THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Whole World Is A Sourcebook!

As a creative, gaming-obsessed, pre-teen I sat in my corduroy shorts in prep school assembly seeking inspiration from the hymns we sang... just what was the to hit/damage bonus of a "bow of burning gold", what effect did "arrows of desire" have and just how fast was a "chariot of fire"?

In 1977, as well as discovering Star Wars, I had been introduced to Dungeons & Dragons and the whole world was suddenly "research material".

Everywhere I looked there were potential magic items or monsters for characters to contend with in dungeons drawn from every imaginable source.

My prep school co-dungeoneer, Tom, even ran me through a D&D adventure based on the first season of The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy (a radio serial he had introduced me to and also had a major impact on my life).

Television and books (particularly the sword and sorcery tales of Fritz Leiber, and a little later Harry Turtledove's first Elabon stories - Wereblood and Werenight) shaped many adventures and characters in those early years; then later comic books became a major source of inspiration as our games moved away from straight fantasy into the four-colour world of superheroes.

From these I still have three comic book standards that I would one day love to weave into a single, long-running roleplaying game: time travel, alternate dimensions, and cosmic entities.

Yet somehow, even in the games I've run for the Tuesday Knights in the past couple of decades, I have yet to squeeze all three of them in successfully; feeling that a campaign needs to progress at a steady pace for a considerable length of time before such contrasting, incredible elements can have their full, desired impact when introduced.

That said, all three feature heavily in The Sailor on The Seas of Fate, the second of Michael Moorcock's Elric books.

Even dreamier, more surreal and more psychedelic than Elric of Melniboné, this 190-page delight had me joining Elric on a ship sailing a strange ocean that linked not just islands, but worlds and planes of existence in time and space.

In a series of three adventures, Elric discovers he is but one face of The Eternal Champion, travelling to the Earth's future with three other incarnations of the Champion (Hawkmoon, Corum and Erekose) to battle two universe-threatening alien magicians; then he finds himself being chased by a Melnibonean sorcerer from history and swept up in a mythical love story; before finally taking a Heart of Darkness-style river journey to the legendary, lost birth place of his people.

These stories continue to leave me breathless, blown away by the absorbing text, the clever imagery and mental stimuli they spark in my enfeebled brain.

It also made me appreciate, perhaps, why I have never successfully tackled such cosmic themes as I desire to in my roleplaying games - they are best left to the master storytellers!

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Kickin' It Old School!

Supreme fantasy author Michael Moorcock admired pulp maven Robert E Howard's brutal barbarian Conan so much that when he set out to create his own swords and sorcery epic he wanted it to be as unlike the tales of the Cimmerian as possible.

And so, he created Elric: the doomed, feeble, albino sorcerer-king kept alive by, first, mysterious narcotics and later by the evil energy of his cursed sword, Stormbringer.

When I last reread the first of the Elric books - Elric of Melnibone - it took just about two days, I still couldn't put it down.

A combination of my insomnia and the power of the writing saw me reading at all hours of the day and night.

Moorcock proves you don't need a ponderous, phonebook-sized tome to tell a thrilling, memorable fantasy tale.

In a 'mere' 190-pages Elric goes from languishing on his Ruby Throne to dealing with elemental creatures, fighting off an invasion, crossing the Young Kingdoms to find his kidnapped sweetheart and finally journeying to another plane of existence to retrieve Stormbringer at the behest of the Chaos demon-god Aroich.

Outside of Tolkien's main Lord of The Rings' characters and Conan himself, Elric and his legendary sword must be two of the best known names in fantasy literature... their dreamy, nightmarish adventures seeping into all manner of related media (e.g. heavy influences on early roleplaying games from Dungeons & Dragons and Arduin to Chaosium's own Stormbringer game; to the prominent technomage in Babylon 5 universe called... Elric).

And next year, we're getting three different new Elric roleplaying games: one for Dragonbane, one for Dungeon Crawl Classics, and one for 5e!

Reading Elric of Melnibone again stirred in me nostalgic memories for the other books of my youth - Fritz Leiber's Nehwon tales with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Harry Turtledove's stories of Gerin The Fox - and the old school fantasy roleplaying games of my teen years.

It filled me with a hankering for that '80s Dungeons & Dragons-style vibe, that feeling of wonder and "not knowing what's around the next corner".

To quote Wikipedia:

"Some fans of pencil and paper role playing games use [old school] to describe RPGs characterized by simple game mechanics and flexible rules. The character generation system in such RPGs tend to lack extensive lists of skills and abilities. Basic Dungeons & Dragons and the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons are often considered 'old school' role playing games."

All this hankering for past gaming glories was also been stoked back in the 2000's by several great rules-lite, war story-heavy fantasy gaming podcasts I listened to at the time. Sadly, these are now gone - swept aside by the tidal wave of "actual play" podcasts.

The pods I listened to eschewed the attitude of some of the more snobby or 'elitist' podcasts back then which looked down their virtual noses at "game stories" or the "tell me about your character" attitude.

Personally I believe that's a central element of roleplaying games - you are generating collective stories, so why not share them? Isn't this just another form of creating fantasy literature?

As long as the stories are interesting, they are as valid as any other anecdote you may care to tell.

Paintings and Ice Schooners Lead Me Down A Rabbit Hole

Beautifully packaged parcel from Peahen In The Tree

When I started putting my thoughts together about returning to the world of blogging a year or so ago, I never imagined I'd be writing so much about my book collection.

But then I discovered Booktube, and my perspective shifted somewhat.

The other day, a random eBay advert hit my eyeballs for different edition of a key book from my formative years as a young gamer: Wereblood (or, in this iteration, Were Blood) by Erik Iverson (aka alt-history maven Harry Turtledove).

My 'new' copy of Wereblood

But what made this printing of particular interest to me was the painted Boris Vallejo cover (see above), which bore no relevance to the Gerin The Fox story told in Wereblood whatsoever.

In fact I knew it from a 1985 roleplaying supplement from Mayfair Games' Role Aids line that I was mildly obsessed with as a youth. Ice Elves did exactly what it said on the tin (and in Vallejo's 1978 painting).

It was an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure and rules supplement that explored the idea of a race of elves living in the frozen North, getting around on ultracool "ice riggers".

The reason I was rather hooked on this supplement is because of the similarities, especially in the whole "ships that glide over ice" aspect, to the first Michael Moorcook book I ever read: The Ice Schooner.

However, the more I thought about this - especially when my parcel from online book trader Peahen In The Tree arrived - the more surprised I was by the fact that Vallejo's art didn't decorate the covers of the either of the two editions I have of The Ice Schooner.

My two copies of The Ice Schooner

But a wee bit of Googling quickly revealed it had, of course, been used as a cover illustration for a 1978 Dell Publishing edition of The Ice Schooner:

Was this painting originally commissioned for this book?

A key aspect of the book that introduced me to the wonderful writing of Michael Moorcock is that it was another purchase from P&P Book Exchange in Goods Station Road, Tunbridge Wells.

This is the same - sadly, long-gone - second hand book store where, four decades ago, I discovered the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft for the first time and was transformed from a "dabbler" in comics to full-on collector when I purchased piles of Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans and John Byrne Fantastic Four comics.

It's no understatement to say that one store played a major role in shaping my lifelong geeky interests. 

The world needs more browsable, brick-and-mortar, second hand book shops.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Conan and The Fox

Last week I wrote about how I encountered Conan The Barbarian in comic books (courtesy of the wonderful, old digest releases), but I reckon this must have also been around the same time I discovered him in literature as well.

This literary retrospection reminded me of the first Robert E Howard books I ever owned.

It must have been the very early 1980s when I found myself, during a shopping trip to Maidstone with my parents, as a young teenager in a discount book store (I seem to recall it was one of those shops that sold remaindered titles and craft bits and bobs, kind of a forerunner to today's The Works) and my eye was immediately drawn to the exciting covers of The Howard Collector and The Gods of Bel-Sagoth, which turned out to be anthology titles focusing on the output of Robert E Howard, father of Conan.

I also acquired Wereblood and Werenight, which would turn out to be game-changing sword-and-sorcery titles for me.

These short and pacy novels had an air of Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser about them, and I strongly suspect Fritz Leiber's dynamic duo were a major influence on author 'Eric Iverson'.

At that time, I was deep, deep, deep in the early bloom of my love of Dungeons & Dragons and all things RPG and those two novels were a major influence on me.

But then I could never find anything else written by Eric Iverson. I always hoped he'd continue the adventures of Gerin The Fox, the protagonist of Wereblood and Werenight.

It was only about a decade or so ago that, thanks to the creation of the Internet, I discovered that Eric Iverson was actually just a pen name of alternate history aficionado Harry Turtledove... and that there were more Gerin The Fox tales.

They turned out to be reasonably easy to track down at the time, on Amazon and eBay, but given how much I loved the original duology as a teenager I still haven't cracked open these later books for fear they can't recapture that magic.

It's probably about time I tried though...  

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Conan Digests

When we were readying ourselves to move house half-a-dozen years ago, I was shifting boxes in the 'office' part of my attic-gamesroom and 'discovered' a long concealed bookcase; squirrelled away in the corner, on which was my collection of eight, old Conan The Barbarian digests.

These were pocket-sized, British reprints (in black and white) from the early '80s, of Conan's original stint in the pages of Marvel Comics, each around 50-pages long.

These were my first exposure to both Conan The Barbarian and the works of Robert E Howard, I would have been about 14 or 15 when I picked these up.

I guess I was a comparative latecomer to the exploits of the mighty Cimmerian, having cut my sword-and-sorcery teeth - soon after being introduced to Dungeons & Dragons at the tail-end of the '70s - on Fritz Leiber's Nehwon tales with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Harry Turtledove's stories of Gerin The Fox, and then Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné, years before I encountered Conan The Barbarian.

In truth, I think, after the comic book digests, my first actual Robert E Howard book was a remaindered copy of The Gods Of Bal-Sagoth, an Ace Science-Fiction collection of non-Conan stories, that I purchased in a discount book store while out shopping with my parents.

Like pretty much everything at that time, my early interest in Howard's work - and Conan - was fuelled by my desire to make everything about my blossoming passion for roleplaying games, and particularly Dungeons & Dragons.

A passion they still serve today.