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Adventure in a Place of Unholy Shadows: A Review of Crypts and Things

Adventure in a Place of Unholy Shadows: A Review of Crypts and Things

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Screen Shot 2013-09-25 at 10.39.17 Back in the 70s, when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), I spent a long time wanting a ruleset that would let me recreate the sort of sword and sorcery that I was reading back then.

I wanted to play a game that caught the atmosphere of Robert E Howard’s Conan, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories. I wanted to adventure in a place of unholy shadows, where magic was scary and thrilling and men with swords sought lost treasures in glittering towers where old gods and dark secrets waited.

Clearly, D&D was not quite what I was looking for. The white box contained an unholy mishmash of Tolkien, bits of medieval history, and a weird variation of Vancian magic from the Dying Earth which, while awesomely powerful, was not very scary or, well, magical. Magic items were as common as if they came in cereal boxes. And what was with it with those cleric guys and the undead?

The setting of D&D did not look like any fantasy world I had read about, but it was clearly influenced by a number of them. There were thieves that might have been Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. There was a barbarian character class in an issue of White Dwarf that might, if you squinted, have resembled something like Conan.

But D&D did not quite hit the mark. There were also elves and halflings and dwarves and all manner of other things that did not exist in the S&S universes of my particular dreams. There were echoes of Howard and Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith, but they were smudged over with bits of Tolkien and a kind of high fantasy.

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The Devil in the Details: A Review of Lawyers in Hell

The Devil in the Details: A Review of Lawyers in Hell

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Lawyers in Hell-smallLawyers in Hell (Heroes in Hell, Volume 12)
Created by Janet Morris, edited by Janet and Chris Morris, and written “with the diabolical assistance of the damnedest writers in perdition.”
Perseid Press (456 pages, June 8, 2011, $19.95 in trade paperback)

This is volume twelve in the most clever and interesting shared-universe series I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Lawyers in Hell actually precedes Rogues in Hell and Dreamers in Hell, both of which I previously reviewed here. And like those other volumes, this one is also outstanding.  So let me start off with a bit of info on what’s going on this time around in Hell, among the characters drawn from the pages of history, legend, folklore, and mythology.

Hell is a twisted, ironic echo of life on Earth. Here the mighty have fallen, though they retain some delusion of grandeur. Here the lowly have risen in rank, though they are no more than toys for Satan to play with. Everyone in Hell is HSM’s (His Satanic Majesty’s) pawn, his puppet.

Erra is the Babylonian god of mayhem and plague, and rumors of Erra and his 7 Sibitti enforcers running amok in Hell are spreading like hellfire. They have been sent by Heaven to audit Hell, to enforce punishment equally. They are there to make damned sure that every damned soul in Hell “receives injustice justly. Or something like that,” to quote author Nancy Asire. “Lawyers are shaking in their boots or salivating over their opportunities.”

As the title of this volume suggests, each story/chapter revolves around legal battles being fought, court cases being heard, and lawsuits being drawn up. Everyone in Hell wants out of Hell and the damned are going through whatever legal system there can be said to exist in Hell. Where’s Perry Mason when you need him? I don’t think he’s in Hell. Not yet, at any rate.

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Gateway Drug: Excalibur

Gateway Drug: Excalibur

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Excalibur poster-smallFirst, I should say how delighted I am to be blogging here at Black Gate. Not only are the companions first-rate, but I’m thrilled to be able to talk about some of my favorite things: heroic fantasy, sword and sorcery, and mythology.

I came into fantasy the way a lot of people did: via Star Wars. Prior to that, I read almost exclusively hard science fiction, where the aliens and the spaceships were the point of the story, not window-dressing. But among the many other things Star Wars did for me in 1977 was nudging me into those realms of magic where not everything was concrete (or metal or plastic).

Once inspired, I read The Lord of the Rings like everyone did, although I confess that the microscopic font in the paperbacks almost scared me off, as well as the textbook-like appendices. Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan comic led me to the original Howard stories, which I loved. But the thing that finally turned me into a bona fide, full-bore fantasy fan was Excalibur.

It came out the Summer after I graduated from high school. Much like music before Elvis, unless you know what fantasy movies were like before this, you can’t appreciate what an eye-opener this film was. Up until then, the only fantasy films around were family-friendly knock-offs of Star Wars, all aiming for that same market and all telling essentially the same story of a simple young man who sets off on a great, mostly chaste and bloodless, adventure.

Excalibur didn’t just boast sexy girls, it featured real sex. The battles were were filled with impaled knights and severed, blood-spurting limbs. The mysticism had the dark, heavy quality of church liturgy, nothing like the breezy simplicity of the Force. And in place of the serene Obi-Wan Kenobi or Gandalf, you had a Merlin who was half sage, half clown, and never as smart as he thought he was.

But the visual depiction of King Arthur was probably the single thing that changed my whole idea of fantasy.

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Monster Island

Monster Island

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Monster Island Runequest-smallI’ve been spending a lot of time on Monster Island for the last few weeks, wandering its haunted beaches, exploring its lovely hidden grottoes, and fleeing from its carnivorous apes.

This is hands down one of the finest sandbox gaming products I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. From what writer Pete Nash tells me, there may be other sandbox products coming from Design Mechanism and I will definitely be at the front of the line when they’re released.

But what, you ask, is a sandbox gaming product? Well, a lot of adventures are site-based. Take the most famous (and one of my least favorite) dungeons of all time, Tomb of Horrors. It doesn’t matter where you put Tomb of Horrors, really, because the entire product is about the dungeon and its contents.

Monster Island is a very different animal. First, it isn’t out to arbitrarily kill the players. Second, it isn’t just one adventure, it’s a campaign book – but not one that’s a linked set of adventures or dungeons. Instead, it describes an entire setting. It provides a host of adventure sites, setting specific monsters, random encounter charts, thumbnail adventures, background details, and the like.

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Jack Williamson, Lin Carter and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Jack Williamson, Lin Carter and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The Humanoids-smallMordicai Knode and Tim Callahan are making me look bad.

I know, what else is new. But seriously, these two have taken on the project of a lifetime — reading every author in Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N (all 29) and reporting back in great detail every week at Tor.com.

I took on the project of a lazy Saturday afternoon: read their posts whenever I got around to it and report back here every two weeks or so. Sounded easy at the time. But Knode and Callahan still somehow managed to get way ahead of me. They’re relentless — since I last checked, they’ve covered Jack Williamson, Lin Carter, and John Bellairs, and meanwhile I’m still trying to figure out where the hell I left my copy of The Face in the Frost.

Okay, time to play a little catch-up. Let’s start with post 14 in the ongoing series, in which they tackle Jack Williamson’s classic SF novel, The Humanoids:

Mordicai: I’m just unclear on how it relates to Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, you could have a whole campaign about golems or Inevitables or Modrons and co-opt the plot from this book, but I think that is a stretch. Maybe the lesson you could learn from this book is that making hugely flawed characters is more interesting than making banal superhuman heroes who laugh in the face of danger and never give into the temptation to pry the ruby eyes out of the idol of Fraz-Urb’luu?

Tim: Yeah, I don’t see the Dungeons and Dragons link at all, and I am pretty darn sure Gary Gygax didn’t have any Modrons in mind when he generated his list of fave books. The Modrons are wonderful and all — who doesn’t like Rubik the Amazing Cube mashed up with Mr. Spock — but they aren’t central to early D&D. Or any D&D. Ever.

But, to be fair, Appendix N doesn’t specifically name The Humanoids as an influence, but mentions Jack Williamson in general. Probably his pulpier early stuff was what Gygax had had in mind. In retrospect, we should have read the Legion of Musketeers in Space with Falstaff and Friends book. But something called The Humanoids sounds like D&D from a distance. If you squint. And don’t read the back of the book.

Yeah, The Humanoids has nothing to do with D&D. Could have told you that. Guys, guys. You should have read our Jack Williamson feature last month. This is why we do this stuff.

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Wrath-Bearing Tree by James Enge

Wrath-Bearing Tree by James Enge

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The first time I saw a James Enge novel on the shelf of my local bookstore, I broke into a little dance of jubilation. I’d been reading Enge’s short stories about Morlock the Maker in the pages of Black Gate — this was when BG had literal paper pages — and it was news to me that Enge had made the leap from short fiction to novels.

The blurbs on Enge’s books all say some variation on this theme: you will find no other character in fantasy literature, or maybe in literature generally, who is like Morlock the Maker. He’s a traumatized combat veteran who’s still one of his world’s great ass-kickers, yet he’s also an enthusiastically geeky mad scientist. He’s a cynic who will risk all he has to protect innocence where he finds it. He’s wickedly funny, in fewer words of dialogue than should really be possible. Read around in Morlock’s world a while, and you feel pretty soon like you know him, but you can never guess what he’ll do next. A Morlock novel! Could anything be better?

Over the next few years, Enge followed Blood of Ambrose with This Crooked Way and The Wolf Age, and it turned out the one thing better than a Morlock novel was a whole trilogy of Morlock novels.

I loved the cranky old Morlock, the character whose curmudgeonliness sometimes verged on becoming a superpower, so I am still getting used to Enge’s new Tournament of Shadows trilogy about Morlock’s origin story, which began with A Guile of Dragons and now continues with Wrath-Bearing Tree. As a young man, our hero is every bit as odd, unpredictable, noble, hilarious, tragic, clear-eyed, and difficult as his future self, but he hasn’t yet put the damage on and become the ugly old man we loved in the short stories that became This Crooked Way.

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Night Winds by Karl Edward Wagner

Night Winds by Karl Edward Wagner

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Night Winds-small

“He’s evil incarnate! Stay away from him!”
— from Darkness Weaves

Long before the coiners of the term grimdark were born, Karl Edward Wagner was creating some of the most aggressively unheroic fantasy. There had always been a dark current to swords & sorcery from the genre’s beginnings in the 1930s with Robert E. Howard. But not even Michael Moorcock’s 1960s antiheroes prepared S&S fans for Wagner’s 1971 novel Darkness Weaves and its amoral mystic swordsman, Kane.

Six feet tall and “three hundred pounds of bone, sinew, and muscle,” Kane is cursed to live forever for rebelling against the god who created him. Peering out from his fiery red hair and beard, his blues eyes blaze with a killer’s fury — a warning to all who cross his path. Though a violent death can free him from his accursed immortality, he is determined to survive.

Over the course of three novels and seventeen stories, Kane plots and murders his way across continents and centuries. He is by turns a mighty sorcerer, a bandit lord and a lone wanderer. While it’s explicitly stated in one story that Kane is “seldom needlessly cruel,” he’s seldom sympathetic.

It’s in the two collections of short stories, Death Angel’s Shadow (which I reviewed last year at my site) and Night Winds, that Wagner crafted his greatest swords & sorcery. His novels, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade, and Darkness Weaves, all have their moments, but they don’t have the short, sharp, shock of the stories. While the books are memorably epic, the stories are fast-paced nightmares.

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Adventures On Film: Pan’s Labyrinth

Adventures On Film: Pan’s Labyrinth

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Heart of Summer Having panned Merlin some weeks back, it’s time to dive headlong into one of the best fantasy films of this century, and possibly one of the best, period.

Yes, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is that good. Director Guillermo del Toro, he of Hellboy fame, was clearly out to prove that given solid material, sufficient devotion, and a lack of Hollywood oversight, he could deliver a contender.

True, Pan does invite several divisive questions, such as why must contemporary filmed violence be so jarringly graphic? Del Toro loves jets of blood almost as much as that eternal child-man, Quentin Tarantino, and he indulges himself more than once along his tale’s labyrinthine path. But is it necessary?  Does the vivid bloodletting aid the narrative? Pan is a hybrid, true, a film about war and revolution, and such chronicles cannot easily avoid bloodshed. But as anyone who has ever seen Pan’s sewing and stitching scene can attest, this movie achieves prime “I can’t look!” status. It’s visceral; it hurts.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) also begs a second question, perhaps even more sinister: is it allowable to put a child (or child character) into such peril? Pan doesn’t pull its punches. Our heroine, young Ofelia (played with no affectation whatsoever by Ivana Baquero), is in mortal danger throughout this film, and unlike, say, Harry Potter or Buffy (Slayer of the Dentally Challenged Undead), there is no guarantee she will survive.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of John W. Campbell

Vintage Treasures: The Best of John W. Campbell

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The Best of John W Campbell-smallJohn W. Campbell is one of the most important figures in 20th Century science fiction and fantasy.

If Campbell’s name seems familiar, it’s no accident. He’s come up multiple times in this series so far. In my last article, The Best of Hal Clement, I noted that Clement’s heroes frequently quoted Campbell’s pulp heroes Morey and Wade, and that Clement had been discovered by Campbell in June 1942, when Campbell was editing Astounding Science-Fiction.

In my previous piece, on The Best of Jack Williamson, I also observed that Williamson had “survived the coming of Campbell,” by which I meant that he was one of the few authors talented enough to continue writing SF in the pulps after about 1939, when Campbell had re-made the entire field in his image.

I could go back through all the other articles in this series and see just how often Campbell comes up, but I think you get the point. In the first half of the 20th Century, science fiction existed almost solely in the magazines and Campbell dominated the field so thoroughly that the start of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” is usually marked by the year he began editing Astounding — the year he discovered writers like Robert Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Rey, and many others.

In his memoir, I, Asimov, Asimov called Campbell “the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely.”

But we’re not here to talk about Campbell the editor. We’re here to talk about Campbell the writer. And specifically, the eleven short stories he wrote between 1932 and 1939 collected in The Best of John W. Campbell.

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Andre Norton, Michael Moorcock and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Andre Norton, Michael Moorcock and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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stormbringerAnd so we come to two of the most influential and prolific fantasy writers of the 20th Century, Andre Norton and Michael Moorcock, as we follow intrepid literary explorers Mordicai and Tim Callahan on their voyage of discovery through Appendix N at Tor.com.

Tim and Mordicai have been none too gentle to some of the writers in Appendix N, including L. Sprague de Camp, Gardner Fox, and even Roger Zelazny. But in Norton and Moorcock, they find authors they can appreciate.

Here’s Tim on Michael Moorcock:

I read The Swords Trilogy and The Chronicles of Corum early, and they made an impact. They exploded inside my mind in a way I have never forgotten, even if I can’t remember many of the story details from any particular chapter… but I didn’t really feel like I tuned into Elric until halfway through the first reprint volume, when we get the four novellas of Stormbringer…

It’s classic Moorcock, in that imaginative and terrifyingly evocative way that I loved all those years ago when I first picked up The Swords Trilogy off a spinner rack in my hometown general store. Stormbringer begins with agents of chaos abducting Elric’s wife, and it takes off into the realm of mass warfare and conflicts with not-quite-dead-gods soon enough.

Moorcock aims for the mythic.

Read the complete article here.

Good to see a little love for classic sword & sorcery, but personally I don’t see a lot of direct influence from Elric on D&D — unless you count the section on powerful artifacts in the Dungeon Masters Guide, which clearly was conceived with weapons like Stormbringer in mind.

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