Long ago, I discussed my own thoughts about the 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie. In issue #63 of Dragon (July 1982), Gary Gygax offers his own.

 As I pen more posts for this series, you'll notice that many of its entries are themselves about series of articles from the pages of Dragon. I could offer a lot of explanations for this, but the simplest, I suppose, is that, with series, you know what you're getting. In theory, if you like one entry in the series, you will probably enjoy those that follow. Series provide a foundation on which to build and a format to follow that makes them attractive to both writers and readers – that's the reason this blog has so many series of its own.

Issue #59 (March 1982) introduced me to a new series of Dragon articles. Entitled "Giants in the Earth," this was an irregular feature devoted to presenting famous characters from fantasy (and occasionally science fiction) literature in terms of Dungeons & Dragons game mechanics. This particular issue included write-ups for five different characters – Poul Anderson's Sir Roger de Tourneville (by Roger E. Moore), L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea (by David Cook), Alexei Panshin's Anthony Villiers (by Andrew Dewar), Clifford Simak's Mark Cornwall and Sniveley (both by Roger E. Moore). 

At the time I first saw this article, I think I was only familiar with Sir Roger de Tourneville, having already read The High Crusade. The others were completely unknown to me and, in the case of the Simak characters, I'm embarrassed to admit, still are. Nevertheless, I found the piece fascinating for several reasons. First, almost from the moment I started playing D&D, I began to think about how best to stat up characters from myth, legend, and books. Seeing how "professional" writers did so held my interest. Second, many of the entries – even the science fiction ones! – included suggestions on introducing these characters into an ongoing D&D campaign, an idea I'd never considered before. Finally, the entries served to introduce me to authors and books I might otherwise never have encountered, just as Appendix N and Moldvay's "Inspirational Source Material" section had done.

That last one is of particular importance to me, especially nowadays, as the inspirations for fantasy roleplaying shift away from books of all kinds and more toward movies and video games. With the benefit of hindsight, one of the things that's very obvious is how much more literary fantasy was in my youth. Arguably, that's because, until comparatively recently, fantasy hadn't much penetrated the mainstream and thus there were few other ready sources for the genre. If you were interested in wizards and dragons and magic swords, books were all you had, whereas today we have a greater number of options available to us. Perhaps – and maybe I'm just being an old man again – I detect a difference in kind between the literary fantasies I grew up reading (and that inspired the founders of the hobby) and the pop culture stuff we see today.

The irony of my being introduced to "Giants in the Earth" through this issue is that it's one of the last ones published in Dragon. Though I'd eventually see some of the earlier installments, the vast majority of them were long out of my reach, their having been published long before I started playing RPGs, let alone reading the magazine. Even so, the few that I did read served the useful purpose of broadening my knowledge of fantasy and science fiction, as well as acquainting me with characters and writers who would, in time, become lifelong companions. 

I think it's fair to say that Gary Gygax had a very thin skin when it came to criticisms of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game line, even when the criticisms weren't aimed at a book or module in which he had a hand. A good example of what I'm talking about can found in the "From the Sorceror's [sic] Scroll" column he penned for issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982). There, Gygax responds to criticism of Deities & Demigods.

"Spins a web, any size."

The Internet is the world's largest rabbit hole. Sometimes, while looking into some topic or other, I find a link that leads me elsewhere, resulting in the discovery of another link – and then another and another – until, before long, I have wandered far from my original intention, assuming I even remember what it was. This happened to me the other day, when I was reminded of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon that I inexplicably loved as a child. I vaguely recalled that Ralph Bakshi was involved in the second and third seasons of the show and wanted to confirm this fact. In doing so, I stumbled across something I'd never know or, if I had, my age-addled brain had forgotten it: L. Sprague de Camp's frequent partner in crime, Lin Carter, is credited as a writer for 52 episodes of the series. 

The extent of Carter's writing on these episodes is unclear, as there are multiple writers credited for them. Furthermore, many episodes consisted of two stories, so it's possible, perhaps even likely, that his contributions were small. Nonetheless, the idea that Carter, whose skills as a writer paled in comparison to his as an editor (and that's being kind, despite my fondness for some of his output) was in any way involved in this train wreck of a show makes me grin. About the only thing I can charitably say about the cartoon, which I should again stress I loved as a kid, is its theme song, memorably covered by the Ramones in 1995.

Carter's association with Marvel didn't end there, of course. Apparently, before Roy Thomas successfully licensed Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian – a milestone in the history of the character's mass media popularity – he approached Carter about using his Thongor of Lemuria as the basis for a comic book. Carter balked at the low licensing fee that Marvel offered and Thomas sought out Conan instead, eventually leading to one the most successful comics of the 1970s. Carter later changed his mind and a story featuring Thongor would appear over eight issues of Creatures on the Loose! between March 1973 and May 1974. 

The '70s were a hell of a ride.

My feelings about L. Sprague de Camp are complex, to put it mildly. A cultured and erudite man, as well as a talented writer, De Camp played a key role in promoting Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian during the 1950s and '60s. At the same time, I think it's fair to say that De Camp never really understood Conan or (especially) Howard and, in the process of promoting both, he canonized some of his misunderstandings to such an extent that they're still commonly accepted to this day (e.g. REH killed himself because he was a grief-stricken momma's boy). As an admirer of Howard's body of work and a student of his life and thought, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that De Camp's distortions didn't color my opinion of him. Yet, as I noted above, De Camp was a genuinely accomplished writer whose own works reveal considerable skill and imagination, not mention exercising influence over Gary Gygax's vision of Dungeons & Dragons.

King Vuar said: "Good my lord, my concubine Ilepro, whom I think you know, has  a desire that you alone can satisfy."

"Yes, Sire?" Jumping to a wrong conclusion, Derezong Taash goggled like a bullfrog in spring. For one thing, King Vuar was not at all noted for generosity in sharing his women, and for another thing, of the royal harem, Derezong had the least desire to share Ilepro.

The king said: "She wishes that jewel that forms the third eye of the goddess Tandyla. You know that temple in Lotor?"

"Yes, Sire." Although he retained his blandest smile, Derezong's heart sank to the vicinity of his knees. This was going to prove even less entertaining than intimacy with Ilepro.

King Vuar adds that he wishes Derezong to retrieve the jewel by stealth, since he has no desire for a war with the kingdom of Lotor. Reluctantly, the sorcerer sets off for Lotor, taking his over-eager apprentice Zhamel Seh with him – "Action! Excitement!" Zhamel exclaims, after being told of Derezong's mission, swishing the air with his sword. 

Once in Lotor, Derezong makes preparations to enter the temple of Tandyla surreptitiously and steal the jewel, along the way learning some details of the setting, such as the fact that, according to Derezong anyway, the goddess Tandyla "was a mere blind to cover dark rites concerning the demon Tr'lang, who in elder days had been a god in his own right." It's clear that De Camp took a stronger interest in the minutiae of the Pusadian Age than Howard ever did of his Hyborian Age, which, as a RPG referee, I find endearing.

Together, Derezong Taash and Zhamel Seh follow through with their plan, making their way to the temple unseen and, by means both magical and mundane, succeed in obtaining the jewel. They even fend off a pair of warriors tasked with guarding the statue of the goddess, much to the relief of Derezong, a short, pudgy old man who had worried about just such an occurrence. It's at this point that a new worry enters the mind of the sorcerer: the theft was too easy. The more he thinks about it, the more certain he is that something is badly amiss and that his entire mission to Lotor, including the stealing of the Eye of Tandyla, was a ruse of some sort, though he did not yet know to what end or who had orchestrated it.

"The Eye of Tandyla" is a delightful sword-and-sorcery romp, peopled by interesting and amusing characters and filled with equal parts derring-do and humor. Reading the story, I had no doubts as to why Gygax thought so highly of De Camp and numbered his works among those listed in Appendix N. Likewise, I think I gained better insight into just what De Camp had hoped Howard's tales of Conan could have been, however misguided that hope was. As I mentioned earlier, "The Eye of Tandyla" recalled something Clark Ashton Smith might have written in one of his lighter moods. It's a fast-paced, fun story with some interesting bits of world building and I enjoyed reading it greatly.

The most magical place I've ever visited was the Middle River Public Library in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. As a child, I must have gone to the library every couple of days, looking for new books on dinosaurs and planets and frogs, three subjects very near and dear to my heart. I learned to write my name – no mean feat! – specifically so that I could get my very own library card. Though small, the Middle River Library had a surprisingly good collection of books that appealed to me. It was here, for example, that I first came across EC Comics and H.P. Lovecraft and these early experiences left me with a lifelong love of horror in all its forms.

Because the library was small and thus had limited space for shelves, there were spinner racks all over the place. Generally, the racks were used for small and light volumes, like magazines, comics, and paperback books. In the 1970s, when I was a child, fantasy and science fiction were much more likely to be published as paperbacks than as hardcovers. Consequently, these spinner racks abounded in books of this sort, a significant portion of which were originally printed in the 1960s, during the explosion in interest in these genres. I spent a great deal of time at those spinner racks, turning them slowly to admire their covers and sometimes grabbing a few books to take home with me.

Even now, more than four decades later, I can remember vividly the covers of some of the books I saw there, so long ago. Perhaps the most memorable were the Lancer/Ace Conan collections edited by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. With one exception, these collections were all published between 1967 and 1971 and contained a mix of Robert E. Howard's original stories – mostly in altered form, unfortunately – and pastiches by other authors intended to fill in the "gaps" in the chronology of Conan's life. Frank Frazetta provided the cover illustrations for most of these collections, some of which are forever burned into my memory.

I know I grabbed a few of them, like Conan of Cimmeria and Conan the Adventurer, solely on the strength of their covers alone. I have only dim recollections of the actual contents of these collections; I must confess that it took me several more years before I developed a fondness for Conan or REH. Even so, it was a beginning, a first foray into the world of sword-and-sorcery, and it probably contributed to my eventual deep dive into the genre during my teen years. There's a lot to criticize about the Lancer collections on the editorial side – my feelings about De Camp in particular are not positive – but there's no denying that, along with Marvel's comics, they introduced a lot of people, myself included, to the Hyborian Age. I'm very grateful for that introduction

"The Phoenix on the Sword" by Robert E. Howard is rightfully called the first published story of Conan the Cimmerian. However, it's actually a rewrite of "By This Axe I Rule!," an unpublished tale of Kull of Atlantis. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" was written later but, unlike "The Phoenix on the Sword," it was always intended to be a Conan story, thus making it the first original piece of Conan fiction, a fact supported, I think, by its taking place early in the Conan's life, when he was young and relatively inexperienced. These might seem like trivial details but the story of the creation and publication of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is not without value to understanding it and its place within the Conan canon. 

Howard submitted the short story to Weird Tales sometime in early 1932. Farnsworth Wright, its editor, rejected it curtly with the words, "I do not much care for it." Much ink has been spilled over the matter of just why Wright did not care for it, with some suggesting that the content of the story was too racy for his sensibilities. However, a cursory examination of the contents of any issue of Weird Tales, as well as the Unique Magazine's many covers by Margaret Brundage, should quickly disabuse anyone of this interpretation. Instead, I think we should take Wright at his word: he simply did not enjoy the story and there need not be any further explanation. I'll come back to the supposed raciness of the story before long.

Undeterred by the rejection, REH went back and rewrote the story, replacing Conan with another nearly-identical character, Amra of Akbitana (a name that Conan fans should recognize as an occasional alias of the barbarian). He then retitled it "The Frost King's Daughter" and submitted it to the amateur periodical The Fantasy Fan, edited by Charles Hornig (who is himself an incredibly fascinating individual). When it appeared in issue #7 (March 1934), its title was changed again, this time to "Gods of the North." A version of the story featuring Conan, as Howard has intended, did not appear until 1953 in the Gnome Press edition of The Coming of Conan, edited by L. Sprague de Camp. Despite the fact that De Camp had access to Howard's original manuscript, he nevertheless tinkered extensively with the text, as he so often did, and it would not be until 1976 that an unaltered version of the Conan version would appear, in Donald M. Grant's Rogues in the House. In the years since, other versions of the Howardian text have also appeared in print. 

The story itself is a short one, one of the briefest of all Conan tales but, for my money, it's also one of the most memorable and visceral. A young Conan is working as a mercenary in the service of the Aesir against their Vanir enemies. Though he survives a fierce battle that takes the lives of his comrades in arms, Conan is nevertheless wounded and exhausted. He falls into the snow, as a "rushing wave of blindness engulfed him." It's then that the story truly begins.

A silvery laugh cut through his dizziness, and his sight cleared slowly. He looked up; there was a strangeness about all the landscape that he could not place or define - an unfamiliar tinge to earth and sky. But he did not think long of this. Before him, swaying like a sapling in the wind, stood a woman. Her body was like ivory to his dazed gaze, and save for a light veil of gossamer, she was naked as the day. Her slender bare feet were whiter than the snow they spurned. She laughed down at the bewildered warrior. Her laughter was sweeter than the rippling of silvery fountains, and poisonous with cruel mockery.

“Who are you?” asked the Cimmerian. “Whence come you?”

After a short exchange, Conan gazes upon "her billowy hair [and] her ivory body … as perfect as the dream of a god" and is "spell-bound." Take note of that last phrase. I do not believe Howard has chosen it carelessly. Indeed, I believe it is key to understanding everything that follows. 

The mysterious white-skinned woman mocks and taunts Conan, who attempts, in the haze of his wounds and fatigue, to determine who she is and how she has come onto this battlefield, which is littered with the corpses of the feuding Aesir and Vanir. At last she asks him,

"Then why do you not rise and follow me? Who is the strong warrior who falls down before me?" she chanted in maddening mockery. "Lie down and die in the snow with the other fools, Conan of the black hair. You can not follow where I would lead."

With an oath the Cimmerian heaved himself up on his feet, his blue eyes blazing, his dark scarred face contorted. Rage shook his soul, but desire for the tainting figure before him hammered at his temples and drive his wild blood fiercely through his veins. Passion fierce as physical agony flooded his whole being, so that earth and sky swam red to his dizzy gaze. In the madness that swept him, weariness and faintness 

Conan will take no more of her taunting; he is now determined to catch the woman and make her pay for her ridicule. 

The remainder of the story is some of Howard's most intense and impassioned writing. Conan is overcome by powerful feelings that impel him forward, relentlessly chasing the woman across the snows, deeper and deeper into the cold – but are his feelings rage or lust or something else entirely? It's common to suggest that it's base lust that motivates him or perhaps a combination of lust and anger at being belittled, but I urge readers to remember that Howard describes Conan as being "spell-bound" after he first sets eyes on the woman. I believe that the Cimmerian has been literally bewitched and that the remainder of the story bears this out, as the woman, realizing she may have made a mistake in trifling with the young Conan, calls upon every power she can muster to prevent herself from falling into his hands.

"The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is a great story, a powerful exemplar of Howard's blood and thunder style of storytelling. Farnsworth Wright may not have thought much of it, but it's one of my personal favorite tales of Conan and a good introduction to him and his world. 

One of my favorite parts of the AD&D Players Handbook has always been Appendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence. Though it provides very little information – it's mostly just a listing of the twenty-five inner and outer planes – I spent untold hours reading and re-reading it as a young person, not to mention staring with awe at Figure 1, which offered a visual representation of the interrelations of all these weird places. To say I was "enraptured" might be a bit strong, but there's no question that Gary Gygax's glorious-mad vision, which married AD&D's alignment system to a cosmology straight out of de Camp and Pratt. Heady stuff to an eleven year-old!

As the years wore on, AD&D's planes acquired a little more solidity, starting with 1980's Queen of the Demonweb Pits, which gave us a glimpse into what a layer of the Abyss might be like (answer: a lot weirder than I expected it would be). Then came Roger E. Moore's magisterial article on the Astral Plane in Dragon #67 (November 1982), followed by an equally impressive one about Gladsheim in issue #90 (October 1984) a couple of years later. In between these, Gygax got in on the act, penning an article in issue #73 (May 1983) that tackled the Inner Planes, including the previously-unknown quasi-elemental planes (and came with a nifty multi-colored cut-out cube intended to represent the relationships between them). And who can forget Ed Greenwood's two-part treatement of the Nine Hells in issues #75 (July 1983) and #76 (August 1983)?

I gobbled up each of these expansions of Gygax's original scheme from the PHB – and more! – and frankly longed for a definitive treatment of these mysterious otherworldly realms. My wish was finally granted in 1987, when Jeff Grubb's Manual of the Planes first appeared. Unsurprisingly, I bought it as soon as I was able and devoured its contents immediately. This book was exactly what I had wanted, collecting together all the details scattered across multiple books, modules, and articles and adding to them, in order to create a more complete picture of the cosmos of AD&D. 

What I particularly liked was the way that Grubb does his best to make each plane unique, particularly with regard to way that magic works. This is something that Queen of the Demonweb Pits did first and that Moore picked up and developed further in his articles. Yes, it was a little frustrating at times to have to consult a list every time someone cast a spell to see if its effects were in any way changed, but the sense that "we're not in Kansas anymore" gained through its use more than made up for the extra effort, or so I thought. The planes were, from the beginning, intended as stomping grounds only for experienced characters – and players – so it only made sense that the very rules of the game might be changed there.

That said, most of the planar descriptions are short, singling out only a few key locales and only briefly touching on their inhabitants. I know people who were disappointed by this, hoping that the book would provide exhaustive information on each of the planes. Even I, who liked the book a great deal, half-expected that there'd be, if not a map, something akin to one that gave a better sense of how all the various planar landmarks related to one another. Despite that, I was fine with the relatively light level of detail, because it left plenty to the individual referee's imagination. If I had a serious criticism of the book, it's how few new monsters were included in the book, something I would have expected, especially after the wondrous details the Monster Manual II provided us about the inhabitants of the lower planes. I suspect the limits of the 128-page limit are responsible for this, but I was disappointed nonetheless.

Ultimately, I judge the Manual of the Planes a success, one of the better books of post-Gygaxian AD&D and one with a fairly long reach. Many of its planar conceptions were taken up by later authors and expanded upon, especially once the Planescape setting appeared in 1994. Unlike Planescape, which opted for its own rather idiosyncratic tone and style, Manual of the Planes is still broadly within the framework established by Gygax in the 1970s, which might explain my continued fondness for it. No book is perfect, of course, but I still think a pretty good one.

These rules are strictly fantasy Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser putting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS & DRAGONS to their taste.

The seminal influence of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber on the creation of Dungeons & Dragons is well established, I think. The role of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is probably less known, given how few people have even heard of, let alone read, the Harold Shea series. Even less known, I think, is the influence of the Barsoom stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And yet he's the very first author whom Gary Gygax mentions in the "forward" [sic] to Volume 1 of original D&D. 

Consider, too, Gygax's words in the (again misspelled) "forward" to Warriors of Mars, written less than a year later.

Worlds of heroic fantasy are many, but perhaps the best known of them all is the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs, where John Carter, Tars Tarkas, Dejah Thoris, etal [sic] adventure endlessly in eternal youth.

I don't think there can be any question that Gygax highly esteemed the Barsoom stories, which are included even in Appendix N (though, it should be noted, Burroughs is not listed among "the most immediate influences" upon AD&D). 

OD&D contains multiple references to Mars, such as the tables for wilderness wandering monsters in Volume 3. The column for "Desert" has a parenthetical note "(Mars)," with entries for Red, Black, Yellow, and White Martians, as well as for Tharks. There's also an "Optional Arid Plains" column with entries for Apts, Banths, Thoats, Calots, White Apes, Orluks, Siths, Darseen, and Banths. Now, none of these beings or creatures are given any game stats and indeed it wouldn't be until the 1981 Moldvay Basic Rules that this would change, when one of these – the white ape, albeit with only two arms – finally appeared in print. Additionally, Mars is cited as an example of another world where one might set D&D adventures.

As it turns out, Gygax did just that. One of his son Ernie's characters was called Erac's Cousin and had an adventure on what is quite clearly the Mars of John Carter. One retelling of his exploits can be found here, from which I quote the following:

The name of L. Sprague de Camp isn't held in particularly high regard these days among admirers of Robert E. Howard and understandably so. While there's no denying that De Camp did play a role -- and an important one at that -- in the popularization of Howard's work, especially his Conan tales, it's equally true that he played an even bigger role in the popular misunderstanding not only of the Cimmerian but also of his creator. Unlike a few of REH's more rabid defenders, I attribute neither malice nor jealousy to De Camp's treatment of him. Rather, I think it's simply that De Camp was so different, intellectually and emotionally, from Howard that, even as he recognized the Texan author's brilliance, he could never come to appreciate him on on his own terms. Instead, he continued to view him through the lens of his own worldview -- and often found him lacking.

Solid evidence in support of this thesis can be found in one of De Camp's own swords-and-sorcery offerings, The Tritonian Ring, which first appeared in the Winter 1951 volume of Two Complete Science-Adventure Books, paired with H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. Though that pairing might seem odd -- and it is on several levels -- it also makes some sense, too, once you recognize that De Camp intended The Tritonian Ring to be a work of historical rather than pure fantasy. The "Pusadian Age" in which the story is set is intended to be a prehistoric time of our Earth, before both magic and the gods had lost their potency. In this respect, it's very similar to Howard's "Hyborian Age," except that De Camp based his fictional past on what he considered a surer footing, including a study of the pre-Ice Age geography and ancient accounts of the distant past, such as Plato's depiction of Atlantis. The Pusadian Age is thus a "realistic" attempt to present a forgotten time of magic and adventure -- in short, one better suited to a mind like De Camp's.

The Tritonian Ring takes places on the conjoined landmass of Europe, Asia, and Africa he calls Poseidonis and identifies with the mythical Atlantis. Despite its mythical origins, De Camp nevertheless tries to ground this far-off realm in plausibility, so he presents readers with a society and culture that, while magical, has not mastered technology beyond the ability to work bronze. In fact, the appearance of iron and iron-working is the pivot on which the entire story turns, as iron, the reader learns, is "the thing the Gods most fear." As is the case in many legends, iron is opposed to magic, blocking it and weakening it. De Camp expands on this idea and explains that even the gods are powerless before this strange new metal, which is being sought by the king of the northern kingdom of Lorsk in order to advance the position of his own realm. Seeing this as a threat, the gods urge the monstrous gorgons to attack Lorsk, hoping to dissuade its king from his wild path. Instead of backing down, the king sends his own son, Vakar, on a quest to find the iron that will save Lorsk and foil the gods' plans.

Vakar's quest forms the bulk of The Tritonian Ring and it's a remarkably fun read. De Camp is an engaging, witty writer and that comes through in even his worst novels. The Tritonian Ring, though, is one of his better efforts, in part, I think, because his Pusadian Age is interesting and well-drawn, with a logical culture and cosmology. The conflict that De Camp postulates between the rise in the use of iron and the end of the "old ways" is engaging and a good source of drama. It also, I think, reflects where De Camp's own sympathies lay. Unlike Howard, who viewed barbarism as both natural and inevitable, De Camp instead sees Progress­™ as mankind's true destiny. Prince Vakar, for example, does not hear the voices of the gods in his head, in contrast to most of his contemporaries and he looks with disdain on tradition and long-held customs, seeing them as impediments rather than aids to humanity's growth. He comes across as a 20th century rationalist of the sort De Camp himself admired. That's not a criticism: I think much of the book works well precisely because Vakar is a "man ahead of his time." Vakar is just as much of an exemplar of De Camp's own worldview as Conan is of Howard's -- and therein lies the gulf between these two men.

If ever you wonder why the name of L. Sprague de Camp is so often held in contempt by fans of Robert E. Howard, you need look no further than "The Black Stranger," a Conan yarn that did not see print in its original form until 1987, making it one of the "most recent" Howard stories to see print. I don't believe that anyone knows precisely when "The Black Stranger" was written (more knowledgeable Howardists can correct me) or whether it was ever submitted to Weird Tales. We do know that REH rewrote the story for another character, the Caribbean pirate Black Vulmea, though that version of the story didn't see print until the 1970s. De Camp published a heavily altered version of the story in the March 1953 issue of Fantasy Magazine. Later, in the 1967 collection, Conan the Usurper, De Camp changed the title to "The Treasure of Tranicos" and it's probably under that title that a great many readers first encountered the story.

The 1987 version of "The Black Stranger" was published in anthology called Echoes of Valor, edited by Karl Edward Wagner. Wagner plays an important role in the history of Howard scholarship, because of his efforts to restore the texts of Howard (and several other pulp fantasy authors) to their original form. In doing so, "The Black Stranger" is freed from De Camp's imaginary chronology of Conan's exploits and allowed simply to be. There's no overarching significance to the events it describes. Indeed, "The Black Stranger" has a somewhat odd feeling to it, since it's essentially a pirate story rather than a swords-and-sorcery one, though the definition of the latter is of course broad enough to include tales such as this. Still, I think the story is better served by being presented in this fashion rather than, as De Camp would have it, as a significant step on the road to Conan's becoming king of Aquilonia. "The Black Stranger" is too slight a tale to bear such narrative weight and, more to the point, there's absolutely no evidence that Howard himself conceived of it as anything more than another episode in Conan's many, many adventures.


In its original form, "The Black Stranger" tells the tale of Conan's discovery, in the Pictish wilderness, of a hidden cave filled with the treasure of the pirate Tranicos. When he attempts to claim the treasure for himself, a demon of mist forms and attempts to kill him. Conan escapes the cave with his life and not long thereafter discovers that others seek the treasure he's just inadvertently discovered. These others consist of two feuding buccaneers, Black Zarona and Strombanni. When Conan meets them at the stronghold of an exiled Zingaran nobleman, he offers to join forces with them to loot the treasure and share its spoils equally. Of course, Conan's real plan is to use his erstwhile allies to draw out the demon while he makes off with the fabled treasure. Of course, the pirates themselves are far from trustworthy and have their own plans ...

As I said, "The Black Stranger" is a slight story, far from Howard's best. I like it well enough, but there's very little about it that screams "Conan!" to me. That may be why, when De Camp published it in the '50s, he felt the need to spice it up and give it some greater meaning beyond being another example where Conan outsmarts some fellow criminals to make himself (temporarily) rich. Unfortunately, I don't think "The Black Stranger" can bear that kind of narrative weight and De Camp's attempt to make it do so come across as hamfisted and tone-deaf -- like so much of what he did to Howard's corpus.

My own ambivalence toward the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian is well known. My overall feeling is that it's a decent enough sword-and-sorcery flick in its own right, but one should never make the mistake of confusing it with the Robert E. Howard creation on which it's nominally based. But, as negative as I might be about the film, it's nothing compared to what Gary Gygax wrote in "A Couple of Fantastic Flops," which appeared in issue #63 (July 1982) of Dragon. There, Gary lambastes Conan the Barbarian in the harshest of terms:

"Conan Meets the Flower Children of Set" might have been a better name for the film -- and if there is any resemblance between the cinema version of CONAN THE BARBARIAN and that of Robert E. Howard, it is purely coincidental. The disappointment which began to grow inside me about one-quarter of the way into the film was not mitigated by anything which happened later on. In fact, bad became worse. I refuse to become involved in even a brief synopsis of the movie's story line.

He goes on to say, "If you have any respect for Conan as presented by Howard, then I suggest that you stay away from the theater or else be prepared for great disappointment." Gygax adds that "L. Sprague de Camp should have been ashamed to allow his name to appear in the list of credits as 'Technical Advisor'," which is particularly amusing when one considers how the man is currently regarded in the field of Howard scholarship. More damning than any of the above, though, is the fact that the article, as its name implies, reviews two fantasy films. In this case, the second film is the execrable The Sword and The Sorcerer, which Gygax declares to be "superb" when compared to Conan the Barbarian (though still "silly").

Also of interest in the article is the fact, according to Gygax, a D&D movie is "scheduled for release sometime in late 1984 or 1985." He goes on to say that

if the D&D® film isn’t of the quality of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, I will not only blast it in a review similar to this one, but I will apologize to you as well. Meanwhile, don’t be turned off by what you see on the screen these days. Give us a chance to prove that the genre can be good!

This makes me wonder what Gary thought of the actual D&D movie we did finally get.

With the latest attempt at a movie featuring Robert E. Howard's famous Cimmerian upon us, I found myself thinking of tales actually written by REH that might be ripe for adaptation. My thoughts inevitably turned to "The God in the Bowl." This is an interesting story almost as much for its textual history as for its content. Though submitted for publication to Weird Tales sometime in 1932, it was rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright, a fate it shared with "The Frost Giant's Daughter" (though the latter did see publication in an amateur periodical, with Conan replaced with "Amra of Akbitana"). Consequently, "The God in the Bowl" was unknown to the wider world until it was published in the September 1952 issue of the British magazine Space Science Fiction. Like so many Conan tales published at the time, L. Sprague De Camp edited "The God in the Bowl," often changing the words and phrasing of various sections. Howard's original, unadulterated text did not appear in print until 2002.

Though I am very fond of the story myself, I can fully understand why Wright might have rejected it. Unlike many Conan yarns, this one is slow-paced, even thoughtful, largely lacking in action and having no female character whom Margaret Brundage could paint in a state of undress for the cover of Weird Tales. "The God in the Bowl" is, for all intents and purposes, a police procedural story, with a young Conan the prime suspect in a murder. A watchman at "a museum and antique house men called Kallian Publico's Temple" in Nemedia comes across "the sprawling corpse that had been the rich and powerful owner of the Temple." In death, Publico's face is blackened, as is his tongue, and his eyes nearly pop out from his head. Though his tunic is torn, his many bejeweled rings remain on his fingers, to the amazement of the watchman, who naturally suspects greed as the motive.

Not long thereafter, Arus, the watchman notices a figure coming through one of the openings in the hallway.

Arus saw a tall powerfully built youth, naked but for a loin-cloth, and sandals strapped about his ankles. His skin was burned brown as by the suns of the wastelands, and Arus glanced nervously at his broad shoulders, massive chest and heavy arms. A single look at the moody, broad-browed features told the watchman that the man was no Nemedian. From under a mop of unruly black hair smoldered a pair of dangerous blue eyes. A long sword hung in a leather scabbard at his girdle.

Arus felt his skin crawl, and he fingered his crossbow tensely, of half a mind to drive a bolt through the stranger's body without parley, yet fearful of what might happen if he failed to inflict death at the first shot.

The stranger looked at the body on the floor more in curiosity than surprise.

"Why did you kill?" asked Arus nervously.

The other shook his tousled head.

"I didn't kill him," he answered, speaking Nemedian with a barbaric accent. "Who is he?"

I'm very fond of this introduction to the youthful Conan, because it succinctly establishes that, though a barbarian, Conan is no mere brute. He speaks a foreign language intelligibly and does not attack the watchman, even though he points a crossbow at him. And though, as we later learn, Conan had entered the Temple to steal, he speaks plainly and without guile to the watchman, flatly denying that he is a murderer, a position he maintains even when interrogated by a member of the city's inquisitorial council. The rest of the story consists of Conan and the Nemedians trying to piece together what actually happened to Kallian Publico and dealing with it.

"The God in the Bowl" is a short story and, as I said, not filled with much swordplay or indeed any other kind of action. That's probably why I like it so much: it shows facets of Conan other than his great strength and skill at arms. He's shown to be both intelligent and honorable -- as well as clearly contemptuous of civilization. In short, "The God in the Bowl" is an excellent introduction to the full character of Howard's Conan, as well as to many of the elements and themes of his Hyborian Age tales. It's also a story that's ripe for expansion and development, laying the foundation for original follow-ups to it. What a pity that a story like this is never chosen as the basis for a Hollywood screenplay!

I was reading the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide this evening and I suddenly noticed something I hadn't before or, rather, something finally clicked in my head and I find it hard to believe it took so long for it to do so. In the miscellaneous magic section, you'll find the following:

Cubic Gate: Another small cubic device, this item is fashioned from carnelian. The 6 sides of the cube are each keyed to a plane, 1 of which will always be the Prime Material, of course. The other 5 can be chosen by any means desired. If the side of the cubic gate is pressed but once, it opens a nexus to the appropriate plane, and there is a 10% chance per turn that something will come through it looking for food, fun, and/or trouble. If the side is pressed twice, the creature so doing, along with all creatures in a 5' radius will be drawn through the nexus to the other plane. It is impossible to open more than 1 nexial point at once.

How is it that I only just realized that this is a direct borrowing from De Camp and Pratt's The Carnelian Cube? It's not like Gygax was even hiding the fact, since he outright states the material from which it's made in the very first sentence of the item's description! Shows how closely I must have read that description in years gone by.

(It's worth noting, by the way, that both D&D III and Pathfinder have retained the De Camp/Pratt connection in their descriptions of this item. Does anyone know if the latest incarnation of D&D does the same?)

While combing through my collection of Ares magazines, I discovered that, in issue 2 from May 1980, there's an article in it entitled, "Conan: Illusion and Reality." It's a four-page overview of the writings and characters of Robert E. Howard, with particular attention paid, naturally, to his famous Cimmerian. It was also written by L. Sprague de Camp. Compared to many of his other pieces about REH I've read, though, De Camp seems almost effusive in this one. I genuinely got the sense that De Camp enjoyed Howard's writings, even if he was utterly baffled by the man who produced them.

Consequently, the article is filled with De Camp's signature amateur psychoanalysis of Howard, suggesting, for example, that

Around 1933, Howard's characters began to show a more normal interest in sex. It may not be a coincidence that in the next year he began regularly dating a young lady.

or that

Many stories end with the entire cast, save one or two, dead. In one of his last stories he kills off absolutely everybody, leaving none to tell the tale. A psychologist could plausibly argue that such plots foreshadow Howard's own end.

And of course he couldn't resist concluding that Howard "never grew up."

We can be grateful that the long shadow De Camp cast across Howard's legacy is at last being chased away by some sunlight. Over the last few decades, a fuller picture of REH has emerged, a more complex one than the Peter Pan-cum-Oedipus that De Camp peddled for so long. That's why it was so weird reading this article; it's a blast from a past that's increasingly been discredited and forgotten -- and thank Crom for that.

So, it appears that the latest session report of my Dwimmermount campaign has caused something of a stir, judging from my comments and emails. A number of readers expressed some degree of concern/alarm that I had transgressed an unspoken "rule" of fantasy roleplaying games by making a connection between the world of Dwimmermount and our Earth. I must confess that I did anticipate this sort of reaction. A good many gamers like to "keep their chocolate out of their peanut butter," to speak and having a scientist from 20th century America appear as an NPC does just that. And while I did anticipate this reaction, I obviously don't share it.

But I do understand it. When I first entered the hobby, I tried to get into the various authors and stories the older guys said were "important" for me to read, like Burroughs, DeCamp, Pratt, and so forth. Try as I did, though, I can't deny that, back then, I found a lot of this stuff boring, especially when compared to the "modern" fantasy books that were all the rage back then, like Terry Brooks and David Eddings. And those books did not include modern day characters traveling to other worlds (or, to the future, in the case of Brooks) and interacting with all their fantasy creatures and situations. They were serious fantasy, after all.

Of course, had I bothered to look at Appendix N, I might have noticed the large number included in it who wrote stories that involved a 20th century man traveling into a fantasy world:

• Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions
• Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom, Amtor, and Pellucidar books
• DeCamp and Pratt's Harold Shea books
• P.J. Farmer's World of Tiers series
• Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser do the opposite, being fantasy characters who travel to our Earth, albeit in the past
• H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands stories
• Abraham Merritt's Dwellers in the Mirage
• Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné frequently travels to other worlds, including our own.

I could probably go on and cite many more examples, but my point is simply that Gary Gygax, when he had the opportunity to cite the books and authors who were most influential on him, included quite a few examples that involved cross-overs between 20th century Earth and a fantasy world. For that reason, I increasingly find it difficult to see anything "wrong" with doing the same in my D&D campaign.

Looking back, I think what has happened is that, as the fantasy genre has changed over the years, it's opted strongly for "self-contained" worlds that are separated from our own. Although there are exceptions -- Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books, for example -- they're mostly outliers. Instead, when people think of what a fantasy novel should be, they tend to think of The Lord of the Rings as a model (even though Tolkien intended Middle-earth to be the mythic past of this world) rather than something like A Princess of Mars or "The Roaring Trumpet." Somehow, what had been a mainstay of fantasy for the better part of this century has been reduced to a curiosity, particularly among gamers who aren't familiar with the pulp fantasy literature from which the early hobby took inspiration.

All of this is simply a long-winded way of saying that, far from seeing any problems with the introduction of a 20th century man into my OD&D campaign, I see his presence as every bit as natural as the presence of a spaceship in the World of Greyhawk. Of course, lots of gamers still have problems with that too, but at least I'm in good company.

This image keeps "haunting" me.

Earlier this year, I had a dream in which L. Sprague de Camp came unexpectedly to my house looking just like this. Last night, I was attending the wedding reception of a former colleague of my wife and I was seated at a table with a charming gentleman who looked eerily like the young and beardless De Camp seen here -- sans the horned helm, of course. I hope I didn't stare too much at the poor fellow, but it really was odd how much he looked like De Camp.

Ah well.

I'm busy digging myself out from under more emails and comments -- that's what I get for taking one day off a week -- so it'll be a while before I have any substantive posts today, but, rest assured, they will come. At the very least, I have a post about HPL that I didn't make yesterday and possibly the first part of my multi-part review of Jim Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG releases, starting with Tower of the Stargazer.

I'm going to take a break from my usual Monday installment of "Pulp Fantasy Library" and instead talk about the 1996 film, The Whole Wide World, starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Renée Zellweger.

The film is an adaptation of One Who Walked Alone, a 1986 memoir by Novalyne Price Ellis, who met Robert E. Howard in 1933 and spent much time with him between 1934 and 1936. Ellis became one of Howard's friends, despite their differences in personality and temperament. Ellis is often described by some as Howard's "girlfriend" and I suppose the term is apt enough, provided one doesn't read too much into it. She and Howard would often go out together, but, at least on Howard's part, there seems to have been little expectation that this arrangement was a prelude to something more permanent. Nevertheless, the two shared a close friendship while she was living in Brownwood, Texas and teaching in Cross Plains, where REH was living with his parents.

Ellis wrote her memoir in part to set the record straight about her friendship with Howard and to present a clearer picture of the man she knew for three years. She believed that both had been misrepresented by L. Sprague de Camp -- you knew he'd make his appearance somewhere, didn't you? -- in his biography of Howard, Dark Valley Destiny. Unsurprisingly, One Who Walks Alone is well regarded by the new generation of Howard scholars, who've worked hard over the last several decades to paint a fuller picture of REH than the mad, mother-obsessed misfit that De Camp and his acolytes have offered up to the world for so long.

That's not to deny that Robert E. Howard was a "tortured" individual who had difficulty "fitting in," facts superbly portrayed in The Whole Wide World. Vincent D'Onofrio vividly evokes Howard, his speech patterns, his mannerisms, his walk, and, most importantly of all, his volatile genius. There's no question that D'Onofrio's REH is a misfit; he certainly doesn't fit in and there's a part of Howard that seems to revel in this fact. He enjoys standing apart from the crowd, whom he often holds in some contempt for their lack of imagination and small-mindedness. At the same time, one gets the sense that another part of Howard realizes that standing apart from the crowd is a recipe for loneliness and perhaps even despair, particularly for a young man already given to "black moods," as he called them (and with which he imbued his most famous of characters).

Renée Zellweger's Novalyne Price -- Ellis is her eventual married name -- is a college student and school teacher with aspirations of being a writer. Consequently, she wants to meet Bob Howard, who was known to be a successful pulp writer, and was a close friend of her former boyfriend, Tevis Clyde Smith. Not long after meeting, the two of them spend an increasingly large amount of time together, to the mutual disapproval of Novalyne's own friends, who think REH is crazy, and Howard's mother, who both relies on her son for assistance and wants him to devote himself more fully to his writing.

It's important at this point to say a few words about Hester Howard in relation to the film. While I would say that The Whole Wide World goes a long way toward portraying the complex nature of the bond between REH and his mother, certain elements of it could be easily misinterpreted as pure fact. One must remember that the movie is told from Novalyne's point of view, so there are details and nuances she doesn't see or understand. To her, Hester Howard seems to be an obstacle in her friendship and possible romance with REH, as Bob is intensely devoted to his mother and she to him, often resulting in his having to cancel dates or being out of touch for long stretches of time, while he tended to her (she was suffering from tuberculosis, among other ailments). His devotion is thus a combination of filial obligation and appreciation for his mother's encouragement of his literary career. Howard said that he felt Conan stood behind him as he wrote the stories of his adventures, but it's just as true to say that Hester Howard stood behind him, as the movie makes clear.

There are many, many aspects of the film I could praise (including its cinematography, which is something I rarely notice in movies), but, ultimately, it's seeing Robert E. Howard as a living, breathing human being that is its greatest triumph. Whether he's shadow boxing down the streets of Cross Plains, reading aloud -- and loudly -- from rough drafts of his latest yarn, or quietly discussing literature, Howard comes across as a real person rather than the caricature De Camp made him out to be, a caricature that, sadly, is still too often treated as the whole story. As De Camp would have it, all the genuine human complexity of his life is instead boiled down to "that crazy writer who killed himself."

On the subject of Howard's suicide, the film, I think, does an excellent job. Some might object to the fact that it occurs off-screen and is not obviously foreshadowed (the latter fact being the more objectionable, as Howard talked of suicide for years beforehand), but I think the decision was a wise one. The surest way not to make the manner of Howard's death the central fact of his life -- let alone "the key" to understanding him -- is to treat it as an abrupt, even unexpected event, which it probably was to many people who knew him. Anything more would be to acquiesce to the "REH is crazy" interpretation of his life that this film does so much to combat. Instead, Howard's suicide is merely one fact of his life, the final one certainly, but not the only one and definitely no more central to his life than were the suicides of, say, Ernest Hemingway or Clark Ashton Smith's mentor, George Sterling -- just as it should be.

While not without its inaccuracies and outright fabrications, The Whole Wide World is nevertheless a good film, perhaps the best film ever made having anything to do with Robert E. Howard or his literary creations. It's a pity that it's not better known, as it's accessible, well-acted, and beautifully made, making it the perfect way to introduce those unfamiliar with Howard to his life and works. I highly recommend it.

The writing duo of Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp were, according to Gary Gygax, great influences on Dungeons & Dragons, particularly in the form of the Harold Shea "Enchanter" series. In my opinion, the collaborations of these two authors were generally better than their solo works. I suspect it's because each author reined in the worst aspects of the other when working in concert. A good case in point is 1942's Land of Unreason, a terrific story about a contemporary American who finds himself transported to the land of Faerie.

The book's protagonist is Fred Barber, a diplomat living in Yorkshire, England during World War II. On the night of Midsummer's Eve, when Barber's hosts leave out a bowl of milk as an offering to the fairies, he decides to make light of the custom by swapping the milk for scotch whiskey. As a consequence of his jest, the fairies who come for the milk become intoxicated -- and more than a little perturbed at his actions. They kidnap Barber, spiriting him off to Faerie, where he's taken to the court of King Oberon to answer for his deed.

Oberon offers Barber a chance to return to his own world if he will first atone for his crime by undertaking a mission on behalf of the fairies. He's to go off into the Kobold Hills -- the source of many magic weapons -- and determine if an ancient enemy of the fairies has returned. Barber reluctantly agrees and sets off through the bizarre landscape of Faerie on his mission. While doing so, he meets all manner of equally bizarre characters and his interactions with them, not to mention the quest itself, set the stage for revelations about the nature of Barber's own existence.

Land of Unreason is a fun book. Its depiction of Faerie is one I particularly enjoy, for this otherworldly land functions according to its own weird logic, one that is largely alien -- and often inimical -- to visitors from our reality, like Barber. Its inhabitants are, by turns, helpful, seductive, and terrifying. One gets the very real sense that mortal men were not meant to dwell in Faerie, something I much prefer to the dewy-eyed romanticism one often sees associated with fairies. I'll also admit that I'm a sucker for tales of modern men transported to fantasy realms, a trope that was once a staple of the genre but now seems to be less common (though it hasn't disappeared entirely). It's well worth a look if you've never had the chance to do so.