The Volcanic Fortress of Surt

Well, look, there must be something about spring, because it appears that just around this time one year ago I "began" work on a campaign setting/megagdungeon called The Volcanic Fortress of Surt . I was following the Gygax 1975 challenge, and perhaps that is why I got lost. Instead of using the 1974 game upon which to base my creation, I should have been using the 1975 game! And that game is Tunnels & Trolls . This epiphany suddenly struck me when a friend began roasting my appreciation for Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes (a compilation of suggested rules, based on Tunnels & Trolls, for those specified genres) and I found myself writing: In fact, we should play it right now , everywhere and always! Why the sudden insight? Well, if you will bear with me, dear reader, I would like to explain just how weird my project is--so weird that there may be no audience for it other than myself--and why I intuitively understood that not even WhiteBox was a good underlying ...

  To explain, perhaps, the significance of this weird title, it originates from a reflection Tolkien shared in a letter to his son Christopher. I'm not going to track down the specific language of that discourse, but, if I remember right, Tolkien explained to his son a "vision" he had had while doing his shift once in Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. While meditating before the Holy Host, he saw all human souls as dust motes suspended within the all-embracing and all-encompassing Light of God's Awareness. Perhaps it's verging on sacrilege here, but it is this image that comes to mind when I think about my relationship with rpgs in this new year: I am a mote suspended between three blazing suns, and my focus and considerations are constantly drawn/shoved/pulled/forced among Against the Darkmaster, Conan 2d20, and Swords & Wizardry. Against the Darkmaster (VsD) There is no other game that provides me with more nostalgic joy. Yes, it is "wonky...

Some context here: This is a letter to a writing friend who came across Marc Laidlaw's presentation to a Game Writers Conference that was given way back in 2005. I'm only now truly recognizing the date of Laidlaw's composition, so it seems that some of my responses, which will be shared here, are unfair. I'll deliver them anyway, mostly because, as anyone who reads on will find, I said that I wasn't going to share them at all! 😁 But here they are, anyway, so we all can "congratulate" ourselves. (Read on, and you'll see what I mean by that word in quotation marks.) My friend, who is a published novelist working chiefly in a mode that I will call "traditional writing," shared Laidlaw's presentation with me after being shown it by a student of his. My writing friend was fairly awed and illuminated by the piece, though his overall response is what I call "complicated." My response is complicated, as well, but for a different reason...

I am almost through my rereading of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land , the first of the primary texts upon which I intend to build my campaign for Gygax '75. To remind any readers, I am building a campaign using Swords & Wizardry WhiteBox that very much is not traditional fantasy. And I will do this by building out of or up from texts that are not cited in Appendix N and have not been influenced by Tolkien. And yet I have found myself diverted and consumed by fantasy that is even more traditional than D&D, because I currently am leading two Against the Darkmaster (VsD) campaigns. Consequently, my work on Gygax '75 has been interrupted; my reading of The Night Land has slowed down, as I immerse myself in post-Tolkienian works such as Ian Esslemont's The Forge of the High Mage , or Margaret Weiss's Amber & Ashes , or C.J. Cherryh's The Dreaming Tree . And I have found myself struggling in my role as GM of these VsD campaigns. One campaign has be...

 His arm has grown long indeed. --Gimli in The Two Towers Larry Elmore's  Companions of the Lance I currently have two campaigns of Against the Darkmaster underway, so, though I have begun work on The Volcanic Fortress of Surt, specifically by beginning a reread of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land , I'm also keeping up with Tolkien-adjacent high fantasy. And I'm nearing a complete reading of The War of Souls Dragonlance trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. As a kid, hungry for more Lord of the Rings, I devoured both the Dragonlance Chronicles and Legends trilogies. And never read them again, just as I never read again Terry Brooks's Shannara novels or went back to however dismally far I made it into Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant . I have reread Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, of course, many times, and I have read the books in that series, also, that were published almost as afterthoughts. I even have reread Lloyd Alexander...

The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost...  --Galadriel, from Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring It seems to me that, nearly every spring, I, like the land about me, shake off the dead vines that I have worn the winter through and grow new life up through them. The literary critic Northrop Frye, who developed a perspective about the conscious and/or unconscious effects of the seasons in the arts, may have observations about this. I pay them little mind: I am absorbed in what's next. Like some others I know, I am ready to "cut back" the dead growth of last summer. One reason is just regular old "spring fever." The season of Winter Nights tales is behind me. Now it's time to leave the hearth, go outside, wander the fields and forests that still are tinged with elements of boreal fantasy. But another impulse simply is to "reclaim my time." It's time to suns...