Points of Interest on the Map of Dragon Pass

It's a two-page spread, the map of Dragon Pass, early in The Glorantha Sourcebook. The left page is mostly green with forests and grasslands; the right page has more brown, indicating aridity. There's a mountain range running from southwest to northeast on the left page and another range in the bottom half of the fold between the pages. Highly visible labels include Tarsh, Beast Valley, and Prax. Looking a bit closer, we find Esrolia, Grazelands, Heortland, and others. The Shadow Plateau jumps out as a roughly rectangular spot of gray at hte bottom of the left page; the map scale indicates that it's about sixty miles wide and thirty miles from north to south. Villages are scattered across the map, as are oases in the desert of the right-hand pagee. And there are interesting marked objects: the Sun Wheel Ruins, the Throne, the Obscure Plinth, the Block, the Stump.

Here, I'd like to bring draw together this blog's previous posts, "What's Glorantha?" and "Fantasy Maps as Possibility Structures" in a particular example. This map appears just before a thirty-page section of the sourcebook entitled "The History of Dragon Pass," which is presented as a document written by one "Amstalli of Nochet" in response to a request form his queen. Nochet is in fact a location on the mamp, about thirty miles southwest of the Shadow Plateau. Your humble critic referred back to this map dozens of times as he tried to understand the thirty-page history of the region. But this only whetted my appetite: it talked about major events and personalities but skipped over details about many of the specific locations. I wanted to know more. To illustrate the density (or dimensionality) of the map, I'll take three locations and look them up in the Guide to Glorantha to understand what they are and what they tell us about their fantasy world. I've chosen the Shadow Plateau, of course; Muse Roost, a village or city on the western side of the map, and Contemplative Rest, a peaceful-sounding place near the middle of the map.

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From the surrounding countryside, the Shadow Plateau looks like three-thousand-foot-tall black cliffs. For reference, that's the height of the El Capitan cliff face in Yosemite. The plateau is not a total wasteland; it has vegetation. But it also has a huge amount of obsidian sand, which is there because the plateau used ot hold a city-sized castle called the Palace of Black Glass, dating back to the God Time.

What is the God Time, you ask? In Glorantha, God Time was the era when the authentic myths occurred, when the gods interacted freely with each other. The chronology of the God Time is loose, with myths happening in certain senses simultaneously. It's similar to how ancient people probably didn't worry too much about whether Theseus preceded Hercules in the folk versions of the myths. Linear time, when events can be definitively placed on a calendar, began as the resolution of a catastrophe in God Time, but individuals and structures survived from God Time. Imagine if the Pillars of Hercules in Gibraltar were literal pillars, signed with Hercules's name, and had been since time immemorial.

The Palace of Black Glass was such a surviving structure, and it was ruled by a troll king known as The Only Old One. This fellow was born in the God Time and lived for 1,300 years of linear time, until he was slain by a new andd more powerful king. But he wasn't the only undying demigod hanging around in the region; in the RPG's default starting year of 1625, there are still beings from God Time to be found.

So, after the ruining of the palace, the top of the Shadow Plateau became a dangerous and haunted place, even as a whole troll society existed in the caves and tunnels of the plateau, and in the undestroyed basement of the ancient Palace. Glorantha's trolls appear to be the big brutes of the setting, like Tolkien's Orcs, but they're highly intelligent and quite sympathetic, exiled from their true homeland in the underworld and suffering under a centuries-old curse. In Glorantha's elemental system, trolls are associated with Darkness, but Darkness is distinct from and staunchly opposed to the Chaos that the thread to the setting. So, whiile the Shadow Plateau is dangerous for non-trolls, it's not an evil or corrupt place.

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I picked Muse Roost based on the name, thinking it might be a nice arts commune, or a little village of bird people. That's not what it turns out to be. It's the home and headquarters of an immortal mercenary captain named Ethilrist, Lord of the Black Horse Troop. The Glorantha Sourcebook tells us that he was famous for raiding the underworld for treasure, which included demon horses and a hell hound. Ethilrist qualifies, metaphysically, as a Hero, for having travelled into God Time and returned with power: he's on the just about same level as the other political power players in the era. But the Guide to Glorantha tells us more, and gives us his personality. First, the demon horses are carnivorous and pretty scary-looking. Second, despite having so much power, Ethilrist is needy and insecure. He's written a twelve-volume autobiography explaining why he's such a man of history and destiny; we get the sense that he's rationalizing. The Guide even includes an excerpt from the unfinished thirteenth volume of his opus. So Muse Roost is the city of a narcissistic immortal warlord who fancies himself a patron of the arts, and something of a writer himself.

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I picked out Contemplative Rest on the map because its name reminded me of Traveller's Rest, South Carolina, a little town just north of Greenville. And... neither the Sourcebook nor the Guide say much about this place specifically. It is one of a number of settlements of a non-human fantasy race called Dragonewts. If you're familiar with contemporary Dungeons and Dragons, you might htink that these beings look like the Dragonborn. But the Dragonborn are just dragon-people without much specific personality required. Dragonewts, on the other hand, are walking zen riddles, operating in a way that's totally alien to humans, often seeming to simply ignore everything around them. Their inscrutability is the point. If humans were to enter a Dragonewt settlement like Contemplative Rest, it would feel like something from another planet. The architecture wouldn't just be different, it would be weird, almost eerie. The Glorantha Bestiary is an RPG book full of creatures and non-human beings for players to encounter. It has sidebars for how a player can play as anything from a dwarf or elf to a minotaur or centaur. You can even be a small humanoid duck. But there are no instructions for as a dragonewt.

The one thing we know about Contemplative Rest itself is it's part of a group of dragonewt settlements that are located in such a way that drawing certain lines between them makes the shape of a dragon rune. And something about dragonewt religion is that if the dragonewts are devout, they will eventually reincarnate as cosmic dragons, but if they stray from the path of righteousness, they devolve into dinosaurs.

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An interesting thing about Glorantha is that it's almost entirely expressed in games and resources for games. Greg Stafford wrote a "novel" for the setting but it's in the form of collected pseudo-historical documents that have been assembled into a critical edition by scholars of a later civilization. Lacking epic tales that would give me a tour of the setting, it's maps like these that provide paths into the imagined world.

Fantasy Maps as Possibility Structures

To begin with, let us propose a definition of a map. Let us say that it's a two-dimensional arrangement of symbols, where the spatial relationships between the symbols spatial relationships between the things symbolized. Importantly for our purposes, the things symbolized may be real or imagined. This definition is good enough for a simple drawn map, though it probably doesn't suffice for things like color gradients or borders. But we'll get to that.

A single symbol is not a map. Arrange two symbols, however, and you have the beginning of something. Put a mountain near the top-left corner of the page, and a castle in the middle. Questions arise. How close is the castle to the mountains? Can the people in the castle see the mountain? Do they travel to it? What's in the empty, in-between space? Add a road, a river, and other symbols, and soon you have a web of possible journeys. For a certain sort of mind it is impossible not to plot routes, imagine vistas, and consider obstacles.

The symbols may be arbitrarily dimensional: the dot labeled "Los Angeles" on a map of the United States stands for a dazzlingly complex city and landscape, while a different map's labeled dot may indicate a village that hasn't been imagined yet. The idea of the discrete symbol breaks down here: a color gradient could indicate temperature, or elevation, or any number of continuous things, while a boundary line may symbolize no particular or recognizable feature in a physical location, yet political division of territory is one of the things we want maps to show us.

At this stage, we have something like a map as a spatial symbolic field.

The maps that came with Tolkien's books entranced your humble critic when he was a boy. They were of course helpful in understanding the events described in the books, but it was the places the characters never thought to go that really caught my attention. In The Hobbit's map, what were the Grey Mountains like? And the Withered Heath? And the Iron Hills? Could the group have climbed the Mountains of Mirkwood to get their bearings, or would they have found worse monsters up there? And in The Lord of the Rings, there was that mysterious word on the right side of the map, Rhûn...

It is often said that the map is not the territory, but I do not believe that this necessarily holds for fantasy maps.

A territorial map is the first form of possibility structure, implying as it does any number of traversals. A second form of possibility structure extends in time, elaborating or suggesting a branching sequence of events. And the forms may of course be combined. I think of Hamann's assertion that painting was the first writing, while music was "the original bodily image of all temporal measures and intervals"; in other words, music belongs to time and painting to space. One wonders if the full spatiotemporal possibility structure analogizes to Wagner's total work of art, but one wonders this only briefly, before remembering what it is we're talking about: to wit, RPG sourcebooks.

Americans Don't Do Grimdark

I was reading Fall of Delta Green last week and it struck me how much iconic American horror is about trying to preserve the appearance of normalcy. Our bleakest and most nihilistic art is about dying for the American Dream while knowing full well that it's hollow. Lovecraft believes that people ought to be sheltered from the mind-breaking knowledge of the outer darkness. English grimdark is different: it's about blowing up a horrible world to epic proportions, exaggerating all the misery and brutality of our own world, and then taking it seriously enough that it becomes something other than satire. There's no beautiful dream to protect, no glimmering surface. There's no credible ideology of Mega-City One or the Imperium of Man that makes them look like something worth loving; they're just marginally better than the alternatives.

Americans are considering disillusionment. The English seem to be past that.

What's Glorantha?

The Guide to Glorantha
by Greg Stafford and Jeff Richard
Chaosium, 800 pages, $50 (pdf)

Glorantha is a made-up world, like Tolkien's Middle-Earth. It was initially devised by Greg Stafford, who then used it as a board game setting in the 1970s, and then again as a role-playing game setting after Dungeons and Dragons swept through the nerd world. In the following decades, Stafford colllaborated with his players and other friends to fill out the world of Glorantha, mostly in published ssourcebooks for various iterations of the Runequest RPG, but also in a novel, and in the computer game King of Dragon Pass. Contributors to Glorantha have included Sandy Peterson, creator of Call of Cthulhu, and Robin D. Laws. As a sort of capstone of world-building, Glorantha got its own massive two-volume encyclopedia in the 2010s, the Guide to Glorantha.

To return to the Middle-Earth comparison, there are two things that make Glorantha rather different. First, at a high level, it's built on an obsession with comparative mythology in the same way that Middle-Earth is built on an obsession with constructed languages and a Christian view of old English mythology. Glorantha literalizes the thinking of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, such that the mythic is not just psychologically real, but a source of physical and political power. There's even in-world commentary on Campbell's idea of the Monomyth: the culture that studies world mythology and devises a synthesis then uses their synthesis as a means of imperial power. The second thing that makes Glorantha different from Middle-Earth is that it's stuffed full of low-level goofy things that clearly started out as in-game jokes and were then worked into the lore more or less seriously. For example, there's a wide and arid land inhabited by nomadic tribes of herdsman: a group that rides and herds bison, one that manages herds of impalas, another one for llamas, and one for antelope, but also a tribe of intelligent humanoid tapirs that drive herds of humans possessing only bovine intelligence, which seems to me like a classic Where's Waldo gag.

What I like most about Glorantha is that it's fundamentally, structurally tragic. The world is elemental, in the classic sense, not atomistic. But there are are more elements than just earth, fire, water, and air. There's also darkness, and concepts like law, truth, and illusion. These elements are the famous "runes" from which the RPG takes its title, and the fact that they can't be scientifically reconciled colors the world. The surface-level conflict is that the sun god, representing hierarchical order, and the storm god, representing restless freedom, are intrinsically conflicting and can at best exist in a condition of unsteady compromise. In Glorantha, attempts to synthesize these metaphysical distinctions threaten to break the world by introducing Chaos, the anti-order that will, if unchecked, dissolve the world. So nature pushes back, in one case making it impossible to travel the oceans for centuries in order to thwart an overreaching maritime empire, and in another case having giant dragons appear and eat an entire nation. There's an emphasis on the cultural violence of imperial expansion: there's no absorption without loss, and that's one reason these attempts to transcend opposites are dangerous. But mortals won't stop trying to move forward. To put it pretentiously, Glorantha is a world where Hegelian synthesis simply doesn't work. Progress has a brutal price, and The Guide to Glorantha tells us that the default starting year for the RPG is about twenty-five years away from total apocalypse and a new dark age.

I feel that I've barely scratched the surface of Glorantha. I have certainly only skimmed its encyclopedia. Beyond this, there are many volumes of mythology, and about 1600 years of linear history, with the Dragon Pass area detailed almost down to the square mile. But, of course, it's the distant and bizarre areas of the map that capture my imagination: the Kingdom of War, the Jrusteli Isles, Doraster, Slon.

Picking Up Where We Left Off: The Blog So Far

There are three posts that I regard as marking out the trajectory of what I'm trying to do here.

In "Hell Upriver: Hite's Qelong," I tried to depict how an open-ended hexcrawl was structured for a certain narrative shape: a possibility structure that collapses, in play, to some version of Apocalypse Now. The goal was to take this web of unrealized narratives as an object of criticism. I don't know that I was successful, but the idea of this blog is essentially that you can look at all the choices that go into creating an adventure or RPG setting, connect them to a wider view of human culture, and then analyze them as you would any other cultural artifact, with no regard for whether it's "usable" or "playable."

In "Landscape Architecture for Gardens of Forking Paths," I took a pretentious run at expressing the blog's thesis. With tongue a bit in cheek, I observed that you can make a comparison between "fragmented" or inconclusive methods of postmodernism and the scenario design of roleplaying games, the latter of which can very intriguingly set up situations that could resolve in infinite ways. Jorge Luis Borges imagined reality as a "garden of forking paths"; reading RPG materials can be like looking down on such a garden from above.

In "Three Obstacles to Literary Realism in Roleplaying Games," I got at a thought that's stayed with me ever since, and developed further. In RPGs (and in interactive fiction), we don't see a ton of literary realism. But consequential choices are in fact a part of everyday life, and personally I think that there are some possibilities here: not necessarily as playable RPGs, but as larger "what-if" structures along the lines of, say, It's a Wonderful Life or Sliding Doors. I'm sure I'll be coming back to this, but basically I think you could experss the possibilities of a person's romantic life in the form of an RPG sourcebook, without expecting anyone to ever play it.

But before pulling on that literary thread, I want to turn to the first possibility structure I ever loved: the fantasy map. And while I'm contractually forbidden from analyzing a certain map of the Sword Coast and the Silver Marches, I have an even better map in mind. Next time: Glorantha.

Storm King's Thunder Series: CANCELLED

 It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you of the cancellation of this blog's critical analysis of the Storm King's Thunder campaign. After the first two entries in the series, which I considered quite successful, in early 2023, I turned to the proper beginning of the campaign, where the heroes are deposited in one of three cities, and must aid the city guards in driving off some sort of attack from one or another group of giants. Little did I know that I was embarking on one of the more harrowing episodes of my storied critical career.

At first, everything seemed normal. I was going to compare the three options for the starting cities. First, Bryn Shander, which is famous in the Sword Coast setting, and was featured in the one Forgotten Realms novel I ever read. Next, Goldenfields, a boring place full of boring NPCs where the aggressive Hill Giants are a welcome break from tedium. Finally, Triboar, a medieval version of the American Wild West, with little factions and intrigues, where one day the fire giants show up in force to, as it turns out, dig an artifact out of the ground in the middle of the town. Obviously, the last one is the only cool one, and I was working up a clever way to tell you so.

Unfortunately, that's when I noticed something strange in the Goldenfields section: a particular pattern in the description of the sprawling agribusiness monastery's crop placements. The oat, barley, and wheat placements put me in mind of some of Robert Browning's poems, and in chasing down the references I had to dig a bit in scholarship of the early Renaissance, at which point it became clear that the Bryn Shander section of the adventure was heavily indebted to Marsilio Ficino. And, of course, by now it was autumn, and I had before me a need to make a closer study of scrimshaw as practiced in Icewind Dale, which took me to Nantucket and Cape Cod for a season.

By summer of 2024, I had unified a typological reading of Moby Dick with the later chapters of Storm King's Thunder, particularly in comparing the great kraken with with the famous white whale. But I had to go even further. My manuscript was running at this point to the hundreds of pages, and prose no longer seemed appropriate to the gravity of the subject matter, which had at this point become, frankly, Neoplatonic. I worked into the middle of 2025 rewriting my work into an extended cycle of sonnets, sestinas, and common-meter hymns.

In late June, 2025, I began reaching out to small presses of quality about a print run. Imagine my surprise when my doorbell rang one morning and I found on my front porch a squadron of burly men in brown wool suits and bowler hats. They pressed past me into my house, over my vociferous objections, and ransacked the place until they'd gathered all of my notes and manuscripts. A tall man in a well-cut frock coat then entered my living room. He addressed me in a thick Scottish accent: "D'ye think you're clever, a-delving into such mysteries as these? 'Tis no fit matter for thy wee blog." He then presented me with an elegantly handwritten non-disclosure agreement, on vellum, which bound me to discontinue my research and speak not a word of the raid for a full calendar year. After certain unpleasant alternatives were discussed, I chose to sign. Under his terms, I am to write no more on the Storm King's Thunder campaign.

I shall return, humbled, to the subject of not playing role playing games this month.

February Miscellany

"Poetic Dungeon and Hex Keying" (Monsters and Manuals) considers a versification of dungeon descriptions. Your humble critic believes this would be a positive development, matching the text itself to the elaborate yet formalized "control panels" and layout design of many role-playing books. If all boxed text had to be written in heroic couplets, we might not have so much of it.

"E. Gary Gygax, Social Psychologist" (Roles, Rolls, and Rules) is an older post that is at least worth a skim. One might think that the "alignment system" of Dungeons and Dragons, which classifies characters on good-evil and law-chaos axes, makes for nice memes, but doesn't seem to cohere if applied in the real world. This post attempts to match the D&D alignment system with contemporary research in social psychology, while also explaining its awkwardness.

Notebook: Leiber's Sinister California

From Mount Waterman and steep Mount Wilson with its great observatory and hundred-inch reflector down through cavernous Tojunga Canyon with its many sinuous offshoots to the flat lands and then across the squat Verdugo Hills and the closer ones with Griffith Observatory and its lesser 'scopes, to sinister, almost inaccessible Potrero and great twisting Topanga Canyons that open with the abruptness of catastrophe upon the monstrous, primeval Pacific—all of them (the hills) with few exceptions sandy, cracked, and treacherous, the earth like rock and the rock like dried earth, rotten, crumbling, and porous.

- Fritz Leiber, "The Dweller in the Depths," collected in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

On a gray day in Rhode Island, it is not so difficult to feel that one has found the setting of a Lovecraft story: that the dark and patient forests have retaken many an ill-fated farm, and some force within them is planning the next advance, that a mouldering old mansion in Providence contains a forbidden library and a sorcerer's undecayed corpse. Your humble critic writes from the southern Appalachians, which can, from time to time, suggest grim secrets in the gnarled rhododendrons of some hidden holler.

But southern California is a sunny Eden, at times almost shadowless. A visitor might wonder how such a paradise could ever seem sinister. Filmmakers from Billy Wilder to David Lynch have managed it, as have Chandler, Didion, Steinbeck, Ellroy, and, perhaps most memorably, the exiled Brecht¹, but the focus is typically on the cities, farms, and general human overlay of California. What is interesting about Leiber's "The Dweller in the Depths" is that he finds a sinister quality in the geography, describing it as "outwardly wholesome and bright, inwardly sinister and eaten-way landscape, where Nature herself presents the naïve face of youth masking the corruptions of age." Indeed, the occasional visitor easily forgets the threat of earthquakes, wildfires, droughts, and mudslides.

Leiber is one of the nimblest stylists of twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction; his prose dances and capers around that of his many plodding contemporaries. And beyond his sinister California, there was a wide and mysterious America. We catch a glimpse of it in another brief passage:

As we ate by its dancing, crackling flames, he regaled me with brief impressions of his trip west—the cold, primeval pine woods of southern New Jersey with their somberly clad inhabitants speaking an almost Elizabethan English; the very narrow dark roads of West Virginia; the freezing waters of the Ohio flooding unruffled, silent, battleship gray, and ineffably menacing under lowering skies; the profound silence of Mammoth Cave; the southern Midwest with its Depression-spawned, but already legendary, bank robbers; the nervous Creole charms of New Orleans's restored French Quarter; the lonely, incredibly long stretches of road in Texas and Arizona that made one believe one was seeing infinity; the great, long, blue, mystery-freighted Pacific rollers ('so different from the Atlantic's choppier, shorter-spaced waves')…

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¹ Brecht's dyspeptic view of Los Angeles's gardens is impossible not to quote:

In Hell too
There are, I've no doubt, these luxuriant gardens
With flowers as big as trees, which of course wither
Unhesitantly if not nourished with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great heaps of fruit, albeit having
Neither smell nor taste.

Chesterton's Defense of Melodrama

G.K. Chesterton's first book of essays, The Defendant, contains a short piece entitled "A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls." "Penny dreadful" was the British name for a type of a serialized novel, sold a few chapters at a time in penny-priced issues, and usually dealing with violent, lurid, or horrific subject matter. These stories were controversial among the English upper classes; it was thought that the penny dreadful inspired working-class boys to lives of crime.

Chesterton's defense of penny dreadfuls is occasionally quoted as a defense of "genre fiction" or "adventure stories" in general. In truth, this is a part of the argument, put quite memorably:

People must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. [...] Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

[...]

The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.

The larger part of Chesterton's argument, though, is a denunciation of class prejudice, albeit in terms that discomfit the democratically-spirited American reader by assuming the gap between the educated and working class, then specifically addressing the educated class as a member of that class:

There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture.

Chesterton assumes that his audience needs no defense of the more literary adventure stories by, say, Walter Scott, or Robert Louis Stevenson. It is noted that Scott and Stevenson have chosen scoundrels for protagonists, without inflicting noticeable moral degradation on their sophisticated audiences. If the non-literary writers fail to provide subtle commentary on human character and motivation, they nevertheless offer archetypical heroes who need no such subtlety:

While the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.

Decades later, at the very end of his career, Chesterton returned to the subject in "Fiction as Food," collected in The Spice of Life. More specifically he returned to his maxim that "literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." Having forgotten that he wrote the line in the context of class prejudice and penny dreadfuls, he provided the general argument that fiction, of whatever literary quality, meets basic needs of the human spirit:

Human beings cannot be human without some field of fancy or imagination; some vague idea of the romance of life; and even some holiday of the mind in a romance that is a refuge from life.

What your humble critic calls "genre fiction," Chesterton calls "sensational fiction," and one must admit that Chesterton has the more accurate label. Literary realism is, after all, its own genre. Fantastical stories, or science fiction stories, more often than not appeal to some effect of romance, horror, or sublimity, rather than refined artistic considerations of the particulars of human nature. Chesterton raises the standard of the sensation:

My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world. [...] A novel without any death in it is still to me a novel without any life in it. [...] On the whole I think that a tale about one man killing another man is more likely to have something in it than a tale in which, all the characters are talking trivialities without any of that instant and silent presence of death which is one of the strong spiritual bonds of all mankind. I still prefer the novel in which one person does another person to death to the novel in which all the persons are feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life.

[...] 

I believe that sensational novels are the most moral part of modern fiction, and I believe it upon two converging lines, such as make all real conviction. It is, I think, the fact that melodramatic fiction is moral and not immoral. And it is, I think, the abstract truth that any literature that represents our life as dangerous and startling is truer than any literature that represents it as dubious and languid.

Chesterton's defense of sensational literature easily applies to much classic American pulp fiction, but one must wonder how what it makes of the cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. Lovecraft portrays human culture and morality as a pragmatic necessity but an objective falsehood: we can only be happy while we remain ignorant of the universe's amoral indifference to us and all that we hold dear. Howard, on the other hand, uses Conan and his other muscle-bound warriors to moralize the fall of Rome, condemning the decadence of all civilization, glorifying instead vitality and physical domination.

d12 Explanations for the Devil-worshipper's Unexpected Religious Pluralism

The "random table" has been an emerging poetic form since Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Good contemporary random table poems may be found in Sholtis's The Dungeon Dozen. See, for example, Sholtis's "Monumental Sculpture in the Underworld."

In that spirit, and with reference to the latest installment of the Storm King's Thunder review, your humble critic offers his own random table.

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d12 Explanations for the Devil-worshipper's Unexpected Religious Pluralism

1. Invincible ignorance regarding Asmodeus's true aims: argues that Asmodeus is protecting everyone from the other devils.

2. Required by now-regretted pact to worship devil, but is constantly exploiting technicalities to keep other people from similar pacts.

3. Just an edgy poser.

4. "Worship" mostly consists in getting bankrupted by clever but fraudulent direct-mail scheme.

5. Believes that kindness is the truest tyranny of all.

6. Biding time for a heel turn that everyone else sees coming.

7. Actually wants to impose her beliefs, but cannot because of extreme shyness.

8. Has an intuitive understanding of the civil-religious obligations of this liberal fantasy world's social contract vis-a-vis cultural particularism.

9. Really has more of an aesthetic appreciation for the accumulated achievements of centuries of Asmodeus-worship.

10. Gaming the system: fewer Asmodeus worshippers here means less competition in Hell.

11. Experiences uncontrollable fire-sneezes on days when hell-devotionals are neglected.

12. The Asmodeus cult is the only way to get a date in this podunk town.