Reconsiderations: Death and Resurrection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconsiderations: Old School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconsiderations

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

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

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

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

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

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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.