Lately, I've been furthering my exploration of L. Sprague de Camp's fantasy work, with the Novarian stories, but I've also dipped into some of his earlier Pusadian series. It has sort of a similar relationship to the Howard's Hyborian Age stories that de Camp's Krishna novels have to Burroughsian Sword & Planet. That is, it's an attempt to do the same thing more "realistically" or at least in a concerted and methodological sort of way. For instance, de Camp uses current (to the 1950s) understanding of geologic change to inform his design of his landforms, and more rigorously derives his imagined countries and their names from Greek myth (mostly).
Whether any of that is necessary, every reader will have to decide for themselves, but I appreciate the thought behind it, at least. As I've said before, I find de Camp a very Gygaxian writer, though this is perhaps less true of the Pusadian series than the Novarian one. Still, the humor, and the pragmatic, if not venal characters are there. I also appreciate the less "standard fantasy" sort of setting. It's mostly a Bronze Age level of technology, with iron being the bane of magic.
I discovered that a number of the older Pusadian stories published in the pulps are available on the Internet Archive:
"The Eye of Tandyla" (1951)
"The Owl and the Ape" (1951)
"The Stronger Spell" (1953)
"The Hungry Hercynian" (1953)
"Ka the Appalling" (1958)
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