Appendix N

Weird Tales From The Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons - a book review

Revised and Expanded Edition

Edited by Peter Bebergal

(Disclosure - Strange Attractor Press sent me this for free, and I sped up the review because they are one of the groups behind the exhibition I am attending on Saturday. In other respects, I think and hope my review is accurate and indifferent.) (Also I don't usually do this and have too many books, please do not send me books).

Mark Schultz

The Fiction Of The Body And The Now

"'Then you are after the gem, too?'

'What else? I've had my plans laid for months, but you, I think, have acted on a sudden impulse, my friend."

- Tower of the Elephant

Intelligence, impulsivity and the language of immediate action; even pairs of heroes don’t discuss much what they have done, what they are doing or will do. A handful of words are all that’s required and the stories are short, and are better for it. All of a character must vibrate in a fist of paragraphs, a cupful of deeds, and spring from the page, immediate and clear.

In longer stories the same souls might feel like fools. They would need.. background, complex long-term relationships, god forbid, a socio-political viewpoint? (Some have a bit of this).

In a short story that only has enough room for immediate actions, those actions become the moral truth of the tale, something oddly similar to the opening games of a D&D group, where the 'Characters' barely exist yet, and the only real truths about them are; who will stick their hand in this jar, and who refuse? Who will be the first through the door and who will be right behind them? (and who will carefully be a long way behind them?). Who will be the first to suggest torturing that goblin, who first to provoke a foe and who first to negotiate? Who will run and who stand, should the day go awry? Action is the axis of a character, everything else just spins around their deeds.

Impulsivity, immediacy and atavism, but always with intelligence, sharp wits and keen senses. These stories are about things happening now. Too late! In the time it took you to read this sentence the Barbarian has killed a man and moved to another scene.

And they are of the body. These heroes have no extra-material powers and less manipulations. (Cugel, Elric and some others are a counterpoint). They are their bodies, which makes thought and action one. A strong strand of the genre, (if this is one), is the pleasure of having a body and doing things with it. The first and most precious object of a galaxy of things.

Mignola

Good Because They Are Great, Not Great Because They Are Good

"Suddenly the Mouser began to feel frightened, not for himself at all, but for the girl. Her terror was obviously intense, and yet she must be doing what she was doing - braving her "queer and fearesome grey giant" - for his sake and Fafhrd's. At all costs, he thought, she must be prevented from coming closer. It was wrong the she be subjected for one moment longer to such horribly intese terror." – Fritz Lieber, the Jewels in the Forest

It surprised me how relatively 'good' many of the heroes are. In large part these are self-interested thieves that defeat evil. The Grey Mouser enters the Tomb of Urgaan to steal its jewels, but, on witnessing a girl in danger, leaps out to aid her. In Tower of the Elephant, Conan’s emblematic tale and a holograph of the genre, he only kills one man, and the foe draws first. For the rest he fights animals, and the villain dies through magic power, delivered by the hero, but the vengeance of a slave. Conan climbs the tower ready to rob, to murder, a sorcerer, discovers what he thinks a demon, fears it, hears its tale, weeps for its sorrow and delivers its revenge. It’s not that he is 'good', but good results. Paul Andersons Hauk is a Dane, but not a murderey Viking, he fears the Ghoul his father has become, but ends up saving the community, with BRAWN, (the body! the body!). Tanith Lees Cyrion adventures for the pleasure of it, but defeats multiple evils and frees a city from terror. He has been promised jewels and there are tonnes for the taking;

"Cyrion opened the leather bag, and released the treasure on the square, for adults and children alike to play with.

Empty-handed as he came, Cyrion went away into the desert, under the stars." – Tanith Lee, a Hero at the Gates

In 'The Tower of Darkness', David Masons Marcus and Diana, (the only functional couple in these tales, and nearly the only sexual and romantic relationship), enter a city wearing the results of their last robbery, laden with ill gotten gains they are waylaid by vampires, defeat them and free the city. Manly Wade Wellmans Kardios washes up in a community of Giants, punches one in the face, then fights a cosmic horror in a cave to save them all. Why? For the adventure. Ramsey Campbells Ryre has too much sympathy for slaves and too much hatred for slavers, there would be no story if he didn't. Turjan of Miir is an amoral sorcerer, and barely the protagonist of his own tale, Vance was ever-cold to the touch, but the end of his tale is that a mis-made woman breaks out of her self-confinement and sets of to tell her own story. C.L. Moores Jiriel of Joiry comes the closest to having a complicated motivation and it leads her to victory and doom.

Elric really stands out as being a little shit. Instead of doing, he manipulates others, instead of doing directly, he schemes, instead of the (rare), but even-handed sexual relations of the others, he wants to bang his drugged up sister. He abandons allies, calls up demons. Worst of all, he bleats and complains(!) He is not even being wry and sardonic about it, he is actually whining. Astonishing. (Really Elrics life-story should have ended with him building a huge dungeon full of perverse traps and twisted moral lessons, then going into it, burying it for a few millennia and dying in it. He is the type for it.) Moorcock did set out to subvert our expectations and he does. His Elric is a perfect mirror in morality, relations and most importantly of all, in attitude of action, the way he lives in the world, to the real heroes. For if one thing defines a Sword and Sorcery hero, it is their willingness to take a BIG risk, right now, for a reward which may not be there - in doing so they often lose treasure, but some great evil is defeated and the world made safer. (Apart from Elric who is a whiney villain).

A touch of Beowulf; these tales are pseudo-stories of an imagined Pagan ethic, told by slippery types born into an urban world and a post-Christian morality. The heroes do not dream of 'good' and 'evil', but the soul of the story often does despite them. After all, who is likely to have blazing gems? Usually bad people. Well, they are written for us after all, and if we saw the morals of Antiquity in full, I do not think we would like them. Or buy the next issue. Fake Pagan Tales! Many such cases!

artist i don’t know

A World Of Things And Of The Tales Of Things

"It was woven from the tresses of dead women, which I took from their tombs at midnight, and steeped in the deadly wine of the upas tree, to give it strength." - Tower of the Elephant

It’s never just a rope. Or just a sword, (so many swords), or a gem, tower, mysterious powder, seeing-lens, magical orb, curious ring and more - it is where they come from. Yes there is an element of Flaubert;

"One who possesses so vast an accumulation of wealth is no longer like other men. While handling his riches he knows that he controls the total result of innumerable human efforts - as it were the life of nations drained by him and stored up, which he can pour forth at will."

But these objects are stories too, they are nearly words or poems of their own. Like the rope of Taurus the Nemedian, (and who knows if that story, or any of his stories, were true, but he had one for everything he used), they are like the threads of a multicoloured woolly jumper, and if you pull on the thread, the whole jumper tenses and shifts. So these little tales become windows into vast worlds, disposed with a sprinking of phrases. Always do greater mysteries loom and stranger adventures link, told not in general but through the substance of things. And Things are things we need in games. Especially in the verbal-near-infinity of natural language and immediate coherent use that makes up both the tools and tricks of Fairy Tales and the encyclopedialike engine of Dungeons and Dragons.

"'This meat is excellent,' said Kardios. 'What is it, Enek?'

'The hind foot of an elephant, if you know what elephants are.'

'We had them in Atlantis, for parades and for hauling stones and timbers, but I never ate elephant before.' Kardios took another mouthful. 'It’s as tender and juicy as fine pork.” - Manly Wade Wellman, Straggler from Atlantis

If there was a map of these rare connected places, it would be different, so again the game must differ from the tale. For the world of a game must be systematised, with concrete places, and things between those places. In truth the world of sword and sorcery, even of the big sagas of linked tales, tends to be of hidden cubism, which is what these artefacts, actually are; little windows, pleasing fragments of a larger reality, calling you ever-on, but seen only through these tiny gaps. The act of going ever-on, belongs to the game, not the tale. In that and that alone are we alike the heroes.

Strangeness

Lovecraft and the Unknown

Good god there is a lot of Lovecraft. I mean there is a lot of Lovecraft even beyond his own stories. He exploded over the scene like a slime-volcano. Never again will we have just an ancient city or mysterious elf-land, now it is to be an ELDRITCH city EONS (not millennia) old, and a DREAMLIKE OTHERWORLD.

While always inventive, relatively few of the writers can manage Peak Strangeness, and indeed if we crossed over only a little more into surrealism, fairy-tale or impressionism, the tales would become unworkable, no longer moving through the gateways between a known and unknown world, where the logic and experience of one can be taken into the other, and thence make it actionable, but would become only dreams, which can be experienced, but not used.

Lovecraft’s epochal, cyclopean supers-strange mega-millennia old cities are actually pretty hard to explore in-game. They can be explored in a story because in that story the sheer weight and streamlike bubbling intensity of the flowing visions of sculptures, buildings, half-seen horrors, vapours, lights, sounds and wild imaginings, makes the procedure of exploration more a poem-of-things. (I do not say it’s impossible, only that it is hard and likely less rewarding, over time, than you might imagine. After seeing and experiencing six or seven unutterably strange visions, glancing over three or four globs of greenish tarnished gold that might or might not be tools or treasures of a forgotten eon, running from one squamous blob into a winged tentacle thing; it can get uninteresting.)

We generally don't want to, and perhaps can't "explore" the true-unknown. If we knew about it, it wouldn’t be unknown for a start. But more; human exploration is driven by human needs from the known and understood human world. You explore to get stuff or knowledge that means something in the world you know. If there is nothing human where you are going, exploration will be limited, and more an expression of existential will than anything else.

We explore the Antarctic, and we explore the moon, and via probe, the planets, but there is as-yet, nothing human there, so we don't actually explore that much or with great intensity. As we learn more, and go more, slowly, over time, we might discover not the places, but ways of seeing and using them that make them fungible to human culture. Then, we will accelerate, going more and more, learning more and leaving more human residuum behind in those strange places, till they become just places, not boundaries or wonders. The true frontier will have moved on, to the edge of our sight, where it fades into black.

But really when we explore, in the cool fun way that everyone thinks of when they want to play 'explorer' we actually want to go to places humanity has already been, and where humans have done a lot of human things, (like mining gold, building giant stone heads, setting up the recruitment of hot priestesses, etc), and we want to 'discover' those places - places full of human stuff. (And then possibly steal it and take it home).

As Rumsfeld said; there is the known unknown and then the unknown unknown. Or as the meme sayeth;

Dusanay and the Super-Real

Dunsanay is perhaps the most brilliant and inventive of all the writers shown and his tale 'The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth', begins with a primal alliance of folktale and epic; a moving fortress sending forth evil dreams, its only counter, a blade hidden in the spine of a dragon-crocodile. The only way to defeat the crocodile is to bait it for three days straight, smacking its vulnerable nose, without being eaten, till it starves. Then to melt the beast, draw forth the steel, and sharpen in upon one of its eyes, the other eye being affixed to the pommel, where it will watch for dangers.

It's almost too good to be D&D.

Then a march through a wonderous nightmare castle, meeting layers and layers and layers of fairytale guardians and satanic inhabitants. Like most of these tales the journey is too linear to make a good dungeon on its own, but that's easy to adapt, in concept at least, it is also vastly and beautifully strange, surreal, heightened. A potent blend of hyper-theatre, opera, and perhaps awareness of very early film and photography? Perhaps early animation?

"Thereat the black hair that hung over the face of the spider parted to left and right, and the spider frowned; then the hair fell back into place, and hid everything except the sin of the little eyes which went on gleaming lustfully in the dark. But before Leothric could reach him, he climbed away with his hands, going up by one of his ropes to a lofty rafter, and there sat, growling."

This, surely is a Silly Symphonies spider?

C.L. Moore - A Map Of Hell.

"She crossed a brook that talked to itself in darkness with that queer murmuring that came so near to speech .. she paused suddenly, feeling the ground tremble with the rolling thunder of hoofbeats approaching .... a white blur flung wide across the dimness to her left, and the sound of hoof-beats deepened and grew. Then out of the night swept a herd of snow-white horses. Magnificently they ran, manes tossing, tails streaming, feet pounding a rhythmic, heart-stirring roll along the ground. She caught her breath at the beauty of their motion...

But as they came abreast of her she saw one blunder and stumble against the next, and that one shook his head bewilderingly; and suddenly she realised that they were blind ... and she saw too their coats were roughened with sweat and foam dripped from their lips, and their nostrils were flaring pools of scarlet. Now and again one stumbled from pure exhaustion. Yet they ran, frantically, blindly through the dark, driven by something outside their comprehension.

As the last one swept past her, sweat-crusted and staggering, she saw him toss his head high, spattering foam, and whinny shrilly to the stars. And it seemed to her that the sound was strangely articulate. Almost she heard the echoes of a name - "Julienne! - Julienne!"." - C.L. Moore from 'Black Gods Kiss

All this within a dreamlike otherworld accessed through a dimensional corkscrew, not perceivable to one still wearing the cross of Christ. Is it fairyland? Nightmare? Hell or one of Lovecrafts pocket realms? Wherever it is, it is a near-mappable point crawl with particular distinct locations, routes between them, particular modes of access, residents within and random shifting encounters without. Something surprisingly rare to find in full amidst these tales of inspiration.

The Unlikeness Of The Inspiration And The Game

These stories which provide the impulse or drive to play D&D are very deeply unlike the experience of playing D&D in some interesting ways.

No groups or protagonist gangs. (Would make zero sense in a short story, even Elrics long tale has a few too many in it) The most we get is a pair. It speaks to something slightly charming in humanity that one of our most developed and pleasurable ways of experiencing imagined worlds takes place through the medium of a conversation - because we not only want to bring our friends along, but doing it in a group makes the imagination more real to us. Because we are a social species, and the living presence of a complex group is to us really another kind of meta sensing organ, like a super-eye.

There are few dead-ends; some mazes happen (I only remember one; the harbour maze of the Elrics Dreaming City), but they are solved in one go. There is no back-tracking, no finding of keys, making maps, none of what's grown to be the baseline of a procedural culture of dungeon exploration - again fun to do (sometimes), not to read about. Most dungeons in these stories are sequences of rooms. Others are small closed spaces.

There is no advancement really. Characters might get a bit better at things, get some cool items, then if the tales go on long enough, age and get a bit worse, but generally people occupy a gentle curve of capacity. Neither is there much specialisation-by-profession or by type - anyone can attempt anything. You got yourself a body don’t you buddy?

All these changes are adaptations between two forms of art, the narrative and the game, and even between two experiences of time; One is linear, though containing twists and turns, it has no branching paths and cannot be explored. There are no choices to make except for when and where to put down the book or pick it up, for the whole world can be held in one hand, paused, reversed, stored, forgotten and re-experienced whenever you wish. The other; multiplex in experience yet bound in real-time. Here you can genuinely go one way or another, or even just leave the dungeon. (But you may not be able to return. You need your friends to play this game, and a DM, and a bunch of other crap, and they are not infinitely or eternally available. Your access to this world is much more bound by material circumstances in our own). Need Conan truly kill that goblin? It is a reality made of decisions, its substance being choices, and what seems to be its substance, in truth, merely curtains and theatre scenery.

Though linked by the human imagination, by a desire for adventure and to see new lands, and by a love of Things, and of heroes, and many other things, the sheer chasm between a narrative and a game is very great, and greater still because an illusion lies over it, so that few see it for what it is.

Milk On A Warm Day

The Sword and Sorcery exemplified by Conan and 'Tower of the Elephant', (and the best Conan stories really are very good), and by Lovecraft, goes off quickly, even instantly, like cheese in summer or yoghourt in a sauna, when taken from the hands of its Masters. Like a clay pot, its relatively easy to make something that holds water, and rare grace to make true beauty.

These are such tender confections. And they don’t seem like it. Because the tales are atavistic, heroic, inventive and quick, many lesser writers think they can do them, and because the basic costuming and appearance are so fungible, it’s easy to dress as them.

Kind of like, if you remember the Summer after 'The Dark Knight' came out, Heath Ledgers Joker appeared in photographs in every party, festival, cosplay thing, the guy was fucking everywhere - edgelord and theatre kid combined to make Joker-pressions the substance of the age. Because, like Howard, and Lovecraft, the outward expression is easy to simulate. But all of those theatre kids and edgelords were about as much the Joker as many later writers were and are Lovecraft and Howard, or as much as 'Wheel of Time' is like Lord of the Rings, which is; it isn't at all, it’s merely convergent evolution, like penguins and dolphins being the same shape underwater. One in ten writers seem to understand that Conan is a relatively psychologically subtle character who just doesn't introspect much and does things with immediacy, or that Lovecraft thinks this shit is genuinely terrifying and you should be genuinely scared of Infinite Things.

Vandermeers Afterword

"What if the Gnoles were non-binary?"

Is an actual line from this. From this you likely know if you want to read it.

Thence The Text

In substance, merely stories, and such stories as the 'true heads' amongst you have probably already read and read the Grognardia review of, and the RPG.NET thread of complaints about, I mean you are likely five layers deep on most of this stuff already, if I know you are all.

Yet you ‘Heads’ are still the most likely to actually buy this thing. Because they are good stories, with a few rarities, and the book is a pleasant object, and its particular arrangement, and point of view, splaying forth the paelo-dreams of Dungeons and Dragons and arranging them nicely, in a little Wunderkammer, may amuse.