A Very Real Debt

Though this blog has, since its inception nearly eighteen years ago, been a staunch advocate for recognizing and celebrating the debt Dungeons & Dragons owes to pulp fantasy literature, there can be no doubt, despite the protestations of some (including myself, from time to time), that it also owes a significant debt to J. R. R. Tolkien, born on this day in 1892. That debt is not merely a matter of surface details, such as the presence of elves, dwarves, or halflings, nor even of familiar narrative trappings like ancient evils and lost kingdoms. Rather, Tolkien’s influence runs deeper, shaping expectations about the coherence of secondary worlds, the moral weight of history, and the idea that fantasy settings might possess an internal logic and gravitas extending far beyond the immediate needs of any single adventure.

Even when early role-playing games diverged from Tolkien’s sensibilities – or, in some cases, reacted against them – they did so in dialog with a vision of fantasy he helped to define. The very act of distinguishing pulp fantasy from Tolkienian (or "high") fantasy implicitly acknowledges the latter as a point of reference. On Tolkien’s birthday, then, it seems appropriate to set aside old debates long enough to acknowledge that, however indirect or contested it may sometimes be, his influence on Dungeons & Dragons and the broader hobby is both real and enduring.

Happy birthday, Professor Tolkien!

REPOST: The Emperor of Dreams

[The original version of this post appeared more than four years ago. I thought, in light of this month's theme, that it might be worthwhile to revisit it, since the documentary I discuss really is topnotch and deserves to be more widely seen —JDM]

Immense fan though I am of both H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, when it comes to the writers of pulp fantasy, there can be no question that my favorite remains Clark Ashton Smith. Precisely why this is so is somewhat difficult to say, but, were I forced to nail it down, I would say that its a combination of Smith's incantatory language and the overwhelming sense of melancholy that pervades so much of his work. I tend toward the melancholic myself, which no doubt explains the powerful hold so many of Smith's stories exercise over my imagination. Even more powerful than that, however, is his ability to transport the reader to other worlds wholly unlike our own. Whereas both Lovecraft and Howard could be called, to varying degrees, "realists," which is to say, writers whose tales are grounded in the real world, Smith's stories are very often pure fantasies with little or no connection to mundane existence whatsoever.

Interestingly, this is a point that is also made in The Emperor of Dreams, a 2018 documentary about the life and work of the Bard of Auburn. Written and directed by Darin Coelho Spring and released through Hippocampus Press, the film is simply delightful – everything I could have hoped for in a documentary of this kind. At slightly less than two hours in length, The Emperor of Dreams is able to take its time, allowing Smith's story to unfold at its own pace rather than being rushed. There are sections devoted to every period of Smith's life, from his precocious youth to his adulthood as a pulp fantasy writer to his later life as a sculptor and doyen of the growing field of science fiction and fantasy. Watching this, one truly gets a picture of the whole of Smith's remarkable life, aided by the careful selection of still and moving photography of people and places important to him and his development as one of the great outsider artists of the 20th century.

Equally important to the success of The Emperor of Dreams are the reflections and commentaries on Smith by scholars and admirers, starting with Harlan Ellison, who credits Smith's "The City of the Singing Flame" with putting him on the path of becoming a writer. Also interviewed are Donald Sydney-Fryer, who actually met Smith; Ron Hilger, Scott Connors, and S.T. Joshi, among many others (like the psychedelic artist Skinner). Their thoughts and reminiscences about Smith are insightful and at times touching and they do much to elevate the documentary above a mere recounting of the events of Smith's life and times (however valuable that information is). The Emperor of Dreams is thus a celebration of Clark Ashton Smith and his evocations of the weird in poetry, fiction, and art more broadly.

I already knew a fair amount about Smith's life and works, but I still learned a great deal about him from this film. I knew, for example, that Smith had been a protégé of the Bohemian poet George Sterling, but I did not know that their ultimate falling out occurred as a Smith's writing "The Abominations of Yondo" which Sterling considered unworthy of his talent. Likewise, I had never heard the story of how Smith first took up sculpting or had rejected high school in favor of educating himself by reading books in the Auburn Public Library instead. The movie is filled with such details, along with stories told about him by his stepson that only add to my appreciation of the man. There's even an audio recording of Smith reciting some of his own poetry. If only there had been film footage of something similar!

If you're at all interested in Clark Ashton Smith's life, The Emperor of Dreams is well worth a watch. I somehow did not know it existed until just a few days ago, but am I ever glad that I corrected this lacuna in my education. Very good stuff!

RIP Tim Kask (1949—2025)

Multiple sources report that Tim Kask, TSR’s first full-time employee, died on December 30 at the age of 76 after a short illness. 

Although I conducted a three-part interview with Mr Kask in the early days of this blog, I would not claim to have known him personally, much less well. Our direct interactions were limited to a handful of online exchanges and one particularly memorable encounter at GameholeCon several years ago, during a late-night session of Béthorm, the Tékumel RPG, refereed by its designer and artist, Jeff Dee. For the most part, I knew Tim Kask, as so many of us did, through his work and that work was substantial. As editor of The Strategic Review and, later, the first editor of Dragon magazine, he played a crucial role in shaping the early voice and direction of the roleplaying hobby.

Kask’s passing is another reminder that time continues its steady advance and that we are increasingly losing those who helped create and sustain the hobby we enjoy today. It is for this reason that I encourage anyone who has ever loved a roleplaying game to reach out to its creators and let them know what their work has meant to you. I have done so on several occasions and those messages have invariably been met with kindness and gratitude. With the loss of yet another figure from the hobby’s formative years, it feels more important than ever to make that effort while we still can.

The Ensorcellment of January

Clark Ashton Smith occupies a peculiar and sometimes uneasy place in the history of fantasy literature. He is neither obscure nor widely celebrated, frequently cited yet rarely dwelt upon. For many readers, he exists at the margins of awareness: a friend of Lovecraft, a regular contributor to Weird Tales, a stylist whose prose is admired in quotation more often than his stories are read in full. Yet those of us who do venture deeply into his work quickly discover something far more imposing. Smith’s imagination is vast, luxuriant, and final, as though one had strayed into a world already immeasurably old, already in decline, and wholly indifferent to human ambition or consolation.

Smith was a poet before he was a fantasist and that origin is, I think, essential to understanding his work. His fiction bears the unmistakable stamp of a writer for whom language was not merely a means of conveying a narrative but a source of power and pleasure in its own right. His tales linger over sorcery, extinction, voluptuous cruelty, and the slow unraveling of civilizations that have exhausted their last illusions. Zothique’s dying earth, Hyperborea’s sardonic barbarism, and Averoigne’s sensuous medievalism are linked less by genre than by sensibility – a worldview in which beauty and horror are inseparable and where cosmic immensity inspires not only dread but a dry, almost amused fatalism. Smith’s audience has always been comparatively small, but his influence has quietly seeped into fantasy, horror, and even roleplaying games that prize atmosphere, decadence, and the poetry of ruin over straightforward heroics and tidy resolutions.

The Ensorcellment of January will be a month-long exploration of Smith’s life, work, and legacy. Like The Shadow over August before it, this series is intended neither as hagiography nor as corrective, but rather as an effort to better understand a creator whose contributions to fantasy literature are both substantial and too often overlooked. Longtime readers of this blog already know of my fondness for older, stranger currents of fantasy and horror, works shaped as much by language as by plot, by implication rather than exposition, and by a fascination with time, decay, and forgotten worlds. In that regard, Smith’s influence is widespread, even when it goes unrecognized.

Smith’s legacy, like the man himself, resists easy classification. He was a friend and correspondent of both H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, yet his sensibility remained distinctly his own. He was deeply pessimistic but never humorless, luxuriant in style yet frequently merciless in outcome. This series, therefore, aims to honor that complexity. Over the course of January, I’ll be drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources in an effort to present a clearer picture of who Clark Ashton Smith was and why his work matters within the broader history of fantasy and weird fiction.

The Ensorcellment of January is therefore less a survey or reassessment than a sustained act of attention. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be returning to Smith’s stories, poems, and letters, sometimes to analyze them and sometimes simply to admire them. I’ll share my own reflections along the way, but my central concern will be understanding why I believe Smith continues to speak so powerfully to certain sensibilities and why his work still surfaces, unexpectedly, across contemporary fantasy. This is not an attempt to rescue Smith from obscurity so much as an invitation to linger with him awhile, to listen closely to a voice that remains singular in its cadences and uncompromising in its vision. If you’re willing to slow down and let the spell take hold, I can think of no better time than the month of Clark Ashton Smith's birth for such enchantments.

REPOST: Retrospective: Dwellers of the Forbidden City

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Articles of Dragon: "How Taxes Take Their Toll"

I've written before about my affection for Arthur Collins, who wrote a couple dozen or so articles in the pages of Dragon during the period when I was regularly reading the magazine. Collins was, in my opinion, a perfect writer for the Silver Age of D&D, because he understood the burgeoning desire on the part of many players and (especially) referees for increased setting detail while never losing sight of the fact that the game is supposed to be fun. That is, he wasn't interested in detail for detail's sake but in using it to create a richer and more immersive setting for playing fantasy adventures – at least that's how I read his articles back in the mid-80s.

An example of what I'm talking about is his article, "How Taxes Take Their Toll," which appeared in issue #95 (March 1985). Taking the form of a mock interview between Collins and His Excellency, Algoras Stanheort, Chancellor of the Exchequer, serving his Royal Majesty, Cynefyr, Bretwalda of Feldren, the purpose of the article is to discuss taxes in the context of a fantasy RPG campaign. Collins had already briefly touched upon this in his "The Making of a Mileu" article to which I linked above. There, he briefly enumerated some of the taxes characters might encounter and how they might be used in play, but that was just a passing discussion rather than the article's focus.

Here, though, he devotes the entirety of the article to the topic of taxes and does so in a way that's both practical and humorous. The humor comes from the responses of the character of Algoras Stanheort to the questions Collins puts to him in his "interview." Stanheort comes across as a high-handed aristocrat who clearly loves his job as chief collector of revenue. Consider, for example, this exchange:

DM: That's an awful lot of taxes to load on the people's backs, is it not Your Excellency?

AS: If Providence had not intended for the people to bear such expenses upon their backs, then they should not have had such broad backs upon which to bear them, think you not? (At this point His Excellency permitted himself a chuckle.)

There are many more examples of this sort of thing throughout the interview, such as Stanheort's use of a variety of increasingly ridiculous names for Collins in his capacity as representative of Dragon – "Sir Broadsheet," "Master Must-ask-about-all," "My Lord of Many Questions," etc. If nothing else, it makes for an enjoyable read.

The real meat of the article – and the reason I remember it – consists of insight into all the little taxes, tolls, and tariffs applied to goods, services, and privileges within the Kingdom of Feldren. There are consumption taxes, market taxes, alien taxes, hearth taxes, land taxes, church tithes, and many more. Stanheort talks about them all, providing both their cost and the in-setting justification for them, much to Collins's dismay, as all these fees pile up. It's almost like a Monty Python skit or perhaps something out of Yes, Minister and I still find it amusing today.

I fear I may not have done the article justice. I would not be surprised if many of you, upon reading this, will be wondering, "What use is this to me? Why would I ever want to include so many taxes in my campaign?" The answer is that you probably wouldn't, nor do I think Collins would recommend you do so either, if his dialog with the Chancellor of the Exchequer is any indication. Rather, I see the purpose of the article as drawing attention to the various ways the referee can use taxes and fees both to describe a setting and, more importantly, to make things difficult for the characters – or, if you prefer, to use local laws and customs (pun intended) as springboards for adventures and roleplaying interactions.

When I read the article for the first time, I was quite taken with it and set about drawing up a list of taxes for my Emaindor setting. As was so often the case with that setting, I probably went overboard with the detail – I was fifteen at the time – but I had fun doing it. I suspect that, reluctantly, my players migh have said the same, since I can recall at least one incident, in the city of Zijwek, when the characters were found to have failed to pay an entrance tax to the capital, a tax they didn't even know existed, let alone that they were obligated to pay. The resulting legal negotiations, not to mention a chase through the back alleys of the city, served as the catalyst for a series of scenarios involving the local thieves' guild (and the characters' vow to never return to Zijwek).

Good times!

Pulp Fantasy Library: What the Moon Brings

H. P. Lovecraft’s “What the Moon Brings” is another very short work and, though imperfect in many respects, it nonetheless offers a concentrated expression of ideas and techniques that would later come to define his mature style. More a prose poem than a conventional short story, it lacks both plot and character development, relying instead on mood, imagery, and suggestion. In just a few paragraphs, Lovecraft attempts – if not entirely successfully – to evoke a sense of antiquity, cosmic revelation, and existential unease by presenting a world transformed not through action or violence, but through the simple act of seeing it under an unfamiliar light.

Like many of the works I've been discussing for the past few months, "What the Moon Brings" was written during a transitional phase in Lovecraft’s career, when he was moving away from the imitative Gothic and Poe-esque tales of his youth and toward more experimental and personal forms of expression. This was the period when Lovecraft was most deeply influenced by the fantasy of Lord Dunsany, whose dreamlike narratives and mythic landscapes encouraged him to explore atmosphere and symbolism over more conventional storytelling. “What the Moon Brings” reflects this influence, both in its lyrical prose and in its emphasis on a journey into an altered reality. The piece was never submitted to commercial magazines, likely because its extreme brevity, lack of dialog, and absence of a traditional narrative would have made it unsuitable for such venues but well suited to Lovecraft’s ongoing work in amateur journalism. Instead, first appeared in The National Amateur in May 1923, the very same issue in which "Hypnos" also appeared.

Told in the first person, “What the Moon Brings” follows an unnamed narrator as he wanders through his garden by moonlight and gradually enters a surreal, dreamlike landscape. Crossing a stream and an arched stone bridge, he discovers that the garden has become endless, its walls replaced by trees, grotesque stone idols, and drifting lotus blossoms whose dead, staring faces urge him onward. The stream widens into a river and finally opens onto the shore of a sea, where the sinking moon reveals the ruins of an ancient, sunken city, a place where all the dead have gathered. As the tide ebbs further, the narrator glimpses the basalt crown of a colossal and monstrous idol rising beneath the waves, a revelation so terrifying that he flees by plunging into the shallows and swimming among the drowned streets and corpses of the dead, seemingly choosing death over the madness promised by the greater horror he has seen.

Quite obviously, “What the Moon Brings” engages many of the central themes of Lovecraft's later work. Most prominent is the idea of revelation as horror. The moonlight does not merely illuminate the landscape but strips away comforting illusions, exposing a deeper and more ancient reality. The notion that knowledge itself can be terrifying would become a cornerstone of HPL’s cosmic horror. The submerged ruins and half-glimpsed monstrosities anticipate later images of lost and sunken cities, most notably R’lyeh in “The Call of Cthulhu,” while the journey into an uncanny realm recalls the dream-voyages of stories such as "Celephaïs," and “The White Ship,” and foreshadows The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Stylistically, the piece aligns with Lovecraft’s contemporaneous prose poems, like “Nyarlathotep” and “Ex Oblivione,” where imagery and atmosphere take precedence over narrative. Together, these works suggest Lovecraft’s aspiration, at least in this period, to position himself within a broader tradition of decadent and symbolist literature rather than as a mere writer of genre fiction.

In the context of Lovecraft’s larger body of work, “What the Moon Brings” is minor, but it might be said to serve as a compact statement of his evolving worldview. It bridges his early fascination with dream fantasy and his later commitment to cosmic horror, demonstrating how the two modes might coexist. That's probably its greatest strength and the main reason I'd recommend reading it today, even if he achieves similar ends more successfully in other stories, many of which I've linked to above.

An Old School (Essentials) Christmas Gift

Over at Advanced Grognardia, I've offered up a small Christmas gift in the form of a new version of an old monster from the early days of the blog. Enjoy!

Merry Christmas!

Pulp Fantasy Library: Hypnos

First published in the May 1923 issue of The National Amateur, H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “Hypnos” is one of his more obscure works, seldom chosen for inclusion in anthologies and rarely discussed in detail. At just a few pages in length, it lacks the narrative sweep of his later, more famous tales. Nevertheless, it occupies an important place in Lovecraft’s development as a writer. “Hypnos” is not a story of cosmic horror but rather one about aspiration, beauty, and the perils of reaching beyond human limits.

“Hypnos” is a first-person narrative recounted by an unnamed sculptor. He confesses his terror of sleep and explains that he is writing down his experiences before they drive him irretrievably mad, regardless of how others might judge his account. Years earlier, he encountered a mysterious man in a railway station, a figure whose “immense, sunken, and widely luminous eyes” instantly marked him as a being of singular importance. In that moment, the narrator knew he had found his destined companion – indeed his first and only true friend. He also believed he glimpsed in those eyes the long-sought secrets of hidden cosmic truths.

An intense partnership quickly forms. By day, the narrator sculpts his companion again and again, striving to capture his uncanny features; by night, the two embark on shared dream-journeys that carry them far beyond ordinary human perception. Through the combined use of sleep, drugs, and rigorous experimentation, they pass through alien realms and successive barriers of sensation and awareness. Over time, the companion grows increasingly exalted and ambitious, speaking of using their power of dream-transcendence to rule the universe itself. The narrator recoils from this vision, denouncing it as reckless and blasphemous hubris. Then, during one perilous expedition, they traverse a vast, ineffable void until the narrator reaches a final threshold he cannot cross, while his companion passes beyond it alone.

When the narrator awakens in the physical world, he waits in dread for his friend’s return. The companion eventually wakes as well, but is profoundly shaken and will say only that they must avoid sleep at all costs. With the help of drugs, the two struggle to remain awake, for whenever they succumb to sleep they seem to age rapidly and are tormented by horrific nightmares the narrator refuses to describe. Inevitably, the effort fails. One night, the companion falls into a deep, unresponsive sleep and cannot be awakened. The narrator shrieks, faints, and later regains consciousness to find police and neighbors gathered around him, insisting that no such man ever existed. All that remains is a single sculpted bust in his room, bearing a chilling Greek inscription: ΥΠΝΟΣ (Hypnos).

Whether “Hypnos” is another tale of Lovecraft's Dreamlands cycle depends, as always, on how one views these works within the larger context of HPL's oeuvre. Regardless, there is a sense in which it clearly differs from other dream-adjacent stories. Unlike, say, the stories of Randolph Carter, which treat dreams as a strange but navigable places, “Hypnos” instead presents dreams as perilous thresholds. They are not realms for adventure but gateways to truths that the human mind can barely endure. The story thus lacks the whimsical or romantic qualities found in Lovecraft’s more overtly fantastical dream tales, replacing them with a tone of somber fatalism.

“Hypnos” obviously reflects Lovecraft’s deep admiration for classical art and his belief in absolute esthetic standards. The sculptor’s obsession with ideal forms mirrors Lovecraft’s own reverence for the art of antiquity, but the story complicates this admiration by linking artistic perfection to isolation and inhumanity. To approach the ideal too closely is to abandon the world of ordinary people. The sculptor’s triumph is ultimately inseparable from the loss of his friend (and his sanity).

In terms of Lovecraft’s broader body of work, “Hypnos” is another story that falls within the period of his transition as a writer. Like "The Other Gods," it anticipates the cosmic horror of his later fiction, in which reality is layered and humanity occupies a lowly, precarious rung. Here, horror lies not in malevolent entities but in the discovery that higher states of existence are real and fundamentally incompatible with human life. At the same time, "Hypnos" story retains a personal, almost confessional quality that would largely vanish from the more explicitly cosmic horror tales for which Lovecraft is now best known.

What I think makes “Hypnos” particularly striking is its asymmetry. The narrator and his friend embark on their quest together, but only one of them remains at its conclusion – assuming he was ever there in the first place. This uneven distribution of insight and endurance is a recurring motif in Lovecraft’s fiction, where knowledge isolates and enlightenment (if such is the word) comes at the cost of connection. The narrator’s fate is not madness in the theatrical sense but resignation. He gains a life spent fearing sleep, haunted by what he has glimpsed and by what he has lost because of it.

Though minor in scale, “Hypnos” is a revealing story. It distills Lovecraft’s ambivalence toward transcendence, capturing both his yearning for something beyond the material world and his conviction that such yearning is ultimately destructive. In doing so, it offers a quiet but potent expression of the philosophical pessimism that underlies even his most extravagant cosmic horrors. It's probably for that reason that I have considerable fondness for the story and consider it a minor masterpiece of HPL's fiction.