Enter the Lost World

"In the savage world of Skartaris, life is a constant struggle for survival. Here, beneath an unblinking orb of eternal sunlight, one simple law prevails: If you let down your guard for an instant you will soon be very dead."

So begins just about every issue of the longest running sword-and-sorcery saga in comic book history not based on a Robert E. Howard creation. It’s the story of Lieutenant-Colonel Travis Morgan, USAF, who is forced to ditch his SR-71 blackbird in the arctic circle, but instead winds up in a tropical jungle under an eternal sun, and is soon saving a sword-wielding, fur-wearing, princess with supermodel looks from a velociraptor.

Then things get really weird.

Over the course of the thirteen-plus years, 133 issues and 6 annuals, original run, Travis Morgan wandered through the dream-logic geography of a collective pulp unconscious world—a mash-up of prehistoric adventure, sword and sorcery, comic book sci-fi, and Bullfinch’s mythology, seasoned with a little Tolkienian epic. Damsels were saved a-plenty, monsters were slain, spells were cast, and swashes were definitely buckled. And since June 2009, Mike Grell, The Warlord's creator, has been the guiding hand for more of the same in a new series.

For the uninitiated, I'll summarize the basic set-up. The aforementioned Travis Morgan winds up in Skartaris, a world inside the hollow earth, bearing a strong resemblance to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar. Like most Burroughs protagonists, Morgan wins himself a princess and a kingdom. The main difference between The Warlord and most of Burroughs ouevre is the existence of magic. At first, this is teased as perhaps only the misunderstood, remnant advanced technology from a lost Atlantean civilization, but eventually true sorcery rears its head. This element, and the structure of most of the stories, lends a more sword and sorcery feel to the proceedings, than Burroughsian pastiche.

The Warlord was one of my favorite comics as a kid. It also provided a lot of inspiration for gaming in my early dungeon-mastering years. Well before Aaron Allston's campaign setting for D&D's Mystara line, my players were venturing into a hollow world. Like Skartaris, a couple of my campaign worlds have had a wandering moon whose movements weren't predictable. I also borrowed the cursed hellfire sword (first appearing in issue #34)--which had to draw blood every time it was drawn, even if it be the wielder's--and inflicted it on one of my players.

Skartaris was, and is, what would be called, in gaming parlance, a "kitchen sink" world. It's full of creatures from classical and medieval mythology, remnant super-science from Atlantis, aliens, sorcery, barbarians, lost tech from our world, time-travel, malfunctioning AIs, and of course, dinosaurs. In true "show don't tell" visual storytelling fashion this "anything goes" philosophy is driven home by great images: a tyrannosaur snatching up a unicorn in its jaws; a group of primitive cultists sacrificing a woman on an altar that's actually a crashed SR-71 jet.

One of the most interesting things to me about all this, and one of the things I find inspirational when considering rpg setting creation, is that Grell provides a rationale for these disparate elements existing together. In the distant past, we're told, Skartaris was Wizard World, a high fantasyish Tolkien-lite kind of world of elves, dwarves, wizards, and the like. After a time, for reasons never fully explained as I recall, this civilization waned. In the millennia that followed, openings to the outer earth allowed prehistoric animals to enter and avoid the extinct that claimed their fellows. Sometime later, an Atlantean fleet fleeing the destruction of their homeland arrived in Skartaris and built a technologically advanced civilization, only to have it end in nuclear war. Civilization slowly climbed back to the pseudo-Medieval level of the Warlord's time.

Ok, so I didn't say it was an airtight rationale, but its plenty good enough for gaming.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think this sort of "kitchen sink" fantasy might be exactly what I want to do with my next campaign. Maybe.

Of course, I'll still need to find a way to throw some Planet of the Apes/Kamandi elements in there, but I'm sure "the kitchen" sink is big enough.

Post-Game Report: What Lurks Below

Last Sunday, we continued our Warriors & Warlock campaign, using a somewhat re-imagined version of Paizo's Shadow in the Sky in the Second Darkness adventure path.  The characters were, as before: Zarac the fighter, Renin the psionicist, and Gannon, the thief-monk.

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they had just finished a pitch battle with a group of thieves and thugs hired to ambush them, by their (previously) trusted employer, Saltus, at the Grinning Goblin Gambling House. When their employer slipped into some secret tunnels, the players encountered their first dilemma of the evening--whether to loot the gambling house or give chase.

They did a little of both, allowing Saltus to make good his escape into a cave system ("smuggler's tunnels") beneath the gambling house. After delivering the coup de grace to a psionically stunned boar (the pet of Saltus' right-hand lackey), they quickly determined that none of them were particularly skilled at lock-picking, and so it fell to the psionicist to crush the locked trapdoor with his mental powers.

By then, their desire to get revenge on Saltus was beginning to pick up. It allowed them to avoid arousing Zarac's usually ever-present avarice, which would no doubt have led them to a submerged pirate treasure--but all a vengeful wight. Instead, they chose a different branch and wound up activating magical stalactites which served as a sort of cave security system for a den of troglodytes. These guys had their gambling interrupted:

So throwing down their "simple but inane" (according to the module) game, they came running for the party. The dice were fickle for the trogs. They kept getting natural "twenties" and equally natural "ones"--making them alternate between shrugging off the PCs best blows, and crumpling like paper. One troglodyte went down before they're even in melee range, felled by Renin's mind-bullets.

The other three didn't fall so easy. Zarac (already injured from the battle above ground) and Renin took wounds before they dispatched their foes. Each of the player's put down one trog, and Zarac delivered a killing stroke to the one previously blasted into unconsciousness by Renin.

So far so good--except the sounds of battle had alerted the other trogs, and the remaining adult males of the den came running. The PCs quickly assessed the odds, and made a strategic retreat. They climbed back up to the basement of the gambling hall, then removed the ladders, so the troglodytes couldn't follow.  They had by then recognized the odd smell they had noted in the basement earlier as a lingering sign of troglodyte presence, and weren't eager to have such visitations repeated.

They assumed that Saltus must have escaped. Again they returned to searching the various rooms of gambling house for valuables, or something that might explain his betrayal.

They'd forgotten something.

They forgot the elven ranger that lent them a hand last adventure, and the warning he gave of a renegade elf, apparently working with Saltus, at some unknown purpose. They forgot, and gave their hidden adversary, warned by her troglodyte minions, time to escape.

While they broke into the gambling hall's strangely sparsely funded vault, the weird shadow in the sky that had previously been of much interest, disappeared. While they sat at a bar, trying to figure out how to sell the business they now found themselves in possession of--and who to sell it to--a falling star streaked across the night sky. It slammed into a small island just beyond the harbor, leading to a earthquake and a tsunami.

These natural disasters had been foreshadowed by the dream that had brought Renin to Raedelsport. A dream the PCs had spent parts of several sessions trying to find someone to interpret. The looks on the players' faces when realization dawned was priceless.

The session ended with the characters looking out over the chaos in the city from the second floor of the Grinning Goblin, wondering just what might happen next.

Something I found interesting about the module was that it had a timeline of events that played out on their on. The players were able to interact with them, but they didn't require the PCs to be railroaded into doing so--were free to pursue their own agenda, and often did. While definitely a scenario with a plot (at least in the background), rather than a sandbox, I found it to have a lighter touch than other "story-centric" modules I've played in the past.

The conversion to Warriors & Warlocks has taken some extra work. Luckily, a large numbers of D&D monsters have been statted in Mutants & Masterminds terms on The Atomic Think Tank Message Boards. The three week breaks between sessions should have helped--and I suppose they did, in terms of providing more time to procrastinate.

The long between game intervals probably also led to player's forgetting some important details. From my perspective, this didn't impair the adventure in anyway, though the players felt the lack at times. Since they were relying on notes anyway, that just means they need to take better ones.

Overall, I think a good time was had by all.

In about a month, we undertake Chapter 2: Children of the Void.

Intellects Vast and Cool and Unsymapthetic: Mind-Flayer Speculations

The Illithid came for Rellan today.

They stood in the entrance of the holding cell like wet, bruise-purple statues draped in funerary black. They were motionless save for the subtle, vermiform writhing of their tentacles, and the pulsing of the thick veins wreathing their bulbous skulls.

They had been taking us one by one from the holding cell, for whatever obscure need they had. I say need--though the very concept seems incongruous with the cold dispassion which characterized their actions. Their intelligence was apparent in their black eyes, but inhuman in its workings, and far beyond ours, and so unknowable.

The psychic buzzing that always accompanied their presence seemed to paralyze us at their will. Faintly, sometimes in these visits I thought I could hear their telepathic voices, like distant whispers, as they discussed among themselves which of us to select. These psychic vibrations I perceived as pitched something like the voices of old women, but alien in their lack of inflection or emotion.

Today, the deliberations were quick. The buzzing rose in volume, and Rellan was seized by the emanations of their mind and walked stiffly into the presence of our captors, face contorted with the agony of his futile resistance. In a moment, they were gone, and we were free from the effects of their overbearing psychic presence.

As with the others taken before, we never saw Rellan again.

- From a journal found in a cleared room in the Labyrinth of Ulthraun, delivered to Tuvo brek Amblesh, Magister of the Library of Tharkad-Keln.

Everybody likes Mind Flayers. They're one of the classic monsters of D&D, and have entered the culture of fantasy gaming, appearing in sometimes slightly camouflaged form (and sometimes not) in other tabletop rpgs and computer games.

One of the most appealing things about the Mind Flayers is their inherent alien and mysterious nature. Multiple origins have been given for them in various D&D products over the years and editions. These different origins are often irreconcilable, at least in part.

I see that as a design feature rather than a bug. Mysterious and compelling adversaries deserve equally murky and evocative origins.

In that spirit, here are four possible origins for the Mind Flayers. They're in no way completely "original" and that's purposeful.  They draw from a host of pulp, weird, and science fiction sources, as well as referencing, in some ways, origins offered in official source material. They also utilize modern terminology to help evoke a pseudo-scientific air, but also to help the modern reader come at these classic creatures in a new way.  They're are not necessarily intended to be used verbatim "in game." On the other hand, a dying astronaut whispering his last words, or an ancient, half-malfunctioning video screen relaying one of these origins would be just the sort of genre-bashing that classic D&D was built from...

• The Mind Flayers are abhuman mutants from a far future, dying earth. Endeavoring to save their civilization from extinction, they have been using all their failing super-science to cast as many of their dwindling number as they can back through the eons. In the current era, they are interested in humans as food--and as subjects for experimentation.  They hope to force-evolve mankind into their species, and restore a breeding population of their once mighty race.

• The Illithids are vampiric thoughtforms from a higher plane. If they can be glimpsed in their "true" form by magical or psionic means, they resemble translucent, glowing jellyfish. They descended into material forms out of hunger and curiosity millennia ago, drawn like moths to a flame by the psychic energy of nascent sentient life.

• The Mind Flayers hail from a planet destroyed by the gods themselves--either as punishment for their impious presumption, or out of fear of their developing power. Some illithid escaped the death of their world, and hide in subterranean enclaves, bidding their time, and planning their vengeance.

• The Illithid are but the drones or puppets of ancient aquatic, elder brains. Either these coral-like beings evolved here, or perhaps arrived from some alien world. Whatever their origins, they construct larva which infect intelligent hosts and transform them biologically into illithid, subsuming them in a group mind. The ultimate goals of these elder brains are unknown.

Maybe these aren't mutually exclusive. Or maybe they contain a kernel of truth, but aren't literally true. Mix and match, and use 'em as you like. The goal is to keep the Mind Flayers scary and interesting--and strange.

And Now....A Wolf-Man On A Motorcycle

More specifically, it’s a criminal lycanthrope--member of a rather unusual gang in circa 1913 Los Angeles--astride a 1911 Indian Motorcycle.

I offer this in lieu of the digression I was planning on my preparation for this weekend’s impending game session. I’ll save that for a post-game report.

The art is by the very talented Diego Candia.  It's a panel from a digital comic I wrote and created which hopefully will be appearing as a download for a new application for a very popular device. I say "hopefully," as all the details aren’t ironed out, as yet. Anyway, the story is called Hell-Bent: Infamous Monsters, and features freelance troubleshooter Sam McCord, and his “floating gang” of specialists, versus the aforementioned criminal enterprise.

Though this is the first Hell-Bent story completed, it wasn’t the first conceived. In trying to come up with a second entry for Zuda Comics (and maybe influenced by the research I’d done in making up my character for a sort of magic realism Boot Hill game I was playing in), I conceived a horror/action/Western story, set in Mexico during the Revolution of 1913. Sort of The Wild Bunch or The Professionals meets Army of Darkness, maybe.  That story still languishes, after a couple of artists, and a number of other set-backs.

But the eight pages of Infamous Monsters--which I wrote almost a year ago--have been penciled, inked, and colored, and are being lettered as I write this.  And that’s pretty cool.

Sword & Sorcery Heroes in the Bronze Age [Part 2]

This is the second part of an article originally written for my friend Jim's Flashback Universe Blog. It's part of a series called Bronze Age Spotlight.  This particular piece examines the S&S characters adapted to comics in the so-called Bronze Age, this time, those from DC Comics, in the main.

In regard to Part 1, I'm indebted to Marty Halpern of More Red Ink who pointed out an error: Effinger's When Gravity Fails was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula, but unfortunately won neither.  The post was corrected accordingly, and in doing so I caught a few typos and cut-paste malfunctions which have also been corrected.  Dammit Jim,  I'm a Doctor not a word processor!

Hopefully, I'll be closer to error-free today...


DC's Sword & Sorcery: “TWO SOUGHT ADVENTURE”

“At least we have something in common!—we’re all three crooks!”

- Catwoman (to Fafhrd and Gray Mouser) Wonder Woman #202 (1972)

Perhaps it was because DC didn’t have the works of Robert E. Howard to fall back on, or maybe it was a reluctance to delve into this sort of material, but for whatever reason, they didn’t adapt as many literary sword and sorcery characters as Marvel.

When they did, at least they got two for the price of one—Fritz Leiber’s sword and sorcery duo, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser.

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser’s prose debut was in Unknown in “the Year of the Behemoth, the Month of the Hedgehog, the Day of the Toad”—well, in story, at least. In our world we may reckon that as August 1939. Leiber chronicled the twain’s adventures off and on from that story until 1988’s “The Mouser Goes Below”—a longer span than the entire life of Robert E. Howard. Fafhrd was a Northern barbarian from Cold Corner, and Gray Mouser was a thief and one-time sorcerer’s apprentice from the urban South. They met in decadent Lankhmar, “City of the Seven Score Thousand Smokes,” and became lifelong friends and companions in (mis)adventure.

When Fafhrd and Gray Mouser came to comics, they did so in an unlikely place. They first appeared on the last panel of Wonder Woman #201, during her powerless, kung-fu-fighting, Diana Prince era. Issue 202 has them teaming up with Wonder Woman, her sifu I-Ching, and Catwoman, to thwart a wizard and save Jonny Double who’s trapped inside a mystic gem. In the words of Bart Simpson: “You can’t make this stuff up!”

The issue was written by New Wave science fiction luminary, Samuel Delany. Highlights include Fafhrd backhanding Diana, and Mouser and Catwoman having a totem-appropriate face-off, before they all decide to join forces. This all serves as a “backdoor pilot” for the twain’s run in the bimonthly Sword of Sorcery series premiering in 1973. It only ran for five issues, but featured original stories and adaptations, most scripted by Denny O’Neil (except for one by George Alec Effinger), and featuring art by Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson, and Jim Starlin.

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser vanished from DC at the cancellation of Sword of Sorcery. The two were next sighted at a different company in a 1991 Epic limited series which reunited them with Howard Chaykin, who scripted adaptations of Leiber’s tales. All issues featured evocative art by Mike Mignola.

“Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

- Conan “Queen of the Black Coast” Robert E. Howard

Sword and Sorcery comics did good business in the Bronze Age, both with licensed characters, and original creations like Arak, Dagar, Wulf, Claw, Ironjaw, and the Warlord. It was a true Golden Age for comic book sword-swinging!

Today, Robert E. Howard properties are still appearing in comics, mostly from Dark Horse.  So far they've given us two successive Conan series and various limited series, a Kull series, and a Solomon Kane limited series. Image has given us a line inspired by some of Frank Frazetta’s great sword and sorcery-themed paintings. Marvel and DC, on the other hand, have concentrated on the mainstream superheroes that are their bread and butter; most of their sword and sorcery creations stalk only the back issue bins.  True, we have gotten a Showcase Presents: Warlord, but that's about it.

These things go in cycles, surely. Maybe one of these days will see Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, Charles Saunders' Imaro, or perhaps the outré exploits of Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean, realized on the comics page.

Sword & Sorcery Heroes in the Bronze Age [Part 1]

This is an article originally written for my friend Jim's Flashback Universe Blog.  It's part of a series called Bronze Age Spotlight.  This particular piece examines the S&S characters adapted to comics in the so-called Bronze Age.  I thought it was relevant here and worth repeating...

"Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars…Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."
- The Nemedian Chronicles (Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix in the Sword”)


In 1970, Conan came to Marvel comics, and by some reckoning, brought the whole of the Bronze Age with him. In the years that followed, other swordsman and thieves and various treaders of bejeweled thrones, would follow on Conan’s sandaled heels. They would be visitors from another time—another world—in more ways than one. The four-color world of superheroes would collide with the realm of Sword & Sorcery, a literary sub-genre born in what Lin Carter called “the sleazy, gaudy, glorious golden age of the pulps.”

So come with us now, back to the Bronze Age, where--in the Roy Thomas penned words of Conan the Barbarian #1—“A man's life is worth no more than the strength of his sword-arm!”


Marvel's Swords & Sorcery: “THE MOST SAVAGE HEROES OF ALL!”

Kull
Robert E. Howard’s Conan was the first literary sword and sorcery character to make it into comics, but he wasn’t the first sword and sorcery character. Conan made his debut in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales in a story titled “The Phoenix on the Sword.” This story takes place late in Conan’s life, when he’s king of Aquilonia. It seems a strange place to begin chronicling the barbarian wanderer’s adventures, given the distinct lack of wandering and the decreased levels of barbarism, but this beginning seems to have come by accident. Conan debuted in a story Howard rewrote from a story he had been unable to sell featuring an entirely different character. The original story was “By This Axe I Rule!” and the original hero was Kull. It was Kull, debuting in Weird Tales August 1929 with “The Shadow Kingdom,” who is often considered the first sword and sorcery hero.

Only two Kull stories were published during Howard’s lifetime, though others have made it into print in collections since. Like Conan, Kull’s a barbarian that winds up winning a kingdom. Unlike Conan, the majority of Kull’s adventures deal with his life after becoming king, and mainly center around how heavy the head is that wears the crown. Kull’s a more philosophical and introspective character than Conan—which may explain why he’s never been as popular.

He’s a (relative) latecomer to comics, too. He first appeared in 1971 in Marvel’s Kull the Conqueror, then a succession of two more short lived series of that same title from 1971 to 1985. He also starred in a short-lived, black and white magazine Kull and the Barbarians (which sounds like a gothabilly band, doesn’t it?) in 1975, and made some crossover appearances with Conan in Savage Sword of Conan. After years of quiet repose, King Kull loosed his blade again, this time for Dark Horse, beginning in 2008.

You just can’t keep a good barbarian down.

Thongor
Not only wasn’t Conan the first sword and sorcery character, he almost wasn’t the first to make the leap to comics. Roy Thomas, tasked by Martin Goodman with bringing sword and sorcery to Marvel, had assumed Conan would be too expensive. As he relates in his essay in The Chronicles of Conan Volume One (Dark Horse), he had initially pursued the first sword and sorcery character he had gotten into—Lin Carter’s Thongor of Lemuria.

The Thongor novels were a canny attempt by serial pasticher Lin Carter to combine two of his passions in one. To wit: Thongor--Northern Barbarian (remember Cimmerians? Like them) who adventured in a pseudo-prehistoric milieu (the Hyborian—uh, Lemurian Age) but one which included city-states, airships, and invented flora and fauna (like Barsoom, or Amtor, or—well, you get the idea). In other words, they were Conan if written by Burroughs, or Howard doing planetary romance (which he actually did once, but that’s another story). Thongor swung his first sword in The Wizard of Lemuria (1965).

Roy Thomas and Stan Lee figured the younger, less established Carter would cut a deal for less. And apparently, Stan thought “Thongor” sounded more “comic book”—and he has a point.

Such was not to be. Due to the vagaries of negotiation, Conan came through, and Thongor would sit on the sidelines until March 1973 with Creatures on the Loose #23, where he would begin flexing mighty thews and generally behaving in a Conan-esque manner. Ravenhaired Thongor became a red-head after a couple of appearances, perhaps to distance him visually from his barbaric forebearer. Only, presumably, his hair-dresser knows for sure. Thongor battled monsters and foul sorcery until Creatures on the Loose #29 (1974), when he lost the book to Man-Wolf. Several of his appearances were written by George Alec Effinger, whose 1986 cyberpunk novel, When Gravity Fails,  was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Gardner Fox, with a long history of comics work and sword and sorcery (with his barbarian, Kothar) would work on the run as well.

Thongor is obscure today, but he had shining moment of popularity (apparently) in the seventies. Lin Carter relates in Imaginary Worlds, that a Thongor musical was in the offing, though I’m unsure if it was ever actually performed. A Lin Carter website tells of a Thongor movie in production that was reported in Starlog #15, apparently from the same cinematic titans that brought us the Doug McClure (and Caroline Munro!) vehicle The Land that Time Forgot.

Elric
L. Sprague De Camp, pasticher-in-chief, and his aide—uh—de camp, Lin Carter, had been adapting Howard’s non-Conan yarns into Conan stories to feed the maw of the Lancer Conan paperback series. Thomas had copied that approach in the comics, but expanded it to the adaptation of even non-Howard stories into Conan stories. In March 1972, he’d port over another character into Conan’s world—aided and abetted by that character’s creator. The two-part story beginning in Conan #14 (“A Sword Called Stormbringer!”) adapted the original thin, white duke, Elric of Melnibone, in the Mighty Marvel Manner. Conan and Elric team up against Xiombarg, the Queen of Chaos, burrowed from the Chronicles of Corum, another of Moorcock’s fantasy series.

Elric, albino prince and sort of anti-Conan armed with the don’t-call-it-a-phallic-symbol sword Stormbringer, is the creation of Michael Moorcock, and first appeared in literary form in the 1961 novella, “The Dreaming City.” His story continues to this day, the most recent novel having been published in 2005.

This Marvel Team-Up-esque two-parter wasn’t Elric’s only foray into comics. French artist Philippe Druillet of Metal Hurlant fame, produced an unauthorized Elric graphic novel in the late sixties. Later, the “Dreaming City” was adapted as a Marvel (Epic) graphic novel by P. Craig Russell and Roy Thomas. Since the end of the Bronze Age, Elric has periodically raised his runesword in comics from First, Dark Horse, and DC.

Brak
One of the writers who provide more Conan comics material was John Jakes. Before he became forever linked with Patrick Swayze (at least in my mind) by the TV movie adaptation of his 80’s best-seller historical saga, Jakes wrote some Conan-inspired tales of sword-swinging adventure. His barbarian hero was blonde with a braided ponytail, named Brak. Brak first appeared in “Devils in the Walls” in the May 1963 issue of Fantastic. He went on to star in a series of novels beginning in 1968 with Brak the Barbarian. In 1982, Jakes’ second successful historical fiction series, North and South began, and Brak has been seen no more.

Jakes first foray into comics was without his creation. He wrote the plot that became Conan the Barbarian #13, “Web of the Spider-God” (January 1972). Exactly a year later, Brak debuted in the second issue of the horror anthology Chamber of Chills. This story was reprinted in the black and white Savage Tales (vol. 1) #4 (July, 1974), whose cover promised “THE MOST SAVAGE HEROES OF ALL.” Brak went on to do battle with the minions of evil, god-thing Yob-Haggoth, in his quest to reach Khurdisan the Golden and the high life, for just two more stories in Savage Tales (issues 7 and 8) before disappearing into the mists of Bronze Age legendry. Brak never even got a cover appearance, most of those having been hogged by Ka-Zar.

Next time, we'll take a look at Sword & Sorcery as adapted by DC.

The Rock Cried Out: Dwarvish Origins

I'm probably not the first to notice that Todd Lockwood's rendering of the dwarf in the 3e Player's Handbook illustration of the PC races looks rather anthropoid.  It's proportions seem realistic--like the dwarf is a non-sapiens homonid rather than some fantasy creation, or just a stumpy human.

That got me to thinking about how to add a twist to dwarves in my campaign world. 

I thought about Arthur Machen's idea of an aboriginal race getting pushed out by later cultures, and becoming the source of legends of elves and faerie folk, as put forth in The Novel of the Black Seal, and borrowed by Robert E. Howard in several yarns.  That brought to mind a real relative of humanity maybe driven to extinction by our ancestors.  A group of short, stocky folk, dwelling in caves (in the popular imagination), and from northern climes--Neanderthals...

"Living in caves from the start, these aborigines had retreated farther and farther into the caverns of the hills..."

- Robert E. Howard, "People of the Dark" (1932)

This is a tale told by the dzarduk, the dwarves of Arn, in their great and hidden halls beneath the fells:

This is our oldest tale. A tale from before we counted time. This is the tale of how we became Dzarduk...

It was an Age of Winter and the People (who were not yet the Dzarduk) still lived above the ground. They worked only flint, and did not know the secrets of metal. They hunted great beasts of the forest and the tundra for their meat and for their skins.

It was a hard life, but the People were hard as well. They survived.

That was until the Tall Folk came.  They were not as strong, nor as hardy as the People, but they were more cunning in the use of tools, and they bred in greater numbers. The Tall Folk gradually forced the People from their ancestral hunting grounds. They drove them into the highlands and to the edge of the great ice.

It is likely that there the People would have died, but for the dreaming.

A young shaman had a dream of a star fallen from the heavens into the deep mountains long ago. From within the star, a voice beckoned. It promised safety to the People if they could find its resting place.

Older shamans felt the power of the dreaming, but disagreed on its interpretation. They called on the spirits for guidance, but got no answer. All the People met in council. Many thought it foolish to go further into the mountains, into the realm of ice. Others felt it offered their only chance of survival.

Debate went on far into the night, and when it was over, the People were sundered, each band going where it would. Those that chose not to follow the young shaman's dream were lost, and are no more.

The rest travelled many months in the mountains, through ice and snow. They fought great beasts, and remnants of elder races. Many of the People died.

When they finally came upon the valley where the star had fell, they knew it to be a place of great magic. The star, though broken and half buried, was a wonder--it was made of metal, though the People had no word for that substance yet. When they came close, all could here the voice inside, beckoning.

Many became afraid, and would not approach. The young shaman and a few brave hunters went inside the star. They beheld strange things that they could scarce describe. There were dead beings like men, some of them made of the shining stone, like the star itself.

As they stood inside the star, the shaman called out to the voice of its spirit: "You called and we have come. We beg shelter."

"Shelter I will give you," the spirit responded, "but not without a price. I have waited long for someone to answer my summons. I journeyed far to come here, so far I have forgotten much.  My people have died. Some on the voyage, some in our final fall. I have been damaged. There is no one to tend me."

"We will be your people," the shaman said. "Our old gods have forsaken us, or past on. We will tend you, and serve."

The shaman was then caught in a piercing light, and the hunters--brave though they were-- became afraid they had angered the spirit of the star, and it would kill them all. Then the spirit said:

"If you are to be my people, you must change. You are not yet suitable to my purposes. If you will serve, I will make you wiser than any other people in artifice and the working of metal. But you must be warriors as well as craftsman. I will make you stronger, and cunning in war.  That is the only way that we will endure."

The shaman didn't understand all the words the spirit spoke, but it knew truly that this was the only way the People would survive. He took the spirit's words back to the People. Many were afraid, but solemnly they accepted the offer.

The spirit revealed to the People the sheltered cave entrance that part of the star hid.  It showed them how they might find food in it's stores.

Around the fires they built that first night, the People told this story. The story of how we became Dzarduk, the people that were forged.