My Own Cover Band

First, a couple of brief updates:

I’m still hard at work on the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns and, while it’s going well, it’s not moving quite as quickly as I had originally hoped. I’m still on schedule to complete most of the draft before I head off to Rome, but a few sections of it, including the High Struggle rules, probably won’t be among them. More information on the development of Thousand Suns (and my other writing projects) can be found over at Grognardia Games Direct, while the actual drafts of the second edition are available to my patrons.

Partly because of this, I won’t be returning to regular posting on this blog until after I return from Rome. I’ve got a great deal on my plate over the next three weeks and simply won’t have the time to devote to anything more than intermittent blogging until the second week of June at the earliest.

I say “partly,” because that’s not the whole story behind my break from regular blogging. Certainly, it’s a significant part of the reason – I really am focused on Thousand Suns right now – but it’s not the only one. Another part is that I feel as if I’m running out of things to say.

I realize that sounds rather ominous, even dire, and I don’t mean it to be. Feeling as if I’m running out of things to say is not the same thing as actually running out of things to say. Given my nature, I suspect only death will prevent me from having opinions about roleplaying games and science fiction and fantasy literature. At the same time, I do think it’s true that the way I’ve been writing Grognardia since at least my return in 2020 is unsustainable and that I need to remedy that.

To explain what I mean, what follows is going to be a bit self-reflective and “philosophical,” for lack of a better word, and I apologize for that. I don’t want to bore anyone with the ins and outs of my thought processes, but I can think of no better way to provide context for what I said above. Besides, externalizing my thoughts through writing has always been one of the ways I sort them out and find my way, however haltingly, toward solutions.

Broadly speaking, I have two recurring “problems” when writing this blog and they’re related. The first is one I’ve mentioned before in other contexts. After just shy of 5000 posts since 2008 – 4982 as of now – the odds are good that I’ve already written about almost every remotely old school RPG topic I can easily imagine. That’s obviously not literally true, as evidenced by the fact that I still occasionally strike gold even in well-mined veins of gaming history and discussion, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I regularly struggle to find a genuinely new topic about which to write.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve begun a post on some subject and, as I search through the archives for a relevant link, realized that I’d already written about the same topic, sometimes even using the same title. That would be frustrating for anyone, I suspect. It’s especially frustrating for me because I used to have no trouble finding things to write about each day. One need only look at the first few years of the blog to see that, during the 2008–2011 period, I was often making two posts every single day. That’s a level of output I haven’t achieved in years and likely never will again.

Thinking back on the beginning of this blog brings me to the second problem with which I’ve been grappling: the increasingly recursive feel of RPG discussions. Grognardia has always included lots of commentary about both gaming history and game design. That was, I think, a big part of its original appeal during the early days of the OSR. After nearly a decade of Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons, a lot of us longed for the freedom and exuberance we remembered from the hobby’s earlier years. The OSR gave voice to a genuine desire to recover the things about roleplaying games that had once so appealed to us and I think it was largely successful in that endeavor.

There was a vital energy and effortless creativity in the early days of Grognardia. The blog was buoyed by the rising tide of enthusiasm for older RPGs and, in turn, offered ideas and commentary that contributed to that tide. It was a virtuous cycle and I’m still very proud to have been part of it. Likewise, whenever I see someone reference “Gygaxian naturalism” or “the oracular power of dice,” it pleases me greatly, because I’m reminded that I did, in however modest a way, contribute something worthwhile to the understanding and appreciation of old school roleplaying.

Nowadays, though, I often feel as if I’m making ever finer distinctions with diminishing returns for everyone involved. Whereas the early OSR was filled with Big Ideas and bold (and occasionally ill-considered) opinions, in recent years I’ve increasingly felt as if I’m repeating things I said better a more than a decade ago. To put it another way, I sometimes worry that I’m becoming my own cover band. A good performer knows when it’s time to leave the stage and I don’t want to become a parody of myself.

At the same time, I still feel a great deal of energy and creativity when it comes to my own projects, like Thousand Suns and Secrets of sha-Arthan. I doubt either of them will ever have the same broad appeal as my best Grognardia posts once did, which is why I’ve largely segregated discussion of them to my Substack. They don’t quite fit on Grognardia in the same way and there’s probably no point in pretending otherwise.

For obvious reasons, I’m deeply attached to Grognardia. I’m not yet at the point where I wish to abandon it for good. At the same time, I am at a point where I question its purpose. This isn’t 2010 and the OSR, to the extent that it can still be said to exist in any coherent sense, is very different from what it was during the blog’s heyday. Grognardia is different too and that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, not every endeavor can or should remain frozen at the moment of its greatest cultural relevance. Blogs, like people, age and change. These facts by no means invalidate what's come before. If anything, it may simply mean that the role Grognardia once played is no longer the role it needs to play now.

Of course, I don’t yet know exactly what that means in practice. The one thing I do know is that the conditions that originally gave rise to this blog in 2008 cannot be recreated and that trying to do so is a recipe for frustration. If, upon my return, I'm to keep posting here as I have for so long, some things will have to change. To be clear, I don’t view this as a cause for despair. If I feel any frustration, it’s mostly the frustration of recognizing that a thing which once came effortlessly to me now requires more deliberation and care. That’s hardly unique to blogging or even to writing generally, though it's new experience for me.

In any event, I wanted to explain why posting here may continue to be somewhat irregular for the foreseeable future. Grognardia still matters to me. I’m simply trying to determine what shape it ought to take in the months and, I hope, years ahead – and whether I can find a way forward that feels both honest and worthwhile.

In the meantime, thank you all for continuing to read. Your continued support, appreciation, and encouragement have meant the world to me. More soon, I hope!

"Your Own Cover Band"

I'm still hard at work finishing up the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns, so I'm not yet ready to return to regular blogging here. However, I recently read something that helped me organize some thoughts I'd been having for a while and I thought they might be worth sharing, especially in light of my advocacy for long RPG campaigns. 

As you know, I'm a big fan of science fiction. Truth be told, I much prefer sci-fi to fantasy, despite the fact that I've probably played more fantasy roleplaying games than science fiction ones over the course of the last 45 years of gaming. That said, I'm very particular about my science fiction. I don't like everything with a spaceship or robot on its cover and, as I get older, I find my tastes are getting ever more picky. Consequently, I tend to be skeptical when someone recommends that I pick up a new SF novel, because I've been burned one too many times in the past. I'd much rather reread an old classic than take a chance on new stuff and be disappointed.

Still, a friend of mine recently recommended I take a look at "The Captive's War" series by James S.A. Corey, who was also responsible for "The Expanse" (which I've never read). The new series is planned as a trilogy and the second volume just came out, only two years after the first one. Both of these facts piqued my interest, because I have no patience for interminable series or series whose volumes aren't released at regular intervals. I don't want to wait until I have one foot in the grave before I see the end of a story. 

Still, my natural apprehension made me look into these books a bit more before committing to reading them. I figured I owed it to myself to know what I might be getting into if I decided to take the plunge. In the process of doing so, I came across a recent interview with the "author" – really two authors,. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, with a shared pen name, but I'm sure most of you already know that – that includes some genuinely interesting and insightful comments about the writing process and ultimate direction of the series. It's these comments that sparked this post and about which I want to write for a bit before returning to the salt mines once again.

Consider, for example, the following:

“We live in a world where every large universe is supposed to be endlessly flogged,” Franck says. “Star Wars is never going to stop. It's told the same story a thousand times at this point. The evil Empire has been defeated over and over and over again. It always comes back. Plucky Rebels have to defeat the new iteration of it over and over and over again. It just endlessly repeats. And Star Trek is the same way. If you have a big universe, it is expected you will just keep dipping in that well over and over until you die, and then somebody else will take over and do it for you. Daniel and I don't enjoy that. We like endings. We like getting to an end: ‘Here's the end, and it's over.’”

I could probably devote several posts to the above alone, but instead I want to focus on what was said immediately after this: 

Franck credits Abraham for coming up with a saying that sums up their feelings about longrunning series: “At some point, if you keep going, you become your own cover band.”

“We never want to do that,” Franck says. “We never want to become our own cover band, where you're just endlessly repeating what you said, and writing a slightly different version of the same story you've written a thousand times before. That would bore the shit out of me.”

These comments really hit home, having just concluded my decade-long House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign last October. Since then, I've been regularly asked what I might do the next time I decide to referee a Tékumel campaign and my answer has always been, "Nothing: I don't plan to run a Tékumel campaign ever again." That's not for lack of love for the setting – quite the contrary, in fact. It's precisely because I do love Tékumel and all that my players and I did with it through the House of Worms campaign that I'll never touch it again. 

This is not a new point of view for me; I've articulated it before. I'm very much of the opinion that it's quite possible – probable even – that you can reach a point where there's nothing left to explore through a particular setting or game. I feel that way about Tékumel for certain and I probably feel that way about a number of other RPG settings I've played extensively over the years. Again, it's not for lack of affection for these settings. My disinterest in returning to, say, the Forgotten Realms says nothing about whether I like the setting, only that I feel I've sucked all the marrow from its bones and now am looking for new sources of nourishment.

When I say this, many people look at my like I've got two heads. Some have even tried to (gently) suggest that maybe I'm lacking in imagination if I think I couldn't run more adventures in this or that setting that they know and love. The truth is I could run more adventures or even whole campaigns in Tékumel or the Realms (or Star Trek or ...) but why would I? There are so many more worlds to explore through roleplaying. Why keep revisiting the same ones over and over again? 

That's what the quoted sections of the interview got me thinking about and I think it's a topic worthy of further discussion. There's a lot of talk these days about living in a "stuck culture" and I definitely think there's something to this. I may be old but that doesn't mean I want to see everything from my youth – never mind the youths of my parents – forever recycled. It's OK to move on. It's OK to seek out new things and new ideas. That I, writing on this blog of all places, am saying this probably means something. Just what I don't can't quite say. Perhaps that'll be another blog post when I find the time to write it.

Keep Them Hungry: Fading Suns Edition

One of these days, I'll need to do a proper campaign update for my Dark Between the Stars Fading Suns campaign, which I've been refereeing since October of last year. We're only twenty sessions in, but things are evolving quite nicely. The players have all settled into their characters and the characters are now well established within both the setting and the group. They've even added a new companion, an amnesiac Vorox named Guron, who'd previously been employed as a chef by Count Ennis, the governor of Pandemonium, the planet on which they're currently staying. We're still in the early days, especially compared to House of Worms, but things are going well and I have every reason to expect this campaign has taken root and will still be ongoing for some time to come.

However, there were a couple of minor incidents in yesterday's session that reminded me of a post I wrote almost a year ago. In that post, I noted that it's important to keep the characters "hungry," which is to say, they should always want more than what they're capable of acquiring. It doesn't matter what it is that they want – money, status, knowledge, etc. – only that their reach should exceed their grasp. I say this, because experience has shown me that it's a good driver of both individual adventures and the larger campaign. Want keeps the characters (and players) focused and motivated, which is important, particularly in the early weeks and months of a campaign, before other more "elevated" goals take center stage.

Which brings me to yesterday's session. The characters, led by Sir Yamashiro Li Halan, had returned to The Hub, Pandemonium's capital, after a sojourn in the Badlands. They'd come back to the city for several purposes, most importantly the acquisition of new equipment to replace gear used during their expedition. Initially, they thought this would be a simple matter, since Yamashiro is wealthy. However, as they soon discovered, he's only rich according to the prevailing standards of the Known Worlds. His annual income is 15,000 firebirds – not bad for a wandering wastrel and very good compared to, say, a skilled laborer whose monthly income is probably 20fb a month, but nowhere near as much as everyone had previously assumed.

This meant that the characters' upcoming spending spree was more constrained than anticipated. After several combats against various foes in the Badlands, it was decided both Father Kosta and Holai liTarken needed standard shields (at a cost of 500fb each). Additionally, they needed more ammunition. These small purchases alone added up to nearly 1500fb. That's nearly half of what Yamashiro had on hand. On top of that, the characters had "requisitioned" an air yacht registered to House Gilgar and needed to replace its transponder with one that recognized their current possession of it. This was beyond Iskander Ecevit's skills to on his own. Instead, he turned to his contacts in the Supreme Order of Engineers, who were suspicious of Yamashiro's claims to own the yacht (rightly so) and thus demanded 2000fb to replace the transponder in a timely manner.

Added to the other expenses already accrued, this exceeded Yamashiro's available funds. Never fear, though, as, at the same time the characters acquired the air yacht, they also acquired a case of blaster rifles that could easily be sold to the right people in the Hub – or so they thought. The task of fencing these weapons feel to Orphos the Scraver. It was a simple enough job that should have taken no effort at all. Unfortunately, a roll of 20 on any action is a critical failure and that's exactly what Orphos' player rolled. That brought the attention of the local constabulary, who after failing to extract a bribe from the Scraver to overlook his criminal activities, threw him in jail for the night, during which time they tried (without success) to find out who he was working for and how he'd obtained so many blaster rifles. Though he managed to throw them off the scent, he'd failed to find a buyer, leaving the characters without sufficient funds for all their expenses (and he was incarcerated).

The characters now have some choices to make and those choices will have consequences. Most likely they'll forgo a new transponder, the reasoning being that, so long as they continue to operate in the Badlands, they need not worry about anyone questioning whether they actually own the vehicle they're piloting. That comes with risk, of course, but probably smaller ones than having insufficient ammo or defenses. Choices like this may seem small but they're nonetheless important and I relish them, especially in the early days of a campaign. 

Science Fiction is Fantasy

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite What's New with Phil & Dixie strips appeared in issue #65 of Dragon (September 1982). In it, Phil Foglio muses on the surprising similarities between fantasy and science fiction. It's a great comic and one I can still, more than forty years later, quote almost verbatim. While Foglio probably wasn't being entirely serious, one of the reasons the strip's humor lands is that there is more than a little truth to his flippant comparisons of these two supposedly distinct genres. 

As a lifelong science fiction fan – take a drink! – I've observed how often many of my fellow fans have advanced the notion that science fiction is somehow more “serious” or at least more plausible than fantasy. There seems to be this unspoken assumption that science fiction possesses some kind of intellectual legitimacy that fantasy lacks, perhaps based on the idea that spaceships and robots are, in some meaningful way, closer to reality than dragons and sorcery. I understand the logic behind this perspective, but I simply don't find it convincing.

I obviously say this without any dislike of, let alone malice for, science fiction – quite the contrary. I'm a big fan of the genre, probably a bigger fan, in fact, than I am of fantasy. That's why I increasingly feel that the distinction between the two genres as they're commonly understood rests on a foundation that is far shakier than we'd like to admit. Science fiction, despite its name, is not really about science. It's simply another mode of storytelling and one that's rarely more plausible than fantasy. The difference between the two genres lies not in what is possible, but in what we are willing to believe.

To understand better what I mean here, it helps to take a look at the history of imaginative literature over the centuries. Human beings have always told stories about things that do not exist, whether they're spirits, enchanted forests, utopian societies, lost worlds, or journeys beyond the horizon of the known. These stories served many purposes, often religious, philosophical, and moral, but they all had one thing in common: they evoked the marvelous. 

In the past, the marvelous was typically framed in explicitly supernatural terms, such as miracles or magic. These were the explanatory frameworks available to premodern people. A flying chariot was thus the purview of the sun god and immortality the product of drinking from a magic spring. To people living in earlier eras, that was explanation enough. However, as the intellectual climate started to change in the 16th and 17th centuries, the language of the marvelous changed with it. The old supernatural explanations lost their cultural authority, at least among the educated. In their place arose the new explanatory tools of reason, science, and technology.

Science fiction is, in the realm of imaginative literature, the heir to this cultural transformation. It takes the same fundamental human desire to imagine worlds beyond our own and to transcend our mortal limitations and clothes it in the language of Science. Instead of magic carpets, we have grav belts; instead of philosopher’s stones, we have nanotechnology; and so on. Yet, in most cases, these speculative future technologies are not meaningfully more plausible than their fantastical counterparts.

Faster-than-light travel, for example, is a staple of science fiction because it allows characters to visit other star systems on a human timescale. However, unless our understanding of physics is very wrong, FTL is almost certainly impossible. The same is true, in different ways, of many other common elements of sci-fi, such as artificial gravity, sentient robots, or force fields, never mind the routine colonization of distant planets.

I feel that we readily accept all these sci-fi concepts not because they are in any sense likely, but because they are framed in the language of science. That language carries cultural authority and that authority lends them the illusion of plausibility, even when the underlying ideas are, in fact, no more plausible than a wizard’s spell. The key difference between science fiction and fantasy, then, is not that one is "realistic" and the other is not. It is that they draw upon different sets of cultural assumptions.

In a society where belief in magic or the supernatural is widespread, stories of sorcery don't feel implausible. In a society shaped by centuries of scientific advances, stories framed in technological terms feel more credible, even when they stretch (or outright ignore) the limits of current knowledge. Most people today no longer believe in fairies, but we do believe, often without much reflection, that Science will one day solve nearly any problem. Consequently, we assume that, for example, interstellar travel or artificial intelligence are not merely imaginable, but inevitable.

This assumption is rarely examined, being simply an article of faith in the religion of Progress. Science fiction, at least it's popularly understood, taps into this faith. It reassures us that the future will be wondrous, because the universe will yield its secrets and our ingenuity will use those secrets to overcome all obstacles. Even when SF presents darker visions of the future, it still does so within the same overall framework that depicts technology as powerful, transformative, and, perhaps most important of all, central to human destiny.

Fantasy, by contrast, draws on different symbols, those derived from mythology and folklore. Its marvels are overtly impossible and, therefore, easier for contemporary audiences to dismiss as “mere” imagination. Nevertheless, the imaginative function of the two genres is remarkably similar. That's why I hope this post won't be read as a critique of science fiction, but rather as a celebration of the kinship between science fiction and fantasy.

Science fiction is not, in my opinion, diminished by being understood as a form of fantasy. On the contrary, it's elevated by placing it within a long and venerable tradition of imaginative storytelling that stretches back to mankind's earliest myths. It is one of the ways people today continue to grapple with the unknown, express our hopes and fears about the future, and explore questions that lie beyond the reach of empirical inquiry. Likewise, fantasy need not be defended as if it were secretly “realistic.” Its value lies precisely in its freedom from any such constraints.

Both genres, in their different ways, encourage us to imagine the world differently. They create spaces in which we can ask “what if?” without being bound too tightly to what actually is. If I can be a little mawkish, I'd day that fantasy, broadly defined, gives form to our dreams, our anxieties, and our aspirations. Whether the stories exploring these subjects is expressed through the language of magic or technology is, in the end, a secondary matter.

None of this is to say that science fiction cannot engage with real science or that it has not, at times, anticipated genuine technological developments. Anyone who's read science fiction, especially in its formative years, know that it has indeed done both and often done so brilliantly. However, I think it's worth remembering that, as a genre, it is no more bound by reality than fantasy. Its most enduringly popular images, like FTL starships and intelligent robots, are not predictions. They are myths for a technological age. To insist otherwise is to mistake the trappings of science fiction for its substance.

One Book or Two?

One Book or Two? by James Maliszewski

Pondering a Change to Thousand Suns

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Logjam (Part II)

Logjam (Part II) by James Maliszewski

An Update

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Tea Parties and Terror

Last week, I wrote briefly about events in my ongoing Dolmenwood campaign – which, strangely, still doesn't have a name – and the way those events brought humor to the fore. Today, I wanted to look at a slightly different aspect of the campaign: the ways in which I have changed the "official" setting and made it my own. To be clear, Dolmenwood's setting, the eponymous Dolmenwood itself, is very broadly drawn. Even though its amazing Campaign Book is over 450 pages long, most of the detail it provides is pretty sketchy, leaving lots of room for individual creativity. (To be even clearer: about 275 pages of the Campaign Book is devoted to one-page hex descriptions from which the referee can improvise. Dolmenwood is not Tékumel or Glorantha when it comes to source material.)

As I mentioned before, the characters are currently operating in and around Cobton-on-the-Shiver, a strange little village nestled in the Valley of Wise Beasts that's home to the Cobbins, small anthropomorphic animal-people given sentience by the nine-legged chaos godling known as the Nag-Lord – or Atanuwë to those who worship him, which the Cobbins do. The Nag-Lord is, for all intents in purposes, a Lovecraftian eldritch horror, equal parts Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathotep. The Nag-Lord has is responsible for the creation of both the Crookhorn goat-men and the Cobbins, both of whom revere it as the Lord of Creation.

Atanuwë created the Cobbins as a lark, a dark joke. After all, what's more amusing than a bunch of talking, clothes-wearing, tea-drinking animal-people out of Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Grahame who worship and adore a hideous abomination like itself? While there are a few Cobbins who seek to throw off the yoke of the Nag-Lord and his Crookhorns, the vast majority of them do not. They're content to go about their usual business – fishing, sailing little boats, smoking pipes, etc. – because it's the only thing they know and the way it's always been.

The characters were hired by a member of the aforementioned Cobbin resistance, known as the Grey League. The characters went in, believing that the League, was a potent underground movement who only need some weapons and outside assistance to succeed in their goals. What they discovered, however, was that the League consisted of less than ten Cobbins, though their leader assured them that more could probably be roused to join them if they demonstrated the Crookhorns could be beaten. This did not fill the characters with hopeful feelings and indeed worried them somewhat.

With good reason, too! One of the things I've expanded upon in my version of Dolmenwood is that, because the Cobbins were created by the Nag-Lord, they genuinely, sincerely revere it as the Lord of Creation. Atanuwë did, after all, create them and they owe their very existence to it. This is not in spite of their cruel and darkly humorous treatment at the hands of the Crookhorns but because of it. My reasoning was that the Cobbins know nothing of the world beyond the Valley of Wise Beasts. Their frame of reference is completely warped, twisted by their limited experiences. To them, the Nag-Lord is a god and, because of that, the way it behaves is the way gods behave. Most simply can't conceive of a benevolent deity, nor can they imagine rebelling against the Lord of Creation.

None of this is, strictly speaking, contrary to anything that's stated about Cobbins in Dolmenwood, but it's not something that's explicit. It's something I teased out and developed for my campaign and it's been fun watching the players (and their characters) come to the realization that most of the Cobbins are content with their pathetic lot. Getting them to question their priors, let alone, take up arms against the Crookhorns, is going to take a lot of work on their part. Fortunately, they're very clever and have begun hatching a scheme they believe might get them some way toward this goal ...

Logjam

Logjam by James Maliszewski

Or the frustrations of a writer

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

It is tempting to draw a sharp line between H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales and his cosmic horror fiction. I do not believe, however, that this division is as firm as it appears. The Dreamlands stories and those of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos are not separate creations so much as different angles on the same vision. In both, Lovecraft presents mankind as small. In both, the powers beyond humanity are indifferent, remote, and often hostile. In both, the pursuit of knowledge leads not to enlightenment but to disillusionment. The difference lies primarily in tone and imagery. The Dreamlands stories dress these ideas in velvet and moonlight rather than slime and starlight.

This becomes increasingly clear in Lovecraft’s later dream tales, where the Dreamlands grow darker and more overtly connected to his cosmic horror. The Plateau of Leng, for example, belongs to both realms. It appears first as a dreamlike landscape of cold and mystery, but later becomes a threshold to something far more alien. Likewise, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the messenger of the Outer Gods, enters the Dreamlands not as a jarring intrusion but as a natural inhabitant of that realm. All of this suggests that the Dreamlands are not an escape from the Mythos. They are instead another way of approaching it. Dreaming is not a refuge from cosmic indifference, merely a different form of it.

“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” is often treated as the key to understanding Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories and with good reason. It is his most expansive narrative set there, consisting of a long episodic journey in which Randolph Carter travels across the dream world in search of the “sunset city” he has seen in visions. Carter believes the gods have stolen this city from him and he seeks to confront them and reclaim it.

On the surface, the story is a fairly typical fantasy quest. Carter journeys from place to place, encounters strange beings, bargains with ghouls, is saved by cats, and eventually reaches the cold, forbidding heights of Kadath. The Dreamlands are presented here in perhaps their fullest form, populated by both familiar names and new terrors. Yet a careful reading reveals that, despite outward appearances, this is not a tale of heroic adventure at all. Carter is not seeking to restore order or defeat evil. He seeks only personal fulfillment. He believes that somewhere in the Dreamlands there is a Beauty that will satisfy his longing.

Nyarlathotep’s revelation at the end of the tale is one of Lovecraft’s most moving statements about the imagination. Carter’s sunset city is not something stolen by the gods. It is something he already possesses, namely, his own memory, transformed by dream into something seemingly unattainable. The gods have not taken his desire from him; his desire has taken him away from himself. This is no mere literary twist. Indeed, it could be read as the thesis statement of Lovecraft’s dream tales as a whole. The dreamer’s longing is not truly directed outward toward some distant paradise. It is directed inward, toward something irrecoverable, like childhood, innocence, or the first encounter with wonder.

This is why the dream tales cannot end in triumph. Even when the dreamer finds what he seeks, he cannot keep it. The Dreamlands can offer wonder, but they cannot resolve longing. They can only intensify it, often to the point of existential suffering.

One reason I find these stories so attractive is that they represent Lovecraft’s most sustained attempt to write against modernity. In his horror fiction, modernity is presented as a thin veneer over ancient terror. Science and progress do not protect man; they merely reveal how little control he has. In the Dreamlands, by contrast, modernity is not terrifying so much as impoverished. The dreamer flees the modern world because it cannot satisfy his imagination. Lovecraft’s narrators frequently describe contemporary life as gray, repetitive, and spiritually barren. The Dreamlands, by contrast, are filled with ancient streets, mysterious temples, forgotten gods, and landscapes untouched by industry. They are not simply exotic. They are pre-modern in the most Romantic sense, a world where the past is not history but present.

This is not an incidental feature but a central one. The Dreamlands tales are fueled by a profound dissatisfaction with the contemporary world and a longing for something older, richer, and more enchanted. The irony, of course, is that Lovecraft does not ultimately believe such enchantment can be recovered. The Dreamlands are not a return to the past. They are a fantastical counterfeit of it and, as such, ultimately unsatisfying. This is why so many of the most powerful moments in these stories are tinged with melancholy. Even at their most wondrous, they carry the sense that the dreamer is pursuing something that cannot last.

If Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories have a unifying subject, it is the imagination itself, not merely its power or necessity, but also its danger. These stories are not truly escapist. They do not reassure the reader that there is a better world waiting just beyond the wall of sleep. Instead, they explore the cost of wanting such a world. The suffering dreamers experience in these tales reveals the limits of the human condition. Dreams can show beauty but cannot grant permanence. They can open doors but cannot change the fundamental indifference of the universe. They can provide refuge, but only by separating the dreamer from everything else.

For that reason, I do not think Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories can be separated cleanly from his cosmic horror. They are another side of the same coin, one Lovecraft continued to flip throughout his life. Both bodies of work are concerned with the human desire for meaning, beauty, and transcendence in a universe that does not promise any of these things.

The Dreamlands tales do, however, allow Lovecraft to approach this concern through longing rather than terror. They are the literature of yearning rather than dread, even if their conclusions are not so different. The dreamer may travel far, meet gods, and glimpse wonders beyond imagining. In the end, though, he remains what he always was – a fragile consciousness, haunted by desire and unable to hold what he most wants.

Whether that is comforting or terrifying is likely a matter of temperament. It may well be both. I do not think Lovecraft ever fully resolved this tension, even in his own mind, which makes sense, since it may be intractable. I know I feel it ever more keenly as I get older, hence the continued fascination I have with these stories and the man who struggled for most of his life trying to give shape to longing, only to discover that it cannot be satisfied, only endured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comedy of Errors

I haven't posted any campaign updates in a while, though not for lack of playing. Indeed, I continue to referee three different campaigns, as I have for many years now. Since the end of my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign last year, Dolmenwood is now the longest-running game of the three (the others being Fading Suns and Metamorphosis Alpha). Consequently, it's actually the campaign about which I have the most to share, but, rather than focus on the big picture of the campaign, I wanted to share some specific details from this week's session, which everyone involved found humorous and fun.

I've written before about what I've come to call the "high adventure and low comedy" aspects of roleplaying games. I actually think it's a topic worth exploring in greater depth and perhaps I'll do that at some point. For my present purposes, know only that I'm not talking about intentionally comedic roleplaying, which is a different matter entirely (and probably also worthy of discussion). No, what I mean here is the way that, no matter how serious one intends to be while playing, there's simply no way to ensure a session will cooperate.

In our most recent session, the characters were planning a jailbreak from a village called Cobton-on-the-Shiver. The village is home to little anthropomorphic animal-people raised to sentience by the whimsical and malign Nag-Lord. The Nag-Lord's favored minions, the crookhorns – bigger anthropomorphic goat-men – rule over and abuse the cobbins, which doesn't sit well with some of them, who have formed a resistance movement to oust them from their town. That's where the player characters came in: they were hired to rescue a rat cobbin named Hackle Kingsley from the jail (or gaol, since Dolmenwood is unrepentantly British in its sensibilities). Hackle's important to the resistance and needed to be freed before he was hanged in the town square.

The characters decided to use trickery, not outright violence. Marid, a grimalkin enchanter, suggested that he stride into town, pretending to be the executioner hired by the crookhorn's leader, Baron Fragglehorn, to deal with Hackle. After all, who better than a fairy cat to deal with a rat? Coming with Marid was Alvie Sapping, a teenaged human thief, who posed as his apprentice. Much fun was had as Marid attempted to convince the crookhorns at the jail about his credentials, eventually succeeding. 

The crookhorn guard, Sergeant Scrag, led the pair to the cells, where Hackle was being held. Alvie was eventually allowed into the cell with him so that he could "measure" the cobbin for his hanging tomorrow. In actuality, he was surreptitiously unlocking the leg iron that held Hackle. Meanwhile, Marid talked to Scrag about his work, which interested the crookhorn. Scrag asked if he needed another apprentice, because he thought being an executioner would be "a lot more fun" than being a guard. 

Marid saw this as a perfect opportunity to further his own ends. He told Scrag that, yes, as a matter of fact, he was in need of another apprentice. If Scrag were interested, he should enter the cell with Alvie and he would instruct him on the niceties of the job. The crookhorn was enthusiastic and did so. The young thief got Scrag to look closely at Hackle and, while he did so, he tried to stab him in the back – and failed. Needless to say, this didn't sit well with the crookhorn, who rose to attack him. 

As an enchanter, Marid has access to magic powers called glamours. One of these, forgetting, causes a mortal being to forget what they had witnessed in the previous round. Thanks to Scrag's failed saving throw, he forgot the failed backstab. Whew! Alvie then positioned Scrag a second time with his back to him – and failed his backstab a second time. Scrag turned quickly and prepared to attack him, but Marid intervened once more, explaining that Alvie was just a stupid human who didn't understand that the crookhorn wasn't stealing his job. He made use of another glamour, beguilement, to ensure Scrag believed what he had just said. Thanks to a failed saving throw, he did.

Even so, the crookhorn guard still felt Alvie deserved some retribution. Marid agreed and asked them both to leave the jail cell. The grimalkin then offered Scrag his personal scepter to beat Alvie with. When he turned to leave the cell – yes, you guessed it – Alvie tried to backstab a third time and, once again, failed. Scrag was even angrier now and reached for his weapon to attack, but Marid stopped him, asking, "Don't you want to use my scepter?" When Scrag turned to take it, Alvie made a fourth backstab attack, which also failed.

From there, things devolved into a confused melee, with Alvie nearly dying and Marid having no choice but to assume his wilder form – think the Tasmanian Devil mixed with the Cheshire Cat – to take down Scrag. However, the fight attracted the attention of yet more crookhorns, which, in turn, alerted the other characters that the jailbreak had not gone as well as anticipated. Sir Clement, astride his warhorse, lance at the ready, rushed into to save them, with Fallon and Waldra following behind. 

Alvie's player calculated that the likelihood of his failing four backstab attacks in a row was 0.16%, which is remarkable but not without precedent. After all, that's the nature of dice. It's also why I actually like and appreciate the mechanical "swinginess" of Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants, like Dolmenwood. This week's session, though not doubt frustrating for Alvie's player, was nevertheless a blast. With each improbable failure and Marid's quick-witted responses to distract from them, the session became more and more unintentionally humorous. The end result was a session I expect we'll all remember for some time.

Neither Primitive Nor Professional

I have some muddled thoughts about publishing, old school esthetics, and related matters over Grognardia Games Direct. 

Neither Primitive Nor Professional by James Maliszewski

Rambling Thoughts about the Esthetics of the Old School

Read on Substack

Heart and Soul

A few weeks ago, one of my readers sent me a link to an old article from 2017 about the difficulties of playing Dungeons & Dragons behind bars. I can't be certain, but I probably saw this article when it was first published and I'd be surprised if many of you hadn't also seen it. It's an interesting piece of journalism on a number of levels, including its insights into how – and how much – RPGs are played in prisons. I knew this, of course. Back in the '90s, the owners of my local game store regularly sent packages of roleplaying games to a correctional facility that permitted their inmates to play them. If you think about it, this only makes sense. Convicts have a lot of time on their hands and RPGs are a great way to pass that time. In some respects, it's not too different from the amount of gaming that happens on military bases, where off-duty personnel have long stretches of downtime and limited entertainment options. 

The linked article focuses almost exclusively on the difficulties of obtaining and using dice within prisons, for the obvious reason that dice are often used for gambling and similar illicit activities. That's a genuinely fascinating topic in itself and almost worthy of a post on its own (not least because one of the solutions was the use of chits, like those in my beloved Holmes set). However, as I read the article, what struck me was that there was no clear mention of what the prisoners were using for rules. Do they have rulebooks? I assume they must, right? How else could they play D&D?

A common topic of discussion among gamers is their "desert island" RPG book, the one rulebook they'd want to have with them if they were stranded in a remote locale for an extended period of time. (Mine is The Traveller Book, by the way.)  This makes me think about a different but related topic: how necessary rulebooks really are and how I often I actually refer to them while playing. What if, instead of asking what single rulebook you'd want to have with you on a desert island, we instead ask, "What roleplaying game could you play without recourse to any rulebook?" That's a different question, but no less interesting a one. 

For myself and I suspect most people reading this, the answer is probably D&D. I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons in one form or another for more than 45 years. From the ages of 10 till 17, it was probably the activity, aside from going to school, in which I spent the most time. Consequently, the basic rules of D&D, its foundations and superstructure, if you will, are firmly embedded in my brain – so much so, in fact, that I bet I could reproduce many of its tables and charts from memory. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them that I'm not sure anyone would notice or mind. If they did, it's only because they remember the rules even better and I'd happily use their recollections to improve my own.

Again, I'll reiterate that there are many aspects of D&D, like the minute specifics of spells or monster stats, that I probably couldn't cite solely through mental recall. I don't pretend to have a photographic memory and, even if I did, all editions of D&D, even OD&D, have too many little bits and pieces for anyone to remember them all. However, I'm not sure it's necessary to do so. While playing, I think most of us kind of wing it anyway and, so long as our approximations of the rules don't deviate too much from everyone else's own doodle memories of the rules, it's generally good enough. My lifelong experience is that the specifics of the rules matter only when there's a dispute (or when playing with children, real or metaphorical).

The longer a game has been part of your life and the longer you've played it, the more it becomes something like a folk tradition rather than a set of instructions. People start to carry "the rules" around in their heads, even when those rules are "wrong," according to the text of the rulebooks. How often have you or one of your friends been surprised to discover that this or that rule didn't, according to the text, work the way you thought it did? How long were you playing D&D "wrong" in one way or another? I know I could offer many examples of rules I learned as a kid – or thought I had – and continued to do for years before someone more knowledgeable than I pointed out I was mistaken. I can't be the only one for whom this was the case.

I think this is fine. I'm not simply absolving myself for years of being mistaken about how dragon breath works in AD&D, for example. Rather, I'm saying that, at the end of the day, I don't think it matters whether you use all the game's rules and do so correctly, so long as everyone who's playing is satisfied with the results. I have zero interest in policing anyone else's fun, especially since, as I said, I make and no doubt will continue to make all sorts of errors in remembering and adjudicating rules. I don't enjoy that sort of thing and, frankly, have a hard believing that anyone does.

All of which leads me back to that desert island question I mentioned above. It’s one thing to ask what game you’d want to bring with you. However, it’s another one to ask what game you could bring with you in your head. I think that's a much more interesting question, because it speaks to the games you've played the most and that, by playing, have become a part of you. For me, I think the only answer could be Dungeons & Dragons, as it's the only RPG that is both simple enough to remember and that I've played enough over the decades that it has embedded itself deep within my soul. I'd love to have been able to say Traveller, too, but I'm not sure that's the case. 

What about you? What roleplaying game could you run almost entirely from memory without reference to any rulebooks?

The Sorcerer Departs

I pass… but in this lone and crumbling tower,
Builded against the burrowing seas of chaos,
My volumes and my philtres shall abide:
Poisons more dear than any mithridate,
And spells far sweeter than the speech of love…
Half-shapen dooms shall slumber in my vaults
And in my volumes cryptic runes that shall
Outblast the pestilence, outgnaw the worm
When loosed by alien wizards on strange years
Under the blackened moon and paling sun.

—fragment of an unfinished poem by Clark Ashton Smith (Spring, 1944)

As The Ensorcellment of January draws to a close, I find myself with a sense of unfinished business. Unlike last year’s The Shadow Over August, this series proved more difficult to bring into focus and I can’t quite shake the feeling that I did not do as good a job with it as Clark Ashton Smith deserves. I think that speaks to the particular challenge Smith presents as a subject. His work is less immediately graspable than Lovecraft’s, less defined by a single mythos or set of ideas, and more rooted in atmosphere, language, and sensibility. Smith’s influence is more easily felt rather imitated, which makes it harder to point to clean lines of descent, especially in something like roleplaying games.

I would be less than honest, too, if I didn’t acknowledge that this January has been a more distracted one than I had anticipated. An unexpected family matter demanded time and attention, inevitably affecting not just this series but all my projects over the past few weeks. Such things have a way of reshaping one’s plans, even when one would prefer otherwise. If The Ensorcellment of January sometimes felt less cohesive and expansive than I had originally hoped, the reasons lie as much there as anywhere else.

Still, I hope the series has had some value. If it has prompted even a few readers to seek out Smith’s stories or poems or to look again at familiar fantasy and science fiction through the lens of his luxuriant imagination, then it has served its intended purpose. Clark Ashton Smith remains one of the great wellsprings of the fantastic, a writer whose visions of decadence, desolation, and dark wonder continue to resonate in subtle but enduring ways.

Naturally, the end of this series does not spell the end of Smith's appearances on Grognardia. His influence on fantasy, weird fiction, and the hobby of roleplaying games is too deep and too strange to be confined to a single month. If, as I suspect, The Ensorcellment of January has fallen short of fully doing his unique genius justice, perhaps that is only fitting. Smith, after all, cannot easily be contained and that, in no small part, is why I return to him and his works again and again. I hope more of you will now do the same.

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.