Firsts

My birthday's today and that's got me in a nostalgic mood. Related to the matter of this blog, it's got me thinking about how I developed the various hobbies and interests I have now. Some of the pivotal incidents have been forgotten in the years since, but here's a selection of what I do remember:

Gaming: In my very first post I discussed how I got into gaming in the early eighties. I don't remember exactly when I played that first game, but I do remember the character I used. In fact, I've still got the character sheet. It's worn enough to look like it might be a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the like, and its now in a plastic sleeve to preserve it for posterity. The homemade, blue-ink pin, imitation of an official AD&D character record gives his name as "Grimlin" and relates that he's a 13th level elven fighter. His equipment list is extensive and written in precise, cursive script that I don't think I could replicate today. Among the notable items: Medusa's head, a "magic hawk", a "mirror of souls", a "lazer [sic] gun", and a "ring of ion shield." My memory doesn't extend to what sort of adventures my cousin Tim, my first dungeonmaster, led us on to acquire those items, but the list itself tells me they must have been epic.

The first rpg I played, besides assorted editions of D&D, was the second edition of Gamma World. Again, my cousin was the gamemaster. Probably because I was a little older then, I remember not only my character (a mutated humanoid with four arms named Ace Beta) but my brother's (a mutated armadillo named Norg), too.

Fantasy Fiction: I don't remember the first fantasy novel I read, but I can narrow the list. It could have been The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or the first volume of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, The Book of Three. I'm sure the first Sword & Sorcery I read was Conan, but I can't remember whether I first borrowed Conan the Barbarian or Conan of Cimmeria (the Ace reprints of the Lancer paperbacks) from Tim. Fafhrd and Gray Mouser came close on Conan's heels. I'm certain I first read the Ace edition of Swords and Deviltry--again borrowed from my cousin. Clark Ashton Smith entered the picture when I discovered the the Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition of Zothique in a used bookstore in Albany, Georgia.

That find--and other Lin Carter edited Ballantine adult fantasy series titles (like James Branch Cabell's The Silver Stallion)--led me to develop a serious used bookstore habit that went on for years, and to some extent, continues--though the pickings have gotten leaner in actual bookstores with the rise of ebay, so it's seldom worth the effort. Still, in 1999, it was well worth it, and I was making a lot of interesting discoveries while travelling around on my residency interviewing tour. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I found a Powell first edition of Karl Edward Wagner's Darkness Weaves, and a Warner edition of Bloodstone in a bookstore near the UNC campus. This was an interesting coincidence, because Wagner had attended UNC. It gets even weirder because I was going to be interviewing there for a psychiatry residency position, and would wind up touring a hospital where Wagner had worked as a psychiatrist.

Fantasy Comic: There's no way I remember the first comic book I ever read, but I do know the oldest fantasy comic that I bought off a spinner-rack. That would be Warlord #73.  I'm sure I had read other fantasy comics, or at least perused them at the grocery store, but that was the first one that persuaded me to buy it.

So that's a sampling--and probably enough nostalgia for one birthday.  I've yet to stop finding new authors, books, or games to discover--or old ones new to me.  Enough for another thirty-seven years, and more. 

Fantasy Pharmakon

"Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into locked a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."

- Raoul Duke, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

A couple of years ago, I was following a messageboard thread discussing drugs--intoxicants--in the context of fantasy gaming. It was prompted by White Wolf's Exalted and the modern drugs like heroin and cocaine, apearing therein. One of the writer's involved with defended their choice to use those very modern drugs with those very modern names by saying that "made up" names for things were essentially lame/uncool, and that if a substance was familiar to player's under a certain name, that name ought to be used.

I disagreed in two ways. One, I think using too many words with modern connotations and origins can break the "mood" of fantasy. Such things are "amundisms," as Lin Carter would have it in his seminal exploration on world-building, Imaginary Worlds (1973). Secondly, and most importantly, why should a world like Exalted's Creation, where fantastic creatures like the Beasts of Resplendent Liquids exist--which eat raw materials and excrete drugs--be saddled with the same old, boring drugs found in the real world? Surely, that's a failure of imagination.

Thankfully, many writers of fantastic fiction have not been so limited. Here are several examples of fantastic intoxicants which should serve to inspire interesting new substances for role-playing game characters to use (or misuse):

Black Lotus
In most of Howard's Conan stories, black lotus is a poison (though in "Hour of the Dragon" it's noted that its pollen causes "death-like sleep and monstrous dreams"), but the ancestors of the thoroughly stoned citizens of Xuthal have cultivated it until "instead of death, its juice induces dreams, gorgeous and fantastic." The effects appear to be similar to more mundane narcotics in terms of the heavy sleep and euphoria it induces with the added effect of generating vivid, pleasurable dreams. Find it in: "Xuthal of the Dusk" in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian.

Dreamshit
A mysterious, and powerful, new psychedelic drug on the streets of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Dreamshit takes the form of brown, sticky pellets about the size of an olive that smell like burnt sugar. Eventually, it's discovered that dreamshit is the "milk" of the deadly, mind-devouring, slake-moths. Find it in: Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.

Fledge
In Tim Lebbon's Noreela, fledge is a commonly used (and abused) substance. Mined from deep underground the yellowish substance is put to many beneficial uses by the race of fledge miners for whom it provides sustenance, healing, and the ability to project their minds outside of their bodies. The fledge miners experience no ill-effects from their use, but do have withdrawal if they go without it. Taken to the surface, though, fledge degrades in quality--its mental-projection effects greatly diminish--and becomes highly addictive. Not that fledge mining is totally without dangers. There are rare, but powerful demons (the Nax) sometimes found near fledge veins. Lebbon also gives us another drug--rhellim--which enhances sexual stimulation, and comes from the livers of furbats. Find them in: Dusk, and Dawn by Tim Lebbon.

The Plutonian Drug
The Plutonian Drug appears in the Clark Ashton Smith story of the same name. Also called "plutonium"--though certainly not to be confused with the radioactive element of the same name--it's found on Pluto by the Cornell Brothers' 1990 expedition (I remember watching the intrepid explorers' return on live TV in 1994, don't you?). Its native form is crystalline, but it turns to a powder when exposed to earthly atmosphere. Ingestion of the drug causes the user to be able to perceive their own timeline for a relatively recent period as if it were a spatial dimension, allowing them to see a short distance into the future. Several other extraterrestrial drugs are mentioned in the same story. Find them in: "The Plutonian Drug."

Shanga
Appearing in a couple of stories by Leigh Brackett, shanga certainly brings out the beast in its users.  It isn't actually a drug, but a radiation produced by projector devices, the construction of which is a lost art. Users experience temporary atavism, allowing one to (as the quote goes) make oneself into a beast to get rid of the pain of being a man. The ancient projectors used a prism of an alien crystal rather than quartz, like the projectors found in the seeder parts of Martian trade-cities at the time of the stories. The crystals, the so-called Jewels of Shanga, produce a more potent effect leading to physical de-evolution, with longer exposure causing transformation to ever more remote evolutionary ancestral forms. Find it in: "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" (The Secret of Sinharat), and "The Beast-Jewel of Mars."

There you go. Five substances for hours of simulated enjoyment. Turn on, tune in, play on.

Forgotten Heroes of Swords & Sorcery

Getting into old school Sword & Sorcery today is easy. What with Paizo's Planet Stories, Del Rey's Robert E. Howard series, Night Shade Books' Clark Ashton Smith Collected Fantasies library, and other assort small press publishers, its easier to come by many of the classics of the Sword & Sorcery genre than it has been since the end of the seventies.

Still, a great many interesting stories and characters languish in Out-of-Print Limbo. Here are a few of the characters I've encountered over the years that ought to have collections in print, but tragically, do not, or are just less known than they deserve:

Ryre: Ramsey Campbell's swordsman stars in four stories appearing in four volumes of Andrew J. Offutt's Swords Against Darkness anthology series. The Ryre stories are somewhat spare by the standards of oft-florid pulp prose, but this leanness lends them a unique atmosphere that reminds me (for some reason) of some seventies cinema. As befitting stories from a horror writer, there are outré monsters in most of the Ryre yarns, yet they're different from the usual Howardian-inspired monstrosities of Sword and Sorcery--and Campbell's understated style just adds to their strangeness. Probably my favorite of these tales is "The Sustenance of Hoak" from the first Swords Against Darkness volume (1977) which features a village under an unusual (and horrific) curse. The Ryre stories appeared in a collection in 1996, but not since.


Kardios of Atlantis: Kardios isn't my favorite Manly Wade Wellman character (that would be John the Balladeer) but he is a Sword & Sorcery character, and he was left out of Night Shade Books' five volume Wellman short story series. Kardios is a minstrel, and sole survivor of Atlantis--who sank his homeland with a kiss. There are at least four Kardios stories appearing in the Swords Against Darkness anthologies. Possibly there are more elsewhere. Wellman infuses Kardios with gentle humor and aplomb in face of danger, adding up to a personality atypical for Sword & Sorcery protagonists.

Simon of Gitta: Richard Tierney's Sword & Sorcery version of Simon Magus of New Testament fame. The Simon stories combine sword and sandal action with speculative Lovecraftiana, and historical fantasy. Chaosium released a collection of the Simon Magus stories, The Scroll of Thoth in 1997, which is now out of print. There are also a couple of novels featuring Simon, but only Drums of Chaos, a crossover novel with Tierney's Lovecraftian SF character, John Taggart--and special guest appearance by Jesus--is still in print.


Prince Raynor: Henry Kuttner's prince of doomed Sardopolis, greatest city of the lost civilization of the Gobi. There were only two Prince Raynor stories--"Cursed be the City," and "Citadel of Darkness"--but their well worth your time. Kuttner gives these stories a slightly darker tone than most Sword & Sorcery of their day. In this way, as Karl Edward Wagner points out in Echoes of Valor III, Prince Raynor seems to prefigure Elric. His civilization in the Gobi may be lost, but Prince Raynor is actually in print currently, appearing in Paizo's Elak of Atlantis collection.