film, each with a different cast who spoke different languages in order to both save money and make movies that held a wider appeal in foreign markets than did dubbed versions.

Many of these foreign language versions of famous American films no longer exist, but Drácula survives, albeit in a slightly less than pristine condition (some of the scenes are a little choppy and grainy). Even so, it's eminently watchable and I quickly found myself enjoying it a great deal, so much so that I started to resent the ever more frequent occasions I had to pause the action to go to the door. Eventually, I just decided to give up and rewatch the movie from the beginning after the children went to bed, because Drácula deserved my fuller attention.

Without the benefit of immediately understanding the dialog, I was left primarily with the visuals and that makes for a very different experience in viewing a film. Drácula is longer than its American counterpart, adding nearly 30 minutes. Consequently, it felt slower paced to me, though that might simply have been a trick created by my lack of linguistic understanding. Even so, the camera did seem to linger longer over many scenes, particularly those in which its female cast were onscreen, something about which I can hardly complain. Lupita Tovar's Eva Seward is a much more vibrant presence than Helen Chandler's milquetoast Mina in the American version:

Of course, Carmen Guerrero's Lucy Westenra's all-too-brief appearance is likewise notable, especially this scene where she prepares herself for bed before becoming Dracula's next victim:

Also not to be forgotten are the three Brides, whose portrayal in Drácula is as predatory, almost bestial creatures (and it is they, rather than the Count, who drive Renfield mad):

As I understand it, there are critics who feel the Spanish language version is superior to its English language twin. I can certainly see why one might hold that opinion. Drácula has a lot to recommend it beyond eye candy. Its performances are, on the whole, more emotionally charged and immediate. They're no more realistic than the English versions, since I find both films very "archetypal," which is to say, more like a Greek drama than a scene from life put on the big screen. However, I think the Spanish language actors turned out better performances overall.

Of course, any version of Dracula rises or falls based on the actor in the central role. Carlos Villarias is no Bela Lugosi, despite some superficial physical resemblance between the two. He has no problem portraying the suave, alluring side of the Count, but he lacks the menace that Lugosi could project. When he attempts to do so, Villarias generally isn't very effective and, occasionally, it's laughable. I suspect that it's my lack of fondness for Villarias that prevents me from judging Drácula as the superior to its twin. (And I should state, for the record, that Christopher Lee gives my favorite portrayal of Dracula)

Despite that, Drácula is a superb film and I'm glad I sat down and watched it after meaning to do so for so long. Rather than see it as a "rival" to the English language version, I prefer to see it as a complement to it -- another take on the same movie, which is exactly what it is. It really is amazing how much alike the two movies are, so much so that the differences are easier to notice and, my preference for the women of the Spanish version aside, it'd be impossible to pick one over the other.

Fortunately, I don't have to.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

I'd meant to draw this to everyone's attention last week, but, as was typical throughout October, I was distracted by other things and it slipped my mind until Joe Bloch reminded me of it. Over at Cyclopeatron, there's a post describing an in-store playest of Goodman Games's upcoming (scheduled for late 2011 release, I believe) Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game with Joseph Goodman.

I have to admit that, until now, I was unclear on just what the purpose of the DCC RPG was and what niche Goodman intends it to fill. Fortunately, the Cyclopeatron post answers some of that, the most intriguing part being the following:

According to Joe, his personal motivation behind DCC is to offer an RPG that can, as closely as possible, emulate all of the books presented in the Appendix N of the original AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Joe said he is systematically reading every book in Appendix N in order to formulate the game mechanics for DCC. One specific example of this is turning. Joe replaced the traditional cleric’s turn undead ability with a more general turn unholy in order to more closely mirror turning as envisioned Poul Anderson and Lord Dunsany. Another example is the totally revamped magic system where the success and/or side-effects of spellcasting can be unpredictable:

That alone piques my interest, but I'll need to know more before I stand up and cheer just yet. One of the fascinating things about D&D is that, while its inspirations are clear, it was never designed to emulate those inspirations in a slavish way, which is why, "Vancian" spellcasting no more faithfully mirrors what we see in The Dying Earth than does the alignment system map perfectly onto Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions version of the same. So, it'll be fascinating to see exactly how Goodman uses the early hobby's literary inspirations to create a new fantasy RPG.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Bazaar of the Bizarre

Gamers of a certain vintage are sure to remember the title "Bazaar of the Bizarre" in association with irregular feature in Dragon that presented new magic items for use with Dungeons & Dragons. The title was itself an homage to a short story by Fritz Leiber that first appeared in the August 1963 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, whose cover image depicts a scene from this tale of Lankhmar, which begins with the arrival of the Gray Mouser.

The Gray Mouser slipped into the Plaza at the Fountain end as silently as if he had come to slit a throat or spy on the spies of the Overlord. His ratskin mocassins were soundless. His sword Scalpel in its mouseskin sheath did not swish ever so faintly against either his tunic or cloak, both of gray silk curiously coarse of weave. The glances he shot about him from under his gray silk hood half thrown back were freighted with menace and a freezing sense of superiority.

Inwardly, the Mouser was feeling very much like a schoolboy -- a schoolboy in dread of rebuke and a crushing assignment of homework. For in the Mouser's pouch of ratskin was a note scrawled in dark brown squid-ink on silvery fish-skin by Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, inviting Mouser to be at this spot at this time.

Meanwhile, the Mouser's boon companion, Fafhrd, found himself, as he so often did, in a parallel predicament, bidden by his own supernatural tutor, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, to seek out the same location -- the Plaza of Dark Delights. The Plaza is home to all manner of strange and debauched shops and entertainments:

For there the vendors of drugs and the peddlers of curiosa and the hawkers of assignations light their stalls and crouching places with foxfire, glowworms, and fire-pots with tiny single windows, and they conduct their business almost as silently as the stars conduct theirs.

There are plenty of raucous spots a-glare with torches in nocturnal Lankhmar, but by immemorial tradition soft whispers and a pleasant dimness are the rule in the Plaza of Dark Delights.

Recently, a new shop has opened up in the Plaza, one whose peculiarly dressed proprietor dares to "defil[e] the Dark Plaza with glare." The Mouser begins to think that perhaps it is this that Sheelba has sent him to investigate, a fact confirmed separately by Fafhrd as not only Sheelba but Ningauble too appear to him in the shadows, a fact that worries him:

Moreover that those two bitter wizardly rivals would have joined forces, that they should apparently be operating together in amity ... Something of great note must be afoot! There was no doubting that.

The two wizards explain to the red-headed northerner that beings known as "the Devourers" threaten Lankhmar and that it is his task to defeat them.

"The Devourers are the most accomplished merchants in all the many universes -- so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting methods of selling and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they sell. Indeed, they dare not concern themselves with such matters for a moment, for fear of losing their golden touch -- and yet such are their skills that their wares are utterly irresistible, indeed the finest wares in all the many universes -- if you follow me?"

The two wizards bid Fafhrd to assist them ousting the Devourers from Lankhmar before they ensnare its population into buying trash in exchange for "good money and even finer things," in effect stripping the City of the Black Togas -- and eventually all of Nehwon -- of its valuable items. Fafhrd initially has no interest in such a plan, at which point Sheelba plays on the northerner's friendship with the Gray Mouser.

"It was intended that you have a comrade in this quest, a fellow soldier against noisome evil -- to wit, the Gray Mouser. But unfortunately he came early to his appointment with my colleague here and was enticed into the shop of the Devourers and is doubtless now deep in their snares, if not already extinct. So you can see that we do take thought for your welfare and have no wish to overburden you with solo quests."

For the sake of "that poor little gray fool," Fafhrd undertakes the alien wizards' mission and, with that, one of Leiber's most memorable stories of the Twain kicks into high gear.

I'm finding that, as I get older, I enjoy Leiber's writing, particularly his early stories of Lankhmar, better than I did as a younger man. There's a delightful world weariness and cynicism, shot through with playfulness, that's very attractive to me. "Bizarre of the Bizarre" is a terrific romp, one that, I think, nicely showcases Lankhmar and its most famous denizens. Re-reading it reminded me of just how much D&D owes to Leiber for many of its most basic conceptions. It's a pity that he's not more widely read and lauded, even within the RPG community, for, as this story reveals, Fritz Leiber had a powerful influence on the founders of our hobby.