Retrospective: Fading Suns

(Yes, I know I said I'd do a post today about Argon Gambit, the other adventure found in GDW's Double Adventure 3 and I will, but the Muse had other thoughts, as she often does, and here we are.)

When I initiated the Retrospective series back in 2008, my unthinking assumption was that I would limit myself to writing about RPG products from the first decade or so of the hobby, since that was, more or less, the period when most of what we now call old school games were published. Even though I hadn't given it much thought beforehand, this was, I think, a perfectly defensible position at the time. However, eighteen(!) years have passed since I wrote that first Retrospective post, meaning that more and more of RPG history is now further in the rearview mirror, with even the mid-1990s being three decades ago. 

Likewise, my own interest in the history and development of the hobby has similarly expanded, meaning that the scope of what I want to discuss here is not quite as narrow as it once was. That and the fact that I'm now seventeen sessions into my Dark Between the Stars campaign made me think that maybe I should take a look at Holistic Design's Fading Suns science fiction roleplaying game, whose first edition was released in 1996. 

I distinctly recall when I first saw a copy Fading Suns on the shelf of my local game store, sitting right beside Deadlands, which had come out at the same time. Being an inveterate science fiction fan, I was naturally drawn to the book's weird and moody cover, featuring what I eventually realized was a jumpgate floating in the void of space. Flipping through it, I was similarly struck by its black and white artwork, which reminded me of the illustrations I'd seen in some of White Wolf's offerings. That shouldn't have been a surprise, since the creators of Fading Suns, Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg, who had previously been the developers of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Vampire: The Masquerade before working at Holistic Design and brought some of White Wolf's sensibilities with them.

It's worth noting that Holistic Design is not primarily a roleplaying game publisher but rather a developer of computer games. One of its games was the turned-based strategy game Emperor of the Fading Suns, released in early 1997, six months or so after the RPG. From what I understand, Bridges and Greenberg were brought in to develop the setting of the computer game, which eventually became sufficiently detailed and complex that it was decided to release it as a tabletop roleplaying game. At the time, I knew nothing about the computer game, so my interest was entirely in the RPG, whose aesthetics brought to mind a mash-up of Dune, Warhammer 40K, and Gene Wolfe's "New Sun" series.

As it turned out, my instincts on this score were not far off, as that's pretty close to the general vibe of the setting of the game. Set at the dawn of the 51st century, Fading Suns posits a kind of interstellar Middle Ages, after the fall of a technologically sophisticated Republic. In its place arose an empire composed of scheming noble houses, a Church whose priests command real divine powers, and merchant guilds who retain some of the technology of earlier times. Arrayed against the empire are rebels, heretics, barbarians, and – worst of all – demonic powers dwelling in the dark between the stars. Then there's also the phenomenon of the titular fading suns, as the stars themselves are noticeably dimmed from an unknown cause, adding to the pre-apocalyptic feel of the setting.

The result is a portentous, wonderfully baroque setting that pulls on multiple threads of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, byzantine political and religious intrigue, and some genuinely compelling mystical flights of fancy. For someone like me, this is catnip. Fading Suns manages to combine all these different elements together in a way that doesn't always cohere, but they nonetheless have a vibe that feels distinctive even if it's very obvious from where they're ultimately derived. It's an impressive act of creative alchemy that still holds up well three decades after its original release.

Where Fading Suns falls down, in my view, is its Victory Point rules system. They are, at best, workable, combining elements from White Wolf's Storyteller system and Pendragon with a blackjack-style "roll high but stay under a target number" approach. It's not the worst system ever conceived for a roleplaying game but it's often clunky in play. More than that, I have always found it hard to remember, which leads to frequent rulebook-flipping to confirm details of its implementation. That's always been the biggest downside to a game I've otherwise considered one of my personal favorites. 

Fading Suns cannot, by any stretch of the term, be considered an old school RPG. It's very much an example of the '90s push for more "narrative" games that placed a greater emphasis on mechanizing a character's inner life (i.e. beliefs, drives, passions, etc.) in a way intended to mimic literature and other media. These efforts are still in an embryonic form compared to later, more focused designs, so they don't bother me much. I still referee my current campaign in a rather old school, almost sandbox fashion, with the characters interacting with a setting full of factions all pursuing their own plans independent of them. Fading Suns practically begs for this kind of approach, since the Known Worlds already possess a multiplicity of power groups contending with one another for dominance.

Having contributed professional to its second and current editions, I am no doubt biased, but, for all its flaws, I consider Fading Suns a really good game, one that I've had a lot of fun with over the years. It's not perfect – what game is? – but it packs a lot of compelling, evocative ideas under one cover. I'm very glad to be revisiting it with the former House of Worms crew for however long the campaign lasts. 

Pulp Science Fantasy Library: Hiero's Journey

Today, I'm being doubly cheeky. First and most obviously, I've decided to dub today's post an entry in the previously non-existent Pulp Science Fantasy Library series. In the past, I've occasionally run posts under the Pulp Science Fiction Library title, so this isn't wholly without precedent. In the case of Hiero's Journey, though, I think it's a reasonable modification, since it's definitely not a fantasy book in the usual Tolkien/Howard sense most people understand the term, but neither is it a "proper" science fiction tale of the sort that could have appeared in Gernsback's Amazing Stories.

Second, this is another book I have discussed before, albeit briefly. Like last week's post, this too was part of the Pulp Fantasy Gallery series, an early series that I more or less abandoned after a while (though I have revived a version of it from time to time, many to discuss the different pieces of artwork that have graced the covers of famous fantasy books). In any case, I like Hiero's Journey enough that I thought it would be productive to do a full post on it and its relationship to the history of RPGs.

Though first published in 1973, I didn't read Sterling Lanier's post-apocalyptic tale until almost a decade later, when I chanced upon it in a bookstore at the local mall. Though Gary Gygax listed the book in Appendix N, I am almost certain the first time I ever saw a reference to it was in the foreword to Gamma World, which is why I picked it up. I instantly fell in love with it. If I had to pick a single book that captures my own sense of what Gamma World was meant to be, I'd probably choose Hiero's Journey. Certainly, it's the book that, even now, I still find myself subconsciously influenced by whenever I try to imagine what the game is and should be.

Lanier himself is an interesting fellow. As a writer, he produced only a small number of works, of which Hiero’s Journey is probably the best known (and that's being kind). For a time, he worked as an editor at Chilton Books, where he was involved in bringing Frank Herbert's Dune to publication after having read it in serialized form in Analog magazine. Herbert had had great difficulty in selling his novel elsewhere, but Lanier believed it would sell well. When it didn't, he lost his job at Chilton, which led to his taking up writing more seriously.

Hiero’s Journey is set in North America thousands of years after a catastrophic nuclear war referred to simply as “the Death.” The devastation of that ancient conflict reduced the technological civilization of the past to scattered ruins and reshaped the natural world in unexpected ways. Mutated animals roam the wilderness, some hostile, others capable of domestication, while human societies have reorganized themselves into small states and tribal cultures amid the remnants of the old world.

The novel’s protagonist, Per Hiero Desteen, is a priest-scholar belonging to a monastic order known simply as the Abbey, located within the Republic of Metz, a polity occupying part of what was once Canada. The Abbey preserves fragments of ancient learning and trains individuals with psychic abilities, including telepathy, which have become an important if poorly understood feature of the post-Death world.

At the outset of the novel, Hiero is dispatched on a secret mission by the leaders of the Abbey. Rumors suggest that somewhere to the south lies a cache of ancient knowledge about relics called "computers" that might aid the Republic of Metz in its ongoing struggle against a shadowy group known as the Dark Brotherhood. These enemies, whose influence extends across large portions of the former United States, employ both advanced relic technology of their own and psychic powers in pursuit of domination over the scattered civilizations that survived the Death.

Hiero’s titular journey takes him across a landscape that is at once recognizably North American and yet profoundly altered by millennia of mutation, ecological change, and cultural transformation. Along the way he encounters both allies and enemies, from human societies struggling to survive in the wilderness to intelligent animals capable of communication and monstrous creatures born from the lingering consequences of ancient radiation and experimentation.

One of the most distinctive aspects of the novel in my opinion is the way it blends several types of science fiction. On the one hand, the novel clearly belongs to the lineage of post-nuclear adventure stories that became common during the Cold War, exploring the long shadow cast by nuclear catastrophe. On the other hand, Lanier freely incorporates elements, such as psychic powers, telepathic animals, and quasi-medieval social structures, that give the setting a distinctly fantasy character. The resulting world feels less like a conventional science fiction future and more like a kind of Lost World romance set amid the ruins of modern civilization. That's probably why I so enjoyed the novel when I first read it.

It's also probably why Gary Gygax saw fit to include it in Appendix N to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Though set in post-apocalyptic North America, so much of the story's elements feel as if they could be part of an eccentric Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with psychic powers substituting for spells and ancient technology standing in for magic items. Of course, these qualities are also why the novel almost perfectly encapsulates what Gamma World is about, at least for me. The first time I read this book, I felt as if I finally understood Gamma World in a way I hadn't before. It might be an exaggeration to say this is the "key" to the game, but there's no question in my mind that it's helpful in getting into the mood for playing or refereeing it.

Lanier did write a sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero, which came out in 1983, shortly after I read the original. As follow-ups go, it's fine but nowhere near as good as its predecessor. Lanier was working on a third novel in the series but it was never released during his lifetime. Supposedly, it was finished by another author and published in 2024, but I've never read it and have doubts that it's any good. I had bad experiences with the sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz being released under similar circumstances, so I'm quite wary of these posthumous collaborations. If anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to hear about it.

REPOST: Retrospective: Metamorphosis Alpha

(Because I've started refereeing a Metamorphosis Alpha campaign this week, I have a number of posts planned in which I share my thoughts about the game and its oddities. Before doing that, though, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit my original Retrospective post about it from July 7, 2010. I stand by everything I wrote in that original post, but I have more to say now that I'm in the midst of planning a campaign using MA, as you'll see in the coming days. –JDM)

Although Gamma World was (I think) the first RPG I played after Dungeons & Dragons, it was with its predecessor game, Metamorphosis Alpha, that I was obsessed for much of the early 1980s. Written by James Ward and first published in 1976, making it, depending on one's definitions, the first science fiction roleplaying game ever published, Metamorphosis Alpha is set aboard a vast generation ship (called the Warden in a typical example of early hobby self-referential hubris/humor). En route to another solar system far from Earth, the Warden passes through a radiation cloud that damages its systems, kills its crew, and mutates most of its surviving passengers, as well as the Terran flora and fauna traveling with them, into monstrous forms.

Over several generations, the descendants of the original passengers forget they're aboard a starship (which still functions, more or less, under the control of automated systems) and new societies arise on its various decks, which are kilometers-long in size and include many areas designed to mimic terrestrial environments for the benefit of the passengers who were supposed to live and work aboard the Warden while traveling for decades to another world. Player characters assume the role of un-mutated humans, humanoid mutants, and mutant animals, as they explore the Warden, ignorant that it's actually a starship. It's a very compelling premise, one that it shares with Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop (sometimes titled Starship in certain editions). In many ways, it's a much more interesting, if somewhat more limited, premise than that of Gamma World.

My own obsession with the game stemmed from the fact, sometime after I acquired Gamma World, I also acquired the first The Best of Dragon compilation, which included articles about Metamorphosis Alpha in it. These articles were strangely inspirational to me, all the moreso because they were for a game that I'd never heard of, let alone seen, but that clearly bore a lot of resemblance in basic premise and rules to my beloved Gamma World. Thus began my quest to find a copy of the game, a quest that ended in vain. I asked the guys down at my favorite game store about Metamorphosis Alpha, but they told me it was long out of print and my best bet was to go to a convention and win it at an auction. The old grognards who hung out there added that MA "wasn't very good anyway" and that I was better off just using Gamma World and making up the rest.

And so I did. I pulled out my huge graph paper sheets and set to work to mapping out my version of the starship Warden. It was a long and tedious undertaking, filled with lots of missteps and heartache, because I never felt I could get it "right." This vessel was supposed to be 80 kilometers long or so, which meant that even a big map would have to use a very large scale. Moreover, what would a vast generation ship even look like? The only starships I'd ever seen were from movies and TV shows and none of them were generation ships designed to house a huge number of colonists, animals, plants, and machinery for decades of travel across many light years. Eventually, all these worries and concerns got the better of me and I abandoned my maps, something I regret now, even as I fully understand why my younger self admitted defeat.

Over the years, I retained a high degree of interest in Metamorphosis Alpha and kept hoping that, one day, a new edition would be released that'd give me everything I'd hoped for back in the days before I could even take a look at this mythical game. As it turns out, new editions have been published over the years, but each one has been a terrible disappointment to me, utterly lacking in the aura of mystery and possibility that surrounded the original. To be fair, some of that isn't the fault of the new editions -- though some of it is, as nearly all the new editions have been conceptually flawed in significant ways -- as much of the mystique about this game for me is that I could never find a copy.

I've since been able to read it and I'd say that, while it's definitely a very early game in terms of its mechanics and production values, it's nevertheless excellently inspirational. At 32 pages, it contains just enough information to get the referee going but not so much as to prevent him from putting his own stamp on it. I still don't own a copy myself; I keep an eye out for them but they're generally ludicrously expensive and I can't justify spending that kind of money nowadays. In truth, I should probably pick up where my younger self left off and just create my own starship maps and use Mutant Future for the rules. Heck, I have this crazy idea of a supplement for MF called Generation Ship, which would basically be Metamorphosis Alpha with the serial numbers filed off and better production values. Maybe that's something worth considering ...

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Before the Dark Years"

[Historical Note: The original version of this, from April 23, 2011, was not part of The Articles of Dragon series but a stand-alone post. However, since the article it discusses did appear in Dragon, it seemed appropriate to fold this report into my revival of the series.]

While the way that TSR looted the corpse of SPI was shameful (and likely had a deleterious effect on the wider hobby), it had one positive effect from the perspective of my youth: the advent of the "Ares Section" of Dragon. I've always been more of a sci-fi fan than a fantasy one, so knowing that every issue of Dragon would devote two or three articles to the genre each month was a good thing in my view. (This also probably explains why the issues of Dragon I was most fond of ran from 80s to the early 100s – corresponding very closely to the lifespan of the Ares Section).

Gamma World was well represented in the Ares Section, frequently presenting articles penned by creator James Ward, which I appreciated, given my obsession with official-dom. One of my favorite articles from Ward was published in issue 88 (August 1984), called "Before the Dark Years." It presents a historical timeline of the Gamma World setting, beginning (as all post-apocalyptic timelines do) in 1945 with the first use of nuclear weapons and ending in 2450, which was the approximate start of the 2nd edition of the game (1st edition began later, in 2471 – why the change, I wonder?).

It's true that the article appealed to me back then because it scratched a completist urge to know it all, an urge I have long since – and happily – abandoned. But back then it was simply awesome to know, for example, that the starship Warden was launched in 2290. Re-reading the article, I still love it, but for rather different reasons. I like it for entries like this one:

2322 – Processed-iced asteroid (guidance circuits damaged by terrorists) strikes Mars; eight-year duststorm and climatic disruption result. All colonies on planet isolated; Federation charter suspended for the duration.

Or this one:

2331 – Trans-Plutonian Shipyards assume control of their own programs and generate robotic "life."

The reason I love entries like these is that they hit home that Gamma World's apocalypse doesn't happen in the here and now but in a science fictional future. That ought to be obvious, given the presence Mark VII blasters and black ray guns and so forth, but, somehow, it's easy to forget, perhaps because, in the 70s and 80s, worrying about the End of All Things focused on the present, not the future. Indeed, lots of people didn't think there would be a future, thanks to the Damoclean threat of Armageddon.

Gamma World didn't take that approach. Instead, it's set in the future and the weapons that usher in the Dark Years include not just nuclear missiles but also "dimension-warp" devices and other weaponry undreamed of in our age. I think that set Gamma World apart from other post-apocalyptic games, imbuing it with a more "wondrous" quality and also, if I may wax sociological for a moment, making it a little less frightening to kids like me. The Morrow Project, to cite one example, postulates that the End would come in 1989 as a consequence of Cold War foolishness and, however absurd its specifics, that was a scenario many people genuinely believed might occur in their lifetimes. But a 24th century terrorist group called the Apocalypse? Using dimension-warp weapons and striking at not just Earth but space colonies as far away as the Oort Cloud? That's clearly fantasy and a lot less terrifying.

As I noted recently, my preferred way to play Gamma World is to treat the post-apocalyptic world as largely a blank slate, one utterly unfamiliar to the characters, who not only grew up generations removed form the Fall, but are played by people for whom even the pre-Fall world is alien. That pre-Fall world included settlements on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, is supported by robots, cyborgs, and A.I.s, and is launching extra-solar colonization efforts. That creates a lot of scope for terrific adventures and campaigns; I might even go so far as to say that, as developed in this and other articles, Gamma World provides a canvas every bit as large as that offered by Dungeons & Dragons. Sadly, the game has largely been treated as a joke by its custodians over the years, its full potential never quite realized and that's too bad.

The Hidden Masters of Pulp Fantasy

One of the regular series for which this blog was once known is Pulp Fantasy Library, in which I highlighted individual fantasy and science fiction stories I felt had been influential, directly or indirectly, on the development of the hobby of roleplaying. The series eventually grew to more than three hundred entries and taught me a great deal in the process of writing it. However, it also required considerable effort and often received little reader engagement, so I brought it to a quiet close in 2023. I sometimes consider reviving it in a modified form, but I’ve yet to find the right approach. Still, I keep thinking about these early works of fantasy, which is what led to this post.

From the vantage point of the first quarter (!) of the twenty-first century, it’s all too easy to forget just how strange fantasy and science fiction once were – not merely in their imaginative content but in the intellectual and spiritual traditions from which they drew. We tend to think of early speculative fiction as arising primarily from a matrix of adventure tales, scientific romances, and classical mythology. However, another powerful and often overlooked influence is the world of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other esoteric traditions. These weren’t mere fads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they were serious systems of belief for many, including a surprising number of the authors who helped lay the foundations of what we now call genre fiction.

Even more fascinating is how many once-occult concepts have since become commonplaces of fantasy and science fiction, like astral projection, past lives, lost advanced civilizations, invisible planes of existence, and cosmic cycles of spiritual evolution, to name just a few obvious ones. These weren’t originally the products of scientific or rationalist speculation. They were occult doctrines, often articulated with the structure and certainty of any other religion. Early speculative fiction served as a powerful conduit for these ideas, transmitting them into the cultural imagination.

Take, for instance, astral projection, which recurs throughout pulp fantasy and science fiction. In Theosophy, this is the “etheric body” or “etheric double” leaving the physical body to traverse the astral plane. In fiction, this idea becomes John Carter’s unexplained voyage to Barsoom in A Princess of Mars, where his body remains behind on Earth while his spirit is transported to another world by sheer force of will. Burroughs never offers a scientific explanation for the phenomenon nor did he need to do so. His readers would likely have recognized the trope from already extant popular occult literature.

Similarly, reincarnation and karma, central tenets of Theosophy and many forms of Eastern-influenced Spiritualism, appear in the works of authors like Talbot Mundy, whose protagonists sometimes recall past lives in ancient empires. The same is true of many tales penned by Abraham Merritt. In The Star Rover, Jack London tells the story of a prisoner who escapes his unjust physical confinement by entering trance states that allow him to access a series of former incarnations. This isn’t merely a fictional conceit; it reflects a specific metaphysical worldview in which human identity unfolds across many lifetimes, a view that gained traction during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even readers who didn’t share this worldview would nevertheless have been familiar with it.

William Hope Hodgson is another fascinating case. He blends arcane science with mystical speculation in his "Carnacki the Ghost-Finder" stories, which feature protective sigils, vibrational zones, and references to the "Outer Circle," a realm inhabited by malevolent entities existing just beyond human perception. All of these ideas draw heavily on contemporary occultism. His novel The Night Land, a work of science fantasy more than horror, is set on a dying Earth haunted by monstrous spiritual forces and saturated with the oppressive weight of cosmic time. It echoes Theosophical doctrines of vast evolutionary cycles and the occult preoccupation with psychic resistance to spiritual evil.

Marie Corelli (born Mary Mackay), once one of the most popular authors in the English-speaking world, is now rarely read. Her novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, for example, blends Spiritualist belief with melodrama and science fictional concepts, such as portraying electricity as a bridge between the material and spiritual realms. She directly influenced writers like H. Rider Haggard and even Arthur Machen, both of whom in turn shaped the subsequent development of fantasy. Even Edward Bulwer-Lytton, now best known for the infamous incipit “It was a dark and stormy night,” was a serious student of esoteric lore. His novel Zanoni depicts an immortal Chaldean adept who achieves transcendence through secret knowledge, an early example of the “hidden masters” who would later become a staple of Theosophy.

Which, of course, brings us to Theosophy itself, which had perhaps the most lasting and far-reaching impact on the development of both esoteric thought and fantasy. Founded in the 1870s by the Russian-born mystic, Helena Blavatsky, Theosophy combined elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Neoplatonism, and esoteric Christianity into a vast occult cosmology. Through books, journals, and lectures, it promoted a view of the universe in which mankind was but one phase in an immense spiritual drama, involving lost continents, ascended masters, and ancient wisdom. These ideas found fertile ground in genre fiction. The controversial “Shaver Mystery” stories published in Amazing Stories in the mid to late 1940s and purportedly based on true events involve ancient subterranean races like the evil Deros (which itself served as an inspiration to Gary Gygax). Shaver's stories read like Theosophy blended with pulp sensationalism.

Even Clark Ashton Smith, whom regular readers will know is my favorite of the Weird Tales trio, drew on esoteric themes. Ideas like cyclical time, forgotten civilizations, and arcane knowledge recur throughout his work. His Zothique cycle, set on the last continent of a dying Earth, reflects the Theosophical notion of a future “seventh root race” and the eventual exhaustion of history.

Against this background, H.P. Lovecraft stands out, not because he rejected religion in general (though he did), but because he specifically targeted Spiritualism and occultism. He was deeply familiar with the claims of mediums, astrologers, and Theosophists and dismissed them with open contempt. In his correspondence, he regularly mocks the “credulous” who place faith in séances, reincarnation, and similar beliefs. At the behest of Harry Houdini, Lovecraft even collaborated on a book titled The Cancer of Superstition, intended as a wholesale debunking of Spiritualist claims. The book was never completed due to Houdini’s sudden death in 1926.

Despite this, Lovecraft’s stories are filled with forbidden books, lost knowledge, and ancient alien races whose truths are too terrible for the human mind to bear. In this way, Lovecraft doesn’t discard the tropes of occult literature – he inverts them. Where Theosophy promised spiritual enlightenment and cosmic unity, Lovecraft offers only madness, degeneration, and a universe that is not merely indifferent but actively hostile to notions of human significance. His “gods” are not hidden masters but incomprehensible and uncaring forces. Structurally, however, he preserves much of the occult worldview: a hidden reality lurks behind the surface of things, accessible only to initiates – scholars, madmen, and cultists. Lovecraft didn’t reject that structure; he twisted it and filled it with dread.

All of this makes it remarkable just how thoroughly modern fantasy and science fiction still bear the imprint of these early occult influences. Astral travel, alternate planes, soul transference, hidden masters, and cosmic cycles remain staples of the genres. They’re treated today as neutral, even secular, tropes of worldbuilding, even though their origins are anything but secular. They are spiritual, mystical, and often explicitly religious in intent.

My purpose in this post isn't to diminish these genres or to reduce their works to a list of influences. Nor am I offering an invitation to embrace the esoteric as literal truth. Instead, I'm reminding everyone of just how permeable the boundary between belief and imagination has always been and how fantasy, in particular, has long served as a vessel for metaphysical speculation, even when dressed in the garb of swords and sorcery or rocket ships and ray guns. Perhaps this is one of the reasons these genres endure: they don’t merely entertain; they echo the ancient human desire to find meaning in a world that so often seems devoid of it.

Retrospective: Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game

Between early exposure to televised coverage of NASA launches and constant reruns of Star Trek, it was almost inevitable that I would become a science fiction fan. It helped, too, that my father’s only sister, who was barely twenty years my senior, shared that passion and actively encouraged my fascination with all things related to space travel, robots, and laser guns. So, when George Lucas’s space opera Star Wars premiered in the late spring of 1977, my aunt and I wasted no time in seeing it. Like countless other children of my generation, the experience marked a turning point in the development of my imagination.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Star Wars dominated the mental landscape of my childhood from 1977 to 1979, a reign challenged only by my discovery of Dungeons & Dragons and, through it, the wider world of roleplaying games. Even so, my enthusiasm for Star Wars didn’t vanish. I vividly remember the thrill I felt at the first rumors of "Star Wars II" (the film’s actual title wouldn’t be revealed until late 1979, as I recall). While D&D redirected some of my imaginative energy, it never fully replaced my love for Lucas’s galaxy. That said, there’s no denying that the fervor of my early affection dimmed somewhat in the face of newer, competing obsessions.

By the mid-1980s, that dimming had become a common experience. Star Wars itself seemed to be fading into the past. In 1987, the franchise appeared adrift. Four years had passed since Return of the Jedi had concluded the original trilogy and no new movies were on the horizon. For many fans, the galaxy far, far away was becoming a relic of childhood. The Kenner toy line was winding down, Marvel’s comic book series had ended, and while fan interest endured, it was increasingly nostalgic in character. There were occasional whispers of more to come, but nothing concrete. To be a Star Wars fan in the late ’80s was to dwell in the long shadow of what had been, clinging to worn VHS tapes, dog-eared storybooks, and well-loved action figures.

Meanwhile, the tabletop roleplaying game hobby was entering a new phase. TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons still loomed large, but the landscape was shifting. A host of new games had appeared, offering players fresh ways to explore favorite genres. Yet the RPG industry had not yet figured out how to handle licensed properties particularly well. With a few notable exceptions, like Star Trek or Marvel Super Heroes, most licensed RPGs of the era felt to me like clumsy grafts, existing more as marketing tie-ins than true adaptations. Then, in 1987, West End Games released Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, designed by Greg Costikyan.

What West End delivered was more than just a faithful adaptation of a beloved movie trilogy: it was a revelatory act of worldbuilding. The game employed a streamlined D6 system, originally developed for Ghostbusters, that emphasized speed, flexibility, and cinematic flair over rules complexity. It was a system that matched the tone and pacing of Star Wars perfectly. Characters weren’t defined by a tangle of subsystems but by evocative archetypes: the Brash Pilot, the Young Senatorial, the Quixotic Jedi. Combat was fast and improvisational, encouraging swashbuckling heroics rather than tactical micromanagement. It felt, in a word, right.

But the real genius of the Star Wars RPG wasn’t its rules; it was its tone and presentation. The game didn’t merely borrow the setting of Star Wars; it inhabited it. The rulebook and its indispensable companion, The Star Wars Sourcebook, were filled with film stills, in-universe schematics, detailed planetary entries, and short snippets of fiction. These books didn’t feel like products about the galaxy far, far away; they felt like artifacts from within it. For fans starved for new material, the RPG was a lifeline, offering a way not just to revisit Star Wars, but almost to live in it.

It’s hard to overstate the influence these books would go on to have. Much of what we now take for granted about the Star Wars universe, like species names, background details about the Empire and the Rebellion, classifications of ships and vehicles, and descriptions of distant planets, originated not in the films, but in the pages of these RPG books. Lucasfilm itself came to rely on West End’s material. When Timothy Zahn was hired to write Heir to the Empire in 1991, he was handed a stack of WEG books to use as reference. In many ways, West End Games defined the Star Wars expanded universe before it officially existed.

Within the RPG hobby, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game was also a harbinger of things to come. Unlike many earlier games, it emphasized genre emulation and collaborative adventure over simulationist detail. Its influence can be seen in the rise of narrative-focused design philosophies that would emerge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It welcomed new players with familiar characters and easy-to-grasp mechanics, helping to expand the hobby beyond its traditional fantasy roots and making it more accessible to newcomers.

As I mentioned earlier, there were other successful licensed RPGs during this period, each with its own merits. But, in my opinion, none matched the totality of West End’s vision. The Star Wars RPG wasn’t just a game; it was a doorway into a living, breathing world, one that players could explore, shape, and make their own. Today, with Star Wars a global media brand, it’s worth remembering the quiet, crucial role this game played. It expanded the setting beyond what we saw on screen. It kept the flame alive during a fallow period. And it reminded us all that, with a few friends, a handful of dice, and the right kind of scenario, we too could journey to that galaxy far, far away.

Computer God

Something I've observed is that, if you look at the totality of a creator's work, you'll sometimes notice patterns in their creations. By "patterns," I mean subject matter or themes that keep cropping up again and again. Sometimes, this is done deliberately, with the creator explicitly embracing this, while at other times, it's done subconsciously. There are plenty of exceptions to this, of course; not every creator is given to this behavior. Indeed, one could make a reasonable case that the best creators are those whose works are genuinely varied in their subject matter or themes. 

Yesterday, I posted a story about an "AI agent" that had supposedly become very adept at playing Diplomacy. In reflecting on it, I realized that one of the reasons the story so intrigued me is not simply for its connection to a game I enjoy, but because it connects to a recurring subject within my own creative endeavors: computers as gods. I was suddenly struck by the fact that, without my specifically intending to do so, I'd been playing around with this idea under a variety of different guises. Clearly, it's something that has fired my imagination, hence the prevalence of it in my works to date.

The initial intention behind my Dwimmermount campaign setting was to create a setting for D&D that was outwardly fairly ordinary and traditional but with a secret science fiction background. Part of this background is that the gods of the Great Church were, in fact, artificial beings created by technological advanced Men in the ancient past and whose civilization was ultimately destroyed as a consequence of their hubris. None of this was ever revealed in the course of the campaign, but it provided the intellectual frame by which I understand the setting.

In my House of Worms Tékumel campaign, the characters have spent a long time, both in game and in the real world, interacting with several strange cultures of the mysterious Achgé Peninsula. Among the many ways these cultures differ from those of the characters' homeland of Tsolyánu are the gods they worship. One of the most important is called Eyenál, who is generally depicted as a war god. Some months ago, while interacting with a device of the Ancients, the characters learned of the existence of "ANL/1043," described as being "a 301st generation strategic agent" – in short, Eyenál is some sort of artificial intelligence, possibly charged with Tékumel planetary defenses.

Likewise, in the Secrets of sha-Arthan, I've imagined many different artificial beings created by "the Makers" whose ruins are scattered across the True World. Some of these beings are mere automatons without much in the way of individual will or intelligence, while others are closer to Men. Others still possess vast and alien intelligence utterly unlike that of any other intelligent species. Some of these direct and guide cities or even entire nations, ruling them as gods, though, of course, few on sha-Arthan understand this. 

In each case, knowledge of the true nature of the gods as artificial beings is largely unknown within the setting. Naturally, I know the truth and occasionally the players (as opposed to their characters) catch on to what's really going on. The reaction has been universally positive, so far as I can recall. I distinctly remember the revelation about Eyenál being met with pleasure by several of the players, who felt it provided a clever and unexpected re-interpretation of many of the details they'd already collected about the Achgé Peninsula and its history. 

I presume regular return to the subject of artificial gods is rooted in my lifelong love of science fiction. Stories of "computer gods" or, at least, computers viewed as gods are commonplace in the genre. I wonder, though, if there's more to it than that and, if so, what it is. Clearly, I'm trying to grapple with something through the vehicle of my imagination, though I'm not yet sure what it is. Regardless, I find it fascinating that I continue to revisit this idea and wonder if others find that they return to the same ideas over and over within their own creations.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Cold Gray God

Though C.L. Moore is probably best known for her stories of the swordswoman Jirel of Joiry, it's her tales of interplanetary smuggler Northwest Smith that I've long found most appealing. Smith debuted in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales and, over the course of the next six years, appeared in a dozen more stories in the Unique Magazine and elsewhere. Like adventures of John Carter and other early science fiction, these yarns are now wholly improbable, based as they are on incomplete or just plain erroneous science. They're also a lot of fun, filled with memorable characters and exciting situations.

"The Cold Gray God" opens in the "outlaw city" of Righa at the North Pole of Mars. A mysterious woman, hooded and cloaked in "the concealing folds of rich snow-cat fur," strolls down the down the cobblestoned streets of the city in search of someone. She only stops when she spies 

a man as he belted his heavy coat of brown pole-deer hide and stepped briskly out into the street. He was tall, brown as leather, hard-featured under the pole-deer cap pulled low over his eyes. They were startling, those eyes, cold and steady, icily calm. Indefinably he was of Earth. His scarred dark face had a faintly piratical look, and he was wolfishly lean in his spaceman's leather as he walked lightly down the Lakklan, turning up the deer-hide collar about his ears with one hand. The other, his right, was hidden in the pocket of his coat.

This is Northwest Smith, the very person for whom she's looking. She asks him to come with her, but he's reluctant to do so.

"What do you want?" he demanded. His voice was deep and harsh, and the words fairly clicked with a biting brevity.

"Come," she cooed, moving nearer again and slipping one hand inside his arm. "I will tell you that in my own house. It is so cold here."

Smith allowed himself to be pulled along down the Lakklan, too puzzled and surprised to resist. That simple act of hers had amazed him out of all proportion to its simplicity. He was revising his judgment of her as he walked along over the snowdust cobbles at her side. For by that richly throaty voice that throbbed as colorfully as any dove's, and by the subtle swaying of her walk, he had been sure, quite sure, that she came from Venus. No other planet breeds such beauty, no other women are born with the instinct of seduction in their very bones. And he had thought, dimly, that he recognized her voice. 

When at last the woman takes Smith to her home, she flings back her cloak "in one slow, graceful motion," revealing her face for the first time. The smuggler's "iron poise" is shaken by what he sees; not only was she a "breath-taking beauty," she is a famous woman.

Judai of Venus had been the toast of three planets a few years past. Her heart-twisting beauty, her voice that throbbed like a dove's, the glowing charm of her had captured the hearts of every audience that heard her song. Even the far outposts of civilization knew her. That colorful, throaty voice had sounded upon Jupiter's moons, and sent the cadences of "Starless Night" ringing over the bare rocks of asteroids and through the darkness of space.

And then she vanished. Men wondered awhile, and there were searches and considerable scandal, but no one saw her again. All that was long past now. No one sang "Starless Night" any more, and it was Earth-born Rose Robertson's voice which rang through the solar system in lilting praise of "The Green Hills of Earth." Judai was years forgotten.

And now she was standing before Northwest Smith in a criminal haven atop the Red Planet. Judai explains that she had come because "something called" to her and she "could not resist it." "I have been searching for a long time … for such a man as you – a man who can be entrusted with a dangerous task." Though suspicious, Smith is nevertheless intrigued and wants to know the nature of this task. 

"There is a man in Righa who has something I very much want. He lives on the Lakklan by that drinking-house they call the Spaceman's Rest … The man's names I do not know, but he is of Mars, from the canal-countries, and his face is deeply scarred across both cheeks. He hides what I want in a little ivory box of drylander carving. If you can bring that to me you may name your own reward."

Like any good story of a noir-ish sort, nothing, including Judai of Venus, is what it seems, but, of course Northwest Smith is a man accustomed to such situations. Still, he is ever in need of money and, when Judai agrees to his terms – "Ten thousand gold dollars to my name in the Great Bank of Lakkjourna, confirmed by viziphone when I hand you the box." – he accepts the job. He soon finds himself entangled in a mystery far worse than he could have imagined, involving one of the dark, nameless "gods" that once ruled over Mars millennia before the coming of Earthmen.

"The Cold Gray God" is a quintessential Northwest Smith tale, in which the world-weary interplanetary smuggler finds himself face-to-face with a malevolent cosmic entity when he agrees to help a beautiful woman in trouble. What sets it apart from others with a similar plot are the very personal stakes for Smith. He finds that it's not Judai who is seeking "a man like [him]," but rather the something that called her to Mars. It's a compelling set-up and it contributes greatly to the success of the tale, especially if, like me, you're fond of science fiction from the first half of the last century.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Witch of the Demon Seas

I frequently reflect on my own lack of industry, especially when compared to nearly all of the writers I discuss in my Pulp Fantasy Library posts. These energetic men and women cranked out exciting stories by the ream – so many, in fact, that they sometimes had to resort to using a variety of noms de plume to ensure the magazines would publish their submissions (many of which had policies, formal or informal, against the inclusion of more than one story by the same author in a single issue). 

I bring this up because this is precisely what happened in the case of "Witch of the Demon Seas," which first appeared in the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories. Though credited to "A.A. Craig," the yarn is actually the handiwork of Poul Anderson, another of whose stories is featured in the same issue under his usual byline. Like many pulp fictioneers, Anderson had an incredible work ethic: sixteen of his short stories and novellas were published the same year as "Witch of the Demon Seas." It's difficult not to feel inadequate when faced with such a remarkable output.

Though nowadays Anderson is most remembered for his science fiction, notably his tales of Nicholas Van Rijn, David Falkayn, and, of course, Dominic Flandry, he was also an accomplished writer of fantasy. Three Hearts and Three Lions is perhaps the best known of his fantasies, at least for players of roleplaying games, but The Broken Sword is, in my opinion, equally worthy of admiration (both appear in Gary Gygax's Appendix N, for what it's worth). Pulp writers had to be omnivorous if they wanted to make a living at writing, hence the existence of stories, such as this one, that might broadly be described as "fantasy" (or perhaps sword-and-planet, which was the bread and butter of Planet Stories during its 71-issue run).

Regardless, "Witch of the Demon Seas" certainly takes place on another world, one whose surface is almost entirely covered by water. What civilization exists can be found on numerous island kingdoms, such as the Thalassocracy of Achaera, whose ruler is Khroman the Conqueror. Khroman is "a huge man, his hair and square-cut beard jet-black despite middle age, the strength of his warlike youth still in his powerful limbs." He's also honorable, which we learn early in the story, when he tells his advisor, Shorzon the Sorcerer, that he intends to treat his recently defeated enemy, the fair-haired pirate Corun, with respect, as he is "the bravest enemy Achaera ever had."

When Khroman interrogates him, Corun reveals much about his origins and the reasons for his turn to piracy. Come to think of it, the interrogation reveals a fair bit about Khroman as well.

Khroman stared at him in puzzlement. "But why did you ever do it?" he asked finally. "With your strength and skill and cunning, you could have gone far in Achaera. We take mercenaries from conquered provinces, you know. You could have gotten Achaeran citizenship in time."

"I was a prince of Conahur," said Corun slowly. "I saw my land invaded and my folk taken off as slaves. I saw my brothers hacked down at the battle of Lyrr, my sister taken as concubine by your admiral, my father hanged, my mother burned alive when they fired the old castle. They offered me amnesty because I was young and they wanted a figurehead. So I swore an oath of fealty to Achaera, and broke it the first chance I got. It was the only oath I ever broke, and still I am proud of it. I sailed with pirates until I was big enough to master my own ships. That is enough of an answer."

"It may be," said Khroman slowly. "You realize, of course, that the conquest of Conahur took place before I came to the throne? And that I certainly couldn't negate it, in view of the Thalassocrat's duty to his own country, and had to punish its incessant rebelliousness?"

"I don't hold anything against you yourself, Khroman," said Corun with a tired smile. "But I'd give my soul to the nether fires for the chance to pull your damned palace down around your ears!"

"I'm sorry it has to end this way," said the king. "You were a brave man. I'd like to drain many beakers of wine with you on the other side of death." He signed to the guards. "Take him away."

Upon hearing this, Shorzon takes an interest in Corun, for reasons that soon become clear. Together with his daughter, Chryseis, the story's titular witch, he visits the pirate in his solitary cell. The sorcerer then offers him "life, freedom—and the liberation of Conahur!" Naturally, Corun doubts the wizard's sincerity, but Chryseis, a remarkable beauty, reassures him, "You can help us with a project so immeasurably greater than your petty quarrels that anything you can ask in return will be as nothing. And you are the one man who can do so." 

"What do you want?"

"Your help in a desperate venture," said Chryseis. "I tell you frankly that we may well all die in it. But at least you will die as a free man—and if we succeed, all the world may be ours."

"What is it?" he asked hoarsely.

"I cannot tell you everything now," said Shorzon. "But the story has long been current that you once sailed to the lairs of the Xanthi, the Sea Demons, and returned alive. Is it true?"

"Aye." Corun stiffened, with sudden alarm trembling in his nerves. "Aye, by great good luck I came back. But they are not a race for humans to traffic with."

"I think the powers I can summon will match theirs," said Shorzon. "We want you to guide us to their dwellings and teach us the language on the way, as well as whatever else you know about them. When we return, you may go where you choose. And if we get their help, we will be able to set Conahur free soon afterward."

Corun shook his head. "It's nothing good that you plan," he said slowly. "No one would approach the Xanthi for any good purpose."

"You did, didn't you?" chuckled the wizard dryly. "If you want the truth, we are after their help in seizing the government of Achaera, as well as certain knowledge they have."

"If you succeeded," argued Corun stubbornly, "why should you then let Conahur go?"

"Because power over Achaera is only a step to something too far beyond the petty goals of empire for you to imagine," said Shorzon bleakly. "You must decide now, man. If you refuse, you die."

This is the proverbial offer that one cannot refuse, so, with some trepidation, Corun agrees. Shorzon and Chryseis then lead him to a fully-crewed vessel that will take them to the Xanthi, a race of inimical fish-men with a history of warring against the other peoples of the world. The ship leaves Achaera – without the knowledge of Khroman, I might add! – on a quest whose ultimate objective, Corun suspects, is far from virtuous. For the moment, though, he does not care, as he only wishes "to live! To die, if he must, under the sky!"

"Witch of the Demon Sea" is a delightful romp, filled with monsters, magic, sorcery, and swordplay. The characters, starting with Corun himself, are somewhat archetypal, let us say, but Anderson tells the story with such energy and enthusiasm that I soon didn't care. The story is interesting, too, because it contains elements that could be described as "secret sci-fi," thereby further muddying the waters regarding how to classify this yarn. For myself, I prefer to classify it as "fun" and leave it at that.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Enchantress of Venus

The distinctions separating the literary genres of fantasy and science fiction are fine ones, especially when dealing with early examples of the latter. For example, is A Princess of Mars a work of science fiction because its story takes place on the very real planet of Mars or is it a mere fantasy because so many of its setting details are incompatible with what we now know about the Red Planet? Over the decades, it's been a frequently contentious issue, hence the proliferation of even finer literary genres – planetary romance, science fantasy, and sword-and-planet, to name but a few – intended to put an end to such questions. As I've gotten older, I've simultaneously become less interested in these matters and more accepting of an expansive definition of "fantasy" that includes all types of imaginative fiction.

In the case of Leigh Brackett's tales of Eric John Stark, many of which appeared in the pages of Planet Stories in the 1940s and '50s, this primal concern nevertheless resurfaces. Even in 1949, when Brackett wrote her first story of Stark, enough was known about the other worlds of our solar system that there was little plausibility to their being habitable by mankind without significant technological aid, let alone having intelligent natives of their own. Was Brackett then writing fantasy or did her stories still qualify as science fiction, albeit of an old fashioned sort – or is this, as I increasingly feel, a distinction without a difference? 

Of course, little of this matters, as Stark's adventures are engaging yarns told with great enthusiasm. "The Enchantress of Venus," which first appeared in the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories, amply demonstrates what I mean. Second in the chronology of the tales of Stark, the novella takes place, as its title suggests, on the planet Venus, renowned for its "seas" of buoyant, phosphorescent gas. This detail is important because, as the story begins, Stark is aboard a ship making its way across one such Red Sea toward the town of Shuruun. 

Shuruun is, to borrow a phrase, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Stark is no stranger to such places and thus has no fear of the town. However, he only sought it out to find his friend, Helvi, "the tall son of a barbarian kinglet," who had gone into the town previously and never returned. Stark feels an obligation to locate Helvi and, if necessary, rescue him from whatever peril awaited him in Shuruun. Like so many pulp fantasy protagonists, Stark lives by his own code of honor, one that places great value in friends.

Malthor, the captain of the ship on which he is traveling, repeatedly suggests that Stark, whom he recognizes as a stranger, due to his black Mercurian skin, would do well to lodge with him when they reach Shuruun. Each time, Stark declines. As it turns out, he has good reason to do so: Malthor's true intentions are wholly sinister. Just as the ship gets within sight of the "squat and ugly town" that "crouch[ed] witch-like on the rocky shore, her ragged skirts dipped in blood," Malthor and some of his crew attack Stark in an attempt to take him prisoner, though for what precise purpose he did not know (and would not until later in the story). Rather than suffer this fate, Stark dives overboard into the Red Sea.

The surface of the Red Sea closed without a ripple over Stark. There was a burst of crimson sparks, a momentary trail of flame going down like a drowned comet, and then—nothing.

Stark dropped slowly downward through a strange world. There was no difficulty about breathing, as in a sea of water. The gases of the Red Sea support life quite well, and the creatures that dwell in it have almost normal lungs.

Stark did not pay much attention at first, except to keep his balance automatically. He was still dazed from the blow, and he was raging with anger and pain.

Properly scientific or not, this is evocative stuff and a reminder of why Brackett made such a splash (no pun intended) in the world of pulp fantasy during the 1940s and '50s. 

Emerging from the sea, Stark makes his way to Shuruun in search of Helvi. He is almost immediately recognized as a stranger by the locals, who confront him and appear ready to attack. Before this can occur, a white-haired Earthman named Larrabee calls out and invites him to drink with him. Larrabee, we soon learn, is a notorious thief who "got half a million credits out of the strong room of the Royal Venus." In the nine years since, he has holed up in Shuruun to avoid being found by the authorities. When Stark introduces himself, Larrabee mentions that he knows his name from a wanted poster as "some idiot that had led a native revolt somewhere in the Jovian Colonies—a big cold-eyed brute they referred to colorfully as the wild man from Mercury." 

Stark is amused by this description of himself but soon shifts the conversation to local matters, in particular the whereabouts of Helvi. Larrabee claims not to have seen him and instead speaks of the Lhari, "the Lords of Shuruun," who are "always glad to meet strangers." Hearing this, Stark decides he to call on the Lhari to see if they might know something about Helvi. Along the way, he meets Zareth, the teenage daughter of Malthor, who'd been sent into Shuruun to find him and then lure him into an ambush outside the city. Then, he'd be handed over to "the Lost Ones," who dwell in the interior of the swamp and have an interest in strangers like Stark. Zareth doesn't follow through on her father's plans, though, because he beats her and she hates him. However, she has no interest in joining Stark in visiting the Lhari, who frighten her as much as her father.

If you're having difficulty keeping all these narrative threads – Malthor, the Lhari, the Lost Ones – straight in your head, that's understandable. Brackett throws a lot at her readers at the beginning of "The Enchantress of Venus" and its can be confusing at times. Fortunately, she's a very skilled writer and repays the patience and forbearance shown to her. By the time Stark enters the castle of the Lhari and meets them, in all their decadent glory, for the first time, that things begin to make a great deal more sense. In some ways, that's the real beginning of the novella and the action barrels along from that point until it reaches its ultimate, satisfying conclusion. It's a lot of fun to read and reminds me, in some ways, like many of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian: a "wild" outsider finds himself caught up in the machinations of several sinister factions and must find a way to extricate himself from their clutches. What's not to love?

House of Worms Humor

Tékumel, despite its outward appearance, is actually a science fiction setting – a "secret sci-fi" setting, as I sometimes call it. Clarke's Third Law is in full effect and pretty much everything that is seemingly fantastical has a rational explanation (for a given definition of "rational," admittedly). I've leaned into this quite heavily over the last few years. I decided that the Achgé Peninsula was a storehouse of lost and forgotten ruins of the Ancients, many of which contained some remarkable pieces of "sufficiently advanced" technology. Likewise, the culture of the native Naqsái (and that of their west coast cousins, the Hnákho) owed a lot to the presence of these technologies, however misunderstood they are in the current age.

As a result of events almost two years prior in game-time, the characters inadvertently released three malevolent otherplanar entities from their prison. They were then bidden by the prison's equally otherplanar guardian to find and defeat them. One has was beaten at the Temple of the Ages to the west of the city-state of Mánmikel. The location of the second is now known: occupying the body of a Livyáni woman in the colony of Nuróab (in a strange parallel to what happened to Aíthfo) and causing havoc throughout the Peninsula as a result. The location of the third entity remains unknown.

Currently, the characters are searching for a transplanar energy siphon, a type of Ancient technology known colloquially as a "god trap." Their researches suggest that such technology might be found on an island old texts call the Isle of Sweet Gentility but that the local Naqsái call the Isle of Ghosts. The island is many weeks travel westward along the coast of the Peninsula in the direction of the Hnákho. Part way through their sea journey, they stopped to re-supply (among other things) at the city-state of Chámara. 

The people of Chámara have two great loves: trade and bureaucracy. The last couple of sessions have focused on the characters' attempts to wade through the city's seemingly endless procedures for doing pretty much everything, hence the image above, created by a player, who found the temporary derailment of the characters' goals amusing. Truth be told, these sessions have been amusing, especially as the characters grapple with the fact that, unlike the Tsolyáni, the Chámarans don't seem to go in for bribes and other forms of peculation. The rules are the rules and, if they want their supplies, they'll need to put up with all the interrogations, forms, and waiting in queues that the Chámarans throw at them.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Dragonflight

In my old age, I have become very set in my ways, particularly when it comes to literature. My tastes have hardened and it's rare that I'm willing to give something new a try – and rarer still when I enjoy something new. Such was not always the case, though. In my long ago youth, my prejudices were fewer and I devoured almost any book I came across with a dragon or a spaceship on its cover. 

This was especially the case after I discovered Dungeons & Dragons more than four decades ago. I was so enthralled with D&D that I looked everywhere I could for ideas to incorporate into my games. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time haunting the local public libraries, checking out any fantasy or science fiction book I could get my hands on. Fortunately for me, there were a lot of them and, over the course of a couple of years, I found myself reading books by authors whose names I recognized as well as those I hadn't. 

In the latter category was Anne McCaffrey, whose name I first came across in the "Inspirational Source Material" section of Tom Moldvay's Basic Rules. By this time – late 1981 or early '82 – McCaffrey had already published quite a few books in her "Dragonriders of Pern" series, so I figured the best place to start was at the very beginning, the novel Dragonflight.

Dragonflight was first published in 1968, but portions of it had appeared as novellas in the pages of Analog the previous year. The version my library had was a hardcover edition with cover art by Michael Whelan, but I liked the original paperback cover so much that I included it in this post instead. That said, what I most remember about Dragonflight is the reaction I had to reading its introduction, which begins as follows:

When is a legend a legend? Why is a myth a myth? How old and disused must a fact be for it to be relegated to the category "Fairy-tale?" And why do certain facts remain incontrovertible while others lose their validity to assume a shabby, unstable character?

Rukbat, in the Sagittarian sector, was a golden G-type star. It had five planets, and one stray it had attracted and held in recent millennia. Its third planet was enveloped by air man could breathe, boasted water he could drink, and possessed a gravity that permitted man to walk confidently erect. Men discovered it and promptly colonized it. They did that to every habitable planet, and then – whether callously or through collapse of empire, the colonists never discovered and eventually forgot to ask – left the colonies to fend for themselves.

When I read this, I was, if not exactly dumbfounded, I was at least surprised. There was a dragon the cover, wasn't there? The book was called Dragonflight, after all, and part of a larger series that had come to be known as "the Dragonriders of Pern." What was going on?

I've mentioned in other contexts that, at this time in my life, I often disliked fantasy that included science fiction elements and vice versa. In the years since, my stance on the matter has changed considerably, but, when I first read McCaffrey's introduction, I wasn't sure what to think about it. My confusion was amplified once I started to read the novel, which, on the face of it, very much seems like a fantasy novel. Nowadays, I'd call it a "secret sci-fi" novel – one where the characters don't realize the science fictional underpinnings of the world they inhabit.

Dragonflight tells the tale of Lessa, the daughter of the rulers of Ruatha Hold, whose parents were killed in a coup led by a usurper called Fax. Lessa had escaped death after experiencing a premonition of danger and now lives as a menial laborer, plotting the downfall of the man who slew her family. Meanwhile, F'lar, a dragonrider, travels to the court of Fax at High Reaches Hold, seeking a woman who could "impress" – mentally bond – with the soon-to-be-born queen dragon. Without such a "weyrwoman," the queen will die and, with her, the dragons themselves. 

This is a terrible fate, because dragonriders, we learn, exist to fight against the Thread, an alien enemy that descends from the sky every couple of centuries to bedevil the inhabitants of Pern. Fax, however, does not believe the Thread will return and thus he sees little cause for concern when F'lar discovers that there's no woman in High Reaches Hold. F'lar then wonders if perhaps he might have more success if he were to travel to Ruatha Hold, whose inhabitants were once reputed to have had families with "Weyr blood." Unsurprisingly, the former ruling family of the hold, believed to be extinct, had such blood. Believed to be extinct, since Lessa still lives …

My brief synopsis, I hope, isn't unfair to the overall story of Dragonflight, because I certainly don't mean it to be. Rather, my intention is simply to highlight the ways in which its plot resembles many of the elements common to fantasy literature: a usurper, the last survivor of a royal family living in obscurity, the imminent arrival of an ancient enemy, ancestral powers, and of course dragons. In its form and presentation, Dragonflight is largely indistinguishable from many of the stories I write about in this series. Again, that's not a criticism, merely an observation and one I bring up because of the way that "fantasy" and "science fiction" are so often set at odds with one another. 

In any case, I enjoyed Dragonflight at the time, though I never read any further books in the Pern series, though I occasionally considered doing so. If any readers have any thoughts on the matter, I'd love to hear them.

The Vaults of sha-Arthan

A few people have asked me for more details of the campaign setting I mentioned during my recent interview. Called The Vaults of sha-Arthan, it's an exotic science fantasy setting explicitly modeled on Jorune and Tékumel but intended to be much more "user friendly" and accessible. Rules-wise, it's based on Old School Essentials, with unique character classes, spells, monsters, and magic items. The classes are

• Adept: A skilled user of psychic disciplines
• Scion: An adventuring aristocrat, equally adept at combat and intrigue
• Sorcerer: A master of arcane arts
• Warrior: An accomplished combantant
• +3 Nonhuman Classes

The world of sha-Arthan (which means "true world" in an ancient tongue) is one filled with sclerotic, decadent empires, one of which – Inba Iro – was recently conquered and its venerable throne seized. Though the new rulers, from an upstart frontier kingdom, have largely attempted to maintain the old hierarchies without interruption, cracks have nevertheless begun to appear. Hoary traditions once considered inviolable are now being questioned, including exploration of the Vaults beneath the capital city of da-Imer. 

Many large settlements of sha-Arthan are built atop subterranean structures known Vaults. According to common belief, the Vaults are the original home of Man. They are "vast deeps" from which the Litany of the Forgotten states the Makers came, before even the First Cycle and the establishment of the Empire of the Light of Kulvu. Entering them, let alone looting them of their reputed treasures, is a great sacrilege in most civilized realms – or was until the conquest of Inba Iro. 

Characters begin the campaign as one of the brave souls recruited to explore the Vault beneath da-Imer, despite the taboos against it. They must contend with not only the dangers they surely exist beneath the city but also factions above that seek to help or hinder their progress for their own ends. As time goes on, I expect the characters will become more actively involved with these factions, in addition to traveling to other locales on sha-Arthan and unraveling the mysteries of the world.

In all likelihood, I'll start refereeing The Vaults of sha-Arthan sometime in July or August 2021. Ideally, it'll be a weekly online campaign, like my existing House of Worms campaign. However, it's also possible that I'll be running a play-by-post campaign in parallel, as a way to develop the setting further. I'm a firm believer in learning through play when it comes to setting design. While I already know quite a few high-level details of sha-Arthan, there's a lot more I haven't yet decided – and will only decide once I've had a chance to referee the campaign.

The Vaults of sha-Arthan is an exotic fantasy setting with lots of science fictional elements. It's a chance for me to play with many ideas I've been tinkering with for years but in a completely new context that draws on my years of experience refereeing Tékumel. I'm very excited about it.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Back in September, I was a guest on Dan and Paul's Wandering DMs channel and had a very good time. Apparently, they enjoyed it just as much as I did, because they've asked me to return tomorrow, June 6, 2021 at 1pm EDT. 

This time around, we'll be chatting about the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, particularly as it pertains to roleplaying games. This is a topic very near and dear to my heart, so I feel confident in saying the conversation should be a good one. Though I can't be certain what specific topics we'll discuss, I imagine The Temple of the Frog, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and Tékumel will all come up, as will The Vaults of sha-Arthan setting I've been working on the last few weeks. 

If any of that piques your interest, consider tuning in tomorrow afternoon.