Appendix N Book Club
Jeff, Hoi, and a rotating roster of special guests discuss the adventure, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and weird fiction that inspires our gaming
Tue, March 18, 2025
Gretchen Felker-Martin's "Manhunt"
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Gretchen Felker-Martin's "Manhunt", visceral horror-thrillers, section transitions, interchangeable characters, physical descriptions of characters, depictions of trans genitalia, sexualizing a wide varieties of body types, TERFs and anti-vaxxers, replacing PCs with NPCs, the Broo in Runequest, overland exploration in Forbidden Lands, parental access restrictions in libraries, and much more!
Tue, February 18, 2025
Katherine Kurtz's "Deryni Rising" with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Katherine Kurtz's "Deryni Rising", sarcophagi, achieving literary liftoff, the Brandon-to-Demos scale, fantasy worlds with real-life historical cultures, female fantasy authors writing under their own names, scattered hidden magical races, Empire of the Petal Throne, AD&D psionics, counterspells, adventure hooks to clear a character's name, Dragon Magazine and White Dwarf Magazine on archive.org, and much more!
Wed, January 29, 2025
James Enge's "Blood of Ambrose" with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss James Enge's "Blood of Ambrose", obscure words from classic languages, Scooby Doo episodes, slowing down for character development, The Book of the New Sun books, magic from alchemy, flying horses, world maps, DCC spell corruption, blood that catches fire, other notable works by the author, trial and error, and much more!
Tue, December 31, 2024
H. Rider Haggard's "She" with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss H. Rider Haggard's "She", the smell of the flame, Haggard's other works, "the things dudes won't do for a hottie", the city of Cambridge, the good earthy feminine logic, being torn between two ill-fated women, the lost race genre, the tombs of an ancient civilization, quaint local customs, being unalive (instead of undead), democracies and tyrants, and much more!
Mon, November 25, 2024
Charles R. Saunders's "The Quest for Cush"
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Charles R. Saunders's "The Quest for Cush", the Swahili glossary, the shame of the King County Library system, fiction as gaming supplements, inversions of traditional sword and sorcery, Burroughs's Mythic Africa, the Mary Sue problem, Greeks in Egypt, a dungeon under quicksand, responsible and dilligent city guards, Imaro as a demigod,, and much more!
Mon, November 04, 2024
Edgar Rice Burroughs's "The Gods of Mars" with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Edgar Rice Burroughs's "The Gods of Mars", John Carter in a blond wig, repetitiveness in Edgar Rice Burroughs's works, French words, female characters' screen time, the Tree of Life, fainting characters, early examples of megadungeons, helpful ghosts, constantly escalating tension and perils, authors inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs, wish-fullfillment protagonists, and much more!
Mon, September 30, 2024
Dan Simmons's "Hyperion” with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Dan Simmons's "Hyperion”, listening to audio books at work, Vaults of Vaarn, prescient fiction, choosing whether or not to continue on with fiction series, the Dying Earth, ambiguous endings, failed attempts at humor, the author's current politics, chase scenes, Shadowdark, roasting bestsellers, reading books outside of our comfort zone, plans for the future of the show, and much more!
Mon, January 29, 2024
Episode 146 – Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "A Canticle for Leibowitz” with our Patron Book Club
This episode is dedicated to Rick Byrne. Please consider sending a gift to support Leukemia research at UCSF: UCSF Foundation, PO Box 45339, San Francisco, CA 94145 or make a gift online at makeagift.ucsf.edu. Please be sure to note that the gift is in memory of Rick Byrne to support the Leukemia research of Dr. Neil Dunivan.
Sun, January 14, 2024
Episode 145 – Michael Moorcock's "The Mad God's Amulet” with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Michael Moorcock's "The Mad God's Amulet, Michael Moorcock's love of arcane texts, action scenes, hyperviolence and gore, following expectations, whimsical supporting characters, battles over land and sea, reskinning monsters for science-fantasy, a device that can unlock any lock, the Devil's Rejects, our friend Rick Byrne, and much more!
Mon, January 01, 2024
Episode 144 – Gustave Flaubert's "Salammbô” with special guest Robert Poyton
Robert Poyton joins us to discuss Gustave Flaubert's "Salammbô”, October horror films, the etymology of Hygaxian words, Howardian prose, varied treasures, the French "oh là là", the literary influences of Clark Ashton Smith, the diversity of intersecting cultures in North Africa, African nations, horse nomads, cult generators, unearthly treasure hoards, and much more!
Mon, December 18, 2023
Episode 143 – Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” with special guest Tim Mendees
Tim Mendees joins us to discuss Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”, the dangers of massive hardbacks, literary rabbit holes, the Dorset dialect, cursing those who have wronged us, classist hypocrits, the couragousness that comes with conviction, interdimensional travel through reflective surfaces, interesting and flavorful spells, failing sanity rolls, faerie rewards, and much more!
Mon, September 04, 2023
Episode 142 – Robert Asprin's "Thieves' World" with special guest Brian Yaksha
Brian Yaksha joins us to discuss Robert Asprin's "Thieves' World", the give and take of what you're going to give to the audience, fantasy shared worlds, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar, Aragorn's tax plan, Machiavelli, passing off as older for added credibility, rotating GMs, bespoke stat blocks, power levels, player character points of entry, random tables, and much more!
Mon, August 07, 2023
Episode 141 – Edgar Rice Burroughs's "A Princess of Mars" with special guest Goran Gligovic
Goran Gligovic joins us to discuss Edgar Rice Burroughs's "A Princess of Mars", Asterix and Obelix, the Library of Wonder, Tarzan, being 30 for as long as you can remember, main characters as blank canvases, Robert E. Howard, the Fighting Man class in OD&D, when to embrace realism and when to eschew it, Frank Frazetta's action scenes, gargoyles taking a piss, a brightly dressed Elric, and much more!
Mon, July 10, 2023
Episode 140 – Lloyd Alexander's "The Book of Three" with special guest Becky Annison
Becky Annison joins us to discuss Lloyd Alexander's "The Book of Three", the Dungeons and Dragons movie, dwarven guides, Welsh myth, characters with firm personality hooks, spaghetti westerns, the Black Cauldron, clear linear mission paths, giving each character their moment, changing the stakes of successes, horror mechanics, destroying books or cards for art, and much more!
Mon, June 12, 2023
Episode 138 – Jack Vance's "Cugel's Saga" with special guest Brad Kerr
Brad Kerr joins us to discuss Jack Vance's "Cugel's Saga", virtual tabletops, Brom, pompous vocabulary, whimsical characters, world-class worldbuilding, being nickel-and-dimed by the boss, moving from one grift to the next, interesting mounts, making monsters more mysterious, D&D 4E, being your own boss, and much more!
Sun, May 14, 2023
Episode 138 – George MacDonald's "Phantastes" with special guest Conner Habib
Conner Habib joins us to discuss George MacDonald's "Phantastes", D&D's influence on a young person's imagination, Irish mythology, the art of Gervasio Gallardo, a focus on environment over character, main characters as blank slates, living in a perpetual state of wonder, how people are changed by their history of trauma, readers seeking the consequences of character actions, the woods as both a singular living entity and a collection of entities, the making of meaning after a story is finished, loss of innocence, and much more!
Mon, April 17, 2023
Patron Book Club 137 – William Gibson's "Neuromancer" with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss William Gibson's "Neuromancer", hypnogogic images, heists with scifi crap on top, retrofuturism, slow-moving death, the Velvet Underground, Dan Brown novels, splitting the party, simstims, genetic engineering in RPGs, cyperpunk RPGs, sentient AIs, and much more!
Mon, April 03, 2023
Episode 137 – William Gibson's "Neuromancer" with special guest Nathaniel Webb
Nathaniel Webb joins us to discuss William Gibson's "Neuromancer", D&D Next playtests, self-contained cities in a building, people writing fiction written by Chat-GPT, action/heist stories, ninjas and Rastafarians, getting the heist team together, the hacker's role in a cyberpunk game, Tom Clancy novels, quick dramatic actions, player-facing tools, cozy fantasy, and much more!
Mon, March 20, 2023
Episode 136 – Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" with special guest Yochai Gal
Yochai Gal joins us to discuss Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", Ursula K. LeGuin, Cairn's influences, Book of the New Sun, the Blade Runner movie, androids and empathy, what makes a belief system valid, Philip K. Dick's less approachable works, sex as a survival strategy, current concerns about AI, cyberpunk LARPs, Jack Vance, and much more!
Mon, March 06, 2023
Episode 135 – Caroline Stevermer's "A College of Magics" with special guest Katrin Dirim
Katrin Dirim joins us to discuss Caroline Stevermer's "A College of Magics", the diverse gaming scene in Turkey, YA book covers, politically correct highwaymen, the price that magic extracts, inevitable Harry Potter comparisons, the changing experiences of college students, playing the outsider, Dungeon Crawl Classics luck checks, players who struggle stepping into the spotlight, hat bombs, and much more!
Mon, February 20, 2023
Patron Book Club 134 – Michael Chabon's "Gentlemen of the Road" with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Michael Chabon's "Gentlemen of the Road", miniature wargaming, doing "a Jeff" by listening to the audiobook, Robert E. Howard's Middle Eastern adventures, melancholy guys dressed in black, the role of the animals in the story, surviving in a ruined temple, dual power structures, chloroform mini-games, five-page backstories, being rewarded in-game for bringing in aspects of your character, hitting Wikipedia hard, and much more!
Mon, February 06, 2023
Episode 133 – Michael Chabon's "Gentlemen of the Road" with special guest Bill Gosline
Bill Gosline joins us to discuss Michael Chabon's "Gentlemen of the Road", reading books written for adults as kids, Deities & Demigods as Appendix N, elephant-related words, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay", smug afterwords, Ren faire troupes, world-building in epic fantasy, world-building around the characters, historical fiction, when magic is not a technology, the future demise of Twitter, and much more!
Mon, January 23, 2023
Episode 133 – Poul Anderson's "Operation Chaos” with special guest Andy from Breakfast in the Ruins
Andy from Breakfast in the Ruins joins us to discuss Poul Anderson's "Operation Chaos”, homemade ginger beer, Moorcock's influence on the fantasy genre, frothing latter-day conspiracy theorist wet dreams, the limitations of the word lycanthropy, main characters who suck, heroes defending the military industrial complex, Anderson's influence on Moorcock, Van Helsing the Cleric, werewolves as player characters, Gygaxian naturalism, statting up Christian mythology, and much more!
Mon, January 09, 2023
Episode 132 – Scott Oden's "A Gathering of Ravens" with special guest Rick Byrne
Rick Byrne joins us to discuss Scott Oden's "A Gathering of Ravens", demons in Norse mythology, purging darkness with creativity, faction play, the various Viking lands, grim dark, authentic Irish representation, giving monsters meaning, Orc morality, periods of transition, Conan, the number 42, and much more!
Mon, December 26, 2022
Episode 131 – P. Djèlí Clark's "A Master of Djinn" with special guest Maxwell Lander
Maxwell Lander joins us to discuss P. Djèlí Clark's "A Master of Djinn", programming VR games, conversational RPGs, Audible audiobooks, villains plotting since childhood, the steampunk literary genre, when men write women, antisocial characters, Tunnel Goons, Shadowrun, freaky angels, anti-colonial violence, and much more!
Mon, December 12, 2022
Patron Book Club 130 – Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's "Hard to Be a God" with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's "Hard to Be a God”, impecunious dons, Brave New World, the Soviet Union in the 1960s, de-Stalinization, going straight to feudalism to fascism, the stench of the 18th century, saving artists to advance society, the great expansion of man, the collaboration between criminals and reactionary religious clashes to create facism, the 2007 video game adaptation, The Worm Ouroboros, and much more!
Mon, November 28, 2022
Episode 130 – Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's "Hard to Be a God" with special guest Aaron King
Aaron King joins us to discuss Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's "Hard to Be a God”, West Marches-style gaming, fantasy bestiaries, impecunious dons, astronauts in the middle ages, the character arcs of doomed nobles, the inherent tension that exists from generation to generation, keeping each other safe in the dirt, playing with Barbies, Warhammer 40K, characters using their imagination to see their future, our patron book clubs, and much more!
Mon, November 14, 2022
Episode 129 – Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Farthest Shore" with special guest Joshua Phillip Johnson
Joshua Phillip Johnson joins us to discuss Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Farthest Shore", elves named Josh, media being smarter than us, Audible audiobooks, hanging in Hort Town, magic being leached from the world, ideas of power and kingship, the importance of mentorship, journeying from the quiet places to the places where stuff happens, adult themes in YA lit, warriors' powers being looked at as magic, the reason for the season, and much more!
Sun, October 30, 2022
Episode 128 – Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere” with special guest Jim Hall
Jim Hall joins us to discuss Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere”, art school, crunchy combat, time loops, manic pixie dream girls, the Tony Blair-era of the UK, addressing audience needs, ideas for the sequel, using the Floating Market in an Underdark campaign, journeying into the underworld, D&D as a combat game, his monthly zine, and much more!
Mon, October 17, 2022
Patron Book Club 127 – Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Conqueror" with our Patron Book Club (Part 2)
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Conqueror", art pull-outs in paperbacks, the de Camp vs the Karl Edward Wagner introductions, sword and sorcery tropes, Conan's Greatest Hits, Shakespearean battles, Conan in disguise as a headsman, wanting to spend more time in Stygia, the dangers on the left path, mummy tour guides, smaller villains, August Derleth's landscapes, Savage Worlds RPG, The Tower of the Elephant, and much more!
Mon, October 03, 2022
Patron Book Club 127 – Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Conqueror" with our Patron Book Club (Part 1)
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Conqueror", the terrible glue on Lancer paperbacks, Howard's attempts to reach the English audience, the reach of Weird Tales Magazine, Conan's anti-colonialist stance, Howard's horror writing, de Camp's editing, vampires, evil priests, killer illusions, the Hyborian Age as a living and breathing world, Call of Cthulhu RPG for sword and sorcery, and much more!
Mon, September 19, 2022
Episode 127 – Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Conqueror” with special guest Eric Johnson
Eric Johnson joins us to discuss Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Conqueror”, artists to draw visual inspiration from, de Camp's editorial choices, the rabbit hole of research involved in writing historical fiction, The People of the Black Circle, 10,000 year old hotties, Howard's attitudes toward civilization, The Whole Wide World, Mystara, A Song of Ice and Fire, evil temples packed with unspeakable horrors, Raymond Chandler, and much more!
Mon, September 05, 2022
Episode 126 – William Hope Hodgson's "Carnacki the Ghost-Finder” w/ special guest James Mendez Hodes
James Mendez Hodes joins us to discuss William Hope Hodgson's "Carnacki the Ghost-Finder”, Sonic the Hedgehog fandom, changing conversations around cultural appropriation, Harlem detectives, Greek translations, disembodied limbs, the journey down the magical hog hole, Arthur Conan Doyle stories, the Trail of Cthulhu RPG, avoiding stereotypes when playing races other than your own, GMs falling asleep at the table, offers to help with high school projects, and much more!
Mon, August 22, 2022
Episode 125 – Michael Shea's "A Quest for Simbilis” with special guest Jason Cordova
Jason Cordova joins us to discuss Michael Shea's "A Quest for Simbilis”, Powered by the Apocalypse games, the correct pronunciation of Cugel, gothic horror, the publishing world in the 1970s, Lovecraftian horror fiction, high stakes games of strip poker, moving from absurdity to horror in an instant, crunchier traditional game systems, comedic hijinks, high fantasy vs sword and sorcery, fantasy fiction in the 80s and 90s, and much more!
Mon, August 08, 2022
Episode 124 – Michael Moorcock's "The Knight of the Swords” with special guest Stefan Surratt
Stefan Surratt joins us to discuss Michael Moorcock's "The Knight of the Swords”, other aspects of worldbuilding, uncaring beings of great power, loss of innocence, fantasy genocides, the Dresden bombings, the Vadaugh as elves, Daniel J. Bishop magic items, gods with cool and specific spheres of influence, the Lords of Law, our Patreon, and much more!
Sun, July 24, 2022
Episode 123 – Fritz Leiber's "The Knight and Knave of Swords" with special guest Ahimsa Kerp
Ahimsa Kerp joins us to discuss Fritz Leiber's "The Knight and Knave of Swords", Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in Riverside, ooh naughty sexy times, sex-obsessed adventurers, the city of Lankhmar, transgressive swords and sorcery, aging characters in fantasy RPGs, moon priestesses, pushing luck mechanics, having identifiably unique cultures, mythic Greece, and much more!
Mon, July 11, 2022
Episode 122 – E.R. Eddison's "The Worm Ouroboros” with special guest Caroline Stevermer
Caroline Stevermer joins us to discuss E.R. Eddison's "The Worm Ouroboros”, depictions of Elizabethan masculinity, characters that don't have parents, archaic language, excerpts from Western European literature, understanding characters through their deeds, a woman's virtue measured by her maidenhood, the passage of time in Tolkien's work, the taming the savages trope, the changing landscape of contemporary academia, San Francisco in 1906, and much more!
Mon, June 27, 2022
Patron Book Club 121 – N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season” with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season”, AD&D's obsession with gem names, the tonal resonances between this book and Octavia E. Butler’s “Fledgling”, the missing moon, savior narratives, sci-fi slang traditions, a melonated future, meta vs in-text author motivations, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, using Numenera for the Broken Earth setting, being surrounded by superheroes, systemic abuse in youth institutions, and much more!
Mon, June 13, 2022
Episode 121 – N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season” with special guest Tanya DePass
Tanya DePass joins us to discuss N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season”, Black people cosplaying as White characters, the formation of mountain ranges, effective plot twists, how a Black woman reading a Black woman author might have resonances other people may not, finding new meaning in a text by returning to a piece of fiction later in life, using complex morality in worldbuilding, characters together by necessity rather than being in an adventuring party, Green Ronin RPG systems, how game design is harder than many folks think, how people bring their biases to the games they run, TwitchCon Amsterdam, and much more! The patron poll for episode 129 will drop on Sunday.
Mon, May 30, 2022
Episode 120 – Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn” with special guest Brian Cortijo
Brian Cortijo joins us to discuss Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn”, how wars affect settings, irredeemably evil Drow and Orcs, splitting a wizard's gizzard, the melancholy themes of the film and the books, heroics as showmanship, character agency and the consequence of choice, the abundance of printed material available about the Forgotten Realms, having a mythical creature in your adventuring party, games that are more "story forward", game systems and their reliance on dependability, weeping spiders, and much more!
Sun, May 15, 2022
Episode 119 – Octavia E. Butler’s “Fledgling” with special guest Tim Hutchings
Tim Hutchings joins us to discuss Octavia E. Butler's "Fledgling", modern D&D-insired art, the effect of slavery on language, the book's use of childhood sexuality, vampire fiction of the early 2000s, vampire society, old racist vampires, Thousand Year Old Vampire, power dynamics between vampires and their symbionts, explaining monster lore as a tool for world building, blueberry pies, being terrible at social media, and much more!
Sun, May 01, 2022
Episode 118 – Peter Bebergal's "Appendix N” with special guest Ian McGarty
Ian McGarty joins us to discuss Peter Bebergal's "Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons”, games publishing, lifting magic items from fiction, the Swords Against Darkness anthologies, skeletal vampires, Tanith Lee's wild fiction, Elric and Moonglum, the old school D&D thief class, wanting to die a warrior's death, the Vivimancer class, necromancer PCs, crisp mountain air, and much more!
Mon, April 18, 2022
Episode 117 – Clark Ashton Smith's "The End of the Story" with special guest Matt King
Matt King joins us to discuss Clark Ashton Smith's "The End of the Story: The Collected Fantasies, Vol. 1", Italian horror films, Nightshade Press, the Lin Carter anthologies, all the things CAS wants to have sex with, lamias, pulp magazines, cultivating a sense of dread, highways becoming footpaths, Gygax's theoretical stance on CAS, Gary Con, and much more!
Mon, April 04, 2022
Episode 116 – Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Tombs of Atuan" with special guest Noora Rose
Noora Rose joins us to discuss Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Tombs of Atuan", game masters as game designers, non-white people writing fantasy and sci-fi, the trauma of forced identities, sex and intimacy, Le Guin's masterful character development, reclaiming identities, creating barriers with purple prose, cast-and-forget spellcasting, fantasy whodunits, the rising costs of paper, and much more!
Mon, March 21, 2022
Episode 115 – Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein” with special guest Karlo Yeager Rodríguez
Karlo Yeager Rodríguez joins us to discuss Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein”, Vampire LARPing, the 1818 vs 1831 texts, Victor Frankenstein as a narrator, Mary Shelley's commentary on the fate of Native Americans, Frankenstein's monster as a metaphor for queer angst, Victor Frankenstein as Lucifer falling from grace, the Bride of Frankenstein, Wraith: The Oblivion, the claim of Frankenstein as the first work of science fiction, and much more!
Mon, March 07, 2022
Episode 114 – Tim Powers's "Declare” with special guest Pete Johannsen
Pete Johannsen joins us to discuss Tim Powers's "Declare”, using amber beads as tokens, books found on your doorstep, the language and pace of spy novels, the djinn as fallen angels, power as a human motivator, Rube Goldberg occultism, the U.S. vs the Soviet Union, Torg RPG, djinn as ancient vampires, exploring Christian mythology in fiction and gaming, and much more!
Mon, February 21, 2022
Episode 113 – Michael Moorcock's "The Jewel in the Skull” with special guest Menion (AKA Rob)
Menion (AKA Rob) joins us to discuss Michael Moorcock's "The Jewel in the Skull”, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the influence of Burroughs on Moorcock, the initial emptiness and passivity of Hawkmoon, character motivation, mixing scifi and fantasy, characters being swept up in the current of world events, old-school versus new-school ways of thinking about gaming, what we lose when gaming online, runes as cosmic forces in RuneQuest, the gaming scene in Japan, and much more!
Mon, February 07, 2022
Episode 112 – William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland” with special guest Lucas Zellars
Lucas Zellars joins us to discuss William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland”, natural history as a science, out of body experiences, b-movie monsters, horse pistols, geological time, unreliability injected into the fiction, cosmic pigs, Super Mario Bros., and D&D as Capitalism: The Game or Colonialism: The Game, and much more!
Mon, January 24, 2022
Episode 111 – Glen Cook's "The Black Company” with special guest Jason Lutes
Jason Lutes joins us to discuss Glen Cook's "The Black Company”, Dungeon World, Ursula K. Le Guin, conquistador helmets, swords-for-hire, what makes a villain, grim dark's celebration of the darkest sides of the human experience, wizards as marketing and PR agents, eating tacos, fantasy metropolises, random words as proper nouns, and much more!
Mon, January 10, 2022
Episode 110 – Fred Saberhagen's "Changeling Earth” with special guest Rev. Dak Ultimak
Rev. Dak Ultimak joins us to discuss Fred Saberhagen's "Changeling Earth”, the DCC RPG zine scene, reclaiming H.P. Lovecraft, tanks and UFOs in fantasy fiction, the paperback culture of the 1970s, transcending humanity, cosmic horror, evil characters getting their comeuppance, the Luke Skywalker-type protagonist, genre crossing, throwing out the Firearms issue of Crawl, and much more!
Mon, December 27, 2021
Episode 109 – Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea” with special guest Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner joins us to discuss Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea”, Choose Your Own Adventure books, the explosion of Tolkien's popularity, the feminist revision of Earthsea, wizarding schools, designing magic system limitations, Larry Niven's science brain, the teenage search for identity, wizards of color, normalizing protagonists belonging to marginalized populations, the Jewish inspirations on Riverside, and much more!
Sun, November 28, 2021
Episode 108 – Gene Wolfe's "The Shadow of the Torturer” with special guest Moss Bosch
Moss Bosch joins us to discuss Gene Wolfe's "The Shadow of the Torturer”, socially intimate games, tasty and tender world building, reading a book without realizing it is the first in a series, ridiculous ways to introduce new PCs, reading a book written for multiple audiences, cities the size of a nation, Blades in the Dark, stolen sex dolls, flowers as awkward and incredibly dangerous weapons, obvious foreshadowing, Tik Tok, and much more!
Sun, November 28, 2021
Patron Book Club 107 – Ellen Kushner’s “Swordspoint” with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Ellen Kushner's "Swordspoint", typing up D&D character sheets on a typewriter, normalized gay content, the 80s crack epidemic, double- and triple-crosses, characters who think they're smarter than they are, playing a D&D game in the Riverside, gamifying Honor, staying true to social mechanism in the game, DCC Lankhmar, A Princess Bride, A Princess of Mars, and much more!
Sun, November 14, 2021
Episode 107 – Ellen Kushner's "Swordspoint” with special guest Angela Lemus-Mogrovejo
Angela Lemus-Mogrovejo joins us to discuss Ellen Kushner's "Swordspoint”, the indie tabletop roleplaying game scene, questioning why fantasy is wedded to the European medieval era, our patron polls, confusing characters with one another in political intrigue, relatable gay content, a shortage of female characters being given the spotlight, female characters as whores and laundresses, examples of noir prose, giving the generic fantasy tavern more character, making cool use of support characters, scholars of disappearance, and much more!
Mon, November 01, 2021
Episode 106 – C.L. Moore's "Jirel of Joiry” with special guest Cora Buhlert
Cora Buhlert joins us to discuss C.L. Moore's "Jirel of Joiry”, used book store finds, kisses as stand-ins for sex, the appropriateness of using genre to explore our fear of sexual violence, cozy stories, writers being inspired by their peers, comparing and contrasting Conan and Jirel as characters, employing undead suckers, the influence of comics on the early pulps, her work with Henry Kuttner, fictitious France, C.L. Moore's reemerging popularity, and much more!
Mon, October 18, 2021
Episode 105 – G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday” with special guest Megan Connell
Megan Connell joins us to discuss G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare”, chocolate-covered raisin trees, satire we don't understand, club infiltration, anarchist elections and bylaws, issues of trust and emotional risk in therapeutic games, good versus evil, dehumanizing those who disagree with us, using XP to encourage better gaming, whether it was all a dream or not, losing cultural context in reading works from before our time, and much more!
Mon, October 04, 2021
Episode 104 – Clive Barker's "Books of Blood, Volume 1" with special guest Brendan LaSalle
Brendan LaSalle joins us to discuss Clive Barker's "Books of Blood, Volume 1", our listeners 100 years from now, ghosts taking over theaters, Barker's literary beginnings, relatable characters, "Mama, they fed me to the pig!", Kaiju as political commentary, Willpower saves, stories were everything goes wrong, giving monsters the 411, embodying delusional characters, X-Crawl Classics, and much more!
Mon, September 13, 2021
Episode 103 – Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan” with special guest Patrick Stuart
Patrick Stuart joins us to discuss Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan”, oral traditions, lush prose, taking pride in working as a servant, the sun as an old cake bun, Peake's popularity, Cormac McCarthy, Gormenghast as a demiplane, maintaining status quo as a party goal, the court of Melniboné, physical differences as "monstrous traits", going back in time to support expired Kickstarters, and much more!
Sun, August 22, 2021
Episode 102 – Michael Shea’s “Nifft the Lean” with special guest Sarah Doom
Sarah Doom joins us to discuss Michael Shea's "Nifft the Lean”, Vampire: The Masquerade, horror stories set in the Deep South, "big guava breasts", matching prose style to genre, which came first: humans or demons, the Pagan way of doing things, entitled brats, taking away character agency, drawing upon vocational experience for inspiration, playing characters that are smarter than we are, old school sword and sorcery, and much more!
Mon, August 09, 2021
Episode 101 – Charles R. Saunders's "Imaro” with special guest Pete Petrusha
Pete Petrusha joins us to discuss Charles R. Saunders's "Imaro”, developing management skills through game mastering, how map projections shrink Africa, flipping the script, Charles R. Saunders's legacy, acceptance through truth, depicting differing cultures without judgment, leveling up through campaigns, DCC RPG corruption, the mysterious world outside the PC's hometown, and much more!
Sun, July 25, 2021
Episode 100 – Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Land of Terror" with special guest Martian Kat
Martian Kat joins us to discuss Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Land of Terror", Star Wars, reading something you wouldn't normally read on your own, effective uses of satire, bearded women, evolving perceptions of Black Americans in the 1940s, the global war on terror, one-shot adventures in comics, escaping captivity in RPGs, the Savage Worlds Adventure Deck, humanizing the "other", Twitch streaming, and much more!
Sun, July 11, 2021
Episode 99 – Lord Dunsany's "Don Rodriguez" with special guest Alyssa Faden
Alyssa Faden joins us to discuss Lord Dunsany's "Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley", the Tegel Manor map, ancient history as gaming inspiration, the Wheel of Time series, singing blades, Dunsany's poetic and relatable prose, the frying pan as a character, how to win a castle, river travelling, staying in character, Yoon Suin crab-men, designing city maps, and much more!
Sun, June 27, 2021
Episode 98 - Andre Norton's "Three Against the Witch World" with special guest Little Red Dot
Little Red Dot joins us to discuss Andre Norton's "Three Against the Witch World", Fate RPG, reading comics in the barber shop, Mars as Australia, Mercedes Lackey, the division between science fiction and fantasy, the gender spectrum, the gendered divisions of labor, Andre Norton's bravery, the love of war history, the D&D druid class, Kobold Press, and much more!
Sun, June 13, 2021
Episode 97 - Clark Ashton Smith's "Xiccarph" with special guest Cora Buhlert
Cora Buhlert joins us to discuss Clark Ashton Smith's "Xiccarph", German science fiction, pulp magazines, morbid beauty, vampire flower women, Jirel of Joiry, the Dark Eye, foreshadowing, Gary Gygax's exclusion of Clark Ashton Smith from the Appendix N, Alphonse Mucha, doomed protagonists, the 2022 World Science Fiction Convention, and much more!
Sat, May 29, 2021
Episode 96 - August Derleth's "The Mask of Cthulhu" with special guest Oliver Brackenbury
Oliver Brackenbury joins us to discuss August Derleth's "The Mask of Cthulhu", the Lin Carter Conan stories, competing Appendix N Book Club listener complaints, writing in another author's IP, dem hillbillies who ain't talk too good, being a broke millennial while reading about haunted inheritances, the authorial voice, psychic residue, letting players continue to run their characters during PC possession, the trappings of the Cthulhu mythos, Lovecraft Country, and much more!
Sun, May 16, 2021
Episode 95 – Fredric Brown's "What Mad Universe” with special guest Angeline B. Adams
Angeline B. Adams joins us to discuss Fredric Brown's "What Mad Universe”, psychogeography, toxic fandom, fictionalizing the writer's process, near-future sci-fi, the Troubles conflict in Northern Ireland, the relationship between the text and the art, loose worldbuilding, environmental and knowledge hazards, having protagonists deal with a big scary world, organic plot development, what this book looks like in other mad universes, and much more!
Sat, May 01, 2021
Episode 94 – Stanley G. Weinbaum's "The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum" with special guest Newton Nitro
Newton Nitro joins us to discuss Stanley G. Weinbaum's "The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum", Brazilian speculative fiction, Malazan Book of the Fallen, celebrations of the heterosexual white male, coming to acceptance with death, different cultural moral frameworks, the Virgin-Whore Complex, Brazilian miscegenation, dark humor, reskinning the Keep on the Borderlands, using RPGs to subvert facism, and much more!
Sun, April 18, 2021
Episode 93 – Michael Moorcock's "Elric of Melniboné" with special guest Peter Bebergal
Peter Bebergal joins us to discuss Michael Moorcock's "Elric of Melniboné", gaming stores, Gygax's love of pulp, meta-levels inside of dungeons, grimoires IRL, Elric's rotating sidekicks, the limits of idealism, the tragedy of addiction, Elric in art, the Eternal Champions, Elric as anime, and much more!
Sun, April 04, 2021
Episode 92 – Roger Zelazny's "The Hand of Oberon" with special guest Shauntelle Benjamin
Shauntelle Benjamin joins us to discuss Roger Zelazny's "The Hand of Oberon", TTRPG Twitch streaming, the protagonist's internal experience, similiar sounding names, casual incest, combat mechanics in literature, cybernetic limbs, life-draining highways, getting stabbed by uncles you've just met, interior monologues in gaming, and much more!
Sat, March 20, 2021
Episode 91 - Philip José Farmer's "The Lavalite World" with special guest Kienna Shaw
Kienna Shaw joins us to discuss Philip José Farmer's "The Lavalite World", using present-day religious texts as mythology, literary info dumps, the petty egos of immortals, making moral choices when you your life is at stake, close third-person narration, the dangers of presenting racist characters without critique, Bluebeard's Bride, being a collaborative player instead of a lone wolf, constantly shifting landscapes, and much more!
Sun, March 07, 2021
Episode 90 - Fletcher Pratt's "Invaders from Rigel" with special guest Ginny Loveday
Ginny Loveday joins us to discuss Fletcher Pratt's "Invaders from Rigel", small books with even smaller fonts, colonialism, space travellers who don't understand combustibles, goofily over-capable heroes, interesting adversaries, home play vs organized play, overly replying on combat to handle challenges, separating the art from the artist, and much more!
Mon, February 22, 2021
Episode 89 - Jack Vance's "The Killing Machine" with special guest Paige Leitman
Paige Leitman joins us to discuss Jack Vance's "The Killing Machine", Alexandre Dumas, sexism, interplanetary skin tones, examples of successful worldbuilding, D&D as a western, roleplaying vs rollplaying, planet-hopping revenge games, Star Wars, the OSR community, and much more!
Sun, February 07, 2021
Episode 88 - Fritz Leiber's "The Big Time" with special guest Jason Ray Carney
Jason Ray Carney joins us to discuss Fritz Leiber's "The Big Time", urban modernism, Lovecraft's fear of the other, period slang, the time travel genre, deeply traumatized protagonists, Leiber's understanding of language, being the Black Svengali to one's Trilby, unity of time and space, Conan vs Fafhrd, chronomancy, and much more!
Sun, January 24, 2021
Episode 87 - Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Usurper" with special guest Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney
Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney joins us to discuss Robert E. Howard & L. Sprague de Camp's "Conan the Usurper", body horror, de Camp's heavy-handed editing, offensive physical descriptions of black characters, Lovecraft's contemporaries, the experience of talking about problematic elements in the fandom, Howard's creative process, audience analysis in pulps, the cliche of the dumb barbarian, unknown characters seeking revenge on PCs, and much more!
Sun, January 10, 2021
Episode 86 - Lin Carter's "The Immortal of World's End" with special guest Kira Magrann
Kira Magrann joins us to discuss Lin Carter's "The Immortal of World's End", LARPing as an awkward teenager, goth teenage years, blending sci-fi and fantasy, tonal shifts, strange metaphors, the cognitive dissonance of glorifying violence after seeing war firsthand, evolving cultural norms, positive inclusions of beasts and animals, sexualizing all or none of the characters instead of just the female-presenting characters, random charts, Trancore as a music genre, and much more!
Sun, December 27, 2020
Episode 85 - Fred Saberhagen's "The Black Mountains" with special guest Jason Vey
Jason Vey joins us to discuss Fred Saberhagen's "The Black Mountains", owlbears, waiting for the fun evil parts, the Swords trilogy, cold war themes in a post-apocalyptic world, wizards with swords, the root of the lich, making magic unique, designing for 5e vs DCC RPG, mutations tables, and much more!
Sun, December 13, 2020
Episode 84 - Gardner F. Fox's "Kothar and the Conjurer's Curse" with special guest Clio Yun-su Davis
Clio Yun-su Davis joins us to discuss Gardner F. Fox's "Kothar and the Conjurer's Curse", sexual violence, sword and sorcery LARP ideas, non-stop magical hijinx, video game boob physics, the journey in gaming, using the "rule of cool" with cultural sensitivity in mind, monsters that represent human populations, coincidences as plot devices, creative death curses, power levels for heoric gaming, and much more!
Mon, November 30, 2020
Episode 83 – Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids” with special guest Misha B
Misha B joins us to discuss Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids”, relatable yet opposing idealogies, babies kept in cribs too long, the value of degenerates, the character arch of authors within their careers, morally ambiguous antagonists, superpowered humans overtaking the galaxy, setting ground rules at the table, characters with godlike abilities, moving force down the chain of challenges, and much more!
Mon, November 16, 2020
Episode 82 – Manly Wade Wellman's "Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds" with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Manly Wade Wellman's "Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds", classic Sherlock, the Professor Challenger stories, sycophantic women, the differing moral compasses of the characters, the lens of the Vietnam War, tearing down H.G. Wells, undefeatable villains, adding mechanical wings to random encounters, proto-Lovecrafian beasties, high versus low-level gaming, and much more!
Sun, November 01, 2020
Episode 81 – H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror and Others” with our Patron Book Club
Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror and Others”, setting construction, Lovecraftian punchlines, Robert Bloch, character development, ancient castles, inescapable monsters, the Whateleys, sudden developments of secret knowledge, characters built on people we know, and much more!
Sun, October 18, 2020
Episode 80 – Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Back to the Stone Age” with special guest Vicki Lalonde
Vicki Lalonde joins us to discuss Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Back to the Stone Age”, damsels in distress, messages of empathy, shedding the bonds of the civilized world, the power of friendship, Barsoom, slavery as a plot device, large megafauna, fighters with six-shooters, foreshadowing villains, and much more!
Sun, October 04, 2020
Episode 79 - A. Merritt's "The Ship of Ishtar" with special guest Chris Wolf
Chris Wolf joins us to discuss A. Merritt's "The Ship of Ishtar", slaves in pulp fiction, magic hair-growing shrubs, film noir femme fatales, early wargaming, magic compasses, epic death as a story ender, the Mega Dumb Cast, playing on the Spaceship of Ishtar, and much more!
Sun, September 20, 2020
Episode 78 – Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Warrior" with our Patron Book Club
Members of our Patron Book Club (Jeremy Harper, Christopher Murrie, and Adam Styers) join us to discuss Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Warrior", the Conan paperback publication history, Conan's rapey inner-dialogue, the "barbarism is the natural state of mankind" quote, the roles of priests in sword and sorcery, Red Sonya and Dark Agnes, the strengths and weaknesses of Valeria, the fragile state of Whiteness, Lovecraftian racism, the immensity of the Hyborian world, giving L. Sprague de Camp the credit he's due, Conan casting spells, and more!
Sun, September 06, 2020
Episode 77 - L. Sprague de Camp's "The Clocks of Iraz" with special guest Sharang Biswas
Sharang Biswas joins us to discuss L. Sprague de Camp's "The Clocks of Iraz", Indian classics, wights, internal logic, stories within stories, female characters who entirely exist as sex objects, queer bashing, unified tonal through lines, pre-skill system play styles, diversity in medieval simulationism, magic as a source of law or chaos, how to support sex-positive charities, and much more!
Sun, August 23, 2020
Episode 76 - Michael Moorcock's "The Vanishing Tower" with special guest Jerry D. Grayson
Jerry D. Grayson joins us to discuss Michael Moorcock's "The Vanishing Tower", discovering gaming as a kid, fantasy reading as a kid, comics, looking for representation, Elric as pulp, the grab-bag style of old-school gaming, morose scenery-chewing, the other Eternal Champions, Elric's childhood education, DMG relics, how you too can make hundreds of dollars in the roleplaying industry, and much more!
Sun, August 09, 2020
Episode 75 - Roger Zelazny's "Sign of the Unicorn" with special guest Becky Annison
Becky Annison joins us to discuss Roger Zelazny's "Sign of the Unicorn", female authors, murder-mysteries, audiobooks, characters with godlike powers, world-building, rooting games in a setting, one-on-one gaming, making allies out of enemies, using player imagination, gaming in the era of Critical Role, and much more!
Sat, July 25, 2020
Episode 74 – Andrew J. Offutt's "Swords Against Darkness" with special guest Brian Murphy
Brian Murphy joins us to discuss Andrew J. Offutt's "Swords Against Darkness", reading fantasy fiction as a kid, writing about swords and sorcery, second generation sword and sorcery authors, the understated prose of Poul Anderson, O. Henry's sword and sorcery, multiclass characters, the collected Ryre stories, elves and dwarves in swords and sorcery, sword and planet, and much more!
Sat, July 11, 2020
Episode 73 – Philip José Farmer's "Behind the Walls of Terra” with special guest Jamila R. Nedjadi
Jamila R. Nedjadi joins us to discuss Philip José Farmer's "Behind the Walls of Terra”, World of Darkness games, the false divide between the OSR and indie games, simulacrums, motorcycle gangs, one's own mother as a romantic love interest, hippie culture, fiction written by random tables, GMs building on what players give them, PBtA moves, describing modern items as marvelous artifacts, the perfect way to end a session, and much more!
Sun, June 28, 2020
An Interview with Tim Kask
Hoi and Jeff interview Tim Kask, the co-compiler of the Appendix N list, who gives us some interesting insight into its history!
Sun, June 14, 2020
Episode 72 – Leigh Brackett's "The Best of Leigh Brackett" with special guest Stacy Dellorfano
Stacy Dellorfano joins us to discuss Leigh Brackett's "The Best of Leigh Brackett", the OSR, Boris Vallejo, women writing for male audiences, early antiheros, Eric John Stark as the outsider, Pocahontas, using life experiences in monster design, the balance of crunch and fluff, underwater adventures, Lovecraftian horror, and the future of Contessa Con in the quarantine era, and much more!
Sat, May 30, 2020
Episode 71 – Clark Ashton Smith's "Poseidonis" with special guest Evey Lockhart
Evey Lockhart joins us to discuss Clark Ashton Smith's "Poseidonis", dark + quirk, Northern California as Mythic Greece, pulp colonialism, circus folk, horny 15 year olds, Irony as a rollable stat, Troika's resolution system, bug collecting magic, Pathfinder vs. Dungeon World, the joy of a well-designed wizard's tower, and much more!
Sun, May 17, 2020
Episode 70 – Jack Vance's "Star King" with special guest Sean McCoy
Sean McCoy joins us to discuss Jack Vance's "Star King", police violence, pulp crime, spaghetti westerns, sci-fi RPGs, Intelligence vs. Wisdom, a future controlled by corporations, off-screen sexual violence, the future of Mothership, and much more!
Mon, May 04, 2020
Episode 69 – Fritz Leiber's "Swords and Ice Magic" with special guest Angela Murray
Angela Murray joins us to discuss Fritz Leiber's "Swords and Ice Magic", avoiding the GM system mastery trap, unlikable protangonists, women as sex objects, learning more about characters than just their physical descriptions, Norse mythology, Death as an adversary, being upfront about campaign setting elements, the player's role in story generation, the GM's responsibility to follow the player's lead, playing a Dragonborn Cleric who worships a god who hates dragons, reading fiction when you aren't the target audience, and much more!
Sun, April 19, 2020
Episode 68 - L. Sprague de Camp's "Conan the Buccaneer" with special guest Carmin Vance
Carmin Vance joins us to discuss L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's "Conan the Buccaneer", barriers for entry into the hobby, weird descriptions of breasts, sword and sorcery as escapism, black amazon warriors, reading non-Howard Conan stories, the man-eating trees of Nubia, ritual magic, the bellybuttons of the Easter Island statues, reading with an open mind, and much more!
Sun, April 05, 2020
Episode 67 – Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Tarzan at the Earth's Core" with special guest Chris Holmes
Chris Holmes joins us to discuss Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Tarzan at the Earth's Core", contemporary fantasy fiction, the Holmes Basic set, the varying levels of dignity given to the black characters, IP crossovers, surprisingly positive depictions of Germans, "Mahars of Pellucidar", magic dirigibles, the developmental biology of reptiles, informal vs codified ways of encouraging heroism in RPGs, the incredible speed in which pulp characters learn new languages, and the future of Pellucidarian fandom.
Sun, March 22, 2020
Episode 66 – Lord Dunsany's "The Charwoman's Shadow” with special guest Shanna Germain
Shanna Germain joins us to discuss Lord Dunsany's "The Charwoman's Shadow", Dunsany's evocative prose, shadow magic, fairy tales, the impetuousness of youth, walking 25 miles in a day, love potions, esoteric prices, the lifelong pursuit of magic, the value of reading something you normally wouldn't, and much more!
Sun, March 15, 2020
Patron Book Club 65 - Andre Norton's "Web of the Witch World"
Thanks to Noah Green and Adam Styers for joining our Patron Book Club to discuss Andre Norton's "Web of the Witch World"!
Sun, March 08, 2020
Episode 65 – Andre Norton's "Web of the Witch World" with special guest Humza Kazmi
Humza Kazmi joins us to discuss Andre Norton's "Web of the Witch World", elven fighters, mind reading, the power of love, reclaiming lost power, the culture of Estcarp, domain game play, internal consistency, talismans, character agency, and much more!
Sun, February 23, 2020
Episode 64 - J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Return of the King" with returning guest Daniel J. Bishop
Daniel J. Bishop joins us to discuss J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Return of the King", the fundamental misunderstandings of the Peter Jackson movies, Tolkien's Christianity, Frodo and Sam's gay love, the racist legacy of the Lord of the Rings, bringing our own life experiences to what we read, the value of gaming post-climax, "useless" characters, the appendices, and so much more!
Sat, February 08, 2020
Episode 63 - Lin Carter's "The Enchantress of World's End" with special guest Todd Bunn
Hoi and Jeff chat with Todd Bunn about Lin Carter's "The Enchantress of World's End", flipping expectations, one-shot adventures, sphinxes, and introductory RPG systems!
Fri, January 24, 2020
Episode 62 - Gardner Fox's "Kothar and the Demon Queen" with special guest Elizabeth Chaipraditkul
Hoi and Jeff chat with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul about Gardner F. Fox's "Kothar and the Demon Queen", demon summoning, cheesy erotica, sword and sorcery traditions, and much more!
Sun, January 12, 2020
Episode 61 - A. Merritt's "Dwellers in the Mirage" with special guest Jeannette Ng
Episode 61 - A. Merritt's "Dwellers in the Mirage" with special guest Jeannette Ng
Mon, December 30, 2019
Episode 60 - Fritz Leiber's "The Swords of Lankhmar" with special guest Jen Brinkman
Hoi and Jeff chat with Jen Brinkman about Fritz Leiber's "The Swords of Lankhmar" and get a behind-the-scenes look at DCC Lankhmar.
Mon, December 16, 2019
Episode 59 - Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Adventurer" with special guest Agatha Cheng
Hoi and Jeff chat with Agatha Cheng about Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Adventurer", orientalism, past life regression, and slavery in RPGs.
Mon, December 02, 2019
An Interview with Michael Moorcock
Hoi and Jeff have the supreme pleasure of interviewing Michael Moorcock, author of the Elric and Hawkmoon stories among many others, and the youngest and only living author from the Appendix N list, who is also celebrating his 80th birthday in Dec 2019!
Mon, November 18, 2019
Episode 58 - Michael Moorcock's "The Singing Citadel" with special guest Dirk the Dice
Hoi and Jeff chat with Dirk the Dice about the multiverse, Stormbringer RPG, Law vs Chaos, and Michael Moorcock's "The Singing Citadel"!
Mon, November 04, 2019
Episode 57 - Roger Zelazny's "The Guns of Avalon" with special guest Ethan Schoonover
Hoi and Jeff discuss PVP gaming, turning classic troupes on their head, and the act of imagination and its limits in Roger Zelazny's "The Guns of Avalon" with special guest Ethan Schoonover!
Mon, October 21, 2019
Episode 56 - Poul Anderson's "The Broken Sword" with special guest Tim Deschene
Hoi and Jeff discuss nature versus nurture, invoking Satan, and skin changing in Poul Anderson's "The Broken Sword" with special guest Tim Deschene!
Mon, October 07, 2019
Episode 55 - Philip José Farmer's "A Private Cosmos" with special guest Eric Daum
Hoi and Jeff discuss character morality, action scequences, and female sexuality in Philip José Farmer's "A Private Cosmos" with special guest Eric Daum!
Mon, September 23, 2019
Episode 54 - Fletcher Pratt's "The Well of the Unicorn" with special guest Strix Beltrán
Hoi and Jeff discuss liminal spaces, war, peace, and fear of masculine vulnerability in Fletcher Pratt's "The Well of the Unicorn" with special guest Strix Beltrán!
Mon, September 09, 2019
Episode 53 - H.P. Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" with special guest David Baity
Hoi and Jeff discuss multiple timelines, necromantic reincarnation, and sanity checks in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" with special guest David Baity
Mon, August 26, 2019
Episode 52 - Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Tanar of Pellucidar" with special guest Noah Green
Hoi and Jeff discuss race coding, the laws of gravity, and monogamy in Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Tanar of Pellucidar" with special guest Noah Green.
Mon, August 12, 2019
Episode 51.5 - J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Two Towers" with returning guest Daniel Bishop
Yes, for the Two Towers, we're doing Two Episodes! For Round 2, Hoi and Jeff discuss character fame, the halfling class, and foreshadowing in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Two Towers" with returning guest Daniel J. Bishop.
Mon, July 29, 2019
Episode 51 - J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Two Towers" with special guest Anna B. Meyer
Hoi and Jeff discuss demagogues, war, elves, dwarves, and wizards in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Two Towers" with special guest Anna B. Meyer.
Mon, July 15, 2019
Episode 50 - Extra Credit - Clark Ashton Smith's "Hyperborea" with special guest Jeffrey Talanian
Hoi and Jeff discuss living dungeons, world building, and using evocative setting descriptions at the table in Clark Ashton Smith's "Hyperborea" with special guest Jeffrey Talanian.
Mon, July 01, 2019
Episode 49 - Margaret St. Clair's "Sign of the Labrys" with special guest Katie Shrieves
Hoi and Jeff discuss fungus, hallunications, dream logic, dungeons levels, and hippie culture in Margaret St. Clair's "Sign of the Labrys" with special guest Katie Shrieves.
Mon, June 17, 2019
Episode 48 - August Derleth's "The Lurker at the Threshold" with special guest Jon Hook
Hoi and Jeff discuss Elder Signs, Lovecraftian gaming, and summoning spells in August Derleth's "The Lurker at the Threshold" with special guest Jon Hook.
Mon, June 03, 2019
Episode 47 - Fredric Brown's "Martians, Go Home" with special guest Sean Kelley
Hoi and Jeff discuss impossible-to-kill enemies, player agency, and unsolvable puzzles in Fredric Brown's "Martians, Go Home" with special guest Sean Kelley.
Mon, May 20, 2019
Episode 46 - Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" with special guest Brett Bloczynski
Hoi and Jeff discuss vampires, hunting, the beauty defense, and truly alien aliens in Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" with special guest Brett Bloczynski.
Mon, May 06, 2019
Episode 45 - A. Merritt's "The Moon Pool" with special guest Joseph Goodman
Hoi and Jeff discuss lost worlds, adventuring parties, and Lovecraftian gaming in A. Merritt's "The Moon Pool" with special guest Joseph Goodman
Mon, April 22, 2019
Episode 44 – Jack Vance’s “Emphyrio” with special guest Fiona Maeve Geist
Hoi and Jeff discuss welfare states, decadent elites, and hopeless puppets in Jack Vance’s “Emphyrio” with special guest FIONA MAEVE GEIST!
Mon, April 08, 2019
Episode 43 - Fritz Leiber's "Swords Against Wizardry" with special guest Josh from the Cromcast
Hoi and Jeff discuss Fritz Leiber's "Swords Against Wizardry" with special guest Josh from the Cromcast
Mon, March 25, 2019
Episode 42 - Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Wanderer” with special guest Jon from the Cromcast
Hoi and Jeff discuss Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, & Lin Carter’s “Conan the Wanderer” with special guest Jon from the Cromcast.
Mon, March 11, 2019
Episode 41 - L. Sprague de Camp's "The Goblin Tower" with special guest Luke from the Cromcast
Hoi and Jeff discuss L. Sprague de Camp's "The Goblin Tower" with special guest Luke from the Cromcast
Mon, February 25, 2019
Episode 40 - Lin Carter's "The Warrior of World's End" with special guest Howard Andrew Jones
Hoi and Jeff discuss Lin Carter's "The Warrior of World's End" with special guest Howard Andrew Jones.
Mon, February 11, 2019
Episode 39 - Fred Saberhagen's "The Broken Lands" with special guest Jason Hobbs
Hoi and Jeff discuss Fred Saberhagen's "The Broken Lands" with special guest Jason Hobbs.
Mon, January 28, 2019
Episode 38 - Gardner F. Fox's "Kothar of the Magic Sword!" with special guest Liz Stewart
Hoi and Jeff discuss Gardner F. Fox's "Kothar of the Magic Sword!" with special guest Liz Stewart.
Mon, January 14, 2019
Episode 37 - Jack Williamson's "Darker Than You Think" with special guest Dani Neary
Hoi and Jeff discuss Jack Williamson's "Darker Than You Think" with special guest Dani Neary.
Mon, December 31, 2018
Episode 36 - Manly Wade Wellman's "Who Fears the Devil?" with special guest Michael Curtis
Hoi and Jeff discuss Manly Wade Wellman's "Who Fears the Devil?" with special guest Michael Curtis.
Mon, December 17, 2018
Episode 35 - Michael Moorcock's "Stormbringer" with special guest Terry Olson
Hoi and Jeff discuss Michael Moorcock's "Stormbringer" with special guest Terry Olson
Mon, November 05, 2018
Episode 34 - Roger Zelazny's "Nine Princes in Amber" with special guest Marc Bruner
Hoi and Jeff discuss Roger Zelazny's "Nine Princes in Amber" with special guest Marc Bruner.
Tue, October 09, 2018
Episode 33 - Poul Anderson's "The High Crusade" with special guest Jeremy Farkas
Hoi and Jeff discuss Poul Anderson's "The High Crusade" with special guest Jeremy Farkas.
Mon, September 24, 2018
Episode 32 - Philip José Farmer's "The Gates of Creation" with special guest Christopher Paul Carey
Hoi and Jeff discuss Philip José Farmer's "The Gates of Creation" with special guest Christopher Paul Carey.
Tue, September 11, 2018
Episode 31 - Leigh Brackett's "The Halfling and Other Stories" with special guest Paolo Greco
Hoi and Jeff discuss Leigh Brackett's "The Halfling and Other Stories" with special guest Paolo Greco.
Mon, August 27, 2018
Episode 30 - A. Merritt's "Creep, Shadow Creep!" with special guest Edgar Johnson
Hoi and Jeff discuss A. Merritt's "Creep, Shadow Creep!" with special guest Edgar Johnson.
Mon, July 23, 2018
Episode 29 - Fritz Leiber's "Swords in the Mist" with special guest Joey Royale
Special guest Joey Royale of Drinking & Dragons joins us to discuss Fritz Leiber’s Swords in the Mist! (Please also see the Episode 3 and Episode 18 show notes for additional information about the saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) Swords in the Mist (Ace Books, 1968) by Fritz Leiber was originally published in paperback as the third book in Ace Books’ complete seven volume saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The stories is this volume are “The Cloud of Hate” (1963), “Lean Times in Lankhmar” (1959), “Their Mistress, the Sea” (1968), “When the Sea-King’s Away” (1960), “The Wrong Branch” (1968), and “Adept’s Gambit” (1947). “Adept’s Gambit” was the very first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story written in 1936, only to be rejected for publication in Weird Tales magazine. It did not appear in print until after World War II in the hardcover collection Night’s Black Agents (Arkham House, 1947). H.P. Lovecraft himself read “Adept’s Gambit” in manuscript after Leiber’s wife Jonquil opened a correspondence between the Leibers and Lovecraft that lasted until Lovecraft’s death in early 1937. Lovecraft became a great champion of “Adept’s Gambit”, calling it “remarkably fine & distinctive bit of cosmic fantasy”. The draft that Lovecraft read and critiqued is now lost, but we do know that Leiber removed the overt Cthulhu Mythos references in the story and eventually created the world of Nehwon rather than continuing to set Fafhrd and the Mouser’s adventures in the Mediterranean and Near East of Antiquity. The other particularly notable story in Swords in the Mist is “Lean Times in Lankhmar”, which was originally commissioned by Cele Goldsmith for the all-Leiber November 1959 issue of Fantastic magazine. Leiber’s career had hit the doldrums in mid-1950s partly due to alcohol problems, so Goldsmith’s commissioning of “Lean Times in Lankhmar” was significant step in bringing back Fafhrd and the Mouser. New tales of Nehwon would appear regularly after that up until the late 1980s, enshrining the Twain as Leiber’s most beloved creations. Jeffrey Catherine Jones provided the cover art for Swords in the Mist, opting to create an overall mood of mystery and epic adventure rather than a literal depiction of a scene from any of the stories. Once again though, the trade dress of later printings constrained and compromised the overall effect: TSR continued to hold the role-playing game license for Lankhmar during the 1990s, publishing the following adventures for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition: LNA1: Thieves of Lankhmar (1990), LNA2: Newhon (1990), LNA3: Prince of Lankhmar (1991), LNQ1: Slayers of Lankhmar (1992), LNR1: Wonders of Lankhmar (1990), and LNR2: Tales of Lankhmar (1991). Additionally, Lankhmar: City of Adventure was updated for AD&D 2E in 1993 and it was followed by the sourcebook Rogues in Lankhmar in 1995. TSR’s last Lankhmar product was the boxed set Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar: The New Adventures of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser (1996), which was both a campai
Mon, June 11, 2018
Episode 28 - Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Freebooter" with special guest Diogo Nogueira
Conan the Freebooter (Lancer Books, 1968) by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp, was part of the first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan the Freebooter was the eighth volume published, although it is third in the internal chronology--later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer went out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series, keeping it in print until the mid 1990s. As with the other Lancer/Ace Conan books, series editor de Camp filled in gaps in Conan’s timeline by expanding Howard’s unpublished notes and fragments, re-writing non-Conan stories, and writing entirely new stories. For the purist, the Howard-only stories in Conan the Freebooter are “Black Colossus” (1933), “Shadows in the Moonlight” (AKA “Iron Shadows in the Moon”, 1934), and “A Witch Shall be Born” (1934). In 1955, L. Sprague de Camp rewrote the then unpublished Howard story “Hawks over Egypt” as “Hawks over Shem”, changing the setting from Cairo in AD 1021 and adding the fantastic elements to turn it into a Conan tale. “The Road of the Kings” received the same treatment, being transferred to the Hyborian Age from the Ottoman Empire in AD 1595. Both of the original Howard stories were suppressed after de Camp’s rewrites and would not see print until they were collected in the small-press hardcover The Road of Azrael (Donald M. Grant, 1979). John Duilo contributed possibly the worst Conan cover ever, an anatomically nonsensical depiction of Conan’s battle with the great gray man-ape from “Shadows in the Moonlight”: The sad thing is that Duilo was normally an exceptional illustrator, as evidenced by the moody romanticism of his Western art and the sleazy verve of his men’s magazine covers. The later Boris Vallejo cover interpreting the climax of “A Witch Shall be Born” is much better, but static in comparison to the furious energy of Frank Frazetta: In both “Black Colossus” and “A Witch Shall be Born” we see Conan as a cunning strategist who leads thousand of men into battle. It’s easy to imagine Gary Gygax and company playing out these Hyborian Age conflicts in the pre-Dungeons & Dragons miniatures wargame Chainmail (1971) or in the later Swords & Spells (1976) ruleset. Other story elements from Conan the Freebooter that stand out as being proto-D&D include Shevatas the “thief among thieves” from the prologue to “Black Colossus” and gray man-ape of “Shadows in the Moonlight” is certainly the “APE, Carnivorous” of the AD&D Monster Manual (1977). As always, Robert E. Howard’s stories remain the motherlode of swords & sorcery inspiration…. Reading Resources: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan of Cimmeria Book 1) The Bloody Crown of Conan (Conan of Cimmeria Book 2) TPB (trade paperback) The Bloody Crown of Conan (Conan of Cimmeria Book 2) (Kindle ebook) These books are part of the Del Rey/Ballantine 3-book trade paperback series collecting the Conan stories in the order they were writt
Mon, May 28, 2018
Episode 27 - Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Pellucidar" with special guest Harley Stroh
Hoi and Jeff discuss Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Pellucidar" with special guest Harley Stroh.
Mon, May 07, 2018
Episode 26 - Lord Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter" with special guest Andrew Sternick
Hoi and Jeff discuss Lord Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter" with special guest Andrew Sternick.
Mon, April 02, 2018
Episode 25 - Andre Norton's "Witch World" with special guest Fletcher Vredenburgh
Hoi and Jeff discuss Andre Norton's "Witch World" with special guest Fletcher Vredenburgh.
Mon, March 19, 2018
Episode 24 - J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring" with special guest Daniel J. Bishop
Hoi and Jeff discuss J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring" with special guest Daniel J. Bishop.
Mon, March 05, 2018
Episode 23 - H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" with special guest Bob Brinkman
Hoi and Jeff discuss H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness & Other Tales of Terror with special guest Bob “The Voice” Brinkman! Given H.P. Lovecraft’s omnipresence today, it’s easy to forget that he had largely faded out of reading public’s mind within a few years of his death in 1937. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei did their best to keep Lovecraft in print by founding the small press Arkham House in 1939, but the publishing house’s output for its first 20 years was mostly limited to high quality hardcovers in short print runs. Arkham House was often on tenuous financial footing from its very founding, but the snowballing revival of interest in Lovecraft’s Weird Tales compatriot Robert E. Howard in the 1960s seems to have also raised Lovecraft’s visibility. Arkham House seized the opportunity by releasing three newly re-edited omnibus volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction, The Dunwich Horror & Others (1963, revised 1985), At the Mountains of Madness & Other Novels (1964, revised 1986), and Dagon & Other Macabre Tales (1965, revised 1986) and then licensing the stories for paperback publication. At the Mountains of Madness & Other Tales of Terror (Beagle/Ballantine Books, 1971) was a slimmed-down version of the Arkham House hardcover and featured the novel At the Mountains of Madness and the short stories “The Shunned House”, “Dreams in the Witch-House”, and “The Statement of Randolph Carter”.
Mon, February 12, 2018
Episode 22 – Extra Credit - Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" with special guest Andy Markham
Hoi and Jeff discuss Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" with special guest Andy Markham.
Tue, January 23, 2018
Episode 21 - Margaret St. Clair's "The Shadow People" with special guest Julian Bernick
Hoi and Jeff discuss Margaret St. Clair's "The Shadow People" with special guest Julian Bernick.
Mon, January 08, 2018
Episode 20 - A. Merritt's "Burn Witch, Burn!" with special guest Stephen Newton
Abraham Grace Merritt (better known by his byline A. Merritt) has the odd distinction of being perhaps second only to Edgar Rice Burroughs in popularity as a writer of fantastic fiction during the first half of the 20th century, only to be largely forgotten today. Perhaps this is because Merritt’s relatively small body of work didn’t feature recurring iconic heroes like John Carter of Mars or Conan of Cimmeria, or it may be down to his prose style’s reputation for being more baroque and densely descriptive than is the norm nowadays. Merritt came from a poor Quaker family, and financial difficulties forced his withdrawal from legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He landed a job at the age of 19 in 1903 as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, remaining a journalist for the rest of his life. Early in his career Merritt experienced or witnessed something (political corruption? heinous violence? eldritch horrors?) of which he never spoke again. Merritt was forced to lay low for a year in Mexico and Central America, where he visited many pre-Columbian sites and befriended the indigenous peoples. Merritt’s Latin American exile sparked in him a lifelong love of travel to exotic locales and a keen interest in the rituals and legends associated with those places. This anthropological eye would inform all of Merritt’s fiction, from his first published story “Through the Dragon Glass” (1917) to his final uncompleted novella “The Fox Woman” (first published in 1946). Merritt’s powers of imagination and description would inspire generations of writers of fantastic fiction, not least the “Big Three” of Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. Unlike many of the Appendix N authors, Merritt did not need to survive on his fiction work since he was one of the best-paid journalists of his time--in 1912 he was tapped to be the assistant editor of The American Weekly and was earning $25,000 a year by 1919 (over $365,000 in 2017 dollars). Merritt served as the editor-in-chief of The American Weekly from 1937 until his death in 1943, by which time he was earning $100,000 a year (over $1.4 million in 2017 dollars). Merritt’s editorial responsibilities and his tendency to re-visit and rework his stories meant that he only completed 8 novels and 7 short stories in his lifetime. But regardless of whether Merritt’s commitment to The American Weekly limited his fantastic fiction output, his time there was well-spent as it also allowed him to champion and hire Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok, two up-and-coming artists who would become among the greatest of the pulp era. Both Finlay and Bok would go on to illustrate many of Merritt’s stories and Bok was given permission to complete and publish two unfinished Merritt novellas, The Fox Woman and the Blue Pagoda (New Collectors Group, 1946) and The Black Wheel (New Collectors Group, 1947). Merritt’s second to last novel, Burn, Witch, Burn! was originally serialized in 6 parts in Argosy We
Mon, December 25, 2017
Episode 19 - Jack Vance's "The Eyes of the Overworld" with special guest David Hoskins
The Eyes of the Overworld (Ace Books, 1966) marks Jack Vance’s return to the Dying Earth setting after a break of 15 years. The book is a fix-up of the stories “The Overworld”, “The Mountains of Magnatz”, “The Sorceror Pharesm”, “The Pilgrims” and “The Manse of Iucounu” all of which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between December 1965 and August 1966. To these stories Vance added a second chapter “Cil” to expand the book to novel length. The Eyes of the Overworld is contains many elements of the picaresque novel, from its episodic structure, generally satirical nature, and most importantly its roguish or even outright villainous protagonist Cugel, a man of no particular standing who ultimately never learns anything or changes his essential nature, despite his world-spanning journey and many travails. After The Eyes of the Overworld Vance once more took a long hiatus from the Dying Earth before returning again to the setting in the mid-1980s with Cugel’s Saga (1983) and Rhialto the Marvellous (1984). The Dying Earth books remain Vance’s most recognizable works, even lending their name to an entire subgenre of science fantasy, although the evolution of the subgenre can be traced back at least through Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique cycle and William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912).
Mon, December 18, 2017
Episode 18 - Fritz Leiber's "Swords Against Death" with special guest Jen Brinkman
Swords Against Death (Ace Books, 1970) by Fritz Leiber was originally published in paperback as part of Ace Books’ complete seven volume saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Although Swords Against Death is second in the series chronology, it was actually the fifth book published. The stories is this volume are “The Circle Curse” (1970), “The Jewels in the Forest” (1939), “Thieves’ House” (1943), “The Bleak Shore” (1940), “The Howling Tower” (1941), “The Sunken Land” (1942), “The Seven Black Priests” (1953), “Claws from the Night” (1951), “The Price of Pain-Ease” (1970), and “Bazaar of the Bizarre” (1963). “The Jewels in the Forest” was the very first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story to appear in print, under its original title “Two Sought Adventure” in Unknown magazine in 1939. The subsequent four stories also appeared in Unknown, which was cancelled in 1943 due to wartime paper shortages. A further handful of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories including “Claws from the Night” and “The Seven Black Priests” trickled out over the next two decades. In 1957 all of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories to date except “Adept’s Gambit” (1936/1947) were collected in the Gnome Press hardcover Two Sought Adventure. This collection was later expanded to provide the spine of Swords Against Death.
Mon, December 04, 2017
Episode 17 - Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, & Lin Carter’s “Conan of Cimmeria”
Conan of Cimmeria (Lancer Books, 1969) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan of Cimmeria was the seventh volume published, although it is second in the internal chronology--later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer when out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series, keeping it in print until the mid 1990s. As with Conan, series editors de Camp and Carter filled in gaps in Conan’s timeline by expanding Howard’s unpublished notes and fragments, re-writing non-Conan stories, and writing entirely new stories. For the purist, the Howard-only stories in Conan of Cimmeria are “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” (written in 1934, first published 1953, definitive version published 1976), “Queen of the Black Coast” (1934), and “The Vale of Lost Women” (first published in The Magazine of Horror, 1967). The de Camp and Carter originals in Conan of Cimmeria are “The Curse of the Monolith” (first published in the magazine Worlds of Fantasy in 1968 as “Conan and the Cenotaph”), “The Lair of the Ice Worm”, and “The Castle of Terror”. “The Blood-Stained God” is a de Camp rewrite of a then unpublished Howard story “The Curse of the Crimson God”, with de Camp changing the setting from early 20th century Afghanistan and adding the fantastic elements to turn it into a Conan tale. “The Blood-Stained God” first saw print in the hardcover collection Tales of Conan (Gnome Press, 1955). The final story in this volume “The Snout in the Dark” was completed by de Camp and Carter from synopsis and story fragment found in Howard’s notes. For the curious, the untitled synopsis and fragment can be found in the appendices of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 2003). In addition to the Conan influences on Dungeons & Dragons cited in Episode 2, Conan of Cimmeria was the probable source of the Monster Manual’s remorhaz, a sort of ice centipede inverse of the remora from “The Lair of the Ice Worm”. “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” probably deserves equal credit along with the first Harold Shea story “The Roaring Trumpet” for the Dungeons & Dragons treatment of frost giants, which first appeared in the original 1974 edition and were fully detailed in the Monster Manual (1977). Frost giants would become iconic D&D foes with the publication of TSR’s second D&D module, 1978’s G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, the middle module of the Against the Giants trilogy.
Mon, November 27, 2017
Episode 16 - L. Sprague de Camp's "Lest Darkness Fall"
L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall first saw light as a short story in the December 1939 issue of Unknown magazine before being expanded into a full novel for hardcover publication by Henry Holt & Company in 1941. Unknown was the companion magazine to Astounding, both of which were edited by John W. Campbell, the godfather of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction”. Campbell had taken the reins of Astounding in 1937 and had almost immediately turned it away from its freewheeling high adventure origins towards more scientifically plausible and therefore “realistic” stories. In 1939, Campbell launched Unknown with a very similar mandate towards fantasy fiction; his direction to writers was “For Astounding I want stories which are good and logical and possible. For Unknown, I want stories which are good and logical.” As an aeronautical engineer by training and a paleontologist, historian and educator by inclination, L. Sprague de Camp was an exemplar of the new breed of scientifically savvy writer that Campbell was cultivating. De Camp’s essentially rationalist worldview seems to have given him trouble in depicting the truly impossible, at least in his nominally science fiction works. It makes sense then that he’d quickly gloss over the mechanics and metaphysics of time travel in Lest Darkness Fall in favor of playing to his strengths, in this case a deep knowledge of Late Antiquity, specifically the Gothic War (535-554) that devastated the Italian peninsula and sent it into a state of decline that was only reversed with the coming of the Italian Renaissance. Lest Darkness Fall was de Camp’s first solo novel, but even then some of his tropes were in evidence, such as the highly educated and rational protagonist making his way in a strange new world, both aided and opposed by often comical or even buffoonish locals. De Camp’s writing can be compromised at times by the feeling that he’s holding himself above the material or at least failing to fully embrace it, but thankfully that’s not the case with Lest Darkness Fall. Padway’s dry wit rarely devolves into snark, and his 20th century education and native intelligence aren’t always enough to carry the day–ultimately Padway relies on persuasion as much as intellect. Lest Darkness Fall’s balance of well-developed characters and careful extrapolation of history made it a cornerstone of the Alternate history sub-genre of fantastic fiction to this day as witnessed by its frequent reprintings over the last 80 years. It has also drawn reponses in the form of the short stories “The Man Who Came Early” (1956) by Poul Anderson, “The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass” (1962) by Frederik Pohl, “To Bring the Light” (1996) by David Drake, and “The Apotheosis of Martin Padway” (2005) by S.M. Stirling. The current king of alternate history fiction Harry Turtledove recently tweeted that the book changed his life: “ L. Sprague de Camp’s LEST DARKNESS FALL. Without It, I wouldn’t have studied Byzantium, and my whole
Mon, November 20, 2017
Episode 15 - Lin Carter's "Giant of World's End"
Lin Carter has a multi-faceted reputation in the world of fantastic fiction. As an editor and critic, he is virtually indispensable, most notably for his role in editing the landmark Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (BAFS), as well as the subsequent Flashing Swords!, The Year's Best Fantasy, and Weird Tales anthologies. Carter’s legacy as a writer is considerably more muddied by his “posthumous collaborations” with Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, which often consisted of creating entirely new stories from unfinished drafts and story fragments. These stories were presented as newly rediscovered works, with Carter carrying the torch for Howard and Smith. Lin Carter was hardly alone in his “posthumous collaborations” however, as he was following a precedent set in the 1950s by August Derleth and L. Sprague de Camp. It can be argued that this practice is distasteful or outright literary defacement, but it could equally well be seen as a precursor to today’s “remix” culture. What about Lin Carter’s solo fiction then? His breakthrough Thongor series, starting with The Wizard of Lemuria (Ace Books, 1965) has been characterized as heavily influenced by Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Carter was incredibly prolific over the next four years, knocking out roughly 25 more books along with his editorial work and scripting episodes of the Spider-Man animated series. Carter’s work on the BAF series starting in 1969 may have re-awakened his interest in the denser, more allusive prose styles of the likes of Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, and William Morris. This interest would come to the fore in Carter’s Giant of World’s End (Belmont Books, 1969), set 700 million years in the future in The Eon of the Falling Moon. In the far future Earth of Giant of World’s End, the continents have drifted back together into the supercontinent of Gondwane and the Moon has fallen in its orbit to the point where it will soon collide with and destroy the world. The warrior construct Ganelon Silvermane and his companions Zelobion the Magician and Arzeela the War Maid must traverse this vast continent in an attempt to find a “counter-lunary agent” that will prevent the Moon’s fall and the end of the world....
Mon, November 13, 2017
Episode 14 - Sterling E. Lanier's "Hiero's Journey"
There’s surprisingly little reliable biographical information about Sterling E. Lanier, but like many Appendix N authors he does seem to have been a man of many parts. Most accounts of Lanier’s life have him studying archaeology and anthropology at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania before working as a researcher and historian for most of the 1950s. His other interests included sculpture, natural history, and cryptozoology, all of which would bear on his creative endeavors. In 1961 Lanier began his literary career with the publication of his first short story in Analog magazine and by landing an editor’s position at Chilton Books, best known then and now as a publisher of automotive repair manuals. Lanier cemented his place in science fiction history in 1965 by convincing Chilton to publish Frank Herbert’s Dune in hardcover after it had already been rejected by over 20 publishers. Lanier’s strong interest in ecology must have made the Dune stories jump out at him as they were being serialized in Analog magazine. Unfortunately a prophet is never honored in his own land and Lanier was let go from Chilton the following year when Dune initially failed to live up to sales expectations. Lanier’s creative output was jumpstarted by his dismissal from Chilton and he began working in earnest as a sculptor, jeweler, and writer in the late 1960s. Among his notable works from this period were miniature portrait sculptures of characters from The Lord of the Rings that were supposedly admired by J.R.R. Tolkien himself and that may have served as character models for Peter Jackson’s film trilogy. During this time Lanier also began writing his Brigadier Ffellowes short stories, which were inspired in equal part by Lord Dunsany’s Jorkens “club tales” and his enthusiasm for cryptozoology. Lanier’s interest in ecology and weird creatures would come into full bloom in his first novel for adults, Hiero’s Journey, which his old employer Chilton published in hardcover in 1973, followed by a Bantam Books paperback in 1974. Hiero’s Journey is clearly the main literary inspiration for James M. Ward and Gary Jaquet’s Gamma World (TSR, 1978), the archetypal post-apocalyptic role-playing game. Gamma World and its spiritual descendants such as Mutant Future (Goblinoid Games, 2008) and Mutant Crawl Classics (Goodman Games, 2018) form the weird, kitchen-sink, far-future branch of post-apocalyptic role-playing games as opposed to the more gloomy and “realistic” near-future post-apocalypse RPGs typified by The Morrow Project (TimeLine Ltd., 1980) or Aftermath! (Fantasy Games Unlimited, 1981). Gary Gygax cited Hiero’s Journey as an influence on Dungeons & Dragons and it’s easy to see why. For example, from the original 1974 rules we have the various jelly, mold, ooze, pudding, and slime monsters that echo the outgrowths of the House; they were later fully fleshed (sprouted?) out in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual (1978). Psionic powers were first introduced i
Mon, November 06, 2017
Episode 13 - Gardner F. Fox's "Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman"
J.R.R. Tolkien and perhaps Robert E. Howard aside, no Appendix N author has had as a large a pop culture footprint as Gardner F. Fox, but not for any of the works cited by Gary Gygax. Although hardly a household name today, Gardner Fox was among other things one of the most prolific comic book writers of the 20th Century. Fox was originally a practicing attorney in New York City, but still must have found it hard to make ends meet during the heart of the Great Depression--in 1937 he began writing for DC comics as well as contributing stories to many of the pulp magazines of the era. Over the course of his 30 year career with DC Comics Fox was responsible for such seminal creations as the Golden Age Flash, the Sandman, Doctor Fate, Hawkman, and the Justice Society of America. During the Silver Age of the 1960s, he would help re-vamp the Atom and Hawkman, create the Justice League of America, introduce Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, and write his most famous story, “The Flash of Two Worlds!” (The Flash #123, 1961), which introduced the concept of the Multiverse to DC Comics. Fox left or was cut loose from DC Comics in 1968 when the company shamefully declined to give health insurance and other employee benefits to its older writers and artists. He then turned to writing novels and short stories full-time, churning out tales of all genres both under his own name and under at least 15 pen names. Fox’s works included science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, historical fiction, and the sexploitation spy series Lady from L.U.S.T. (as Rod Gray) and Cherry Delight (as Glenn Chase). Among the over 100 novels that Fox would pen over the next decade and half was the first of the Kothar series, Kothar Barbarian Swordsman (Belmont Books, 1969). Kothar Barbarian Swordsman was clearly meant to cash in on Conan/swords and sorcery boom of the era, but an old pro like Fox couldn’t resist having a little fun along the way, such as with the absurdly pompous introduction by “Donald MacIvers, Ph.D” which leaned heavily on the theories of the obscure German philosopher “Albert Kremnitz”. One can’t help but think that Fox was tweaking the likes of L. Sprague de Camp and other well-educated writers who were insecure about toiling in the vineyards of fantastic fiction. Fox by contrast wears his learning lightly, throwing in a myriad of historical but obscure terms such as “hacqueton”, “athanor”, and “cotehardie” more to amuse himself and because he may have liked their sound in a sentence than as a means to place himself above the material. The Kothar stories are presented with economy, craft, and imagination, so it’s not surprising that they stood out to Gary Gygax amidst all of the other derivative swords and sorcery in print at the time. The most well-known borrowing from Kothar in Dungeons & Dragons would be the lich, a powerful sorcerer who has prolonged his life into undeath--Gygax confirmed this borrowing here. Liches made their D&D debut in the Original edition’s Supplement
Mon, October 30, 2017
Episode 12 - Michael Moorcock's "The Stealer of Souls"
Michael Moorcock’s first five Elric of Melniboné stories appeared in the British magazine Science Fantasy in 1962 and were collected in hardcover the next year as The Stealer of Souls, followed by a U.S. paperback edition from Lancer Books in 1967. Savage and sardonic, the Elric stories must have seemed like a fantasy off-shoot of Great Britain’s “Angry Young Man” movement of that era. At first glance, Elric of Melniboné appears to be the very antithesis of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian: a physically weak sorcerer, addicted to drugs, symbiotically linked to the malignant black sword Stormbringer, and the rightful emperor of a cruel and decadent pre-human civilization. Moorcock and Elric are often characterized as a negation or rejection of Howardian swords & sorcery, but that’s a drastic oversimplification of Moorcock’s relationship to pulp fantasy. Moorcock was precocious fantasy talent, creating fanzines as a schoolboy and becoming editor of the professional magazine Tarzan Adventures by the age 17 in 1957. Moorcock was a notable contributor to AMRA, a fanzine that was a hotbed of discussion about fantasy fiction and counted among its many notable correspondents Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, and Roger Zelazny. As mentioned here, the term “swords and sorcery” was coined by Fritz Leiber in dialogue with Moorcock, although Moorcock has always preferred the term “epic fantasy”. Moorcock has at times minimized but never totally denied his appreciation for Howard, most likely hoping to let the Elric saga stand on its own two feet. He’s also held up his deep regard for the works of Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber, and Fletcher Pratt among others and was later a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorceror's Guild of America, none of which indicates someone contemptuous or indifferent to fantasy fiction. Moorcock continued to write Elric stories in the late 1960s and the 1970s that were set prior to the events of Stormbringer. DAW Books republished the Elric Saga in 1977, arranging the stories by internal chronology, splitting the stories from The Stealer of Souls between The Weird of the White Wolf and The Bane of the Black Sword, the third and fifth books of Elric’s saga respectively. With Moorcock’s approval, Del Rey/Ballantine began publishing the “definitive” version of Elric’s saga in 2008, once again collecting the stories in publication order. Elric’s saga clearly had an impact on Gary Gygax as he specifically mentions Elric as a playable figure in the “Fantasy Supplement” to Chainmail (1971). The Law vs. Chaos alignment system in Chainmail and original Dungeons & Dragons (1974) may have originated with Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, but there’s a distinct Moorcockian flavor in practice, although that would obviously vary from gaming group to gaming group. Rob Kuntz and James Ward wrote up Elric and the Melnibonéan mythos in the fourth Dungeons & Dragons supplement, Gods, Demi-Gods
Mon, October 16, 2017
Episode 11 - John Bellairs's "The Face in the Frost"
At first glance John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost is a bit of an anomaly, both in his own body of work and in Appendix N. It is the only Bellairs work cited by Gary Gygax in Appendix N, and ended up being Bellairs’s first and only fantasy novel directed at adults. Bellairs began work on The Face in the Frost in the late 1960s after reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He created his protagonist Prospero as a reaction to the might and nobility of Gandalf, rendering Prospero and his fellow wizard Roger Bacon as more down to earth, crotchety, and occasionally downright fearful of their circumstances. The Face in the Frost was published in hardcover by Macmillan in 1969, with quirky pen-and-ink illustrations by his friend Marilyn Fitschen that reinforced the alternating whimsy and dread of the story. The book did well enough for Bellairs to turn to full-time writing, with his next work The House with a Clock in its Walls was also a dark fantasy, although set in the late 1940s. Supposedly Bellairs had difficulty selling The House with a Clock in its Walls until a publisher suggested rewriting it as a young adult (YA) book. The House with a Clock in its Walls proved to be a huge critical and sales success, so much so that Bellairs would remain best known as a YA author for the rest of his career, completing a total of 15 books for young readers. It’s interesting that The Face in the Frost did not differ dramatically in mood and tone from Bellairs’ gothic mysteries for young readers, yet it was never re-marketed as a YA work. Ace Books published The Face in the Frost in paperback in 1978, but its odd man out status as Bellairs’s only substantial adult work may have contributed to it going out out of print after Bellairs’ death in 1991. It was then only available only in specialty press editions until it was finally republished in 2014 by Open Road Media, although unfortunately without Marilyn Fitschen’s illustrations. The Ace Books paperback cover by Carl Lundgren (also the cover artist of Dragon magazine issues 50 & 68) renders Prospero as an archetypal high fantasy wizard and captures some of the eeriness but none of the whimsy of The Face in the Frost. It’s unclear when Gary Gygax first encountered The Face in the Frost, but it may have been fresh on his mind as he was writing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In The Players Handbook Gygax explicitly states that magic-users must consult their spellbooks in order to memorize their spells, which echoes Prospero’s habit of studying his spellbook at night before the next day’s journey and adventures. In contrast the Original Dungeons & Dragons box set merely states that a given spell (slot) may only be used once a day--no mention is made of memorization or spell preparation. It appears that Gary Gygax wanted to provide a narrative and theoretical underpinning to what may have originally been a game balance decision. He found much of his answer in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, but The Face in
Mon, October 02, 2017
Episode 10 - Roger Zelazny's "Jack of Shadows"
Roger Zelazny stated that he wrote Jack of Shadows as a “first draft, no rewrite”, which might account for the occasionally elliptical nature of the narrative. Any lack of cohesion in the plotting is compensated for by the dark majesty of Jack AKA Shadowjack’s world. Zelazny is clearly echoing Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories here, at least in the weirdness of the creatures and landscapes of the darkside if not in the playful ornateness of Vance’s prose. Jack of Shadows also emphasizes the interplay and conflict between magic and science, and the borderline immortality/superhumanity of its protagonist, themes that would play out in many of Zelazny’s other works such as The Lord of Light and The Chronicles of Amber. Jack of Shadows was originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1971 and was immediately reprinted in hardcover by Walker & Company, followed by a paperback edition from Signet in 1972. Jack of Shadows was well-received from first release, garnering Hugo and Locus Award nominations in 1972--it did not achieve the lasting popularity of The Chronicles of Amber or many of Zelazny’s other books however, and was out of print for over 25 years until it was recently reprinted by the Chicago Review Press in 2016. Gary Gygax wrote in issue #2 of The Excellent Prismatic Spray (2001) that Jack Vance’s Cugel the Clever and Zelazny’s Shadowjack were the greatest influences on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons thief class as described in the The Players Handbook (1978). The thief’s abilities as written though are rather mundane and have a low probability of success for beginning characters. If the thief’s skills are re-imagined as being a quasi-mystical version of Jack’s powers, then even a 10% chance of utterly disappearing into shadows becomes a very powerful ability indeed! Of course, Jack as he appears in Jack of Shadows is not a mere skulking footpad but a magician of unsurpassed power, so it makes sense that he was written up as such in Wizards (1983), part of Mayfair Games’ Role Aids line of unofficial Advanced Dungeons & Dragons supplements. It’s worth noting that although a thief-type class is considered core to Dungeons & Dragons today, the class was not included in the original 1974 box set and only made its first appearance in the first D&D supplement Greyhawk (1975). In some gaming circles this has kicked off a 40+ year debate over whether the thief deserves to be its own character class or if being a thief is properly a role that all adventurers play….
Mon, September 25, 2017
Episode 9 - Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions
Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions was originally serialized in 1953 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction--eight years later a revised and expanded version of the tale would see print in hardcover from Doubleday, followed by an Avon paperback in 1962. It has remained sporadically in print ever since, largely overshadowed by Anderson’s more famous science fiction works. Although Anderson was best known during the first half of his writing career as a science fiction author, Three Hearts and Three Lions and his following fantasy work The Broken Sword (1954) had a strong impact on knowledgeable fans and fellow writers, perhaps most clearly with Michael Moorcock’s adoption and reinterpretation of the cosmic struggle between Law and Chaos in the Elric of Melniboné stories, which began appearing in 1961. It’s interesting to speculate how much of himself Anderson put into Holger Carlsen, the hero of Three Hearts and Three Lions--they are both Danish-Americans, trained in science and engineering, and apparently wholly rational and pragmatic. Holger rises to adventure though, rediscovering and embracing his true identity as Ogier the Dane, paladin of Charlemagne and one the great heroes of medieval European literature. In a similar vein, perhaps Anderson’s romantic side led him to become a founding member of both the Society for Creative Anachronism and the Swordsmen and Sorceror's Guild of America. Throughout its publishing history Three Hearts and Three Lions never had an iconic cover, and the Appendix N-era 1978 Berkley Medallion paperback is no exception, featuring a serviceable cover by Wayne Barlowe, who would later become more well-known for his anatomically realistic depictions of fantastic creatures and truly alien life. That Three Hearts and Three Lions is one of the most significant influences on early Dungeons & Dragons is undeniable. For example, Gary Gygax specifically cites the book in the listing for the “True Troll” in the “Fantasy Supplement” to Chainmail (1971), although a full description of the Andersonian troll (and the nixie) would have to wait for the original Dungeons & Dragons (1974) box set. The original 1974 rules would also feature the most famous borrowing from Three Hearts and Three Lions, the Law vs. Chaos alignment system, although perhaps filtered through Michael Moorcock’s interpretation in the Elric books. Certain Lawful fighters could elect to achieve Holger Carlsen-esque paladin status with the publication of the first D&D supplement, Greyhawk (1975). Paladins would evolve into their quintessential D&D form as a fighter sub-class in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook (1978) The troll and the nixie would receive much more detailed write-ups in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual (1977), with the Swanmay finally making her first D&D appearance in the Monster Manual II (1983). A close reading of Three Hearts and Three Lions and the various early Dungeons & Dragons would und
Mon, September 18, 2017
Episode 8 - Philip José Farmer's "The Maker of Universes"
In retrospect, the publication of Philip José Farmer’s The Maker of Universes (Ace Books, 1965) marks the beginning of the most productive and rewarding phase of Farmer’s writing career. It can hardly have seemed that way at the time, as Farmer was toiling away as a technical writer in Scottsdale, Arizona to support himself and his family. Even though Farmer had been a published writer as of 1946 and had even won his first Hugo Award in 1953 (as “Best New SF Author or Artist”), commercial success had eluded him so far. Robert Wolff, the initially aged, paunchy, and disillusioned protagonist of The Maker of Universes is obviously a stand-in for Farmer at that point in his life---fortunately Farmer and his wife Bette appear to have been very happy together in real life, as their marriage lasted over 67 years until his death in 2009. The Maker of Universes is one of Farmer’s most personal works, with callbacks to the whole range of his youthful enthusiasms, from Ancient Greek and Native American myths and legends, Edgar Rice Burroughs-style pulp, and Lord Dunsany’s sense of mystery and wonder among others. Interestingly, in Farmer’s introduction to the 1980 Phantasia Press special edition of The Maker of Universes he cites Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass as stronger influences on the book than the more obvious high adventure of Burroughs. Farmer would later write in his introduction to the THOAN, Les Faiseurs d’Univers RPG, that he had first received “impressions” of the World of Tiers while he was laid low with a fever at the age of 18 and believed them to be actual visions from an alternate universe. One has to wonder if Farmer is being utterly serious or so drily tongue-in-cheek as to make no difference…. The cover of the original Ace Books paperback features a wonderfully composed if not entirely accurate depiction of Podarge the Harpy by the versatile and prolific Jack Gaughan The Ace Books reprints from 1977 onward featured Boris Vallejo’s unmistakably beefcakey rendition of Robert Wolff along with an accurately wing-armed Podarge Given The Maker of Universes’ galloping pace and mad invention, it’s no wonder that Gary Gygax found it a particular inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons. Like many other Appendix N works, The Maker of Universes makes no particular distinction between science fiction and heroic fantasy, much to its benefit. The motley crew that eventually assembles around Robert Wolff and Kickaha the Trickster is recognizable as a proto-adventuring party and the World of Tiers itself is the classic dungeon writ (very) large, with each successive level an environment of greater threat and adventure.
Mon, September 04, 2017
Episode 7 – Fletcher Pratt's "The Blue Star"
Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star first saw print in the hardcover anthology Witches Three (Twayne Publishers, 1952), which also included Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and James Blish’s “There Shall be No Darkness”. Pratt himself was the uncredited editor of the Witches Three, which ended up being the second and final volume in the short-lived “Twayne Triplets” series of themed hardcover fantastic fiction anthologies. Witches Three and The Blue Star in particular were positively reviewed at the time by The New York Times and The Washington Post among others. The Blue Star was not republished for the mass market however and soon slipped into obscurity, perhaps partly as a result of Pratt’s death in 1956. The Blue Star would likely remain forgotten to this day had Lin Carter not picked it to be the inaugural work in 1969 of the now seminal Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (BAFS) was launched largely to follow up on the massive success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works for Ballantine Books. Carter was tasked with bringing “fantasy novels of adult calibre” to the mass market paperback format, from original works to reprinting many rare or unjustly obscure “fantastic romances of adventure and ideas”. Although Carter did call The Blue Star “thoughtfully conceived and brilliantly accomplished”, it’s still a bit of a mystery why he thought this rather dense and allusive book was a particularly good choice to launch the series. It is worth noting that one of Carter’s literary mentors and frequent collaborators was L. Sprague de Camp, who was also Fletcher Pratt’s most frequent fiction writing partner. The BAFS edition of The Blue Star features a striking and psychedelic wraparound cover by Ron Walotsky which has almost no bearing on the story contents. After the cancellation of the BAF series The Blue Star remained sufficiently popular to be reprinted twice more by Ballantine Books in 1975 and 1981, although now with a more mundane (if accurate to the text) cover by Darrell K. Sweet. It’s hard to map any direct textual influence from The Blue Star to Dungeons and Dragons, especially given the overall passivity of The Blue Star’s protagonists Lalette Asterhax and Rodvard Bergelin. The Blue Star’s magic system, societies, religions and mores are quite well-developed though and may have appealed to the worldbuilder in Gary Gygax. Gygax the history buff and wargamer may also have felt a special affinity for Fletcher Pratt, who was even more well known during his lifetime as a popular military and naval historian (and naval wargame creator!) than as a writer of fantastic fiction.
Mon, August 21, 2017
Episode 6 – Edgar Rice Burroughs' "At the Earth's Core"
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Pellucidar book At the Earth’s Core was part of the supernova period at the beginning of his writing career, wherein he managed to write 25 novels between 1911-1915! The serialization of At the Earth’s Core in All-Story Weekly magazine in 1914 represents the extraordinary feat of launching three major literary franchises in a mere three years, following on the Mars/Barsoom series and the Tarzan series. Pellucidar's Hollow Earth setting with its weird timeless eternal day and its menagerie of threats from the chillingly alien Mahars, the brutish Sagoths, and various pre-historic megafauna remains one of the most sustained acts of invention in fantastic fiction to this day. Although At the Earth’s Core was popular enough to be published in hardcover starting in 1922 and re-serialized in 1929, it doesn’t seem to have been in print after 1940. Certainly, David Innes is a likeable protagonist, but he lacks the larger-than-life qualities of John Carter of Mars or Tarzan of the Apes. Other suspects for At the Earth’s Core’s lapse into relative obscurity would be the World War II paper shortage, followed by Burroughs’ death in 1950. At the Earth’s Core was first published in paperback by Ace Books in 1962, making it an early factor in the great Edgar Rice Burroughs revival of the 1960s. The lush and colorful cover by Roy Krenkel would certainly have helped it stand out on the racks: The Frank Frazetta cover that graced At the Earth’s Core later Ace Books printings from the early 1970s through the 1980s depicts the horrible anticipation of the Mahar temple sequence. The Pellucidar series is terrific worldbuilding but it did not leave as obvious an imprint on early Dungeons & Dragons as Burroughs’ Mars/Barsoom series, other than in its pulp ethos and sense of high adventure. The general pulp ethos was certainly present in Dave Cook and Tom Moldvay’s X1 - The Isle of Dread module which was included in 1981’s Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set. The Isle of Dread would pave the way for TSR’s Known World/Mystara setting and its undeniably pulpy/Burroughsian Hollow World sub-setting.
Mon, August 07, 2017
Episode 5 – J.R.R. Tolkien's “The Hobbit"
The Hobbit first came to Oxford University professor J.R.R. Tolkien when he was grading papers in the early 1930s. Coming upon a blank page in an exam book, he suddenly wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Tolkien worked on The Hobbit for the next several years before submitting it for publication in 1936 as a children’s book to George Allen & Unwin, then known mainly as an academic publishing house. The publisher Stanley Unwin paid his ten-year-old son Rayner a shilling to review the manuscript, which he reported on as follows: "Bilbo Baggins was a Hobbit who lived in his Hobbit hole and never went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his Dwarves persuaded him to go. He had a very exiting (sic) time fighting goblins and wargs. At last they get to the lonely mountain; Smaug, the dragon who guards it is killed and after a terrific battle with the goblins he returned home — rich! This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9." Young Rayner Unwin’s recommendation convinced his father to publish The Hobbit in hardcover in 1937, to strong sales and critical acclaim. Stanley Unwin asked Tolkien for a sequel to The Hobbit as early as December 1937, a request that would take over 15 years to come to fruition as The Lord of the Rings. During that long process, Tolkien would revise The Hobbit for the first time to bring it into closer agreement with developments in The Lord of the Rings, especially in the depiction of Gollum and the One Ring. Although The Hobbit had been available in the U.S. from 1938 in hardcover, it had not been published in U.S. paperback by the mid 1960s, partly because of Tolkien’s distaste for the “degenerate” paperback format. This all changed when Ace Books put out an unauthorized U.S. paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1965 after finding what they perceived to be a copyright loophole. Ballantine Books rushed to put out authorized U.S. paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in 1965. Tolkien made additional revisions to both works both for his own satisfaction and to cement their U.S. copyright status, with The Hobbit’s third edition appearing in 1966. The most common version of The Hobbit available during the Appendix N era would have been the 45th printing and onwards of the Ballantine Books revised paperback, featuring a lovely watercolor cover illustration by Tolkien himself of Bilbo’s escape from Mirkwood astride a barrel. Gary Gygax denied that Tolkien’s works were a particular influence on the development of Dungeons & Dragons, but he certainly would have been conscious of the desire of prospective players to experience the trappings of Middle-earth. Many denizens of Middle-earth including Hobbits, Ents, Orcs, and Balrogs were present in the “Fantasy Supplement” of Chainmail (1971), Gary Gygax’s medieval miniatures wargame that was the immediate predecessor to Dungeons & Drag
Mon, July 31, 2017
Episode 4 - Jack Vance's "The Dying Earth" with special guest Gavin Norman
Special guest Gavin Norman (author of The Complete Vivimancer and Theorems & Thaumaturgy) joins us to discuss Jack Vance‘s The Dying Earth! Jack Vance originally wrote the loosely connected stories that comprise The Dying Earth while serving in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. Vance’s fiction had started appearing in pulp magazines as early as 1945, and The Dying Earth marked his first book publication when it was released in digest-sized paperback in 1950 by Hillman Periodicals, best known as a comic book and magazine publisher. The Dying Earth appears not to have been particularly successful at first, as it was not reprinted even as Vance’s career went on an upswing in the late 1950s & early 1960s. Hillman ceased publishing in 1961 and Lancer Books snapped up The Dying Earth, reprinting it in paperback in 1962 with a cover by the ever-versatile Ed Emshwiller depicting the denouement of the story “Ulan Dhor”. The Dying Earth did well enough that Lancer kept it in print until they went bankrupt in 1973, by which time its reputation was such that it has remained in print to this day through a series of different publishers. No doubt the continued success of The Dying Earth led Jack Vance to revisit the setting starting in the mid 1960s. These new stories that would eventually be published as The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), followed by the post-Appendix N books Cugel’s Saga (1983) and Rhialto the Marvellous (1984). Gary Gygax wrote in issue 2 of The Excellent Prismatic Spray (2001) that he first became a fan of Jack Vance after reading The Big Planet (1957) in the pulps in the early 1950s and then was “absolutely enthralled...as no work of fantasy had done for a long time” with the publication of The Eyes of the Overworld in 1966. The Dying Earth further cemented Gygax’s love of the setting. When it came time to devise a magic system for Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax felt that a “Vancian” system of memorized spells that are expended when cast and that then must be re-learned before casting again was the best way to provide flavor and balance the magic-user against other classes. The Enchanter series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt would provide the situational pre-conditions for spellcasting in D&D, but these spell components were often glossed-over, as Gygax laments as early as 1976 in issue 6 of The Strategic Review, the predecessor to Dragon magazine. Oddly, D&D’s publisher TSR appears never to have tried to license the Dying Earth setting even though Gary Gygax remained a huge fan of Jack Vance and actually had significant contact with him after Dungeons & Dragons took the world by storm. The first time gamers would get to officially adventure in the Dying Earth was with the publication of Pelgrane Press’ The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game in 2001. Goodman Games has since licensed the Dying Earth setting for its Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, with a target release date of late 2017.
Mon, July 24, 2017
Episode 3 - Fritz Leiber's "Swords and Deviltry"
Swords and Deviltry (Ace Books, 1970) by Fritz Leiber was originally published in paperback as part of Ace Books’ complete seven volume saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Although Swords and Deviltry is first in the series chronology, it was actually the fourth book published. Leiber and his lifelong friend Harry Otto Fischer created Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in an exchange of letters in 1934, basing the pair loosely on their own friendship, with Fischer as the diminutive Mouser and Leiber as the towering Fafhrd. The first story featuring the Twain (as they are often called) to appear in print was “Two Sought Adventure” AKA “The Jewels in the Forest” in 1939 in Unknown magazine. A handful of further Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories trickled out over the next two decades until Cele Goldsmith commissioned brand-new stories for Fantastic magazine starting in 1959, which lead to the Ace paperback collections of the late 1960s. Other than the continued interest in Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, this new appreciation of Leiber’s fantasy fiction was one of the biggest contributors to the sword and sorcery renaissance of the 1960s. In fact, Leiber is credited with coining the term “sword and sorcery” in 1961 when Michael Moorcock called for a name for the type of fantasy fiction that Howard, Leiber and others were coming to exemplify. By the time Swords and Deviltry was published Leiber had been writing tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser for over 30 years, but it is only in this book that he revealed their full origins in the stories “Induction” (1957), “The Snow Women” (1970), “The Unholy Grail” (1962), and “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” (1970). Swords and Deviltry featured a typically moody Jeffrey Catherine Jones cover, although the effect is compromised by the trade dress of later printings: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s gaming history actually predates their first publication, as Leiber and Fischer created a complex three-dimensional board game in 1937 to amuse themselves and help them visualize the Twain’s stomping grounds of the city of Lankhmar and the world of Nehwon. This game was later re-developed and published by TSR as Lankhmar in 1976. Leiber and Fischer weren’t mere hands-off IP licensors, however. Leiber would contribute a witty conversation with Fafhrd and the Mouser about wargaming in the very first issue of The Dragon (1976), followed by the short story “Sea Magic” in issue 11 (1977). Fischer’s short story “The Childhood and Youth of The Gray Mouser” then appeared in issue 18 (1978). Lawrence Shick and Tom Moldvay gave Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser their first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons write-up in issue 27 of The Dragon (1979). The Twain and various other denizens of Nehwon were given a whole chapter in James M. Ward’s and Robert J. Kuntz’s Deities & Demigods (1980), with memorably gritty illustrations by Jennell Jaquays. Future notes on the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series will cover later TSR Lankhmar publications, post-TSR licensees
Fri, July 14, 2017
Episode 2 – Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, & Lin Carter's "Conan"
Conan (Lancer Books, 1967) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan was the fifth volume published, although it is first in the internal chronology--later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer when out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series, keeping it in print until the mid 1990s. In a now controversial move, series editors de Camp and Carter filled in gaps in Conan’s timeline by expanding Howard’s unpublished notes and fragments, re-writing non-Conan stories, and writing entirely new stories, thus jump-starting the Conan pastiche era. For the purist, the Howard-only stories in this collection are “The Hyborian Age, Part 1” (1936), “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933), “The God in the Bowl” (1952, Howard’s original version first published 1975), and “Rogues in the House” (1934). Regardless of the editorial controversies, the Lancer/Ace series was the only widely available source of Howard-penned Conan stories for nearly three decades, sustaining the sword and sorcery boom from the late ‘60s to the mid ‘90s. Robert E. Howard’s furious prose and the now-iconic Frank Frazetta cover illustrations on many of the volumes have cemented Conan the Cimmerian in popular culture. Frazetta had clearly read and internalized the dynamism of the Conan stories, as shown by his cover painting of Conan’s epic struggle with Thak the apeman from “Rogues in the House”. As Dungeons & Dragons was created in the era of peak Conan, it is natural that Conan’s presence would be felt, starting with a write-up in Robert Kuntz and James M. Ward’s OD&D supplement Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes (1976). Gary Gygax himself would write up Conan as he appeared in various stages of his career in Dragon magazine issue 36 (1980)--a treatment that presaged the eventual AD&D Barbarian class in Dragon issue 62 (1982) and Unearthed Arcana (1985). Conan the Cimmerian has since remained a perennial roleplaying game property, both with TSR and other publishers, but that’s a story for another day….
Tue, July 04, 2017
Episode 1 - L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt's "The Compleat Enchanter"
The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is a compilation of the first three novellas in the Harold Shea/Enchanter series, “The Roaring Trumpet” (1940), “The Mathematics of Magic” (1940), and “The Castle of Iron” (1941, revised 1950). The Compleat Enchanter was first published as a Nelson Doubleday/Science Fiction Book Club hardcover in 1975 before being released as a Del Rey paperback in 1976, featuring a charming Brothers Hildebrandt cover painting. The three adventures in this book take place in the worlds of Norse Mythology, Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, and Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso. De Camp and Pratt would later team up for two more Harold Shea stories, “The Wall of Serpents” (1953), and “The Green Magician” (1954). These stories fall outside of the Appendix N Book Club reading list since they were not collected in paperback until 1979, but Gary Gygax and Tim Kask must have been big fans since “The Green Magician” made its first reappearance in print since 1960 in issues 15 and 16 of The Dragon (1978)! In any case, the Harold Shea series undoubtedly left its mark on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, most obviously in the magical spell component requirements in The Players Handbook and the Against the Giants series of modules.
Thu, June 29, 2017
Episode 0 - The Appendix N (and why we care)
Hoi and Jeff explain what the Appendix N is and why they care.
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