A Thief in the Dying Earth

The description of Matthew Hughes's latest short story collection, 9 Tales of Raffalon, is simply: "A Thief in the Dying Earth." Hughes is a fantasy writer who has been working in the space of the "Dying Earth" subgenre, typified by authors such as Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. While Hughes's prose will not stand up to the stiff test of those authors, Raffalon is a creation that should bring a smile to the face of any Vance fan. He is a thief in the vein of Cugel the Clever, continually finding himself (usually with good cause) in the crosshairs of strange wizards and mortal enemies while being rakish and clever about it.

I first found Raffalon by browsing for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I pick up periodically because I enjoy short stories and enjoy the fact that there's still a magazine publishing fantasy stories. I found "The Prisoner of Pandarius" and immediately felt at home with Hughes's world.

The worldbuilding in Hughes is solid. He has created a very peculiar universe, full of interesting and arcane guilds with various restrictions and symbols, and characters who've learned to live right at their edges. The period Raffalon spends in "The Vindicator" working the offices of the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Purloiners and Purveyors is, particularly, a fun way to set up that story. If you want to have thieves' guilds or similar institutions in your game, this is a must-read.

Another area where Hughes shines through is in his description of magic effects. Magic is strange, and visceral, and really quite wondrous. The effect in "Wearaway and Flambeau" is a particularly fun one, as is the experience when Raffalon actually casts a bit of a spell in "Stones and Glass." It's described in a way that really takes the reader through the process and helps you realize why all the spellcasters in Hughes's stories tend to be arrogant and bizarre sorts.

This collection is an assortment of picaresque tales, and while there are recurring figures they don't form much by way of a grand narrative. Raffalon started at the end, in "The Inn of the Seven Blessings" written for the anthology Rogues, and he is pretty much an iconic thief from the earliest of his tales. (Hughes's new character, Baldemar, has more of an arc to his stories.) Raffalon is a bit more likable than Cugel the Clever, who is openly his inspiration, which is to his credit, though he's not as sharp-witted.

Among "Vancian" authors, Hughes does not mimic the decadent prose of The Dying Earth. His writing works fairly well for the stories but isn't just enjoyable on its pure merits. A short sample from "Wearaway and Flambeau":

A thief's credo is to avoid capture and punishment by any means necessary. But Raffalon had added a corollary to that code: when all is lost, at least go out with a bold face. He now set his features into as intrepid an arrangement as he could manage, and turned his gaze upward. He found himself staring, as expected yet hoped against, into the uncompromising visage of Hurdevant the Stringent.

That's about the level of writing you'll get; I find it fine, and it reads quickly, but I wouldn't want to disappoint someone looking for a Vance or, say, a Michael Shea in this anthology.

I enjoy these stories because they are what is advertised on the tin: short stories about a thief in the Dying Earth. It's just nice that after all these years of plumbing brick-length fantasy novels and finding them shallow, somebody is out there still embracing good old picaresque fantasy in the short story form.

9 Tales of Raffalon is available from Amazon or directly from Matt Hughes. It's recommended to anyone interested in dying earth fantasy, thieves and thieves' guilds, or just having some fresh short stories to pick your way through.

Appendix N and the Solar System

Much more of Appendix N occurs within the Solar System than people commonly think.

A significant chunk of the Appendix is what I would call antediluvian fiction. This is works that occur ostensibly on Earth, but in an age before known history. Presumably the future of these settings is some cataclysm that results in the modern positions of the landmasses. This may not be the flood of Genesis, but it may as well be; and "antediluvian" generally fits the world view of these works. These include significant influences on D&D such as R.E. Howard's Conan series and J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, all works that were meant to happen on our earth. Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana also fits in this category.

Following this is historical fantasy. There are elements of this in Anderson's work, Lest Darkness Fall, the earliest Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story ("Adept's Gambit" is set in Tyre, not Lankhmar), some of Norton's fantasy work and most of the Swords Against Darkness stories. There are also elements of historical fantasy in Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar. Howard wrote historical fantasy as well.

Then there is modern fantasy. Burroughs (Tarzan and Pellucidar), Merritt, and the Lovecraft stories not set in the Dreamlands are all contemporary. So are Wellman's Silver John stories, or some of Howard's writing such as the El-Borak series.

Following this are the two flavors of future fantasy set on our earth. Post-apocalyptic works cover entries such as Norton's Daybreak 2250 AD, Lanier's Hiero's Journey, and St. Clair's Sign of the Labrys. Were that not enough, dying-earth works such as, well, The Dying Earth and World's End are set far, far in the future. This motif recurs in the Hawkmoon series by Moorcock and the Book of Swords by Saberhagen.

The next ring is the planetary stories, which any reader will know are dear to my heart. Burroughs and Brackett and Weinbaum all wrote compellingly of Mars. By a weird coincidence, neither the planetary work of Lin Carter (Jandar of Callisto) nor of R.E. Howard (Almuric), both set outside the Solar System, are mentioned in the Appendix.

The last group are set in worlds explicitly connected to our Earth. The fantasy world of Three Hearts and Three Lions, that of The Compleat Enchanter, the Elfland of The King of Elfland's Daughter, Leiber's Nehwon, Moorcock's Eternal Champion multiverse, the world of Blue Star are all at one time or another either sending people or ideas to our world.

Almost none of Appendix N is set in a "proper" separate fantasy world like those often seen in D&D. Yet the default assumption of so many games is exactly that, of a world disconnected from ours but somehow similar in major ways. At best there are hints that it is either a far-future post-apocalypse of our world or an antediluvian version of it.

This is a thing that bugs me the most about great chunks of D&D and similar fantasy. I don't think it's an accident that so much of this work keeps ties to our earth, whether for reasons of myth, or details, or a touch of irony. It's deeply weird that a game where, for instance, The Moon Pool is meant to be a significant influence, we so rarely see PCs like those in The Moon Pool, who are closer to Call of Cthulhu investigators than D&D PCs.

Appendix N in 2015

I went through my Barnes & Noble today, and this is everything that I could find related to Gary Gygax's Appendix N:

Burroughs, Edgar Rice: "Pellucidar" series; Mars series; Venus series
Barnes & Noble has two $10 volumes that between them print the first 5 Mars novels, which have gone into public domain. A pretty good deal overall, although there is no art.

Howard, R. E.: "Conan" series
A single volume from the Conan series sits on the shelves. The other Del Rey volumes have all disappeared.

Lovecraft, H. P.
Huge collections, including from Penguin and Barnes & Noble. There are also multiple anthologies of short stories similar to Lovecraft's.

Moorcock, Michael: STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS; "Hawkmoon" series (esp. the first three books)
Not Elric or Hawkmoon, but Corum is actually being reprinted.

Tolkien, J. R. R.: THE HOBBIT; "Ring trilogy"
There are two shelves full of Tolkien. This has been pretty much a given for the last twenty years or more, as long as I've been reading fantasy. George R.R. Martin is the only comparable author in terms of shelf space.

Vance, Jack: THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al
Assiduous hunting in the anthologies revealed that one of Vance's stories is in a The Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction volume. The Dying Earth proper is gone from shelves.

Wellman, Manley Wade
Wellman's name is on the cover of Acolytes of Cthulhu, a volume of Lovecraft-inspired fiction. It's interesting to note that the flood of Lovecraftian stories has not meant any kind of resurrection of August Derleth; he lies dreaming with dead Cthulhu.

Zelazny, Roger: JACK OF SHADOWS; "Amber" series; et al
A single, stately volume of The Complete Amber has closed out the Science Fiction & Fantasy section in Barnes & Noble for as long as I can remember. It's a massive tome and it's always present. The omnibus has been reprinted at least once, because it has a different cover than my copy, but its presence is kind of a fitting bookend to the SFF section.

The book I actually wound up buying (I already own everything of interest from the above) is from one of the "collateral" Appendix N authors: DAW just reissued The Birthgrave, the debut novel of Tanith Lee. Lee's short story "In the Balance" is in Swords Against Darkness III, the one anthology that made Gygax's list. (The contents are listed on its Wikipedia page.)

It's sad to note of Appendix N, now a 36 year old list, that of its twenty-eight named authors only Michael Moorcock is still alive. Several of the Swords Against Darkness III authors, including Lee (edited to note: Tanith Lee passed away in 2015), are also with us. Even some of the greats have been moved on from: Andre Norton's books used to fill a respectable slot, but now it skips her entirely.

Given the ongoing fandom for Lovecraft, it is somewhat odd that nobody's been putting out any of Dunsany's longer work in good print volumes; The Gods of Pegana, The Sword of Welleran and the other early work is all in the public domain, but I guess it's still not as profitable as the Martian tales. Merritt's work, likewise: we could easily have print versions of The Moon Pool and The Metal Monster, but even his name seems to be lost to the years. Both were major influences on Lovecraft; perhaps someone should lobby S.T. Joshi.

Barring a movie or HBO miniseries (or maybe True Detective taking up Manly Wade Wellman's "Silver John" stories), I don't see any grounds for a serious revival of the rest of the Appendix N authors. Burroughs, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Moorcock, and Howard are the anchors keeping Appendix N literature accessible to new generations, and it's probably going to stay that way for a while to come.

In a way, that's a damn shame. The best of this stuff is rip-roaring adventure. Norton and Brackett are two of the bigger losses, I think, both being women with a great knack for a science fiction or maybe science fantasy yarn.

Moldvay Basic and Appendix N

The Moldvay Basic Set includes a list of inspirational reading material that is occasionally compared to Gygax's Appendix N. The list is credited to one Barbara Davis, so I'll refer to it as Davis's while generally holding the Basic set as Moldvay. I hold the latter in fairly high regard and have periodically written about it, so it bears some questioning whether Davis's list supercedes Gygax's.

First, a comparison is in order. Most of Appendix N makes the Davis list, but not quite all. Despite presenting a substantially longer list, Davis does not include Fredric Brown, August Derleth, Margaret St. Clair, or Stanley G. Weinbaum. Modern Lovecraftians will not mind the omission of Derleth, but he was important both in preserving and popularizing HPL, and in creating what we think of as a unified "Cthulhu Mythos." St. Clair's book Sign of the Labrys was important in creating the concept of the dungeon as an underground world. Both Brown and Weinbaum are important to the science fiction aspects of Gygax's list. So the losses are serious.

The "Young Adult Fantasy" is a curious list. I can't object to any of it; Bellairs and Burroughs were already on Appendix N, though Burroughs does not belong in "Young Adult." Prydain, Oz, Wonderland, Brisingamen, Earthsea, Narnia – all solid, all a bit young for most of the folks who will be reading this. I wonder how much they have in common with Appendix N, but I see them as fine for a set aimed at 10-year-olds.

The Adult Fantasy section adds far too much. It doesn't help that the first new author is Piers Anthony; he has some of Gygax's imprimatur, but Gygax recommended Lin Carter's original fiction. Robert Aspirin's books are the kind of "jokey" fantasy that has happily fallen out of fashion. E.R. Eddison is a solid addition, with his Worm Ouroboros. Tanith Lee's addition reminds me of D&D 5e's Appendix E: a fine author, worth reading, but not really "inspirational" material for anything I'd recognize as D&D. Heinlein and Niven both creep in for reasons that are beyond me. The happiest additions are Clark Ashton Smith and Karl Edward Wagner, both of whom strongly belong. It's also fun that Dracula shows up. I can't say that this is stronger than Appendix N, though.

The additional authors have some solid choices, but seems odd at first glance. A large chunk of the list only makes sense in the context of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, a selection of paperback fantasy novels edited by Lin Carter. Peter S. Beagle, Hannes Bok, James Branch Cabell, H. Rider Haggard, Katherine Kurtz, Mervyn Peake and Evangeline Walton all come straight from that line or its predecessor books. Many of these works were dated already in the 1970s and are moreso today.

When the Adult Fantasy line and Appendix N choices are pared out, we are left with C.J. Cherryh, Samuel R. Delany, Jane Gaskell, Roland Green, John Jakes, Anne McCaffery, Patricia A. McKillip, C.L. Moore, and John Myers Myers. Moore was a top-notch fantasist who always gets left out of things like this, so it's a delight that she is found here. Delany manages to make even less sense on Davis's list than Weinbaum did on Gygax's; at least "A Martian Odyssey" is a master class in how to write or play a totally alien creature. McKillip is in or close to the "Celtic fantasy" mold with Kurtz and Walton. John Myers Myers only wrote one fantasy book of note, Silverlock, although it was probably one that sat on Ms. Davis's library shelves. Jane Gaskell is incidentally responsible for the "brooding romantic vampire," while Anne McCaffery is well known for her idiosyncratic Pern novels. John Jakes and Roland J. Green were responsible for thud-and-blunder novels with heroes named Brak and Wandor, respectively. C.J. Cherryh went on to do sci-fi for decades but in 1981 was known for an excellent science fantasy series, the Morgaine books.

Much as I love the Davis list's inclusion of CAS and C.L. Moore, I feel like it both doesn't have an appropriate filter and doesn't direct readers to as good of a mix of work as Appendix N. There is too much middling fantasy here. I primarily would recommend its whole Young Adult section, plus the handful of additions to Appendix N that I really think are essential (Smith, Eddison, Moore, Wagner). There is a better balance as a list in Appendix N, and I think it's a bit further out from what we now think of as "fantasy" in the sense of a crystallized thing, more wild and undefined.

At the end of the day, it comes down to this: I do think a serious fan of D&D should give everything in Appendix N a shot, if not a full read. Davis's list doesn't have that distinction.

Appendices E and N

The 5e D&D Player's Handbook has an "Appendix E" that I think is worth at least mentioning. Looking over the list, I think there is some merit in talking about at least a few of the works listed in it.

Appendix E is a superset of Appendix N, but it also changes the latter by adding in recommended books for every author listed. Appendix N listed 9 authors "generally" with no specific works – essentially their whole writings. (Although in the case of H.P. Lovecraft, it literally recommends everything.) These thoughts focus on the additions.

• Ahmed, Saladin. Throne of the Crescent Moon.

This is one of several entries in the list that feels like it was just thrown in because somebody at WotC was reading it, and it helped give the list some "modern" credibility. Nothing against it, but nothing about it suggests D&D.

• Anthony, Piers. Split Infinity and the rest of the Apprentice Adept series.

This is one of the series Gary Gygax "added" to Appendix N when asked in 2007. I personally find Piers Anthony quite repugnant to my taste, but then de gustibus non est disputandum.

• Augusta, Lady Gregory. Gods and Fighting Men.

I kind of have to give credit for the authors sneaking some Irish myth into Appendix E. The Irish myth cycles are difficult to piece together and not as popular as Greco-Roman or Norse myth, but have some excellent heroic stuff going on.

• Brooks, Terry. The Sword of Shannara and the rest of the Shannara novels.

This novel is, literally, everything that is wrong with fantasy from 1977 onward. Its publication – Lester Del Rey literally chose it because it was the most like The Lord of the Rings – was the watershed moment when Extruded Fantasy Product began to overwhelm the burgeoning fantasy scene. It's not as bad as some EFP authors (Terry Goodkind is probably the worst) but it is directly responsible for their existence.

• Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch's Mythology.

A terrific way to familiarize oneself with Greco-Roman, Arthurian and Carolingian mythology, if a bit dated in language. I've spent more time with Edith Hamilton's Mythology but Bulfinch is really good for the material in Age of Chivalry.

• Cook, Glen. The Black Company and the rest of the Black Company series.

Another, and in my opinion much more worthy, entry in Gygax's 2007 expansion. The only reason The Black Company wasn't on Gary's original list is that it hadn't been written yet.

• Hickman, Tracy & Margaret Weis. Dragons of Autumn Twilight and the rest of the Chronicles trilogy.

I have mixed feelings on this; on the one hand, this book did help me get into D&D (though within a few years, I had developed much better taste in fantasy novels). On the other, it is crappy Extruded Fantasy Product and did a lot of damage by pushing D&D in that direction.

• Jordan, Robert. The Eye of the World and the rest of the Wheel of Time series.

I read several of these books in college. I regret this fact. It manages to be derivative of both The Lord of the Rings and Dune while learning nothing positive from either series.

• King, Stephen. The Eyes of the Dragon.

What a weird one-off to throw in. I read this book when I was a teenager because my aunt and uncle had every Stephen King book in their house, and one time when we were visiting, I picked up the one book that had "Dragon" in the title. The poison that caused smoke to come out of the king's eyes was the only thing that stuck with me.

• LeGuin, Ursula. A Wizard of Earthsea and the rest of the Earthsea series.

Earthsea is probably my favorite Young Adult fantasy series. I actually had to read the first book in my freshman English class, and wound up loving the original trilogy. Le Guin is kind of known for her political bent, but Earthsea is just good bedrock fantasy writing.

• Lynch, Scott. The Lies of Lock Lamora and the rest of the Gentleman Bastard series.

See Ahmed, Saladin above.

• Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones and the rest of the Song of Ice and Fire series.

The only way to read these books is as a prolonged black-comedy parody on the epic fantasy genre. And they're too damn long to bother reading like that. I've come to hate the "grimdark" pseudo-realism of books like this.

• Pratchett, Terry. The Colour of Magic and the rest of the Discworld series.

Another Gary Gygax 2007 addition. If you like comedic fantasy, then this is better than most. I read a few in high school and it's just not my cup of tea.

• Rothfuss, Patrick. The Name of the Wind and the rest of the Kingkiller series.

See Ahmed, Saladin above.

• Salvatore, R.A. The Crystal Shard and the rest of the Legend of Drizzt.

I knew these books sucked when I was 14. They still suck now.

• Sanderson, Brandon. Mistborn and the rest of the Mistborn trilogy.

See Ahmed, Saladin above.

• Smith, Clark Ashton. The Return of the Sorcerer.

Gary was wrong to keep CAS off his list in 1977, and wrong to not put him on his 2007 revision. Having a list that includes Lovecraft and Howard but not Smith is like listing great Musketeers and having Porthos and Athos, but not Aramis. Yes, de gustibus, but it's a snub against one of fantasy's all-time greats.

• Wolfe, Gene. The Shadow of the Torturer and the rest of The Book of the New Sun.

This is one of the best additions that Appendix E makes. An excellent series, worthy inspiration, and a great pick as the last new entry.

There are a couple of entries in Appendix E that I'm not familiar with and have no particular comment on. But there's one omission that is really unforgivable. Catherine L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories are prime D&D material, written in the heyday of Weird Tales, and present one of the great heroines of sword & sorcery literature. She and her husband Henry Kuttner (who often wrote under each other's bylines) were titans of fantasy and science fiction back when there was no divide. Gygax can be forgiven if he was ignorant of Moore; Mearls and the WotC authors, in an age of the Internet and Google, can't. If you can dig up Stephen King's one mediocre fantasy novel, you can certainly spare an entry for one of the greats.

Appendix E, on the whole, probably has too many duds and too many books that are only on the list because they're popular to be a worthy successor of Appendix N. Really, the 11,000+ pages of Wheel of Time and 4,000+ pages and counting of A Song of Ice and Fire alone should disqualify it; The Lord of the Rings is the longest single work in Appendix N and it's less than a tenth as long as the Wheel of Time. Aside from Gygax's additions and a few others, I would be hesitant to put most of these books on the same level.

The Pulp Magazines Project

The kind of fantasy fiction best loved by many of us in the old school originated in the magazines popular in the early 20th century known as "pulps" because of the low-grade paper that they were printed on. Aside from the most assiduous collectors, most of us only read the pulp stories out of context, reprinted in anthologies or web pages that frequently lose the original artwork and never have the context - the editorials, the letter columns, the advertisements, and the other stories that surrounded them.

Fortunately, the Pulp Magazines Project fixes this for us. It's a terrific resource, collecting pulp magazines that have gone into public domain for one reason or another. It's fun to read and flip through these in PDF form (the "flipbook" reader is a bit annoying for me), and soak in the classic magazines.

Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories is a major touchstone in science fiction history; it basically created the genre, even giving it its name in the early form of "scientifiction." The site only has a handful of issues from Amazing's run, but still manages to capture its very early days and crucial material. It started with reprints, but pretty soon had seminal authors.

For fantasy fans, unquestionably the most important magazine here is Weird Tales. This was the magazine that was home to Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, and the literary circle around them – Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith. Howard committed suicide in June 1936, and Lovecraft passed of an illness in March of 1937; this happens to coincide with the period of Weird Tales that are on the Pulp Magazines Project archive. The loss of its two leading lights put Weird in hard times, and Farnsworth Wright left the magazine, which went under the stewardship of Dorothy McIlwraith. It had other worthy authors under McIlwraith, including Leiber, Kuttner's wife C.L. Moore, and Manly Wade Wellman.

It's worth reading Weird Tales closely, because it helps to put Howard and Lovecraft in context. Read in their context it's clear that they were the farthest-sighted of a like-minded group of authors. For instance, Seabury Quinn's occult detective stories featuring Jules de Grandin are quite clever and told in a gripping pulp fashion, but don't have the same level of transcendence as Lovecraft's work. Yet, side by side, we can see that Lovecraft was very much a part of this milieu.

Of course, you didn't think I'd let you get away without mentioning Planet Stories, did you? Of course not. This was very much not a pioneering magazine in the same sense as Amazing Stories or Weird Tales; the original sword & planet adventures had been published in The All-Story by Burroughs. But Planet Stories is where both Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury developed their tales of Mars, inspired of course by the Barsoom stories. Late in its run, Planet Stories also discovered a writer named Philip K. Dick, who published his first story there. Its pedigree did also include writers such as Asimov, Simak and another Appendix N writer, Frederic Brown. The emphasis on adventure didn't stop harder science fiction ideas.

I like these magazines for three reasons. First, they're full of great adventure stories. Modern genre fiction is too wrapped up in epics and has trouble just getting down to a good adventure where the protagonist is in trouble pretty much the whole time. You get it in the old, short novels that were often just several stories strung together by a thread of a plot, but it really is lacking in bigger and more complex novels.

Second, you wind up reading authors you wouldn't have otherwise. This is a great side effect of the anthology form, and it's more pronounced here. There are people in these magazines I've never heard of, but with a short story it's always worth giving them a try. Even anthologies are only preserving selected authors who appealed to the anthologist; reading the raw form of the pulps gets you some good obscure authors, and also some clunkers

Third, I am always fascinated by seeing these things in their original context. Advertisements of all sorts litter the pages; a sophisticated reader might filter them out, but it's worth pausing once in a while to drink in the environment where the stories we love originally appeared. Similarly all the letter columns, where curious readers inquire about stories and offer their opinions; it's a bit of a lost art nowadays. And of course those wonderfully pulp illustrations.

So there you have your weekend's reading, and perhaps for many weekends to come after that. Enjoy, and feel free to point out any great finds in the comments.

On the Starting Player Character

I recently got into a discussion of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories, and particularly where to start when reading them, on Google+. The apparently natural place to start is the first volume, which depending upon which release you are reading, will be Swords and Deviltry or Ill Met in Lankhmar – either way, with "The Snow Women," "The Unholy Grail" and "Ill Met in Lankhmar." Unfortunately, that's a terrible way to read the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. You're well over 100 pages in before you actually get to Fafhrd and the Mouser interacting. It puts me in mind of modern Hollywood, which is obsessed with telling and re-telling "origin stories" because they follow a predictable pattern. It's a really bad one with Leiber's characters, who are at their best once they've actually gotten together. Reading the Lankhmar books in order denies you the good parts for most of the first book.

It happens that I started reading Leiber with the 1996 release of Lean Times in Lankhmar, and more or less began with the titular story. I wanted to read their origin stories because I knew who they would become. And of course, Leiber didn't start with "The Snow Women" or "The Unholy Grail" or even "Ill Met," but rather "Jewels in the Forest," set after Swords and Deviltry.

A starting OD&D fighting-man has the level title of "Veteran." I like that; it implies that he or she has been through a war and survived. They are not farmboys, and have some training and idea of what they're doing. (Dungeon Crawl Classics changes this, which I think is odd.) But given the way the game is set up, we don't know if they are going to survive.

What I've found through play is that pre-written background doesn't mean anything. This is because of a principle that writers are expected to bear in mind: the story you are telling should be the most exciting and important thing that has ever happened to the character. A background made up for a PC before the start of play is, of necessity, not that interesting; after all, they never got any experience points for it.

This is why fan fiction and prequels tend to be markedly inferior. If the earlier story was the most exciting thing that happened to the character, things that happened before tend to be less exciting by definition. Even characters with serial adventures tend to have a best episode or two, compared with which everything else is simply lesser work.

Interesting player characters in my games have always been the ones that emerge in the midst of play. No amount of background has ever really fixed that. Improvisational roleplaying creates character traits that were often totally unexpected. You can't bake that into the character by writing a story of what happened to them beforehand. The best examples I've seen tend to be people who start from very broad strokes and only become more specific in the heat of the game.

Really, I think this is a big part of why D&D's class system has been so enduringly popular: it gives players a good basis to create adventurers from whole cloth, and then let them gain more definition as the game goes on. Maybe a background story will be appropriate when they hit 4th level and become a "Hero" – just as I only appreciated the origins of Fafhrd and the Mouser once I'd read their adventures in Stardock and Quarmall. But at the start, I really find they're not needed, and only distract from defining the character in play.

In Praise of the Short Story, and the Anthology

I was at my local Barnes & Noble today, and I decided to do something I often do: look about for "Appendix N" material that has snuck back into print. It's a sadly shrinking landscape, unfortunately. Only one volume of Howard appeared, with no Elric and for probably the first time I can think of it, no Andre Norton. Lovecraft and Tolkien are by far the best represented, and Roger Zelazny's Amber books are still in print. Skimpy trade paperbacks of the first three Mars stories by Burroughs are the only other material from actual Appendix N authors.

Until, of course, I went 'round to the beginning of the section and looked at the anthologies. One welcome surprise was The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, a wide-ranging tome that has several Appendix N authors (Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Anderson) as well as a number who should be considered essential reading: C.L. Moore, Karl Edward Wagner, Gene Wolfe, Charles R. Saunders, and Michael Shea. It's wide-ranging and those are just the ones that I've read and enjoyed. (There's also a few authors in slightly different veins - Glen Cook and George R.R. Martin are the standouts.)

A second volume I found, American Supernatural Tales, is edited by S.T. Joshi, who has made a killing on this kind of thing. It features Appendix N authors Lovecraft, Howard, Derleth, and Leiber as well as several more must-reads: Robert W. Chambers, Clark Ashton Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, and Robert Bloch. It also has stories from people who should be read on general principle - the classics in Irving, Hawthorne, Poe and Bierce, to Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson.

Short stories and novellas have always been very special to me as a form. I've been reading a lot of them lately, mostly Clark Ashton Smith and Manly Wade Wellman (the latter thanks to Michael Curtis's Chained Coffin Kickstarter) and the form has always struck me as essential for fantastic literature. Of course, I love novels – whether Tolkien's dense epics or the light reads of Burroughs – but I find briefer jaunts are often more satisfying. The short story author has no time to spend on long descriptions or travelogues; a world must be sketched quickly and dynamically, and the point arrived at in brief.

When I got into fantasy short stories it was in the mid-1990s, my high school years; in a way it was a relief from overly long fantasy epics and tie-in novels. Short stories, by contrast, can focus on an incident or oddity without becoming tedious; they are great for shifting in mood. You can read a Conan story in the morning and a Lovecraft tale at night, and the next day switch to something in a science fiction vein, if you like. Even a single author can vary widely, such as the drastic shift from Lovecraft's "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" to "The Colour Out of Space." It's a day trip rather than a long vacation.

Sword & Sorcery's revival in the '60s was focused around short books, beginning with one called Swords and Sorcery and continuing with its follow-ups, The Spell of Seven, The Fantastic Swordsmen and Warlocks and Warriors. Edited by L. Sprague de Camp, these books are not terribly hard to find and really defined the subgenre at the time D&D was about to come out. They're a better guide to it than Appendix N; in addition to Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, Dunsany, Anderson and Zelazny (and the markedly inferior epigones, de Camp and Carter) they feature Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, John Jakes, and a few others.

The great thing in these sort of anthologies is the breadth of worlds that you visit. I think that the idea that everything today in fantasy is not only a novel but a series of novels manages to diminish that kind of breadth, exchanging it for depth in a single world. For a roleplayer, though, I think breadth of ideas is far more important. So it's good to see these kinds of anthologies back on the shelf. There's nothing wrong with extended stays, but it's good to be able to make day trips.

Clark Ashton Smith and Unbalanced Encounters

If you haven't yet, you should definitely pick up The Dark Eidolon and Other Stories, a new anthology of Clark Ashton Smith's short stories, prose poems and poetry. It's edited by S.T. Joshi, a Lovecraft scholar who has managed to convince Penguin to put out all kinds of weird fiction lately. Joshi's Amazon page is like a wish-list of weird fantasy tales.

The first story in The Dark Eidolon is "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", a short romp in the Hyperborean cycle where two disreputable types go to the ruins of Commoriom in search of treasure. It seems pretty undeniable to me that this is the kind of story that D&D is made of, even if CAS didn't make Appendix N.

Anyway, if you haven't, you should read the Satampra story. Mostly because it's a damn good yarn, but also because it's essential to my point here.

The thing in the basin is a great example of how an encounter should be able to go in a D&D game. PCs need to be able to run like hell, which seems to be missing from a lot of players' mindsets and editions of D&D. If you're going to have bona fide monsters in the game, it stands to reason that they should be able to have the kind of response that the thing coming out of the basin has on Satampra Zeiros and Tirouv Ompallios.

It's a terribly unbalanced encounter, but clever player characters could have handled it otherwise. Not being drunk would be a start, as would a better plan of retreat. Some kind of alternative plan for the creature – fire, oil, throwing food or a corpse at it, pretty much any desperate move, or retreat and research as to its capabilities – could prevent a TPK, but if they stood and fought they'd both be dead.

To me, that's why save-or-die mechanics are a good thing in old school RPGs. Without them, you can't create that sense of visceral terror that we see in Satampra's tale. A careful referee could manage, although not with CAS's unique style, to create something quite parallel in the players as they face an unknown horror.

Of course, not every encounter should be like this one. CAS is unforgivably stingy with the treasure, for one thing. And there should be a time when it's appropriate to the PCs to stand and fight. But combat should generally be at the PCs' choosing, not in carefully arranged set-pieces. You fight when you think you can win, and you shouldn't always think that.

For me, it's very important that the dungeon is dangerous. If it weren't, someone would have already looted it and there'd be nothing left for the PCs to get. Encounters like the one faced by Satampra Zeiros and Tirouv Ompallios are one of the ways to make sure of that.