The Mark of Kane

"His long red hair was torn by the wind despite the rain. His eyes seemed to glow with cold blue fire in the burst of lightning. In his left hand he carried a long sword; in his right hand he held a human head."

- Karl Edward Wagner, "The Gothic Touch"

While not exactly what you would called a forgotten hero of sword and sorcery, Karl Edward Wagner's immortal anti-hero Kane is criminally under appreciated today. Of course, it could certainly be argued that outside Howard's heroes and perhaps Fafhrd and Gray Mouser that all sword and sorcery heroes are under appreciated, but that's a lament for another time. Still, Kane's low profile is particularly unfortunate. I believe he stands with Charles R. Saunder's Imaro as one of the two most significant sword and sorcery characters of the seventies revival--which makes him one of the most important sword and sorcery characters since the death of the pulps.

Kane is Wagner's re-imagining of the Biblical first murder. Created by a "mad god" who wished humanity to be his play thing, Kane rebelled against the "sterile paradise" offered and slew his brother (or half-brother, it's hinted) who was the god's favorite. Perhaps realizing what he had loosed upon the world, the god cursed Kane. Immortal, he would wander the world bringing only violence and strife, only able to find death through violence. Men would know him by his startling blue eyes, the eyes of a killer--the Mark of Kane.

In his essay "Once and Future Kane," Wagner tells us that the primary inspiration for the character was gothic fiction, particularly Charles Robert Maturin's 1820 novel of another unfortunate, cursed to immortality, Melmoth the Wanderer. Certainly, the gothic touch can be seen in the Kane tales, but filtered through Wagner it's (as he put it) "acid gothic"--which is to say it has a tinge of psychedelia about it (or maybe phantasmagoria would be a better word) and some "experimental" (for a fairly conservative genre) stylistic flourishes on occasion.

Darkness Weaves with Many Shades (later just Darkness Weaves) was the first Kane novel, published in 1970 by Powell, in a badly edited edition. Darkness Weaves has some first novel shakiness but it's great piece of pulp fantasy for all that, cheerfully mixing science fantasy, horror, and a little hard-boiled attitude.

In 1973 it was followed by Death Angel's Shadow, a collection of three novellas from Warner. In "Reflections of the Winter of My Soul," Kane takes on a werewolf in a sort of And Then There Were None-ish mystery. "Mirage" features a seductive vampire, while "Cold Light" has Kane up against a righteous paladin and his party in a Die Hard-esque confrontation in a ghost town out of an Almeria filmed Spaghetti Western.

Next came two short-stories. "Lynortis Reprise" has Kane returning to the site of an old battle, and re-imagines the Trojan War with the horrors of World War I. "Dark Muse" is a horror story evoking Chambers' The King Yellow wherein a poet seeks an ancient, magical artifact with ruinous results, and Kane is a side-player/observer.

The second Kane novel, Bloodstone (1975), got a Frazetta cover, and has Kane trying to take over the world with the eponymous ring which controls a sentient, alien super-weapon. 1976's Dark Crusade finds Kane leading a mercenary army for the prophet of a revived (and evil) ancient cult--and of course, trying to turn the whole affair to his advantage.

Over the next few years, Kane short stories appeared elsewhere. "Two Suns Setting" has Kane helping the last hero of giant-kind attempt to regain the crown of their greatest king. "Sing a Last Song of Valdese" is ghost story with Kane helping a wronged sorcerer and his love get their revenge. "Raven's Eyrie" introduces Kane's daughter, Klesst, and his old supernatural enemy, Sathonys. These stories, plus "Lynortis Reprise" and "Dark Muse", were collected in Night Winds (1978).

At the dawn of the eighties, Wagner was devoting more of his time to horror, but not far into the eighties that too would begin to falter. There were a few more Kane stories--including the crossover with Elric, "The Gothic Touch" (1994). Two of the others moved Kane out of his prehistoric past and into the modern day. The much discussed Kane novel, In the Wake of Night, was never completed. Maybe Wagner was tiring of Swords and Sorcery? We'll never really know.

Wagner died in 1994 at the age of forty-eight. It was apparently due to complications of alcoholism, though the internet also relates he had "tick fever" (presumably that means Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever), but David Drake suggests this was an unconfirmed (and dubious) self-diagnosis on Wagner's part--and an excuse.

Flawed though the creator may have been, he gave his creation immortality. Kane lives on. Though out of print, the Warner editions and the handsome Night Shade Books hardcovers can still be found and are worth whatever you pay might for them.

"He strode away laughing into the cold night;

Kane had returned, a new challenge begun."

- Karl Edward Wagner, "The Midnight Sun"

Gloom, Rising from the Underground: The Derro

The derro, as presented in AD&D, always seemed a little superfluous. Okay, the original Jim Holloway art from S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth gives them a sort of Celtic twist (biker moustaches, spikey hair, and plaid pants), but essentially they're just evil dwarves--and that's the duergar's thing.

The derro are kind of bland, really. I'd expect more from a monster inspired by the delusions of a man likely suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

"They recognize no other living thing as friend; to a dero all new things are enemy."

- Richard Shaver and Ray Plamer, "I Remember Lemuria!"

"Dero" (only one "r" here) are from the stories of Richard Sharpe Shaver, edited by Ray Palmer and published in the pulp magazine, Amazing Stories. Shaver was a welder who had begun to hear voices being projected into the welding equipment he used, which he believed came from an underground civilization. These voices, visions he received, and ultimately memories he began to recover from his past lives revealed to him a secret history. He learned of the Elder Race from another world, who had been forced underground by increasing solar radiation. Over time, the elder race degenerated into the "teros" or integrative energy robots, who were helpful to mankind, and the "deros" or detrimental energy robots, who were sadistic and tormented humanity. Robot, it should be noted, doesn't mean a mechanical being in Shaver's terminology. Both races were biological, presumably.

Shaver sent a letter to Amazing Stories detailing his discovery of the ancient source of all human languages, which allowed him to pick out the hiding meanings in English words. This interested Palmer. He claims to have applied Shaver's formula to samples of other languages with "interesting results." Palmer published the letter in the December 1943 issue, and got a big response from readers.

Palmer contacted Shaver for more, and Shaver responded with a 10,000 word manuscript entitled "A Warning to Future Man." Palmer edited Shaver's work and added more of an actual plot, producing the novella "I Remember Lemuria!" published in March 1945. The Shaver Mystery series had begun, and for the next two years, nearly every issue of Amazing Stories featured a Shaver story.

Shaver's deros kidnapped humans for sadistic torture, or for food. Using ancient ray machines, they surveilled surface dwellers and projected tormenting thoughts and voices into their minds. They could also cause all manner of misfortunes, from illness to natural disasters.

It seems to me that something more akin to Shaver's deros would be more interesting than simple evil dwarves. Maybe the two "r" derro could be encountered as a mysterious evil afflicting a village or town. Villagers might disappear, others would be driven to suicide or homicide by tormenting voices. Bizarre events--anything an enterprising gamemaster might wish to borrow from paranormal or ufo lore--would have everyone in town on edge. Eventually, of course, the PCs would venture into previously hidden caves to confront the menace (and take its stuff), but until then the adventure could proceed in something of a "horror" mode--or at least a "weird" one.

The derro are no strangers to madness, and its about time they shared it.

Sword & Planet Hulk

Last week I watched the blu-ray of the animated Planet Hulk feature from Lions Gate. It’s an adaptation of the 2006 storyline in The Incredible Hulk, written by Greg Pak with art by Carlo Pagulayan and Jeffrey Huet. Having not read the comic, this was my first exposure to the material, and I found it pretty enjoyable, and one of the best of Marvel Animation's direct-to-video efforts.

The plot, in brief, goes something like this: the Hulk is rocketed into space by a group of Marvel Universe big-guns who think he’s menace. He winds up going through a space-rift and winding up on one of those mostly barbaric worlds with elements of advanced technology here and there—this one being named Sakaar. There, he’s put into the arena by the forces of the planet’s tyrant, the Red King, with sort of an eclectic group of other aliens. He proves himself in brute strength, but must overcome his sulkiness and stop being a loner. Then, he bursts his bonds to fight for justice (as it were) and takes a page from the Spartacus revolutionary handbook. Ultimately, the Hulk gets a love interest, defeats the Red King, and proves himself to have been the prophesied messiah of Sakaar all along.

The story is pure “sword and planet” or “planetary romance”—which is to say the subgenre of science fiction (or fantasy) that features an earthman (or woman) engaging in heroic adventure on other worlds. Generally these worlds are primitive—or have strange primitive elements—which is where the swords come into play. The prototype of these sorts of stories is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, but the genre has had many adherents, particularly during a revival in the late sixties.

Planet Hulk isn’t the first fusion of superheroica and planetary romance—it isn’t even the first starring the Hulk. Harlan Ellison’s “The Brute…That Shouted Love…At the Heart of the Atom” (The Incredible Hulk #140, 1971) had the Hulk romancing a queen and winning a kingdom in the subatomic world of K’ai—most likely inspired by Ray Cummings’ 1922 novel The Girl in the Golden Atom. The X-Men’s Nightcrawler got into otherworldly swashbuckling in his 1985 limited series. He also got to stand-in for John Carter in a one-off send-up of the genre in Excalibur #16 (December, 1989).

Is there any gaming value here? Well, I think that for those playing superhero rpgs, a sword and planet sojourn might be a welcome respite from slogging it out with super-villains. My personal favorites for something like this would be the old Marvel Superheroes rpg (or maybe one of its retro-clones), or maybe Mutants & Masterminds, utilizing the Wizards & Warlocks supplement (which doesn’t offer a Sword & Planet setting per se, but does swords and lost worlds, which ought to be close enough).

The other possible inspiration would be for a Sword & Planet game with more over-the-top action and power levels than traditionally found in the literary genre. In other words, maybe something analogous to what Exalted is for fantasy --at least in terms of power level, not necessarily flavor. I don’t off hand know the best system for this—though either of the two suggested above could do it, and HERO System no doubt could as well, depending on the level of crunch one wants.

Warlord Wednesday: This Savage World

Continuing my examination of DC Comic's Warlord...

"This Savage World"
Warlord (vol. 1) #1 (January-February 1976)

Written and Illustrated by Mike Grell

Synopsis: In the jungles of Skartaris, Morgan trains in use of the sword with Tara. He recalls the events that led to this point--giving a recap of 1st Issue Special #8. After completing their practice, the two continue their journey to Tara's home city of Shamballah. Morgan tries (again) to explain to Tara about the hollow earth, but she still doesn't believe him. In their travels they glimpse a coffle of slaves being taken to Bal Shazar, and Tara is mesmerized by a satyr--who Morgan knocks out with one punch. Unfortunately, the smoke of their campfire draws the slave raiders, and the are ambushed. Tara and Morgan are chained with the other slaves and marched out across the desert. Unwilling to give up, Morgan begins to saw through Tara's slave collar with the titanium chain of his dog tags. After some time, he manages to free her, but not before they're noticed by the guards. Tara is able to escape on horseback, while Morgan fights off the slavers. Eventually, he's brought down by a blow to the back of his skull. When he regains consconsciousness, he's tied hanging from a tree by his arms, where the angry slavemaster leaves him to die.

Things to Notice:

• The recap gives the name of the Theran king (Baldur) which wasn't given last issue.
• Neither Tara or Morgan understand gravity. Tara has no conception of it, and Morgan gets it wrong.
• The leader of the slavers wears a winged helm much like the one Morgan will eventually adopt.
• The worst invective Vietnam vet Travis Morgan can hurl at the slaver who just crucified him is "stick it in your ear!"

Where It Comes From:
Tara and Morgan are on their way to Tara's home city of Shamballah.  The name comes from the Tibetian Buddhist tradition, where it came to be seen as a earthly paradise of sorts. It enters into the Western occult lore through the theosophist writings of HP Blavatsky. Grell probably encountered it in the Three Dog Night song of the same name ("Shambala") from 1975.

Tara's Skartarian cosmological mythology snippet is a nice bit of color.  Her giant is the Skartarian equivalent of Atlas, the titan who held up the heavens from Greek mythology.  The Atlas Mountains of North (western) Africa are named for him. The name of Tara's giant is "Ashanti" which is the name of a Western African ethnic group, who ruled a pre-colonial empire in what is now Ghana.

The slavers and their hapless captives are on their way to another Skartarian city, Bal Shazar--which is only a slight modification of Belshazzar (Akkadian Bal-sarra-usur meaning "Bel (lord) protect the king"), the name of a prince of Babylon according to the Old Testament Book of Daniel.  Grell probably uses it for its ancient Middle Eastern sort of sound which fits thematically with the slave coffle's trek across the desert.

The satyr sequence drives home the fantasy elements of Skartaris, which serves as a counterpoint to the dinosaurs and other lost world trappings.  The satyr is from Greek mythology, though his protrayal here shows that Grell follows the tendency--present since the Roman era--to conflate them with the god Pan, himself. The specific events in the story may have been inspired by a sequence from the 1964 film, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, where Barbara Eden's character suffers a similar musical seduction.

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.