Jeff, Hoi, and a rotating roster of special guests discuss the adventure, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and weird fiction that inspires our gaming
Kira Magrann joins us to discuss Lin Carter’s “The Immortal of World’s End”, LARPing as an awkward teenager, goth teenage years, blending sci-fi and fantasy, tonal shifts, strange metaphors, the cognitive dissonance of glorifying violence after seeing war firsthand, evolving cultural norms, positive inclusions of beasts and animals, sexualizing all or none of the characters instead of just the female-presenting characters, random charts, Trancore as a music genre, and much more!
Carmin Vance joins us to discuss L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter’s “Conan the Buccaneer”, barriers for entry into the hobby, weird descriptions of breasts, sword and sorcery as escapism, black amazon warriors, reading non-Howard Conan stories, the man-eating trees of Nubia, ritual magic, the bellybuttons of the Easter Island statues, reading with an open mind, and much more!
Hoi and Jeff chat with Todd Bunn about Lin Carter’s “The Enchantress of World’s End”, flipping expectations, one-shot adventures, sphinxes, and introductory RPG systems!
Hoi and Jeff discuss Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, & Lin Carter’s “Conan the Wanderer” with special guest Jon from the Cromcast.
Hoi and Jeff discuss Lin Carter’s “The Warrior of World’s End” with special guest Howard Andrew Jones.
(Please also see the Episode 2 show notes for additional details about the Lancer/Ace Conan books.)
Conan of Cimmeria (Lancer Books, 1969) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of the first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan of Cimmeria was the seventh tenth volume published, although it is second in the internal chronology–later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer went out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series, keeping it in print until the mid 1990s.
As with Conan, series editors de Camp and Carter filled in gaps in Conan’s timeline by expanding Howard’s unpublished notes and fragments, re-writing non-Conan stories, and writing entirely new stories. For the purist, the Howard-only stories in Conan of Cimmeria are “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” (written in 1934, first published 1953, definitive version published 1976), “Queen of the Black Coast” (1934), and “The Vale of Lost Women” (first published in The Magazine of Horror, 1967).
The de Camp and Carter originals in Conan of Cimmeria are “The Curse of the Monolith” (first published in the magazine Worlds of Fantasy in 1968 as “Conan and the Cenotaph”), “The Lair of the Ice Worm”, and “The Castle of Terror”. “The Blood-Stained God” is a de Camp rewrite of a then unpublished Howard story “The Curse of the Crimson God”, with de Camp changing the setting from early 20th century Afghanistan and adding the fantastic elements to turn it into a Conan tale. “The Blood-Stained God” first saw print in the hardcover collection Tales of Conan (Gnome Press, 1955). The final story in this volume “The Snout in the Dark” was completed by de Camp and Carter from synopsis and story fragment found in Howard’s notes. For the curious, the untitled synopsis and fragment can be found in the appendices of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 2003).
Frank Frazetta once again contributes an unforgettable cover painting, this time of Conan’s battle with Atali’s brothers from “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”:
In addition to the Conan influences on Dungeons & Dragons cited in Episode 2, Conan of Cimmeria was the probable source of the Monster Manual’s remorhaz, a sort of ice centipede inverse of the remora from “The Lair of the Ice Worm”. “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” probably deserves equal credit along with the first Harold Shea story “The Roaring Trumpet” for the Dungeons & Dragons treatment of frost giants, which first appeared in the original 1974 edition and were fully detailed in the Monster Manual (1977). Frost giants would become iconic D&D foes with the publication of TSR’s second D&D module, 1978’s G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, the middle module of the Against the Giants trilogy.
Reading Resources:
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan of Cimmeria Book 1) (Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 2003) is the first of a 3-book trade paperback series collecting the Conan stories in the order they were written by Robert E. Howard, often going back to his original typescripts. Also included are many of Howard’s Conan story drafts, note, and fragments, but none of the posthumous revisions and new stories by de Camp, Carter, et al. This volume also features numerous evocative interior illustrations by Mark Schultz.
http://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/RobertEHoward/REH-Conan/@Conan.html is an online public domain repository of all of the Conan stories that were published during Robert E. Howard’s lifetime and several posthumously published works that are out of copyright.
Gaming Resources:
G2 The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl (1e) (RPGNow affiliate link)
Monster Manual (1e) (RPGNow affiliate link)
If you are in Brooklyn and want to join the IRL book club, then come over here.
The list of books we will discuss are outlined within this link.
And finally, the in-print omnibus, anthology, and online resources are living over here.
Lin Carter has a multi-faceted reputation in the world of fantastic fiction. As an editor and critic, he is virtually indispensable, most notably for his role in editing the landmark Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (BAFS), as well as the subsequent Flashing Swords!, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and Weird Tales anthologies. Carter’s legacy as a writer is considerably more muddied by his “posthumous collaborations” with Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, which often consisted of creating entirely new stories from unfinished drafts and story fragments. These stories were presented as newly rediscovered works, with Carter carrying the torch for Howard and Smith. Lin Carter was hardly alone in his “posthumous collaborations” however, as he was following a precedent set in the 1950s by August Derleth and L. Sprague de Camp. It can be argued that this practice is distasteful or outright literary defacement, but it could equally well be seen as a precursor to today’s “remix” culture.
What about Lin Carter’s solo fiction then? His breakthrough Thongor series, starting with The Wizard of Lemuria (Ace Books, 1965) has been characterized as heavily influenced by Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Carter was incredibly prolific over the next four years, knocking out roughly 25 more books along with his editorial work and scripting episodes of the Spider-Man animated series. Carter’s work on the BAF series starting in 1969 may have re-awakened his interest in the denser, more allusive prose styles of the likes of Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, and William Morris. This interest would come to the fore in Carter’s Giant of World’s End (Belmont Books, 1969), set 700 million years in the future in The Eon of the Falling Moon. In the far future Earth of Giant of World’s End, the continents have drifted back together into the supercontinent of Gondwane and the Moon has fallen in its orbit to the point where it will soon collide with and destroy the world. The warrior construct Ganelon Silvermane and his companions Zelobion the Magician and Arzeela the War Maid must traverse this vast continent in an attempt to find a “counter-lunary agent” that will prevent the Moon’s fall and the end of the world.
In Carter’s introduction to Giant of World’s End he considers his book in the same End of Time tradition as Clark Ashton Smith’s “Zothique” cycle and A.E. van Vogt’s The Book of Ptath (1947), but curiously he omits any mention of Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” books. Smith and van Vogt’s works were far enough in the past to be safely acknowledged, but it’s likely that Vance’s The Dying Earth (Lancer Books reissue, 1962) and The Eyes of the Overworld (Ace Books, 1965) were too recent to cite comfortably as open influences. In any case, Giant of World’s End is undeniably Vancian, from the odd customs of the various cultures that the protagonists encounter, to the strangely petty ancient powers of the world such as The Seven Brains of Karchoy. The attempts at quirky humor and deliberately formal dialogue also owe a lot to Vance, but can seem a bit forced.
Another perhaps less obvious influence on Giant at World’s End is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with Ganelon Silvermane’s amnesia and inability to love echoing the Scarecrow’s missing brain and Tin Woodman’s missing heart respectively. Also the band of adventurers’ disappointment at the reveal of the senile Last Technarch of Vandalex calls back to Dorothy’s peek behind the screen at the “humbug” Wizard of Oz. Carter’s nods to the Oz books are less surprising when you consider that he wrote five Oz novels that were published posthumously as The Tired Tailor of Oz (2001) and the collection The Merry Mountaineer of Oz (2004).
Nothing in the text of Giant of World’s End indicates that it was originally intended to be part of a series, especially considering its downbeat ending. Nevertheless, Lin Carter must have felt that the supercontinent of Gondwane remained rife with story possibilities as a prequel, Warrior of World’s End was published in 1974 by DAW Books. Four more books in the “Gondwane Epic” would appear through 1978. Supposedly there were to have been nine books in the Gondwane Epic, bringing the story around full circle to Giant of World’s End but the series was cancelled because of low sales. It’s interesting to note that the five prequels were reissued by Wildside Press in the early 2000s, but that Giant of World’s End has never been reprinted aside from a U.K. paperback edition in 1972–perhaps the reissues did poorly too or there’s an obscure publishing rights issue involved.
Giant of World’s End features a Jeffrey Catherine Jones cover that doesn’t depict any scene in the text, but may be conveying Arzeela’s despair over her unrequited love for Ganelon Silvermane. It’s a literal “brown study”:
Out of Lin Carter’s quite large body of work, only the “World’s End” books are cited by Gary Gygax as influences on the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. Many of the works in Appendix N are superior on their literary merits, but Giant of World’s End doesn’t lack for memorable creations such as the Talking Ship Mannanan MacLear, the Myriapod at the arena of the Piomazians, Zelobion’s magical system of Phonemic Thaumaturgy, and the ruined city of Grand Phesion. The somewhat cobbled together nature of Carter’s book makes it easier pull out the eminently gameable bits that would be harder to extract from more original, dramatically unified works. And gamers, from Gary Gygax down to present day DIYers are nothing if not tinkerers….
If you are in Brooklyn and want to join the IRL book club, then come over here.
The list of books we will discuss are outlined within this link.
And finally, the in-print omnibus, anthology, and online resources are living over here.
It’s time to pull the divan by the fire (or to turn on the lava lamp inside your wizard van), crack open an old paperback, and join us as we explore the fiction of the Appendix N….
Downloadable episode available here.
Conan (Lancer Books, 1967) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of the first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan was the fifth volume published, although it is first in the internal chronology–later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer went out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series, keeping it in print until the mid 1990s.
In a now controversial move, series editors de Camp and Carter filled in gaps in Conan’s timeline by expanding Howard’s unpublished notes and fragments, re-writing non-Conan stories, and writing entirely new stories, thus jump-starting the Conan pastiche era.
For the purist, the Howard-only stories in this collection are “The Hyborian Age, Part 1” (1936), “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933), “The God in the Bowl” (1952, Howard’s original version first published 1975), and “Rogues in the House” (1934).
Regardless of the editorial controversies, the Lancer/Ace series was the only widely available source of Howard-penned Conan stories for nearly three decades, sustaining the sword and sorcery boom from the late ‘60s to the mid ‘90s. Robert E. Howard’s furious prose and the now-iconic Frank Frazetta cover illustrations on many of the volumes have cemented Conan the Cimmerian in popular culture. Frazetta had clearly read and internalized the dynamism of the Conan stories, as shown by his cover painting of Conan’s epic struggle with Thak the apeman from “Rogues in the House”:
As Dungeons & Dragons was created in the era of peak Conan, it is natural that Conan’s presence would be felt, starting with a write-up in Robert Kuntz and James M. Ward’s OD&D supplement Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes (1976). Gary Gygax himself would write up Conan as he appeared in various stages of his career in Dragon magazine issue 36 (1980)–a treatment that presaged the eventual AD&D Barbarian class in Dragon issue 62 (1982) and Unearthed Arcana (1985).
Conan the Cimmerian has since remained a perennial roleplaying game property, both with TSR and other publishers, but that’s a story for another day….
Reading Resources:
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan of Cimmeria Book 1) (Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 2003) is the first of a 3-book trade paperback series collecting the Conan stories in the order they were written by Robert E. Howard, often going back to his original typescripts. Also included are many of Howard’s Conan story drafts, note, and fragments, but none of the posthumous revisions and new stories by de Camp, Carter, et al. This volume also features numerous evocative interior illustrations by Mark Schultz.
http://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/RobertEHoward/REH-Conan/@Conan.html is an online public domain repository of all of the Conan stories that were published during Robert E. Howard’s lifetime and several posthumously published works that are out of copyright.
Gaming Resources:
Daniel J. Bishop’s terrific write-up of Conan the Barbarian and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG is here.
Update 07/16/2017 – I mentioned Talbot Mundy and Howard Fast as adventure fiction predecessors to Robert E. Howard, but I was thinking of Mundy and Harold Lamb. This won’t be the last time that I’m wrong on the internet:-) – Hoi
If you are in Brooklyn and want to join the IRL book club, then come over here.
The list of books we will discuss are outlined within this link.
And finally, the in-print omnibus, anthology, and online resources are living over here.
Appendix N Book Club 