When I was writing my three-part series on the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, I realized that I had somehow never written a Pulp Fantasy Library post about “The End of the Story,” the very first tale of the Averoigne cycle, appearing in the May 1930 issue of Weird Tales. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. “The End of the Story” is frequently overlooked, probably because, unlike most other entries in the cycle, it is set not in the Middle Ages but in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution. [Note: The text linked above gives the date as 1798, which I believe is simply a typographical error. —JDM]

Even so, I feel a little sheepish about this, as it's an excellent story, both within the Averoigne cycle and within Smith's larger body of work. It's also one of his earliest fiction works, written just a few years after "The Abominations of Yondo." Though still a relative amateur at prose, the story nevertheless presents a clear expression of Smith’s decadent sympathies and his esthetic rebellion against conventional morality. Consequently, it is less a horror story than a parable of temptation and the lingering bitterness that follows salvation.

The story is framed as a manuscript discovered after the mysterious disappearance of a young law student, Christophe Morand. The manuscript contains his confession, written at his father’s estate near Moulins in the province of Averoigne. What Morand recounts there is not a description of an ordeal escaped, but of a paradise glimpsed and lost.

Caught in a violent storm while riding through the forest, Christophe stumbles upon the abbey of Périgon, where he is warmly received by its abbot, Hilaire. The abbot is no ascetic but rather a cultivated Epicurean. He is well-fed, well-read, proud of his wine cellar, and even prouder of his astonishing library. The abbot’s library is a treasure trove of lost antiquities, holding lost fragments of Sappho, an unknown dialog of Plato, and many other unique literary and philosophical curiosities. 

Also present is a hidden volume that the abbot fears – an anonymous text written in archaic French, which he claims is cursed. Hilaire's warning is melodramatic, full of signs of the Cross and invocations of Satan. Unfortunately, it's precisely for this reason that Christophe is so tempted by it. Smith handles the temptation represented by the forbidden text beautifully. It is not lust, ambition, or even greed that drives Christophe, but pure esthetic curiosity. It is the scholar’s hunger for forbidden beauty.

When Christophe eventually does read the manuscript, he finds that it tells of Gérard de Venteillon, a medieval knight who, on the eve of his wedding, encounters a satyr in the forest. The creature whispers a secret so powerful that Gérard abandons his faith, his fiancée, and the world itself. He then follows a hidden path to the ruins of Château des Faussesflammes, presses a triangular stone, and descends into the earth, never to return.

The satyr says that

The power of Christ has prevailed like a black frost on all the woods, the fields, the rivers, the mountains, where abode in their felicity the glad, immortal goddesses and nymphs of yore. But still, in cryptic caverns of the earth, in places far underground, like the hell your priests have fabled, there dwells pagan loveliness, there cry the pagan ecstasies."

Though the words are those of a satyr, it seems clear to me that they're also the words of Smith himself, who had little use for formal religion of any kind, least of all medieval Christianity.

Later, from his window at the abbey, Christophe recognizes nearby ruins. Like Gérard before him, he feels irresistibly drawn to them. Ignoring every warning, he slips away, finds the triangular stone, and descends into the vaults beneath Faussesflammes. Instead of the horror he was promised, Christophe discovers a radiant pastoral world – a classical paradise of laurel groves, flowing rivers, marble palaces, satyrs, and nymphs. This is no hellscape but Arcadia restored, the world Christianity erased.

At the heart of this paradise waits Nycea. She is one of Smith’s most memorable creations: a lamia, an ancient vampire-serpent whom Christophe perceives only as a goddess of beauty. Their meeting is neither violent nor coercive. It is, in fact, strangely tender, luxurious, and, above all, intoxicating. Yet Christophe’s response goes beyond simple lust, just as his desire for the forbidden manuscript in the abbey was more than mere curiosity. Nycea represents recognition, the sense that he has always loved her without knowing it. Smith presents their union not as corruption but as fulfillment. The reader is meant to understand why Christophe would risk damnation for her.

It is at this point that Hilaire bursts in, brandishing holy water. Nycea flees, and the paradise Christophe has discovered collapses into dust. The vision vanishes, and he comes to his senses amid the rubble of the vaults beneath Faussesflammes. Hilaire explains that Nycea is an ancient demon who lures men to their doom, drains them, and devours them. The manuscript was her bait, her carefully laid trap. Gérard and countless others met their deaths this way, and Christophe, the abbot insists, is fortunate to have escaped the same fate.

Christophe feels no gratitude. He feels only rage. He does not believe he has been rescued; he believes he has been robbed.

Unheedful whether or not he had rescued me from dire physical and spiritual perils, I lamented the beautiful dream of which he had deprived me. The kisses of Nycea burned softly in my memory, and I knew that whatever she was, woman or demon or serpent, there was no one in all the world who could ever arouse in me the same love and the same delight.

The true end of the story comes when Christophe vows to return. He swears that he will seek out the ruins of Faussesflammes again and descend once more into the vaults below. He has chosen to risk death and damnation, because he cannot unsee paradise and cannot accept a world without it.

“The End of the Story” is among Smith’s finest tales. Though it differs in many respects from later Averoigne stories, I have always found it especially compelling. Those later entries lean more overtly into the grotesque, but this one is strangely moving and elegiac. It mourns not only the loss of one man’s vision of paradise but also the passing of an older, pagan world – a realm of beauty, sensuality, and wonder erased by the march of Christianity and history.

Howard’s influence is obvious, visible in every barbarian hero who swings a sword against a decadent civilization. Lovecraft’s shadow falls across horror fiction, video and roleplaying games, Internet culture, and popular media more generally. Smith, by contrast, seems oddly absent. His admirers are devoted, but comparatively few writers openly cite him as an influence and his worlds have spawned no major franchises, games, or films.

Why?

The answer is not, I think, that Smith was less imaginative or accomplished than his better-known colleagues. On the contrary, his work is among the most distinctive produced during the pulp era. That's why I would argue that the very qualities that make Smith unique also make him difficult to imitate, adapt, and institutionalize. He inspired readers but not movements.

For example, Smith’s prose is unmistakable. He wrote in long, sinuous sentences thick with Latinate vocabulary, archaic constructions, and sensuous imagery. His stories are, as I have often said, more like prose poems, luxuriating in sound and rhythm as much as, if not more than, narrative. This is both his glory and his barrier. It is hard to write like Clark Ashton Smith without slipping into parody. His style is too idiosyncratic, too personal, too bound to his own esthetic sensibility to become a template others can easily adopt.

To be fair, the same danger exists with his peers. Bad pastiches of Howard and Lovecraft are legion and most attempts to imitate either man’s prose end up as caricature. The difference is not that Howard and Lovecraft are easier to imitate well, but that their styles lend themselves more readily to abstraction. One can strip them down to a handful of recognizable features and reproduce those features mechanically. The result is often parody, yes, but it is also functional.

Howard’s short sentences, violent verbs, and blunt emotionality can be reduced to a usable toolkit. Lovecraft’s catalogs of dread, his breathless escalation of adjectives, his favorite rhetorical tics (“blasphemous,” “cyclopean,” “unnamable”) are equally modular. Writers can plug these components into new stories and produce something that approximates Howard or Lovecraft, even if it lacks the originals’ power.

Lovecraft, moreover, created something deliberately exportable: a shared mythology. The Great Old Ones, forbidden books, ancient cults, and cosmic revelations became a collaborative playground even during HPL's own lifetime. Other writers could add to it (as Smith himself did), reinterpret it, and build upon it. Over time, the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” became a franchise or shared universe long before such terms even existed.

Howard did something similar in a different way. Through Conan and his other heroes, he defined the mode of fantasy we now call sword & sorcery. Other writers could step into that mode, create their own barbarian protagonists, and feel they were participating in a recognizable tradition, even when their efforts lacked the vitality that made Howard’s work so special.

Smith did neither. His stories are scattered across multiple settings, none of which form a unified cosmology. He rarely revisited characters. There is no obvious structure inviting expansion. Each tale feels like a sealed jewel, complete in itself – beautiful, yes, but not obviously expandable. There is no “Smith Mythos” for later writers to inhabit.

Nor does Smith’s worldview encourage imitation. His stories are saturated with decay, extinction, and cosmic exhaustion. Civilizations crumble. Sorcerers damn themselves. Gods are indifferent. Death is inevitable and often absurd. Where Howard offers heroic struggle and Lovecraft offers cosmic terror, Smith offers instead cosmic indifference plus irony. The universe doesn’t care and neither should you.

Worse, Smith’s characters are often complicit in their own destruction. Their greed, curiosity, or hubris leads them to ruin, and his stories rarely provide catharsis. There is no triumph, no moral lesson, often not even a clear horror, just the quiet confirmation that everything ends. This sometimes produces powerful literature, but it is poorly suited to adventure fiction. It does not encourage sequels or heroic identification. It offers atmosphere, not aspiration.

Influence also spreads through media. Howard’s creations moved into comics, films, games, and endless pastiches. Lovecraft’s ideas found second lives in tabletop RPGs, video games, movies, and online culture. Smith has never received this treatment. There are no major film adaptations, no prominent games, no shared universe projects. His work remains largely confined to small press editions and academic appreciation. Without this secondary life, his stories remain artifacts rather than living traditions. They are read, admired, and shelved, but rarely transformed.

Perhaps the most important difference is that Smith thought of himself first and foremost as a poet. His fiction is saturated with poetic concerns. Plot is often secondary. Character is minimal. The stories exist to evoke sensation rather than to tell a tale in any conventional sense. In this way, Smith belongs less to modern genre fiction than to a lineage that includes Lord Dunsany, the French decadents, and the Symbolist poets. He is writing fantasy as an esthetic experience, not as an entertainment product. This makes his work resistant to adaptation. You cannot easily turn “The Empire of the Necromancers” into a movie or a game without losing the very thing that makes it memorable. Strip away the language and little remains but a skeletal plot (no pun intended).

Written by Mathilde Maraninchi and published in 1982, Donjons et Dragons is an incredible artifact from the early days of the hobby. At just under 100 pages in length, it's both an introduction to "a new type of boardgame [jeu de société]: the roleplaying game" and as a playable summary of the rules themselves. That latter part, for me, is one of the most remarkable things about this peculiar volume: it functions as a bootleg D&D rulebook released a year before the official French translation of the Moldvay Basic Set (which I owned). 

There is a great deal I could say about Donjons et Dragons simply on the basis of reading it and perhaps I will in future posts. For now, though, I wanted to focus on the interior artwork by Joël Bordier, which is incredible. For example, here are the illustrations of several of the character classes:

Because I’m focusing this month’s posts on the life, works, and legacy of Clark Ashton Smith, I’ve been trying to find roleplaying game products to discuss in my weekly Retrospective series that connect, even tangentially, to him. I’ve been surprised by how difficult this has proven, a fact that’s probably worthy of a post of its own. Still, while pondering the question, I was reminded that fourteen years after the publication of Castle Amber for the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh edition of Dungeons & Dragons, TSR released a follow-up adventure, albeit a rather unusual one.

Released in 1995, Mark of Amber is a strange product, at once a sequel to 1981’s module X2, an experiment in multimedia presentation, and part of a broader effort by TSR to retrofit its “Known World” setting for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Consequently, this boxed adventure offers a revealing snapshot of TSR in its final years, as it looked backward for inspiration while simultaneously trying out new gimmicks in the hope of reinvigorating sales.

In the abstract, the core idea behind Mark of Amber is a solid one, namely, a return to the old-school weirdness of Castle Amber and expand upon it in interesting ways. Unfortunately, the published adventure is very much a product of its time, the mid-1990s, and all that entails. The tension between the original module’s unrepentant eccentricity and the narrative design impulses then in vogue results in a product that feels caught between two worlds, neither fish nor fowl.

It’s important to remember that, while Castle Amber has many virtues as an adventure, subtlety was never one of them. Tom Moldvay trapped the characters inside a haunted manor populated by eccentrics modeled on figures from Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction. Once ensnared, the PCs were expected to poke around the castle, encountering all manner of bizarre and often dangerous oddities. Castle Amber was thus a classic funhouse dungeon that, despite its literary inspirations, made no great pretensions about itself. It was simply a module where curiosity was its own reward – and frequently its own punishment.

Mark of Amber presents itself as a sequel, taking place decades after the events of X2. The d’Ambreville family still looms large, but the tone has shifted considerably. Gone is the open-ended exploration of a cursed mansion. In its place is a more structured mystery involving murders, secret identities, and dreamlike visions tied to the immortal Étienne d’Ambreville. This shift, I think, reflects a broader change in adventure design. Where Castle Amber invited players to wander, experiment, and uncover strangeness at their own pace, Mark of Amber asks them to follow a plot. Events are paced. Clues are arranged. The Dungeon Master is given a clear narrative spine to maintain.

This approach is by no means unique to Mark of Amber and isn’t even necessarily a flaw. Mystery scenarios, for example, often benefit from structure. Still, it does highlight just how different TSR’s adventure design priorities had become by the mid-1990s. If Castle Amber feels like a haunted museum for the characters to explore freely, Mark of Amber feels more like a guided tour. There are still plenty of strange sights to see and unhinged NPCs to interact with, but the route to them is far more constrained.

To the extent that Mark of Amber is remembered today at all, I suspect it’s largely because of its inclusion of an audio CD. TSR intended it to be played during the session, with specific tracks keyed to certain locations and encounters. The disc contains ambient soundscapes, musical stings, and even narrated segments designed to heighten immersion. This wasn’t the first time TSR had experimented with audio accompaniments, but it was, so far as I can recall, the only time I encountered it myself.

As ludicrous as this might seem now, in 1995 it was actually a somewhat ambitious idea. Tabletop RPGs were still overwhelmingly analog experiences. I doubt every group even had a CD player available at the table and, even when they did, cueing tracks mid-session would almost certainly disrupt play. As a result, the CD was probably more trouble than it was worth. For me, it stands as a perfect emblem of TSR’s late-era mindset: occasionally bold and genuinely experimental, but often out of step with how most people actually played their games.

An equally interesting aspect of Mark of Amber is its place within the evolution of the setting that would come to be known as Mystara. In its earliest conception, the Known World belonged firmly to the Basic/Expert line. AD&D already had its own distinct stable of settings, like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Krynn, each with different assumptions about character power and campaign focus. Nevertheless, beginning in 1994, TSR began adapting Mystara for AD&D and Mark of Amber is part of that effort.

How well this translation worked overall, I can’t really say, since I didn’t purchase any of the other AD&D Mystara products. Even so, I sense a certain contradiction here. Mystara was built as a sandbox setting, with clear geography and room for emergent play, while many AD&D adventures of that time emphasized plotted narratives. Mark of Amber embodies this mismatch, taking place in a setting born in the freewheeling era of the early 1980s now pressed into service for a much more scripted style of play.

All of this leaves Mark of Amber as an uneven adventure. It boasts strong atmosphere, memorable NPCs, and an ambitious presentation, but it’s probably best remembered today for what it reveals about the state of TSR and, by extension, Dungeons & Dragons, just a few years before the company was acquired by Wizards of the Coast.

Bringing this back to Clark Ashton Smith for a moment, Mark of Amber is a curious artifact. Its connection to CAS is almost entirely inherited rather than organic, filtered through Castle Amber rather than drawing directly from the source. Where Moldvay’s original module gleefully embraced the weirdness and excess of Smith’s fiction, Mark of Amber seems to me to approach that inheritance with a more cautious, narratively controlled hand.

In that sense, the adventure neatly encapsulates TSR’s situation in 1995. It looks backward to a beloved classic, tries to dress it up with new technology, and then situates it within a setting undergoing corporate redefinition. The result is neither a pure revival nor a bold reinvention, but something in between. It's a respectful sequel that never quite recaptures the anarchic spirit that made its predecessor memorable.

In honor of Clark Ashton Smith's birthday, I sketched out a character class based broadly on the characters from "The Empire of the Necromancers."  It's still a work in progress, but I like the broad outlines of it and will probably find a way to make use of it in a current or future projects.

CAS at age 19

Today marks the 133rd anniversary of Smith’s birth, which seems as good an occasion as any to reflect on what made his work so distinctive. Rather than simply commemorating another member of the Weird Tales stable, I think it’s worth pausing to consider how Smith’s early life as a poet (and the literary circles in which he moved) gave his fiction its singular texture and enduring power.

Clark Ashton Smith’s literary career began not in pulp magazines but in the rarefied world of early twentieth-century poetry. Born in 1893 in Auburn, California, he had little formal schooling, largely due to health issues, but he compensated through voracious self-education. He devoured classical literature, taught himself French and Spanish, and immersed himself in the Romantic and Symbolist poets. By nineteen, he had produced The Star-Treader and Other Poems, a volume so striking in its imagery and diction that contemporary critics compared him to Keats and Shelley. For a brief moment, Smith seemed destined for a serious poetic career.

Central to his early success was George Sterling, often called the “uncrowned king of Bohemia” in San Francisco literary circles. Sterling became Smith’s mentor, champion, and friend, introducing him to writers and artists and encouraging his lush, decadent style. Sterling himself wrote in a fin-de-siècle mode, rich with classical allusions and sensual imagery, and Smith absorbed this esthetic deeply. From Sterling, Smith learned that language could be luxuriant, that excess was not a vice but a virtue, and that literature could aspire to the condition of dream or myth rather than mere narrative efficiency.

CAS and George Sterling

Even so, Smith never simplified his voice. He did not trim his sentences, streamline his vocabulary, or abandon his baroque imagery. If anything, he doubled down. While other writers adapted themselves to the expectations of pulp magazines, Smith forced the magazines to accommodate him. His stories read less like conventional narratives and more like prose poems that just happen to feature necromancers, dying empires, and alien gods.

I think this poetic foundation explains why Smith’s fiction feels so different from that of his peers. In Smith, language is not merely a vehicle for story; it is the story. His plots are often simple – curiosity leads to doom, hubris invites annihilation, etc. – but the pleasure lies in how those ideas are expressed. He builds atmosphere through rhythm and sound, crafting sentences meant to be savored aloud. His vocabulary is famously archaic and exotic, not as an affectation but as an extension of his poetic training. Words matter to Smith almost like physical objects, chosen for their texture as much as for their meaning.

Perhaps most telling is Smith’s attitude toward horror. Lovecraft’s terror is intellectual, rooted in the shattering of human significance. Howard’s horror is visceral, something to be fought or fled. Smith’s horror is esthetic. His monsters are often beautiful, seductive, or strangely noble. Doom is inevitable, but it arrives wrapped in velvet. This, too, comes from poetry, from the Decadent tradition that finds fascination in decline and ruin. For Smith, decay is not merely tragic; it is strangely lovely.

This places him at a peculiar angle to his Weird Tales compatriots. Lovecraft wrote to reveal philosophical truths. Howard wrote to thrill and exult. Smith, however, wrote to evoke. His stories appeal to me not because of memorable protagonists or clever twists, but because of the way they sound and even feel, if that's the word. They linger in my mind like fragments of strange dreams.

Having already drawn attention to two of the major story cycles in the work of Clark Ashton Smith yesterday, today I turn to two more: Zothique and Poseidonis. Each represents a distinct phase of Smith’s imaginative geography, namely, worlds poised at the edge of decline, saturated with decadence, strange magic, and the long shadows of forgotten civilizations. Where his earlier cycles explore other corners of historical (and prehistorical) fantasy, Zothique and Poseidonis focus on the dying days of Earth and the last flickering embers of Atlantis, respectively. Together, they showcase Smith at his most lush and melancholic, weaving tales that revel in beauty even as they chart the slow, inevitable unraveling of entire worlds.

Zothique 

Zothique is Earth’s final continent, rising millions of years in the future beneath a dim, blood-veiled sun, as the stars creep closer and ancient gods stir once more. It's a world steeped in entropy and oblivion, with endless deserts, hollowed ruins, and decadent, dying cities clinging to their last pleasures. Sorcery has supplanted all but the faintest traces of forgotten science, while humanity wallows in sensual excess, necromancy, and world-weary ennui.

The tales set in Zothique revolve around death as a form of release, the futility of ambition, and cruelly ironic reversals of fortune. It's also probably Smith’s most celebrated cycle and a foundational work of the “Dying Earth” subgenre. Beneath the lurid imagery lies a bleak, almost serene acceptance of decline, where even triumph tastes of dust. For my part, it remains my personal favorite – equal parts macabre, mesmerizing, and strangely beautiful.

Prominent stories in this cycle include:

• "The Empire of the Necromancers" (1932): Exiled wizards raise the dead as slaves in a barren land, only for the undead royalty of the ruin they intend to plunder to rebel against them.
• "The Isle of the Torturers" (1933): A plague-immune king endures sadistic horrors on a cruel island.
• "Xeethra" (1934): A shepherd gains royal memories, quests for a lost kingdom, and bargains with a dark god.
• "The Dark Eidolon" (1935): A sorcerer unleashes apocalyptic vengeance on an emperor, with ironic consequences.
• "The Last Hieroglyph" (1935): An astrologer follows cosmic guides to an unexpected revelation about existence.
• "Necromancy in Naat" (1936): A prince searches for his love on an island of undead slaves.
• "The Death of Ilalotha" (1937): A funeral orgy draws a lover to a reanimated corpse's embrace.
• "The Garden of Adompha" (1938): A king's grotesque garden turns against him.

Poseidonis 

Poseidonis is the last foundering isle of Atlantis, fated to be swallowed by the encroaching seas sometime after the fall of Hyperborea. Drawn heavily from the Theosophical vision of Atlantis and its people, it is an island steeped in sorcery and fading grandeur. Its crumbling cities and embattled coastlines stand as monuments to a civilization already half-lost to legend, even as its inhabitants cling to power, ritual, and ancient secrets.

The stories of the Poseidonis cycle dwell on memory, moral decay, and the inescapable certainty of doom, charting the slow unraveling of a culture that knows its end is near. Corruption festers behind gilded facades, while prophets and magicians vainly attempt to forestall the inevitable. In this way, Poseidonis becomes less a place than a mood. It's a twilight world poised on the brink between myth and oblivion, where every triumph is shadowed by the certainty of the sea’s final claim.

The core stories of this cycle are:

• "The Last Incantation" (1930): Aging Malygris summons his lost love's image.
• "A Voyage to Sfanomoë" (1931): Scientists flee the sinking of Atlantis by traveling to another world.
• "The Double Shadow" (1932): Wizards unleash a cursed shadow from an ancient tablet.
• "The Death of Malygris" (1934): The necromancer's "death" triggers terror among rivals.

Among the more interesting aspects of Clark Ashton Smith’s literary output is the way many of his best-known stories fall into a series of loosely connected “cycles.” Each cycle is defined by a shared setting, one that all the stories belonging to it inhabit, even if those stories are separated by vast stretches of time or only lightly connected by recurring names, places, or legends. While these cycles share certain common elements – decadence, black magic, sardonic humor, and a pervasive sense of decline – each nevertheless possesses a character and atmosphere all its own. A story set in Hyperborea feels different from one set in Zothique or Averoigne, not merely in geography but also in tone, mood, and underlying assumptions about history, magic, and humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Since I plan to write about several of Clark Ashton Smith’s settings over the course of the coming month, it seems worthwhile to begin with a short series of introductory posts outlining these worlds for readers who may not yet be familiar with them. Each post will offer a brief overview of a particular setting, highlighting its distinctive features and thematic concerns. I’ll also include a selective bibliography of some of the key stories associated with each setting, many of which I’ve already examined in earlier Pulp Fantasy Library posts. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive or encyclopedic survey. Rather, I simply wish to establish a shared foundation, one that will make it easier to explore these settings in greater depth in later posts devoted to Smith’s most enduring and influential creations.

In this first installment, I’ll focus on two of Smith’s best-known settings – Averoigne and Hyperborea –with additional settings to follow in Parts II and III of the series.

Averoigne

Averoigne is a fictional region in southern France, with its own unique geography and history. It's a land of walled cities like Vyones (home to a grand cathedral and a scheming archbishop), winding rivers such as the Isoile, dense sinister forests, and ruined castles like Fausseflammes and Ylourgne. Set during the Middle Ages and early modern period, supernatural elements abound in the tales of Averoigne, like sorcery (often practiced covertly, even by clergy), vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and demonic intrusions. The Church holds sway but is frequently helpless or corrupt against these forces, which enables Smith to blend religious satire with elements of horror. The Averoigne stories often explore themes of lust, forbidden knowledge, and the clash between faith and paganism. 

The major stories in this cycle are:

• "The End of the Story" (1930): The earliest written story of Averoigne, it takes place in the 18th century. In it, a law student uncovers a forbidden tome at Périgon Abbey, leading to a romantic encounter with a lamia in a ruined chateau.
• "A Rendezvous in Averoigne" (1931): A troubadour and his lover stumble into a vampire-infested castle, blending romance with gothic horror.
• "The Maker of Gargoyles" (1932): A lustful stonemason's creations come alive to terrorize Vyones, serving as karmic punishment.
• "The Holiness of Azédarac" (1933): A bishop-sorcerer uses time magic to send a monk back to pagan times, where he finds love and questions his faith.
• "The Colossus of Ylourgne" (1933): A necromancer assembles a giant corpse to ravage the land, stopped by a heroic wizard in an epic tale of dark sorcery.
• "The Beast of Averoigne" (1933): An alien serpent creature arrives via comet, pitting science against religion as a sorcerer battles it.
• "Mother of Toads" (1938): A grotesque witch seduces a young man with potions, leading to horrific revenge.
• "The Enchantress of Sylaire" (1941): A dreamer enters a fairy realm, defeats a werewolf, and chooses eternal love over mortal life.

Hyperborea

Hyperborea is an ancient, lost land roughly where Greenland stands today, existing in a warm prehistoric era (possibly the Miocene or Pleistocene) before glaciers engulfed it. It's a jungle-clad realm of ebony mountains, opulent cities like Commoriom (abandoned due to dire prophecies) and Uzuldaroum, as well as northern locales like Mhu Thulan. Dinosaurs roam alongside mammoths and saber-tooths, while wizards, thieves, and elder gods like Tsathoggua dominate. The themes of cosmic indifference, ironic comeuppance, and the encroaching ice-doom of the land permeate the stories, often with black humor amid the horror. Smith's Hyperborean stories are the most sword-and-sorcery in content and tones of his work.

The key stories of this cycle are:

• "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" (1931): A pair of thieves raid a ruined temple, awakening a monstrous guardian in ironic horror.
• "The Door to Saturn" (1932): Sorcerer Eibon flees to an alien planet, encountering bizarre creatures in a comedic quest.
• "The Testament of Athammaus" (1932): An executioner fails to kill a regenerating criminal tied to ancient gods.
• "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan" (1932): A greedy lender chases cursed gems into a monster's lair.
• "The Ice-Demon" (1933): Treasure hunters face a malevolent glacier in a tomb city.
• "The Seven Geases" (1934): A hunter endures escalating curses, bouncing through underworlds to a punchline end.
• "The Coming of the White Worm" (1941): A wizard confronts a deceptive iceberg-entity enslaving others.

This post is not, strictly speaking, a Retrospective, since I've already done one on Tom Moldvay's 1981 module, Castle Amber – two, actually, if you count the repost as well. Nevertheless, in honor of The Ensorcellment of January, I thought it more than appropriate to take another look at the only old school Dungeons & Dragons module to take explicit inspiration from the works of Clark Ashton Smith. While I'll endeavor not to repeat much of what I said in my original Retrospective, there will inevitably be a few points to which I'll return, though I hope I'll offer some additional insights to justify doing so.

Despite my repeatedly thinking otherwise, the name of Clark Ashton Smith does not appear anywhere in Appendix N to Gary Gygax's AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide nor does he appear in the expanded list of "favorite authors [and] inspirational sources" in his 1992 Mythus Magick bonus. On one level, it's a very odd omission, as Gygax was quite well read when it came to fantasy and science fiction literature – including lots of early pulp fantasy authors, like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, both of whom he considered "among the most immediate influences" on his conception of the game he co-created. 

The fact that Gary Gygax, of all people, could seemingly have either not known or not cared about CAS suggests that, compared to many of his literary contemporaries, he has always been, if not necessarily obscure, something of an acquired taste. Speaking even as an avowed devotee of Smith, I can’t really blame anyone who finds his mellifluous prose, sardonic demeanor, and detached misanthropy a bit much, particularly when set beside the more muscular storytelling of Howard or the raw imaginative urgency of Lovecraft. Smith demands patience and a willingness to luxuriate in language for its own sake. His stories often feel less like adventures than like jeweled relics to be contemplated from a respectful distance.

Consequently, Smith’s fiction is not easily mined for gameable elements in the way Conan’s swordplay or Lovecraft’s Mythos can be. Howard offers clear models for heroic action and conflict. Lovecraft provides a cosmology of forbidden knowledge, cults, and monsters that can be lifted almost wholesale into play. Smith, by contrast, traffics in mood, decadence, and fatalism. His stories often lack conventional heroes, hinge on ironic or poetic reversals, and end not with triumph or revelation but with extinction, transformation, or bitter resignation. These qualities make his work harder to translate into D&D and that difficulty is probably at the root of why Gygax took little notice of him. Smith does not easily become a list of monsters, spells, or magic items.

Fortunately for me, Tom Moldvay did notice him. Although I’m still not absolutely certain that it was Castle Amber that first introduced me to Smith – it may well have been Call of Cthulhu, released the same year as module X2 – I can say with certainty that it was this adventure that solidified Smith’s hold over my imagination. Castle Amber suggested that roleplaying games could evoke not just action or terror, but a sense of dreamlike estrangement and baroque melancholy. It suggested that play could feel uncanny rather than merely dangerous, strange rather than merely challenging, and that those feelings could linger long after the dice were put away.

That lingering quality is a large part of why I still love Castle Amber four decades later. It is, above all else, unsettling. On the surface, it is just another dungeon for characters of levels 3 to 6, complete with monsters, traps, and treasure. Dig a little deeper, though, and the dungeon in question reveals itself as a kind of fun house, governed less by internal logic than by a warped, almost oneiric sensibility. Its 70 keyed locations feel less like rooms in a coherent structure and more like fragments of half-remembered stories stitched together by madness and decay.

One chamber hosts a boxing match against magical constructs; another contains the lair of spellcasting spiders imported from The Isle of Dread (itself another Moldvay creation); elsewhere, there is a kennel of hellhounds. None of these elements really belong together, at least not in a naturalistic way and that disjunction might be the point. The titular Castle Amber resists easy categorization. It feels wrong in a way that is difficult to articulate, as if it obeys a set of esthetic or even metaphysical rules that the players can sense but never fully grasp. Layered on top of this is the grotesque parade of the Amber family themselves – decadent, deranged, and occasionally tragic figures who are, unsurprisingly, closer to characters out of Smith’s own stories than to standard fantasy villains.

Over at Advanced Grognardia, I've got a post in which I provide game stats and a description of a monster from my Telluria campaign setting, along with some commentary on its origins. 

In light of a recent Pulp Fantasy Library entry, I thought readers might enjoy this write-up of Clark Ashton Smith's sorcerer, Maal Dweb. The description originally appeared in the "Giants in the Earth" column appearing in issue #30 of Dragon (October 1979), written by Lawrence Schick and Tom Moldvay (though I suspect, given his love of Smith, that Moldvay was likely the author of this particular character).

With The Ensorcellment of January now underway, I’m taking a brief hiatus from H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales to share my thoughts on four Clark Ashton Smith stories I consider particularly worthy of attention. The first of these is a story of which I am especially fond, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” which appeared in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. Whatever its other virtues – and they are many – it stands as one of the clearest early expressions of sword-and-sorcery literature. More broadly, it encapsulates many of the qualities that define what I think of as pulp fantasy at its most effective: immediacy, moral ambiguity, horror, and a palpable sense that the world is not merely indifferent to human ambition but actively hostile to it.

The tale opens with one of my favorite first sentences ever to appear in a fantasy story:

I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua, which lies neglected by the worship of man in the jungle-taken suburbs of Commoriom, that long-deserted capital of the Hyperborean rulers.

The story that follows fully earns that opening. It is a first-person account by a professional thief explaining not only how he came to lose his right hand, but how his most recent heist ended in catastrophe. Not a bad beginning! Together with his companion, Tirouv Ompallios, Zeiros ventures into Commoriom, the long-abandoned capital of Hyperborea, a place shunned even by other robbers. Rumored to be cursed and haunted by strange gods, Commoriom nonetheless promises fabulous wealth to anyone bold (or foolish) enough to plunder it. For Zeiros, that promise is irresistible.

The two thieves break into an ancient, seemingly intact temple of the elder god Tsathoggua – the toad-god’s first appearance in Smith’s fiction – where they find no jewels or gold, but instead disturb a foul, viscous substance resting within a vast bronze basin. This substance rises and assumes the form of a monstrous, many-limbed creature that hunts them through the ruins all night long. At dawn, the thieves realize they have come full circle and have returned to the temple itself. Barricading themselves inside proves useless. The creature oozes through a damaged lintel, consuming Ompallios in silence and nearly claiming Zeiros as well. He escapes only by sacrificing his right hand, surviving to record the tale as a warning.

Smith wrote “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” early in his career as a prose writer, when he was still finding his footing in the pages of Weird Tales and the story bears the clear imprint of his literary influences. Poe’s fascination with doom, confession, and inevitable consequence is evident in the framing, while the French Decadents inform the luxuriant prose and preoccupation with corruption, blasphemy, and decay. At the same time, Smith is also clearly engaging with the raw material of adventure fiction – thieves, lost cities, fabulous treasure, and sudden violence. The fusion of these elements gives the story its remarkable staying power. Even decades after first reading it, I can still vividly recall the experience.

A great deal of the story’s success lies in Smith’s choice of protagonist. Zeiros is no hero. He is greedy, cynical, and ultimately self-preserving, surviving only at the expense of his partner in crime. This perspective strips the tale of any romantic gloss and reinforces a central truth of Smith’s Hyperborea, namely, that audacity is not rewarded, only punished. For that reason, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” is more than merely a foundational sword-and-sorcery text (though it certainly is that). It represents a decisive shift away from quests, kingdoms, and moral uplift toward immediate danger and personal survival. The stakes are not cosmic salvation or political destiny, but simply whether the protagonist lives to see another day. In that respect, it is a near-perfect encapsulation of the pulp fantasy ethos.

Though he never, to my knowledge, confirmed it, I have long suspected that “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” exerted some influence on Fritz Leiber’s conception of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. These roguish protagonists, with their ill-conceived schemes and narrow escapes, feel like natural descendants of Zeiros and Ompallios. Likewise, the relationship between Smith’s two thieves – transactional, greedy, and ultimately fragile – anticipates later depictions of adventuring partnerships defined more by convenience than by trust.

Sometime this year – people better informed than I will know the precise date – James M. Ward's Metamorphosis Alpha will celebrate its 50th anniversary, the original having been released in 1976. Since I'm currently refereeing a campaign using these venerable science fiction RPG rules, I've been spending a lot of time online looking for additional resources to expand and enhance them. During one of these deep dives, I discovered a piece of news from March of last year that I somehow overlooked: 

Catalyst Roleplaying Games is proud to announce that we are working with Para Bellum Consulting for a special 50th anniversary release of Metamorphosis Alpha, an enduring classic of science-fiction roleplaying. This edition will honor the spirit and ingenuity of the original edition while offering exciting updates, including modernized gameplay and greatly expanded plot options.

The announcement doesn't give a release date or indeed provide much information of any sort beyond the usual marketing spiel one expects from such things. Even so, I'm intrigued. A few years ago, Goodman Games did, I think, a superb job of supporting the original Metamorphosis Alpha with new material, some of which I plan to incorporate into my campaign. From the sounds of it, Catalyst is creating an entirely new game, which isn't quite as exciting to me, but who knows? Maybe their "honor[ing] the spirit and ingenuity of the original edition" will be more than just empty words. 

If anyone knows any more about this new version of MA, please let me know in the comments.