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.

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')…

~~~~~

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.

Appendix N at Project Gutenberg

Gary Gygax's Dungeon Masters Guide included the famous "Appendix N," a list of fantasy and science-fiction writers and books that inspired the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The list was and remains an excellent starting point for exploring the golden age of fantasy literature. Some of the material in the appendix has escaped copyright and may be found in the cultural treasure trove that is Project Gutenberg. Since Project Gutenberg is excellent at maintaining stable links, it is worth the effort to gather links to various Appendix N resources on the site.

Major Works Available

The authors whose works are best represented on Project Gutenberg are the earliest ones, and much of their work has passed into the public domain.

• Edgar Rice Burroughs: although his later writings are still under copyright, the beginnings of three of his most famous series are free.
• The Barsoom/Mars series begins with A Princess of Mars.
• The Pellucidar series begins with At the Earth's Core.
• The Venus series is not yet in the public domain.
• Gygax does not mention Burroughs's most famous character of all, but the Tarzan series begins with Tarzan of the Apes.
• Lord Dunsany's early works are here as well, including The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) and The Book of Wonder (1912).
• The majority of the Conan stories from Robert E. Howard are missing, but the novel and the last story are there: Hour of the Dragon and "Red Nails." We also find the eerie and unusual "Gods of the North" (published elsewhere as "The Frost-Giant's Daughter"). Sadly, the site is missing the essential and energetic early tale, "The Tower of the Elephant."
• A few of H.P. Lovecraft's major stories are available, but his complete works are freely available elsewhere on the internet. If, however, the seeker of major works is only looking for "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Colour out of Space," Project Gutenberg provides them.
• Two novels by A. Merritt may be found: The Moon Pool, which is explicitly recommended in Appendix N, and its sequel The Metal Monster, which is not.
• There are a few works by Fletcher Pratt, including the Gygax-recommended novel The Blue Star.
• Clark Ashton Smith is missing from Appendix N, but he so obviously belongs there that I am including him here. Project Gutenberg does not have his stories, but it does have two volumes of his poetry: Ebony and Crystal, and The Star-Treader. Smith's poems are full of pulp-fiction imagery, but take an elegiac tone: fantastical fever-dreams recollected in tranquility.
• Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" is on Project Gutenberg. It is not a long story, but it marks a transition away from the planetary fantasy of Edgar Rice Burroughs and towards something that feels more like contemporary hard science fiction. The follow-up Mars story, "Valley of Dreams," is available, as are the three mad scientist stories that begin with "The Worlds of If."

Minor Works Available

Other authors from the Appendix N list do not have any major works on Project Gutenberg, but do have short stories, usually from classic genre magazines such as Galaxy, Weird Tales, or Planet Stories.

• Poul Anderson, Philip José Farmer, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton are all represented by early stories from science fiction magazines, but not by any of the fantasy stories that are listed in Appendix N, nor by their later longer novels.
• The Leigh Brackett stories at Project Gutenberg seem to all be from Planet Stories, and presumably count as "sword and planet" stories in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
• Margaret St. Clair's page has a mix of planet stories and science fiction.
• None of Manly Wade Wellman's classic Silver John tales are on Project Gutenberg, nor are his John Thunstone books. However, there is a Weird Tales horror story called "The Golgatha Dancers" that gives the reader a good introduction to Wellman's pulp style.

There is very little material at all for August Derleth, Gardner Fox, Sterling Lanier, Andrew Offutt, Jack Vance, or Jack Williamson.

Finally, there are no stories from J.R.R. Tolkien, but his Vocabulary of Middle English is freely available, and could be handy in certain rather unlikely situations.

Entirely Absent

Some of the Appendix N writers have no work at all on project Gutenberg: 

• John Bellairs
• Frederic Brown
• Lin Carter
• L. Sprague de Camp
• Michael Moorcock
• Fred Saberhagen
• Roger Zelazny

Postscript

The Monsters and Manuals blog, by a writer called "Noisms," has its own "Project Gutenberg Appendix N," but the idea of that post is to list the writer's favorite public domain fantastical works, rather than to chase down Gygax's favorites. Noisms's list includes Coleridge, Voltaire, and George MacDonald.

A comment on that post recommends a role-playing game, the entire premise of which is to role-play in the future as envisioned by Victorians such as Rudyard Kipling or Arthur Conan Doyle. The game is called Forgotten Futures, and its website is a marvel of digital endurance. The game is so old that it was initially distributed as "shareware," and it is still maintained and freely available.

Finally, Goodman Games is a gathering place for Appendix N obsessives, and its "Adventures in Fiction" section is full of further information on all of the authors listed above.

~~~~~

QUESTIONS FOR COMMENTERS:

• Of the Project Gutenberg short stories by Appendix N authors, are there any that should have been highlighted in this post but were not?
• Are there other authors with work in the public domain that would fit well on this list?