Chamber of Chills

I mentioned in my earlier post today that there was a Marvel comics adaptation of "The Thing on the Roof" in issue #3 of Chamber of Chills (March 1973), scripted by Roy Thomas (of Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan fame, among many others) and drawn by Frank Brunner. Here's the cover – and, no, nothing like this happens in either the story or the adaptation.

The adaptation is broadly faithful to Howard's story, though it eliminates the first part of it, where Tussmann comes to the narrator (here given the name of Mr Erwin rather than being unnamed) and asks his help in procuring a copy of the 1839 edition of Nameless Cults, instead launching straight into the narrator's visit to Tussmann's Sussex manor. It's also a bit more melodramatic, adding little flourishes here and there that I assume were intended to heighten the tension and horror of the tale.

Likewise, the comic ends with an actual revelation of the creature that is responsible for Tussmann's demise, something Howard intentionally leaves vague:

I can certainly see why Thomas and Brunner decided to depict the unseen Thing on the Roof, but, as is so often the case, I'm not sure it could ever have done justice to anyone's imagination of what the creature looked like. In any case, I'm nonetheless pleased to draw your attention to another comic book adaptation of a pulp writer. I think the role comics, especially Marvel comics, played in introducing a new generation to the works writers from decades before. Come to think of it, that'd a worthy topic for a post all its own ...

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Thing on the Roof

When I restarted the Pulp Fantasy Library series back in September, I did so primarily because I knew I could devote myself to writing about every H.P. Lovecraft story associated with the Dreamlands, even tangentially. Because there are a lot of stories that fit this description, I didn't have to think much about which story I'd write next, which eased a lot of the burden I'd previously felt about the series. Now that I've concluded that project, I find myself once again pondering what next to write about and I felt some of my former apprehension return. After all, with 350 entries to date, I've written about most (though not all) of the obvious stories.

Because I'd devoted the first month of the year to Clark Ashton Smith rather than to his colleague and fellow January baby, Robert E. Howard, I thought a good way to solve my immediate problem was to find one of his stories I'd never covered before. REH was a prolific writer and, while his tales of Conan and Solomon Kane are probably his best and most well-known, there's still a wealth of options to choose from, especially if I wanted something a little off the beaten path. That's when I remembered "The Thing on the Roof."

Originally published in the February 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Thing on the Roof" is a horror story in the vein of Lovecraft's tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I first came across it in the early '90s in an anthology of Howard's horror fiction edited by David Drake and then, later, encountered an adaptation of it from an early '70s Marvel comic book (Chamber of Chills issue #3). Compared to, say, "Pigeons from Hell," which is likely the most celebrated of Howard's horror yarns, "The Thing on the Roof" is a much more modest affair, but it's still interesting nonetheless, if only for its slightly different take on "Lovecraftian" subject matter.

The story itself is quite short and fairly straightforward. Its unnamed narrator is a scholar and book collector. He is unexpectedly approached by his academic rival, Tussmann, who offers to publicly retract his previous aspersions on his work in exchange for help obtaining the rare 1839 “black book” edition of Friedrich von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. Tussmann has become obsessed with a passage describing a remote “Temple of the Toad” in Honduras, where a mummy wearing a toad-shaped red jewel supposedly guards a hidden treasure and believes only the 1839 edition contains a full description of the temple. After months of effort, the narrator secures a copy and Tussmann confirms that the original text contains crucial details omitted from later editions. Claiming firsthand knowledge of the temple from a previous expedition, Tussmann then departs for Central America determined to recover the treasure of the temple, convinced that the jewel is, in fact, a key to a store of gold concealed beneath the altar.

Months later, Tussmann summons the narrator to his Sussex estate, where he reveals that he found no gold, only the mummy and the strange jewel, which indeed opened a hidden passage beneath the temple. His account of what lay below is evasive and unsettling and he appears increasingly unstable, hinting that he may have awakened something when he used the jewel to open a subterranean crypt. The narrator, rereading von Junzt, realizes the horrifying implication: the “treasure” was not gold but the temple’s monstrous god. That night, amid strange noises and signs of an unseen presence, Tussmann locks himself in his room with the jewel. The narrator later breaks in to find him dead, his skull crushed by what appears to be the imprint of a gigantic hoof and the jewel missing, suggesting that whatever was released from the temple has followed its key back to England.

As a story, "The Thing on the Roof" is a modest affair. Most of the story consists of conversations between the narrator and Tussmann, as the two discuss historical details about von Juntz, the Temple of the Toad, and related matters. For a Robert E. Howard tale, it's devoid of almost any action, which is probably its most remarkable quality. As a story, it's fine – nothing special but perfectly serviceable for the kind of story it is. For whatever reason, Howard himself really like the tale, writing in a 1930 letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith that "this story is by far the best thing I have ever written and one which I am really inclined to believe approaches real literature, distantly, at least." Even overlooking an author's inevitable blindness about his own material, REH's self-assessment is overly charitable.

"The Thing on the Roof" is worth a read, because it's quick and has a few interesting elements, even if it's far from Howard at his best. Sometimes, even Homer nods. 

The Glittering Lure

I could not permit the 120th anniversary of the birth of Robert Ervin Howard to pass without a comment, however brief. The problem is that, after all these years, what more could I possibly say about him, his work, and his legacy that others have not already said before and said better?

Even so, Howard persists, not as a relic of the pulp era and not merely as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, but as a writer whose vision still exerts a mighty gravitational pull. His stories refuse to stay put in their historical moment. They feel immediate, urgent, volatile, and alive. That is no accident. Howard did not write as an antiquarian or as a stylist; he wrote as someone possessed by an idea. Civilization, in his view, is a fragile veneer stretched over something older, darker, and more honest. His fiction presents this truth again and again, not as theory but as lived experience.

In a 1926 letter to his friend, Tevis Clyde Smith, Howard enclosed a short poem:

I am the spur 

That rides men's souls,

The glittering lure

That leads around the world.

It is tempting to read this as youthful bravado, but it also functions as a manifesto of sorts. Howard understood the power of story as provocation, as something that drives people rather than comforts them. His tales are spurs: they prod, unsettle, and awaken half-buried instincts. They lure readers not toward safety or progress but toward forgotten ages of blood, fire, and iron. I think this is the crux of his appeal. Howard does not reassure us about who we are; he reminds us of what we once were and what, perhaps, we still are.

Conan is the most famous expression of this vision, but he is far from its only vehicle. Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, each embodies a different response to the same underlying tension. Barbarism and civilization are locked in an endless cycle and neither emerges morally unscathed. Howard’s heroes stand between these worlds, belonging fully to neither. They are not noble savages or enlightened rulers. They are survivors. Their virtues are physical, instinctual, hard-won. Through them, Howard staged his ongoing argument with modernity itself.

What makes this compelling is its sincerity. Howard believed what he wrote. The loneliness, the defiance, the brooding fatalism – these are not literary poses. They are emotional truths drawn from a young man struggling with isolation, economic anxiety, and a deep sense of historical displacement. Even when his plots verge on melodrama, the conviction behind them carries everything forward. His stories do not feel manufactured; they feel lived in.

This is why Howard’s legacy extends far beyond sword-and-sorcery. Undoubtedly, he helped shape that genre, but, more importantly, he articulated a worldview that continues to resonate. Tabletop roleplaying games, modern fantasy, movies, TV shows, comics, and more carry his imprint. Yet he remains oddly marginal in literary discussions. He's admired and cited, but rarely examined with the seriousness he deserves. That is slowly changing and rightly so.

Consequently, anniversaries like this matter not because they allow us to say something new about him and his work, but because they give us the opportunity to say something again. To reread “Beyond the Black River.” To rediscover an overlooked poem. To remember that a young man from Cross Plains, Texas reshaped modern fantasy not through polish or prestige, but through raw imaginative force.

Howard died young, but his stories endure as spurs still digging into the soul, glittering lures drawing us back to lost ages of steel and shadow. On this 120th anniversary of his birth, that seems reason enough to pause, tip one’s hat, and acknowledge the truth of his own words: he still leads his readers around the world.

Invisible Titan

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, three names dominate almost any discussion I have about the foundational figures of modern fantasy, science fiction, and horror: Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. All three were central contributors to Weird Tales in the 1920s and ’30s. All three helped shape the emerging genres in profound ways. All three are still read today. And yet, their legacies are anything but equal.

Howard’s influence is obvious, visible in every barbarian hero who swings a sword against a decadent civilization. Lovecraft’s shadow falls across horror fiction, video and roleplaying games, Internet culture, and popular media more generally. Smith, by contrast, seems oddly absent. His admirers are devoted, but comparatively few writers openly cite him as an influence and his worlds have spawned no major franchises, games, or films.

Why?

The answer is not, I think, that Smith was less imaginative or accomplished than his better-known colleagues. On the contrary, his work is among the most distinctive produced during the pulp era. That's why I would argue that the very qualities that make Smith unique also make him difficult to imitate, adapt, and institutionalize. He inspired readers but not movements.

For example, Smith’s prose is unmistakable. He wrote in long, sinuous sentences thick with Latinate vocabulary, archaic constructions, and sensuous imagery. His stories are, as I have often said, more like prose poems, luxuriating in sound and rhythm as much as, if not more than, narrative. This is both his glory and his barrier. It is hard to write like Clark Ashton Smith without slipping into parody. His style is too idiosyncratic, too personal, too bound to his own esthetic sensibility to become a template others can easily adopt.

To be fair, the same danger exists with his peers. Bad pastiches of Howard and Lovecraft are legion and most attempts to imitate either man’s prose end up as caricature. The difference is not that Howard and Lovecraft are easier to imitate well, but that their styles lend themselves more readily to abstraction. One can strip them down to a handful of recognizable features and reproduce those features mechanically. The result is often parody, yes, but it is also functional.

Howard’s short sentences, violent verbs, and blunt emotionality can be reduced to a usable toolkit. Lovecraft’s catalogs of dread, his breathless escalation of adjectives, his favorite rhetorical tics (“blasphemous,” “cyclopean,” “unnamable”) are equally modular. Writers can plug these components into new stories and produce something that approximates Howard or Lovecraft, even if it lacks the originals’ power.

Smith’s language resists this sort of modularization. You cannot easily isolate a few stylistic tricks and reproduce the effect. His sentences work because of their internal music, their strange balances and cadences, their density of allusion and imagery. Remove any one element and you break the spell. What remains is either pallid imitation or outright parody. In that sense, Smith’s prose is less a toolbox than a fingerprint. You can borrow Howard’s tropes. You can borrow Lovecraft’s cosmology. But you can’t really borrow Smith’s voice, at least not without immediately revealing that it isn’t his.

Lovecraft, moreover, created something deliberately exportable: a shared mythology. The Great Old Ones, forbidden books, ancient cults, and cosmic revelations became a collaborative playground even during HPL's own lifetime. Other writers could add to it (as Smith himself did), reinterpret it, and build upon it. Over time, the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” became a franchise or shared universe long before such terms even existed.

Howard did something similar in a different way. Through Conan and his other heroes, he defined the mode of fantasy we now call sword & sorcery. Other writers could step into that mode, create their own barbarian protagonists, and feel they were participating in a recognizable tradition, even when their efforts lacked the vitality that made Howard’s work so special.

Smith did neither. His stories are scattered across multiple settings, none of which form a unified cosmology. He rarely revisited characters. There is no obvious structure inviting expansion. Each tale feels like a sealed jewel, complete in itself – beautiful, yes, but not obviously expandable. There is no “Smith Mythos” for later writers to inhabit.

Nor does Smith’s worldview encourage imitation. His stories are saturated with decay, extinction, and cosmic exhaustion. Civilizations crumble. Sorcerers damn themselves. Gods are indifferent. Death is inevitable and often absurd. Where Howard offers heroic struggle and Lovecraft offers cosmic terror, Smith offers instead cosmic indifference plus irony. The universe doesn’t care and neither should you.

Worse, Smith’s characters are often complicit in their own destruction. Their greed, curiosity, or hubris leads them to ruin, and his stories rarely provide catharsis. There is no triumph, no moral lesson, often not even a clear horror, just the quiet confirmation that everything ends. This sometimes produces powerful literature, but it is poorly suited to adventure fiction. It does not encourage sequels or heroic identification. It offers atmosphere, not aspiration.

Influence also spreads through media. Howard’s creations moved into comics, films, games, and endless pastiches. Lovecraft’s ideas found second lives in tabletop RPGs, video games, movies, and online culture. Smith has never received this treatment. There are no major film adaptations, no prominent games, no shared universe projects. His work remains largely confined to small press editions and academic appreciation. Without this secondary life, his stories remain artifacts rather than living traditions. They are read, admired, and shelved, but rarely transformed.

Perhaps the most important difference is that Smith thought of himself first and foremost as a poet. His fiction is saturated with poetic concerns. Plot is often secondary. Character is minimal. The stories exist to evoke sensation rather than to tell a tale in any conventional sense. In this way, Smith belongs less to modern genre fiction than to a lineage that includes Lord Dunsany, the French decadents, and the Symbolist poets. He is writing fantasy as an esthetic experience, not as an entertainment product. This makes his work resistant to adaptation. You cannot easily turn “The Empire of the Necromancers” into a movie or a game without losing the very thing that makes it memorable. Strip away the language and little remains but a skeletal plot (no pun intended).

None of this means Smith has had no influence at all. It is simply quieter and harder to trace. You can see echoes of Zothique in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. Moorcock’s multiverses also carry hints of Smith’s cosmic weariness. Some New Weird writers share his fascination with decay and estrangement. Heavy metal and doom metal esthetics often feel Smithian. But these are tonal resonances, not structural inheritances. Smith shapes mood, not genre.

In the end, Smith represents a road speculative fiction largely did not take. Instead of heroic adventure or shared mythologies, he offered a literature of extinction, irony, and esthetic despair. His fantasy is closer to Baudelaire than to Tolkien. That he left a lighter footprint may perhaps be fitting. His work resists institutionalization. It does not want to become a franchise. It exists simply as an artifact that is beautiful, strange – and terminal.

A Poet Among the Pulpsters

CAS at age 19

When discussions turn to the triumvirate of Weird Tales – H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith – there is a tendency to group them together as if they all sprang from the same soil and wrote from the same impulses. In reality, Smith stands apart in a crucial way. Lovecraft was, at heart, an antiquarian essayist who transformed his philosophical anxieties into cosmic horror. Howard, by contrast, was a storyteller of raw physicality, a bard of blood and thunder who wrote like a man shadowboxing the page. Smith, however, came to weird fiction by a very different road. He was a poet first, last, and always and that vocation shaped every sentence he ever wrote.

Today marks the 133rd anniversary of Smith’s birth, which seems as good an occasion as any to reflect on what made his work so distinctive. Rather than simply commemorating another member of the Weird Tales stable, I think it’s worth pausing to consider how Smith’s early life as a poet (and the literary circles in which he moved) gave his fiction its singular texture and enduring power.

Clark Ashton Smith’s literary career began not in pulp magazines but in the rarefied world of early twentieth-century poetry. Born in 1893 in Auburn, California, he had little formal schooling, largely due to health issues, but he compensated through voracious self-education. He devoured classical literature, taught himself French and Spanish, and immersed himself in the Romantic and Symbolist poets. By nineteen, he had produced The Star-Treader and Other Poems, a volume so striking in its imagery and diction that contemporary critics compared him to Keats and Shelley. For a brief moment, Smith seemed destined for a serious poetic career.

Central to his early success was George Sterling, often called the “uncrowned king of Bohemia” in San Francisco literary circles. Sterling became Smith’s mentor, champion, and friend, introducing him to writers and artists and encouraging his lush, decadent style. Sterling himself wrote in a fin-de-siècle mode, rich with classical allusions and sensual imagery, and Smith absorbed this esthetic deeply. From Sterling, Smith learned that language could be luxuriant, that excess was not a vice but a virtue, and that literature could aspire to the condition of dream or myth rather than mere narrative efficiency.

CAS and George Sterling

If Sterling gave Smith his ornate beauty, it was Ambrose Bierce who supplied the venom. Bierce, by then an aging icon of American letters, recognized Smith’s talent and corresponded with him. Where Sterling fostered romance and rapture, Bierce sharpened Smith’s sense of irony and cruelty. Bierce’s influence can be felt in Smith’s merciless endings, his delight in cosmic indifference, and his refusal to grant characters easy moral victories. The combination of Sterling’s estheticism and Bierce’s mordant wit produced something rare: prose that is simultaneously sumptuous and pitiless.

The problem for Smith was that poetry did not pay. By the 1920s, the market for ornate verse had largely collapsed. Smith found himself in financial difficulty and turned, reluctantly at first, to writing fiction for magazines like Weird Tales. It is important to emphasize that Smith did not approach this shift as a conversion. He did not become a pulp writer in the way Howard wholeheartedly embraced the form. Instead, he treated fiction as trade work, seeing it as necessary labor to save himself and his aging parents from utter penury.

Even so, Smith never simplified his voice. He did not trim his sentences, streamline his vocabulary, or abandon his baroque imagery. If anything, he doubled down. While other writers adapted themselves to the expectations of pulp magazines, Smith forced the magazines to accommodate him. His stories read less like conventional narratives and more like prose poems that just happen to feature necromancers, dying empires, and alien gods.

I think this poetic foundation explains why Smith’s fiction feels so different from that of his peers. In Smith, language is not merely a vehicle for story; it is the story. His plots are often simple – curiosity leads to doom, hubris invites annihilation, etc. – but the pleasure lies in how those ideas are expressed. He builds atmosphere through rhythm and sound, crafting sentences meant to be savored aloud. His vocabulary is famously archaic and exotic, not as an affectation but as an extension of his poetic training. Words matter to Smith almost like physical objects, chosen for their texture as much as for their meaning.

His worldbuilding, too, reflects a poet’s sensibility. Whereas Howard constructs the Hyborian Age through action and Lovecraft builds his cosmos through dreadful revelations, Smith creates settings through sensory accumulation. Colors bleed into one another. Landscapes are described like paintings glimpsed in flickering torchlight. Cities feel half-remembered, as if drawn from some collective unconscious. His imaginary realms, whether Zothique, Hyperborea, or Averoigne, are not maps but moods.

Perhaps most telling is Smith’s attitude toward horror. Lovecraft’s terror is intellectual, rooted in the shattering of human significance. Howard’s horror is visceral, something to be fought or fled. Smith’s horror is esthetic. His monsters are often beautiful, seductive, or strangely noble. Doom is inevitable, but it arrives wrapped in velvet. This, too, comes from poetry, from the Decadent tradition that finds fascination in decline and ruin. For Smith, decay is not merely tragic; it is strangely lovely.

This places him at a peculiar angle to his Weird Tales compatriots. Lovecraft wrote to reveal philosophical truths. Howard wrote to thrill and exult. Smith, however, wrote to evoke. His stories appeal to me not because of memorable protagonists or clever twists, but because of the way they sound and even feel, if that's the word. They linger in my mind like fragments of strange dreams.

In the end, Clark Ashton Smith is best understood not as a pulp writer who could occasionally write beautifully, but as a poet who temporarily inhabited pulp fiction. Forced by circumstance to trade verse for narrative, he brought with him Sterling’s decadent romanticism and Bierce’s biting skepticism, infusing Weird Tales with a voice unlike any other. Sixty-five years after his death, that voice still echoes, ornate and unforgiving, reminding us that even in the cheapest magazines, true art can take root and flourish in the strangest soil.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games"

I strongly considered not writing a post about this particular article from issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), since I know it’s likely to stir up strong feelings and perhaps understandably so. At the same time, the guiding principle behind my revival of the Articles of Dragon series has been to focus on pieces that had a particular impact on me when I first read them, and this one – “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games” – most certainly did. Of course, if you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, that should come as no surprise.

The question of Tolkien’s influence on the creation and later development of Dungeons & Dragons is a topic to which Gary Gygax regularly returned. From nearly the moment the game appeared, Gygax denied that Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings, held any special place of honor among the many fantasy works that inspired him. He never denied having read and enjoyed The Hobbit, nor that he had borrowed certain monsters and creatures, such as orcs and halflings, from Tolkien. What he seems to have rejected was the idea that this borrowing meant D&D was primarily inspired by Tolkien, rather than being a mishmash of many different influences.

I say "seems," because I really don't know why this particular question so vexed Gygax. That he kept writing articles like this more than a decade after the first appearance of the game suggests that it somehow mattered to him. I suppose the easy explanation is ego – he simply couldn't countenance the idea that someone might think D&D's success was owed, in whole or in part, to the popularity of Tolkien's work rather than his own imagination and ingenuity. But is that what was going on? Honestly, I don't know and I'm not sure anyone else does either.

"The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games" is a strange article. For one, Gygax begins it by admitting – in the very first paragraph – that "the popularity of Professor Tolkien's fantasy works did encourage me to develop my own." This is undeniable, since the Fantasy Supplement to Chainmail directly references J.R.R. Tolkien and includes not just hobbits but orcs, balrogs, and ents among its bestiary (all of which appeared in OD&D, at least in its earliest printings). Gygax continues that "there are bits and pieces of his works reflected hazily in mine," before stating that "I believe his influence, as a whole, is minimal" [italics mine].

Gygax then recalls the many, many fantasy books and authors he read, beginning in childhood. He points particularly to Robert E. Howard's only Conan novel, Conan the Conqueror (more accurately The Hour of the Dragon) as being his first exposure to sword-and-sorcery literature. He then goes on to cite L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Abraham Merritt, and H.P. Lovecraft as also being important to developing his sense of fantasy. None of those names should come as surprise, since he highlights all of them in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. (Of more interest to me is why Jack Vance is not mentioned at all, despite Gygax's regular praise of him and his works and his role in inspiring the D&D magic system.)

With that out of the way, Gygax says he "thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit" but found The Lord of the Rings a "tedious ... allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil." Tolkien would, of course, object strenuously to that characterization of The Lord of the Rings, but we must take Gygax at his word. He claims to have found the novel's action to be slow, its magic unimpressive, and its resolution disappointing. Moreover, Tolkien drops his favorite character, Tom Bombadil, soon after introducing him, which contributed to the slowness with which he finished it (three weeks).

Gygax then goes on, rather unconvincingly in my view, to say that many of the common elements of Middle-earth and Dungeons & Dragons have common sources, like Norse mythology for dwarves, and that therefore no one should assume the game he created owed much to Tolkien. In fairness, he also admits once again that there were some things he borrowed with the intention of "capitalizing on the then-current 'craze' for Tolkien's literature." He did this in a "superficial manner," believing that, once he'd attracted these Tolkien fiends to D&D, they'd soon realize that there was only "a minute trace of the Professor's work" therein.

As I said, I really don't know what to make of all of this. On the one hand, I generally agree with Gygax that D&D's similarities to Tolkien's creations are skin-deep at best and probably included solely for the purposes of enticing Middle-earth aficionados to the game. On the other hand, the fact that Gygax kept beating this particular drum makes me wonder if he actually believed the lines he was saying. Furthermore, Gygax was never shy about admitting the debt he owed REH or Vance or Leiber, so why did the charge he was borrowed Tolkien rankle him so? It's frankly baffling to me.

REH vs CAS

At the end of last week, I asked readers whether they’d prefer that I devote this coming January to Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith, in the same way that I dedicated this past August to H.P. Lovecraft.

So far, the “contest” is remarkably close. At the moment, the Bard of Auburn holds a very narrow lead over Two-Gun Bob, but not by enough to declare the matter settled. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Both Howard and Smith are more than worthy of a full month’s attention on this blog and each brings something distinct and compelling to the table. I’d be delighted to spend January exploring either one of them and, judging from the comments and emails I’ve received so far, many of you feel the same way.

Because the vote remains so tight, I may need to turn to another method of choosing. One option I’m considering is putting the final decision to my patrons. Their support of Grognardia is direct and it seems only fair to let them weigh in when a topic inspires this much enthusiasm. If nothing else, it would be a fitting way to break the tie and ensure that the choice reflects the people who help make these month-long deep dives possible.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone who hasn’t yet commented or sent me an email to do so. Whichever way this goes, January is shaping up to be another enjoyable excursion into the history of early fantasy literature.

January Approacheth

Back in August, I devoted the entire month on this blog to discussing H.P. Lovecraft and his legacy, under the banner of The Shadow over August. What began as an experiment turned out to be one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve undertaken on Grognardia in some time. Not only was it fun to revisit Lovecraft’s writings and influences in a focused way, but the response from readers was far more enthusiastic than I had expected. It reminded me of the value of spending a sustained period delving into a single creator whose work has shaped the hobby in so many ways.

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about doing something similar in January. Two of the other great figures associated with Weird Tales, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, were both born in that month. Each is, in his own way, a towering influence on fantasy, horror, and roleplaying games. Consequently, I would very much like to give one of them the same kind of month-long attention I gave to Lovecraft in August.

Notice I said one. For practical reasons, I can only manage one such project right at a time, however much I'd like to do both. That leaves me with a choice and, rather than make it myself, I thought it would be more fitting (and fun) to put it to you, the readers.

I’ve come up with titles that mirror the spirit of The Shadow over August and capture something of each author’s tone:

• For Robert E. Howard: The Savage Sword of January
• For Clark Ashton Smith: The Ensorcellment of January

Both possibilities appeal to me for different reasons and I would enjoy devoting a month to either writer. So, I’m asking for your help in deciding which one I should pursue. If you have a preference – Howard or Smith – please let me know in the comments. I’ll tally the responses and announce the outcome before the end of the year, as I can begin preparing for whichever choice wins out. It's a difficult choice, to be sure, and I don't think there's a wrong option. Plus, I can always devote January 2027 to whichever of the two isn't chosen for 2026.

As always, thank you for reading and for your continued enthusiasm. August’s experiment succeeded in large part because of your engagement and I’m looking forward to seeing where January takes us.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Cairn on the Headland

Though Weird Tales was without question the premier magazine of the pulp era, it was hardly alone in exploring the strange and macabre. Among its would-be rivals was Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, edited by Harry Bates, a capable writer himself, best remembered for his 1940 story “Farewell to the Master,” which later inspired the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Strange Tales set out to challenge Weird Tales directly and earned a solid reputation for the high quality of its fiction and the caliber of its contributors, including such luminaries as Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Sadly, the magazine’s ambitions outpaced its fortunes. Its publisher went bankrupt after only seven issues, released between 1931 and 1933.

One of the most intriguing stories to appear in Strange Tales was Robert E. Howard’s “The Cairn on the Headland,” published in the magazine’s final issue in January 1933. The tale stands out not only for its content, which is an imaginative fusion of Norse mythology and Christian legend, but also for what it reveals about Howard’s own enduring fascination with that theme. As he often did, Howard wrote and rewrote versions of this story in his search for a suitable market. Unlike his friend H.P. Lovecraft, who generally shelved a piece once Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected it, Howard was relentless in finding new outlets for his fiction. Yet the persistence with which he revisited this particular idea suggests he found something deeply compelling within it and I’m inclined to agree.

The story begin as “Spears of Clontarf,” a historical adventure centered on the Battle of Clontarf  (1014 AD) and featuring Turlogh Dubh O’Brien, one of Howard’s recurring Irish heroes. When he failed to sell it, REH recast the material as “The Grey God Passes,” introducing more overt fantasy and mythic elements to the same historical events. This, too, went unpublished in his lifetime. Finally, Howard returned once more to the subject, transforming it into a modern story of supernatural horror. In this final version of the idea, the Battle of Clontarf becomes a haunting memory intruding into the present, and Howard at last succeeded in finding a publisher. It's this version of the story I want to discuss today, as the final entry in this month's horror-themed Pulp Fantasy Library posts.

The protagonist of "The Cairn on the Headland" is James O’Brien, an Irish-American scholar devoted to medieval Irish history. Fluent in Gaelic and steeped in the great chronicles of his ancestral homeland, O’Brien embodies Howard’s ideal of the learned yet passionate antiquarian. His career, however, is blighted by Ortali, a strange blackmailer who holds false evidence linking O’Brien to a murder. Ortali believes O'Brien will one day unearth some great treasure through his researches and hopes to benefit from them, hence his extortion. Trapped, O'Brien has little choice but to work side by side with Ortali, even as his hatred for him grows.

During a visit to Dublin, the two men explore the titular cairn on a headland overlooking the city. The locals shun it, believing it cursed since the time of Clontarf, when the Irish under King Brian Boru threw off centuries of Viking domination. O’Brien is uncertain whether the cairn commemorates the victors or their foes, but he is certain it should not be disturbed. Ortali scoffs at his superstition, vowing to return at midnight and dig beneath the stones for treasure, mockingly wearing a sprig of holly, which the villagers say must never come near the place.

Later, O’Brien encounters a mysterious woman dressed in archaic clothing who introduces herself as Meve MacDonnal. She gives him the lost Cross of Saint Brandon [sic], insisting he will soon need it. Only later does O’Brien realize that Meve MacDonnal has been dead for centuries, her grave not far away. That night, in troubled sleep, he dreams – or is it remembers? – his former life as Red Cumal, an Irish warrior who fought at Clontarf. In this vision, Cumal helps defeat a one-eyed Viking chieftain who reveals himself as Odin in human form. Wounded by a spear marked with a cross, the god lies helpless, trapped in mortality. Cumal knows that holly must never touch Odin’s body and he and his comrades seal him beneath a cairn.

O’Brien awakens from his dream to find Ortali gone. He rushes to the headland and arrives just as the blackmailer uncovers the body buried within, unchanged after a thousand years. A sprig of holly falls from Ortali’s lapel and the corpse stirs. Odin reawakens, shedding human guise to become a towering, demonic spirit wreathed in auroral light. His first act is to destroy Ortali with a blast of lightning. O’Brien, remembering the cross he'd been given, raises it high. The relic shines with unearthly brilliance, banishing the pagan god in an act resembling an exorcism. At dawn, O’Brien stands alone among the shattered stones, free of both Ortali and Odin.

The story's fusion of Norse myth and Christian legend is unusual, though not entirely without precedent in Howard's writing, especially when one considers his many Solomon Kane yarns. The Battle of Clontarf becomes not just a struggle for Ireland’s freedom but also a cosmic contest between Light and Darkness, Christ and Odin. Howard’s Odin is no noble All-Father but instead a demon, an ancient power of frost and cruelty whose defeat marks the turning of an age. 

Such stark moral contrasts are typical of Howard, but in “The Cairn on the Headland,” they take on an unmistakably theological tone. The story reflects the medieval Christian reinterpretation of pagan gods as fallen angels. Howard’s Odin undergoes precisely this transformation, stripped of his majesty and recast as a malevolent spirit lingering on the edges of history. Yet, for all its moral gravity, the tale remains quintessentially Howardian. O’Brien, though a scholar by nature, is no passive intellectual. Confronted with a supernatural threat, he meets it head-on, triumphing not only over Odin himself but also over the lingering shadow of his own moral weakness and subjugation to Ortali’s blackmail.

“The Cairn on the Headland” may have begun as an unsold historical adventure, but in its final form it stands among Howard’s more distinctive weird tales. It's a compelling fusion of myth, theology, and pulp vitality. It also serves as a kind of bridge between his historical fiction and his horror stories, where the heroic and the haunted intermingle. On the storm-swept coast of Ireland, faith and myth collide and the old gods are finally banished, not by priests or saints, but by a man of courage who embodies Howard’s enduring belief in strength, will, and the indomitable human spirit.

Interview: Jeff Talanian

1. How did you first discover the works of H.P. Lovecraft and what was it about his writing that captivated you?

Greetings, James, and thank you for the opportunity to chat about one of my favorite authors, H.P. Lovecraft. So, when I was a young teenager in the early- to mid-1980s, I was playing in a local AD&D group that was run by a childhood friend by the name of Andrew. One week, my friend Bob, whom I am still friends with to this day, wanted to run something different for the group as a one-shot. It was Call of Cthulhu, by Chaosium. I played a scientist armed with a pistol, and my guy either died or went mad – I don't recall the specifics. But I loved the content, and it led me to looking up the story "The Call of Cthulhu," by Mr. Lovecraft, and it's since been a lifelong fascination. So, I discovered HPL through gaming. I think it was about 1983 or 1984.

2. Lovecraft’s influence on Hyperborea is unmistakable. What elements of his cosmic horror do you think best lend themselves to tabletop roleplaying?

The crushing sense of futility in which mankind must come to terms that he is an insignificant ant in comparison with the Great Old Ones; that no matter how much he achieves, whatever lofty heights he attains, there is something larger out there that views man with indifference, if even at all. It is a different mindset than some previous presentations in which player characters can actually achieve a god-like status or even become immortals with all the benefits derived therefrom. In a true cosmic horror campaign, for no matter how much power and glory you achieve, you are still no more than the aforementioned ant in the grand scheme of things.

3. Lovecraft is often associated with "modern" horror, but Hyperborea is firmly sword-and-sorcery. How do you blend the alien terrors of the Mythos with the more grounded violence and heroism of pulp fantasy?

I drew a lot of inspiration from HPL's brothers-in-arms, as it were – Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and no small amount of inspiration from other authors such as Abraham Merritt and Fritz Leiber. As Howard and Lovecraft became closer friends, as evidenced by the letters they exchanged, we started to see the influences of cosmic horror played out in Howard's fiction, which was a subtle shift away from some of his earlier themes of more heroic, action-oriented yarns. This also applies to Smith's work, which borrows from Lovecraft's work, but in a lot of cases, HPL was borrowing from CAS (see Tsathoggua). So, even though HPL was writing a lot of his works from a modern (for his time) perspective, and other authors have since done the same, I think it should be recognized that authors such as REH and CAS were taking these same concepts and themes and applying them to other worlds and other times of a more fantastic bent.

4. What’s your favorite Lovecraft story, and why? Has it ever directly influenced an adventure or mechanic in Hyperborea?

"The Shadow Out of Time" is not only a personal favorite, but also one that I have derived a great amount of inspiration from for the entire Hyperborea adventure game itself. In 2008, in the aftermath of Gary Gygax's passing, whom I'd been working for three years as a writer, I found myself back to square one. I decided to make my own game that I would enjoy playing with my beer-drinking buddies, and if other gamers liked it – great! If they didn't, then to hell with them! I wanted my game to be built out from and inspired by earlier systems by Gygax and Arneson, and I wanted its setting to have a Bran Mak Morn, Conan, and Kull feel to it, but with a heavy dose of the weird fiction produced by Howard's friends, H.P.L. and C.A.S. At the time, I was rereading all of Lovecraft's works, and when I read "The Shadow Out of Time," I had an epiphany. It was inspired by the following passages:

I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.

There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.

Here was a story showing me exactly what I needed to do with my setting and how I could pull it all together – whether you are talking about Kull's Valusia, the Elder Things of Antarctica, or Tsathoggua worshipers of Hyperborea – it was all there! I then began to conceive of an idea of an adventure game setting in which all these elements could be pulled together, and more!

5. You’ve cited not just Lovecraft but also Howard, Smith, and Merritt as inspirations. What do you think the shared thread is among these authors and how does Hyperborea pay homage to that tradition?

I think that each and all they were incredibly imaginative writers who dared to write for a genre that was largely shunned, and they were excelling at it. I believe they wrote "up" to their readers, and never catered to a lowest common denominator to increase sale. Their themes were complex, thoughtful, and induced a range of emotions from curiosity to dread to fear. Sure, I have tried to pay homage to this in my works and the works I'm overseeing, and I hope that my stuff has honored the great pulp tradition (at least in gaming form).

6. What does pulp fantasy offer that contemporary fantasy often neglects or downplays?

Contemporary fantasy has largely been stuck in Tolkien's back yard for many years. It's not a bad backyard to be trapped in, because the good professor was one of the greatest practitioners of literature to ever do it, and there have been some wonderful homages to his works. Pulp fantasy is different. It often features a single viewpoint protagonist, it's usually not about saving the world, and it has a more immediate, realistic feel to it, even if the things experienced are beyond the mundane. They often feature an unexpected twist at the end that results in the death of the protagonist or worse, so you are almost always at the edge of your seat when reading these fantastic tales.

7. You've continued to refine and expand Hyperborea across its editions. Has your approach to incorporating Lovecraftian elements evolved over time?

I think conceptualizing a world setting in which Lovecraftian elements are real and present is something that I am always trying to see improved or evolved, as you put it. For example, a ranger in Hyperborea is not a specialist versus humanoids and giants; rather, he is a specialist against otherworldly creatures whose objectives do not accord with the welfare of mankind. So, rangers in Hyperborea hunt Mi-Go, the Great Race, Night Gaunts, and so forth. The content we produce touches on this, in a world that has seen mankind nearly wiped out by a star-borne contagion and now clings to a meager existence in which these many horrors abound.

8. Do you think there's such a thing as too much Mythos in an RPG? Can it become over-familiar or even cliché?

I think if it is done well, with purpose and a vision that is worked hard for, it can never be too much. Imagine, if you will, how many people in the last two millennia have studied the classics, reading and rereading The Odyssey and The Iliad. So, I don't think the Mythos will ever get old, but as readers become more savvy, they will discern between quality pastiche and silly pastiche.

9. As a game designer and worldbuilder, what lessons have you learned from Lovecraft’s approach to mythmaking and the unknown?

I learned that we, as designers and world builders, should not feel bound to the religions and myths of the ancients when conceptualizing and exploring antemundane concepts. Anyone can create a world or a setting that draws inspiration from known works but also has the audaciousness to explore and develop strange new worlds and realities. You just have to have the stubbornness to do it, dismissing naysayers and detractors. Do what thou wilt, my friends.

Thank you for having me, James. Cheers!

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: James Edward Raggi IV (Part I)

I think it's fair to say that James Edward Raggi IV needs no introduction. He's been publishing old school fantasy roleplaying game materials since 2008, many of which are not only foundational to the OSR but also take inspiration from the works and ideas of H.P. Lovecraft. I asked James a few question relating to LotFP, HPL, and other matters and he very kindly provided with some lengthy answers that will appear over the course of the next two days.

1. Let’s start with the obvious: Lamentations of the Flame Princess has always been described as a “weird fantasy roleplaying game.” What does “weird” mean to you and what role does Lovecraft play in shaping that definition?

Formally it's taken straight from Lovecraft's definition of “weird” from his Supernatural Horror in Literature essay:

“The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

Basically what Lovecraft called “cosmicism.”

I think the best example of this sort of “weird” in fiction wasn't even made by Lovecraft, but by Algernon Blackwood in The Willows. I put some quotes of this in the old Grindhouse box for LotFP that I thought served as the best short examples:

“We had strayed into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin.” 

“You think it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.”

“There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us.”

That's my ideal of what the “weird” should be, but in practical terms it isn't always so. It's sometimes just a slush word to signify some sort of genre crossing, such as mixing fantasy with horror or sci-fi.

The Dream-Quest of the Old School Renaissance

Earlier this week, in the first entry of the (temporarily?) revived Pulp Fantasy Library series, I wrote about H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key.” Though that short story isn't at all what one might regard as a horror tale, there's nevertheless a moment that haunts me. The protagonist, Randolph Carter, now middle-aged, has discovered that he can no longer dream. He can no longer reach the realms that once filled his youthful sleep with wonder. The real world, with its routines, explanations, and disappointments, has closed in around him. What’s terrifying here isn’t what lies beyond the stars, but what no longer lies within: imagination itself.

For Lovecraft, this was personal. As I explained in my earlier post, “The Silver Key” is an introspective tale of memory, longing, and the slow death of the inner life. The titular key is not just a magical object, but a symbol of return to dreams, to possibility, to the boundless interiority of childhood. Carter finds it in the attic of his boyhood home, tucked away like some forgotten relic. Using it, he travels not only in space but in time, becoming his ten-year-old self again and vanishing into the Dreamlands. "The Silver Key" is, therefore, a story of reclaiming something lost and, Lovecraft suggests, essential. That’s what makes it resonate with me now in a way it didn’t when I first read it as a younger man. Reading it now, as old age creeps up on me with soft and silent feet, I see that the tale speaks to a hunger that fantasy can sometimes feed – a hunger not simply for escape, but for restoration.

Lovecraft wasn’t the only writer of his era to feel this way. Robert E. Howard, his friend and correspondent, also saw the modern world as a spiritual prison. In a letter to Lovecraft, he lamented “this machine age” and its failure to nourish the soul. He believed that many young people yearned for freedom because the world offered so little of it. That yearning animated nearly all of his fiction. Conan the Cimmerian is, if nothing else, free: untamed, unruled, and untouched by the slow death of civilization.

This yearning for freedom crops up in all kinds of unexpected places. You see it in the eyes of motorcyclists when they talk about the road. You taste it in absurdly spicy food meant not to please the palate but to make one feel something. You glimpse it in the half-forgotten dream of space travel or in the stubborn refusal of children to abandon wonder for pragmatism. You also feel it keenly and powerfully in tabletop roleplaying games.

For many of us, RPGs have been a kind of silver key. They’ve opened doors not just to fictional worlds, but to parts of ourselves we feared we’d lost. They’ve let us imagine lives not defined by careers, schedules, or the slow grind of adult compromise. The best roleplaying games recapture something of childhood’s wild creativity, when anything was possible and the laws of reality were made to be bent or broken – when the world could be made anew with a pencil, some dice, and shared imagination.

This connection between fantasy, freedom, and dreams isn’t just thematic but structural. The earliest roleplaying games were dreamlike in their very design. Their dungeons weren’t architectural blueprints; they were symbolic landscapes, more like the underworlds of myth than the ruins of history. Secret doors, teleporting rooms, talking statues, and pools of acid weren’t practical features. They were emblems of mystery, transformation, and risk. They didn’t simulate the world; they enchanted it.

I don’t think this weirdness was an accident. It was a kind of cartography, mapping inner spaces and personal mythologies. Playing D&D in my youth didn’t just feel like being part of a game. It felt like connecting to a hidden tradition, something esoteric and half-occult. It wasn't a gnosis passed from master to pupil but rather photocopies shared in schoolyards and cluttered hobby shops. It was chaotic, yes, but in that chaos lay the promise: you can go anywhere and do anything.

Even if we didn’t fully understand it at the time, I think that’s what many of us in the early days of the Old School Renaissance were trying to reclaim. We wanted not merely older rules, but older visions. We remembered when RPGs weren’t yet respectable. We remembered when they still felt like artifacts from another world, scrawled by strange hands. We remembered when they allowed us to believe, even if for just a few hours, that we could step outside the cage of the everyday, before the world dictated to us what was real and what was merely fantasy.

I do not believe that fantasy, properly understood, is an escape from reality. No, it is an escape to something deeper. It is a return, a recovery, a dream re-entered with eyes open and soul intact. In that sense, every gaming table is an attic and every set of dice a silver key. Whether we’re mapping dungeons, slaying dragons, or simply pretending to be someone else for a while, we are all, in our own way, Randolph Carter, standing once again before the cave in the woods, ready to step through.

Hugh Rankin and "The Silver Key"

Though the covers of Weird Tales are usually more well remembered by history (for obvious reasons), it should be remembered that most of the stories published within the Unique Magazine had at least one accompanying illustration. So it is with H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key," which featured this piece of artwork by Hugh Rankin.

Rankin provided illustrations for dozens of stories during the 1920s and '30s, including many by Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Perhaps his most significant one may be one from "Pickman's Model," depicting a ghoul.

I can't say with absolute certainty that this is the first ever depiction of one of Lovecraft's ghouls in a publication, but I suspect that it is. That alone makes Rankin worthy of remembrance. 

(I feel compelled to add Lovecraft's own drawing of a ghoul, which he drew in 1934, years after the publication of "Pickman's Model." I find it strangely charming.)

REPOST: Conan of Cross Plains

Janus must be very fond of writers, for so many were born this month: J.R.R. Tolkien, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Allan Poe, Abraham Merritt and, today, Robert Ervin Howard. Of them all, Howard is possibly unique in having created a character – Conan – who is a genuine pop cultural icon, his name recognized even by people with no prior connection to pulp fantasy. The irony is that that recognition often acts as an impediment to appreciating Howard's genius in having created him. Indeed, the popular conception of Conan bears only a passing resemblance to the character who first strode onto the pages of Weird Tales in December 1932.

It may sound fantastic to link the term "realism" with Conan; but as a matter of fact - his supernatural adventures aside - he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that's why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.

--Robert E. Howard to Clark Ashton Smith (July 23, 1935)

It's a pity that this character, this amalgamation of so many real people Howard met in Depression era Texas, isn't the one with which so many are familiar today. He is, for my money, vastly more interesting than the dim, loincloth-wearing, stuffed mattress to be found in so many popular portrayals of the Cimmerian.

Of course, Howard himself has fared little better in the popular imagination than has his most famous creation. To the extent that anyone even knows any facts about the author's life, they're likely based on distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies, such as those L. Sprague de Camp peddled in Dark Valley Destiny. Fortunately, the last three decades have seen the rise of a critical re-evaluation of both REH and his literary output, finally allowing both to be judged on their own merits rather than through the lenses of men with axes to grind.

This is as it should be. Robert E. Howard was a man like any other. He had his vices as well as his virtues; there is no need more need to reduce discussions of him to mere hagiography than there is to ill-informed criticisms. But men, particularly artists, need to be understood in their proper context, historical as well as cultural. Until comparatively recently, Howard hasn't been given that chance. Like Conan, he's been reduced to a caricature, a laughable shadow of his full depth and complexity that illuminates little about either his life or his legacy.

As the quote above makes clear, Conan may have been a man of the Hyborian Age but he was born in Depression era Texas and, I think, is most fully understood within that context. This is equally true of Howard himself, as Mark Finn noted in Blood and Thunder, a much-needed biographical corrective to De Camp:

One cannot write about Robert E. Howard without writing about Texas. This is inevitable, and particularly so when discussing any aspect of Howard's biography. To ignore the presence of the Lone Star State in Robert E. Howard's life and writing invites, at the very least, a few wrongheaded conclusions, and at worst, abject character assassination. This doesn't keep people from plunging right in and getting it wrong every time.

It's often claimed that Howard led a tragic life but I'm not so sure that's true. If anything, he's had a far more tragic afterlife, for, despite of all the Herculean efforts made to elucidate his life and art, he is still so often remembered as "that writer who killed himself because he was upset about his mother's death." Couple that with the disservice done to his creations and it's a recipe for the frustration of anyone who reveres his memory, warts and all.

Yet, there is reason to hope the tide may eventually turn. Del Rey has done terrific work in bringing Howard's writings – and not just his tales of Conan – back into print. Better still, these are all Howard's writings, not the hackwork pastichery of others. In fact, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find those faux Conan stories on bookstore shelves. It's my hope that, at the very least, this will ensure that future readers will have a better chance to encounter the genuine articles than I did when I first sought out stories of the Cimmerian as a young man. Likewise, the facts of Howard's own life are also becoming more well known, at least among scholars and dedicated enthusiasts of fantasy. It may be some time before past falsehoods are cast aside for good but it's at least possible to imagine that now, whereas it was not even a few years ago.

Like the 119th birthday of Robert E. Howard, that's something worth celebrating.

Against the Black Priory

Back at the start of April, I wrote about my inability to replay the old AD&D computer game, Pool of Radiance. The difficulty lay primarily in its user interface, which was clunky and difficult to use on a contemporary computer. Likewise, the graphics, which looked fine on the screen in the late 1980s, did not translate well on a better monitor with a higher resolution. Consequently, I found it nigh impossible to play, let alone enjoy, Pool of Radiance again (or likely any of the other AD&D computer RPGs from that era). That's a shame, because I'm a fan of computer roleplaying games and am always on the lookout for enjoyable ones.

Fortunately, I stumbled across Skald: Against the Black Priory, a brand new (released May 2024) computer RPG inspired by the 8-bit CRPGs of old, while introducing aspects of modern design to make it more playable on contemporary machines. Though Skald no doubt took a lot of inspiration from games like Bard's Tale – likely explaining its title – one of the things that sets it apart in my opinion is the combination of sword-and-sorcery and cosmic horror of its narrative. Think Robert E. Howard's "Worms of the Earth" or Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea stories and you have a good idea of the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I've enjoyed my time playing the game. It's party-based (with up to six characters) and uses a top-down perspective, in keeping with its inspirations. There are lots of little details hidden throughout the game, both to assist you in your quests and to paint a picture of the overall setting. The game is quite unforgiving at times (again, in keeping with its inspirations). Not only are enemies tough, especially at low levels, but there are some choices you can make that result in automatic death. Though its interface is better suited to modern sensibilities, the game itself is quite old school in its deadliness (though there is an option for "narrative play," if you aren't interested in a challenge).

All in all, I have almost entirely positive feelings about Skald: Against the Black Priory. My biggest complaints are minor (the combat system can be grindy) and are outweighed by the game's cleverness and atmosphere. Playing through it has definitely whetted my appetite for more games like this. Now, I just need to find them ...