Initially, Swords & Sorcery: A Blog was going to be dedicated solely to classic heroic fiction. I figured I would just re-read and write about the books I already knew and loved, like Death Angel’s Shadow or Stormbringer, and that would be enough.

Then I discovered I was living in the midst of a S&S revival. Spurred by magazines like Black Gate and fueled by authors like James Enge and Howard Andrew Jones, new stories at least as good as anything from the genre’s heyday in the seventies were being created.

That led me on a hunt for anything new in S&S. I quickly learned that for every Enge or Jones, there were a dozen writers regularly gracing the electronic pages of numerous online magazines.

For what I now wanted, which was to get a sense of what was going on down on the ground and then convey that to any readers I might have, the standout publications were Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, edited by Adrian Simmons, David Farney, and William Ledbetter and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, edited and published by Scott H. Andrews.

For over a year now I have continually struck genre gold in both magazines.

Over the past year of reviewing, I’ve read thirty stories from HFQ and BCS. Re-reading my reviews, I was struck both by how many of the stories I liked, and how many I recalled in detail. In fact, there was only one story I actively disliked. There was straight up no-holds-barred swords & sorcery, techno-fantasy, some chinoiserie, and an Arthurian tale thrown in for good measure.

I went out looking for heroic fantasy, and was rewarded instead with an antidote for all the monstrously long and never-ending series weighing down Barnes & Noble’s shelves.

What I found were writers creating exciting and vivid worlds and characters that would come to an end before my remaining hair turned white.

All the stories I read served as reminders that neither scale nor originality require a thousand pages. I really like Steve Erikson’s Malazan series, but its first two volumes are longer than the entire original six-book run (five of which are short story collections) of Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar books.

The most striking images of my mental sci-fi and fantasy landscape are drawn from short stories. As much as I love The Lord of the Rings, its influence on that landscape is vastly overshadowed by Robert E. Howard’s “Marchers of Valhalla” and Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Charnel God.” Perhaps it’s because a great short story tends to focus on a single, vivid event or emotion and then polishes it to diamond-bright intensity.

Here are the nine best stories from the past year’s worth of HFQ and BCS I read:

1. Poring over my reviews, I found that one of the strongest stories I read was the second one I reviewed. In Cory Skerry’s “Sinking Among the Lilies” (BCS #92) a monster-hunter named Imuri Bane comes to the fishing village of Keyward in hopes of making some easy money at his trade. I love the world Skerry’s created, his hero and the complex situations of the story. I wrote that the story’s a “brutal examination of exploitation and the obligation to become involved in the muck of life and cherish the scars that that can cause” and I stand by those words today.
2. Mike Allen’s “The Ivy-Smothered Palisade” (BCS #93) is presented as a letter written by a woman named Daeliya. In it, she tells her companion Eyan why she’s disappeared and why he should never seek her out. Daeliya reveals that as a child she was sent to an orphanage following her parents’ execution. From there she escaped to an old estate filled with all manner of mystery and strangeness. That strangeness has followed her to the present and brought about her current circumstances. The story seems grown from the same lush decay that nurtured Brian McNaughton’s Throne of Bones and many of Clark Ashton Smith’s tales.
3. HFQ # 12 introduced me to Seamus Bayne and his story “Crown of Sorrows.” A mercenary is forced into the service of an evil wizard-king straight out of central casting. From that small, stock opening, Bayne created a perfect miniature epic. While it ends satisfyingly, it’s also left open to expansion.
4. In HFQ #13, Bayne did just that with “Dance Upon Sand.” It reverses the trajectory of the first story, starting with war and a tremendous sense of scale and concluding with the actions of a single man standing alone.
5. Two more excellent paired stories are “Death at the Pass” (HFQ #10),
6. and its sequel “Death and Dignity” (HFQ #14) by Michael R. Fletcher. The stories’ protagonist is the demonologist-general, Khraen, reluctantly raised from the dead to serve in a necromancer’s army of conquest. With only twelve thousand words, Fletcher creates a world of exquisite detail. My favorite thing is the wide array of magic filling the stories: “the Demonologists — under the leadership of Palaq Taq’s Emperor — had subjugated the lesser magics. The Wizards with their filthy chaos-magic cowered in the far north where they’d fled after the Emperor’s purging wars. Elementalists and Sorcerers, understanding the true balance of power, knew their place while Shamans were left to babble at their demented tribal spirits. Necromancers had been but unknown.” I was extremely happy to learn that Fletcher is considering writing more of Khraen’s postmortem adventures. HFQ may focus on heroic fantasy, but doesn’t limit itself to that subgenre and BCS is all along the speculative fiction spectrum. I may have started out seeking swords & sorcery but some of the most striking stories, the ones that have stayed with me the longest, are distinctly not S&S.
7. “Virtue’s Ghosts” (BCS #100) is Amanda M. Olson’s first published story. In it, everyone receives a pendant at adolescence that bestows a power, or virtue, that serves to counter his or her greatest weakness. It’s narrated by a young woman as she observes her aunt, once a talented singer but then given the virtue of silence. The narrator is almost convinced her aunt’s a ghost, and there is indeed a haunted pall hanging over the story.
8. Noblewoman Ivette du Brielle is the alter ego of Leslianne Wilder’s swashbuckling adventuress “The Crimson Kestrel” (BCS #114). She climbs and thieves her way up and down the great tiered city of L’Echelle. Among the obstacles she faces are other thieves, spies, aged nobles and robot spiders (ROBOT SPIDERS!). Set in a very ancient regime-style world, this might be the most fun story of all those I reviewed. I am pretty jazzed that Wilder promises evil puppets in the next Kestrel adventure.
9. Finally, the Spring 2013 issue of HFQ has “The Lion and the Thorn Tree” by J.S. Bangs. Bangs’s story unfolds in an African-inspired world somewhere to the left of reality. A ghostly lion stalks a pregnant woman fleeing the forces of the sorcerer who has conquered her homeland and killed her husband.

I feel very confident recommending these nine stories as jumping on points for HFQ and BCS. They’re all written by authors I look forward to reading more from.

However, I haven’t read every single issue. That means there might be even better stories waiting for you to discover in their archives.

I can’t praise these magazines enough. For free, every issue, they bring good stories right to my desktop. They may get rated as only semi-pro publications, but I can think of a couple of recent professional anthologies that don’t have any stories that come close to the best I’v read in HFQ or BCS over the past year.

When I started reviewing HFQ and BCS, I hoped to learn more about the new heroic fiction being written, the present direction of swords & sorcery and bring that information back to my readers. I did that, encountering tons of artists creating fantasy almost in opposition to the mega-series dominating the field nowadays.

I’ve gotten comments from readers thanking me for directing them to both magazines. I’m happy to have found a community of artists, critics, and fans creating and supporting swords & sorcery.

Modern fantasy’s roots are deeply planted in short stories and I’m glad to help promote all those writers and magazines working in a medium I love dearly.

And there’s more out there: more magazines, more writers. I link to a raft of them on my blog.

Some may not be as slick as HFQ or BCS. Others definitely don’t have the same level of story quality.

All, though, are publishing new works and widening the readership of fantastic fiction. If you can think of any magazines I don’t link to, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line so I can get them up there.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

“This you knows. The posts on Black Gate travel fast, and time after time I’ve done the tell. But this ain’t one body’s tell. This is the tell of us all who love the Mad Max franchise. And you gotta listen to it and remember. ‘Cause what you hear today, you gotta tell the newborn tomorrow. I’s looking behind us now, into history-back. I sees those of us who got the luck and started the haul for hi-def. And I remember how it led us here and we were heartful ‘cause we saw the pan-and-scan VHS of what was. And we knewed we got it straight.”

If it weren’t for my aversion to camping and having to use porta-potties, I would attend Wasteland Weekend every year, a “360° post-apocalypse environment” held each September in the Southern California desert for other Mad Maxians. I’m that much of a fan. I prefer an air-conditioned theater and a marathon of the three films (to which a fourth will be added next year) over risking a Gila monster bite, however.

Now I can hold the movie marathon in my less-well air-conditioned apartment — with indoor plumbing and absolutely no Gila monsters! — because Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome made its debut on Blu-ray last week, completing the trilogy in hi-def.

For both fans and the general public, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome generally ranks below the other two movies, Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2 (1981). The third film plays a lot nicer with other children than its predecessors: the low-budget exploitation biker/revenge flick of Mad Max and the violent action spectacle of The Road Warrior took a Spielbergian mid-‘80s shift that’s positively heartwarming. This was when the series went from an earned “R” rating to a family-friendly PG-13, and its rough wasteland-traversing hero came to the rescue of a clan of K-through-12s.

The simplistic comparison is to call Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome the Conan the Destroyer of its franchise: “the kid-friendly cheesy one.” But this comparison only applies to the level of violence. The drop in quality is nowhere near that between the two Dino de Laurentiis Conan movies. Beyond Thunderdome, viewed almost thirty years after its premiere, doesn’t feel like a horrible betrayal of what came before, but a natural outgrowth of its setting and storytelling. Yes, it’s still the third best of the original trilogy, but consider how high the bar was already set: there’s no shame having to stretch a bit and not quite reach it. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a worthwhile movie that repays repeat viewings. Seeing it now on Blu-ray makes me realize that I adore it — and not in spite of the passel of children, but because of them.

When I previously wrote about the three Mad Max films after a marathon screening, I noted each movie appears to take place in a different world. The background is never the same: Mad Max occurs in a tottering dystopia, The Road Warrior in the aftermath of a giant war and global fuel shortage, but only in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome does the wreck of the world happen via mushroom clouds and fallout — “pocks-a-clypse!” The world is a much stranger place, turning toward a setting that borders on sword-and-sorcery.

The first time we see Max (whose name is spoken only once during the running time), he isn’t blazing down an empty two-lane blacktop in a turbo-charged car, but dragging a dead vehicle across sand dunes with a team of camels. In fact, paved roads never appear anywhere in the film. Consider that: a sequel to a movie called The Road Warrior and an earlier movie about a highway policeman has no roads in it. (Unless you count the railroad used for the climactic chase scene.)

When Max arrives at Bartertown, one of the settlements trying to grope toward a restored civilization, we drop farther into the fantastic. Remove a few gunpowder weapons and industrial machines, and this might be Shadizar from Conan the Barbarian. Cultures and costumes collide, the law is decided through gladiatorial contests, the ruler sits in a silver tower above her subjects, and beneath the bustle of trade is a hellish underworld overseen by an imp and a giant. Where The Road Warrior is based on the classic film Western for most of its backdrop, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome stirs up the frontier town with thick amounts of science-fantasy.

What most people remember about the film is the gladiator fight inside the titular arena where “two men enter, one man leaves.” Max, operating as an agent for Bartertown’s leader Aunty Entity (Tina Turner, oddly subdued for this nutty world), fights in Thunderdome against Blaster, the towering enforcer who works as the muscle half of the duo who controls Bartertown’s underground pig-fueled methane factory. Co-director George Miller must have known it was hopeless to attempt to top the tanker chase conclusion to The Road Warrior — one of the greatest vehicular action scenes in history — so he devised the unusual Thunderdrome fight as the movie’s set-piece. The sequence feels less groundbreaking today when wirework stunt battles have become a cliché in Hollywood. But the choreography of two combatants flipping around on bungee cords to reach an assortment of weapons is still a great out-there idea at home with the increasingly weird world of the Mad Max-a-clypse. The action scene meant to stand in for the chase from The Road Warrior, involving a train from Bartertown trying to outrace Aunty Entity’s legion of odd vehicles (including a great cow-hide car), is less interesting and seems aware of it.

But it’s the children who make the film work together as a thematic piece, instead of just an adventure flick with a memorable action scene. “The Tribe,” the post-apocalypse version of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, is more the core of the movie than Thunderdome. (Aren’t we trying to get beyond Thunderdome anyway?) These descendants of airplane crash survivors live in an oasis sunk in a crack in the desert, where they await the return of “Captain Walker,” who they believe will lead them to the idyllic “Tomorrow-morrow Land.” Max ends up in the children’s care — and they assume he is Captain Walker come as their Messiah. But at first Max refuses to help them.

The Tribe is the “answer civilization” to Bartertown. They are parallel societies attempting to forge a future. The first half of the film stars Bartertown and its population of violent and cynical beasts. The congested city of trade feels like a place Max might exist in, since he’s become a cynical beast himself. But Max initially has nothing to offer Bartertown, no goods and no services. “You got nothing to trade, you’ve got no business in Bartertown,” Alfred Hitchcock (credited as “The Collector” and played by Frank Thring*) informs Max when he tries to enter the settlement. Max only gets inside by making a deal with Aunty Entity to pull a political assassination. And he won’t go through with that either because Max isn’t quite the beast he thought he was. But, “Bust a deal, face the wheel!”: Bartertown kicks Max out into the sand.

[*Frank Thring would later play an Alfred Hitchcock-like director in Howling III. His resemblance in looks and voice to the famous director is uncanny.]

Then the children find him, and Max is inside the other growing civilization — one that is a genuinely new culture. The children, born after the nuclear holocaust and unaware of its details, are developing an oral society with new myths based on the shreds of evidence of the world that existed before them. The details in these sequences — a confluence of script, performances, costumes, and props — create a believable original culture. The language of the children is particularly rich, although tricky to follow at first. Like the slang in A Clockwork Orange, it takes some effort to adjust to how the children have repurposed words and ideas, but it’s worth the work.

The dialogue of the Tribe is endlessly quotable. Here is a good sample of their argot from a scene where one of the oldest, Savannah Nix, tries to convince the others to follow her on a trek from their oasis after Max’s existence proves the desert can be crossed:

SAVANNAH NIX: That’s the trick of it. Who’s coming?

JOANNA GOANNA: Across the Nothing? Don’t you ‘member? When you’s finded him, he were half jumped by Mr. Dead.

SAVANNAH NIX: Nobody’s saying it ain’t a hard slog. We knows that now. But if we wants the knowing and the doing of things, there ain’t no easy ride.

SLAKE M’THIRST: There ain’t no knowing and there ain’t no doing! There ain’t no skyraft and there ain’t no sonic. You slog out there to nothing!

SAVANNAH NIX: Whoever’s got the juice, track with us.

In The Road Warrior, Max helps out a human settlement trying to create a better world for themselves, a re-start of society. But the people of the oil-pumping compound are almost all adults who remember what the world was like before civilization went to dust. The Tribe, however, has no memories of anything from before the plane crash that left their families stranded in the “Nothing,” surrounded by “Mr. Dead.” They are a new generation separated from the expectations of the old. They have a hope for a future that isn’t controlled by the past. Their use of language is part of the rebuilding of society: it’s an effect of their oral culture and the artifacts they have, but also a microcosm of a society re-forming based on detachment from previous meanings.

Oh, have I mentioned the kids are just fantastic characters? Each one with a special idiosyncrasy, identifiable even if you don’t always catch their individual names, like Scrooloose, Savannah Nix, Gekko, and Slake M’Thirst. The children all give performances of great naturalism. (Admittedly, the “child” with the largest role, Helen Buday as Savannah Nix, is only six years younger than Mel Gibson.) Repeat viewings of the film uncover subtle emotional veins among their scenes. The most moving sequence has two of the children, Mr. Skyfish (Mark Spain) and Joanna Goanna (Justine Clarke), listening to a record and hearing a French tutor ask them to repeat the phrase, “I am going home.”

Max doesn’t turn into the immediate savior of the Tribe: he prefers to hole up in the oasis and stay there, and to hell with the rest of the world. And even after he changes his mind and helps the children who chose to leave the oasis, the movie does not offer him any idyllic happy ending. Instead, he receives a similar fate of isolation that he did in The Road Warrior. The idea of “Mad Max helping out a bunch of kids!” in practice is no different than what he did for the people in the compound in the second movie. The Tribe is the next logical step in civilization’s regrowth, and Max is again excluded from it — in a way that recalls the ending of John Ford’s classic The Searchers. The scavenger sacrifices for the good of civilization, yet has no place in it.

George Miller, who directed both previous Mad Max films, shares directorial credit with George Ogilvie on Beyond Thunderdome, and this is important for the scenes with the Tribe. Miller originally intended to direct the whole film, but after his producing partner Byron Kennedy died in a helicopter crash while scouting locations, Miller lost some of his enthusiasm for the project. He then brought on Ogilvie, an award-winning theater director who had worked with Miller on a television mini-series, to co-direct. Although the division of work isn’t clear, Ogilvie was apparently hired to handle the drama-heavy scenes while Miller attended to the action parts. The Bartertown scenes certainly feel like Miller directed them, while the scenes with the Tribe have the mark of a director familiar with stage work. The children are engaged in a form of theater; when Savannah Nix does the “tell” of their history, using a frame woven from sticks that imitates a television monitor, the children work together to create an experimental theater piece. If the children’s scenes are indeed mostly the work of Ogilvie, he did an exceptional job. He gets remarkable performances from the young actors, some who don’t look much older then three or four.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome excels on its Warner Bros. Blu-ray transfer. This is by far the best-looking of the three films on hi-def, although some of this can be attributed to the condition of its source: this movie had the largest budget of the series. Dean Semler’s splendid photography is captured with rich natural hues and film grain, and the improved stock from when he shot The Road Warrior means the nighttime and underground scenes have discernible detail, rendered crisply on the disc.

And the sound quality: pow! The movie was originally released to select theaters in a 70 mm blow-up with six-track stereo sound, and the new DTS Master Audio 5.1 mix gives Beyond Thunderdome the full throaty roar it deserves from those multiple tracks. The soundtrack is especially well served: Maurice Jarre’s sweeping score — which has definitely grown on me after initial hesitation — and the two Tina Turner songs, “One of the Living” and “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” billow out into the sonic space. But the best part of the new sound mix is clarity in the dialogue between the children. I’ve previously found them difficult to understand, and not only because they speak in specialized argot. The DTS-MA fixes this, and now listeners can focus exclusively on the children’s unusual words instead of struggling to hear the words at all.

The downside to the Blu-ray is a lack of supplements. A trailer, that’s all we get. None of Warner’s previous DVD releases contained any bonuses, so this isn’t a surprise. It would be nice to have the two Tina Turner music videos, but apparently there are rights issues involved there.

The fourth Mad Max film, Mad Max: Fury Road, with Tom Hardy taking over the title role, wrapped principle photography in the Namib Desert in December, ending ten years of punishment from some god whom George Miller ticked off. (Oh, it was frustrating.) The new film will probably premiere in 2014 — and then Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome will no longer be “the last movie of the series,” and even those who don’t like it will be unable to call it “the disappointing conclusion.” It will be interesting to see if views of Beyond Thunderdome continue to evolve — up or down — after Fury Road burns rubber.

Oh, I prefer the song “One of the Living” over “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” Because we do need another hero. At least more Mad Max.

It would be morally wrong of me not to include the classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 sketch about “Beyond Thunderdome.”

Ryan Harvey is a veteran blogger for Black Gate and an award-winning science-fiction and fantasy author who knows Godzilla personally. He received the Writers of the Future Award for his short story “An Acolyte of Black Spires,” and his story “The Sorrowless Thief” appears in Black Gate online fiction. Both take place in his science fantasy world of Ahn-Tarqa. A further Ahn-Tarqa adventure, “Farewell to Tyrn”, the prologue to the upcoming novel Turn Over the Moon, is currently available as an e-book. You can keep up with him at his website, www.RyanHarveyWriter.com, and follow him on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews has done his own retrospective, “Changing the Playing Field: H.L. Gold & Galaxy Science Fiction,” a detailed and affectionate look at Gold and the superb magazine he created:

Galaxy appeared in October 1950 as a monthly publication. It paid far better than its competitors, and Gold proved to be a far better editor than his counterpart at Astounding… With Gold at the helm, Galaxy Science Fiction began to change the tone of the genre. Astounding had taken advantage of the scientific rush that followed the development of the atomic bomb, and the resulting doomsday stories that followed. Gold went in another direction, explaining in an editorial that “The shape humanity is in is cause for worry, I believe, but not the kind of paralyzing terror that clutches science fiction writers in particular… Look, fellers, the end isn’t here yet.”

Strong, socially aware and satirical fiction became the mainstay with Galaxy, and 1951 proved to be an excellent year for the publication: “The Fireman,” by Ray Bradbury, appeared in the February issue, set in a dystopian world where literature was burned by government agents, and was later expanded into his landmark novel Fahrenheit 451. April brought Cyril Kornsbluth’s story “The Marching Morons,” and September saw Gold bring Robert Heinlein away from Astounding with his three-part story The Puppet Masters…

Around the same time, Gold began calling Alfred Bester, asking for some work, eventually wearing him down to the point where Bester came up with a series of ideas that became his first novel, The Demolished Man. The first installment started in January 1952, and continued through March. The novel was an immediate hit, and in 1953, it earned the first ever Hugo Award for Best Novel. October of 1953 brought a new Isaac Asimov novel, Caves of Steel, bringing the author’s robot stories from the logic puzzles of Astounding into the more socially oriented world of Galaxy.

This is a companion piece to Andrew’s February article on John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction (which we covered here.) Read the complete article here, and Matthew Wuertz’s review of “The Fireman” and the complete February 1951 issue here. [Thanks to John DeNardo at SF Signal for the tip.]

Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign

I’m a big fan of rule systems. Throughout my experience in role playing, both as a player and a gamemaster, I’ve loved building interesting characters, worlds, and storylines on my own, rarely relying on established modules and setting manuals. But to me the rules are a guide for the game and I try to follow them fairly closely, using them to inspire new ideas on where to go. In a way, it’s the limitations of rule systems that provide the boundaries for the story to evolve off of.

For years running MUSHes, I grew frustrated with characters who would assume knowledge that had no basis in the statistics their characters had. Most of this time was spent on games based on White Wolf’s Storyteller system, in which I mainly focused on Mage: The Ascension, so had to deal with a disturbing number of Mages who assumed that, just by virtue of being a Mage, they knew all about the other supernatural races, like details about the various Vampire: The Masquerade clans. Not without the right Lore rating, buddy!

These days, I’ve returned to fantasy adventure gaming, running a Pathfinder campaign. Still, though, I like using the rules and statistics as my guide. If a character doesn’t have any ranks in Swim, then I roleplay him as if he’s never learned how to swim … and maybe he’s just a little scared of the water because of it. No ranks in Knowledge(nature), then he doesn’t know what poison ivy looks like and mistakes large dogs for wolves.

In fact, I go out of my way to buy ranks that I don’t feel will be particularly useful just because I feel the character needs to have them. A ranger who doesn’t have any ranks in Craft(bows), and is thus unable to craft new arrows while away from town, makes absolutely no sense to me. Even if I have every intention of buying my arrows with adventure loot, I spend the skill points to have a couple of ranks of Craft(bows), because it’s something the character would know!

This is my thinking on the character level, but rarely have I adopted many campaign-level rule systems, letting the overall campaign evolve a bit more freely. In part, this is just because I’ve never seen campaign-level systems that seemed flexible enough to do what I wanted, yet still provided useful guidance for characters. That is until I got my copy of Pathfinder‘s new Ultimate Campaign (Paizo, Amazon) supplement, which instantly got implemented into my current campaign and has enriched the options in just a single game session. Now if my players say, “I want to own a tavern” or “I want to build a kingdom,” I can tell them exactly what it will take, instead of just making something up.

Ultimate Campaign has a number of systems for various aspects of gameplay. I don’t think any GM would want to (or should) implement all of them, but depending upon your campaign setting, group dynamics, and play style, there’s something in here for pretty much every group. If it has a flaw, it may be that there’s just too much good stuff in it … so much, in fact, that it looks like they are shoving some related material into an upcoming supplement, Quests & Campaigns (Paizo, Amazon). I’ll definitely want to see what new options it presents but, for now, let’s focus on the systems in Ultimate Campaign:

Character Background:

The first chapter includes a variety of background options and traits (sort of like mini-feats) that can enhance the creation of your character. There are also randomization tables for a lot of the key features, such as numbers of siblings, formative childhood events, and so on. For players who have only a vague sense of the sort of character they’d like to play, this can be a big help to flesh out their background. It’s also great for GMs. Planning a NPC to introduce in an upcoming storyline, I had a very generic idea of what class I needed. I rolled up a couple of randomized background components and now have quite a complex character with enough of a backstory to generate some side plots and complications for months to come. (He also has two half-orc siblings, which is not something I would have planned.)

Downtime:

The second chapter focuses entirely on a coherent downtime system that can be implemented to cover activities between adventures, primarily focused on giving the players options to build organizations and businesses; but the system has benefits even for those who have no specific interest in that sort of thing. Basically, the system is built around accumulating four different types of Capital:

• Goods
• Influence
• Labor
• Magic

Goods and Labor are cheapest, with Influence a touch more expensive, and Magic substantially more expensive. You can either buy this Capital outright, spend downtime earning it at a discounted cost, or have the GM provide it as an adventuring reward. This immediately appeals to me as a good way of adding rewards beyond raw gold, magical items, and XP, and which motivates roleplay as the players have to figure out how best to leverage the Influence that they gained when ridding the local village of their Orc problem. Should they use it to build a small tavern or shop or magical academy in town, recruiting employees and a manager to run things (and thus generate more Capital), or should they just trade it in for discounts on equipment and move on to the next adventure?

The systems for creating buildings, businesses, and organizations are extremely clear and for those who like such things are a great optional system to incorporate, but they’re not for everyone. Those who just want to bust some heads can certainly do so.

Campaign Systems:

The third chapter contains a wealth of campaign systems:

Alignment: Descriptions of the various alignments and a system for tracking behaviors that may cause an alignment change.

Bargaining: Rules for characters who want to haggle over the price they get for their adventuring loot, crafted items, or other treasures.

Companions: New details on animal companions, eidolons, cohorts, followers, and hirelings, including ways to help incorporate them into ongoing plots in the story.

Contacts: Rules for establishing and maintaining contacts, as well introducing a system for tracking the trust and risk levels of dealing with a particular contact.

Exploration: When adventuring in a new territory, these rules can help guide your exploration efforts.

Honor: For characters and cultures that value honor, this is a nice system to track that honor and “spend” honor points in order to gain favor. Various honor codes are presented, or you could create your own. One problem with this is that it seems very culture-dependent. Still, if you have a character who values honor strongly, this provides additional motivation and roleplaying opportunities to focus on honorable behavior.

Investments: Some characters may want to make their money work for them, but not by using the downtime system to actually build a business on their own. One option for these characters is to invest in another business. I especially like this because they can be tied directly into the adventures in the game. For example, if the dragon terrorizing a local village burned down the granary, perhaps the owner will need an influx of cash in order to rebuild, providing an investment opportunity for the very adventurers who just uncovered a dragon’s hoard!

Lineage: Rules for building a family history and incorporating it into the game, dealing with the death of family members, and so on. This is a pretty system-light section, actually, and mostly just provides some good ideas for weaving background characterization into the game.

Magic Item Creation: An expansion on the basic magic item creation rules, including cooperative crafting, upgrading existing items (changing bracers of armor +1 into bracers of armor +3, for example), recharging magical items, altering existing items, and implementing talismanic components that are needed in the crafting process.

Relationships: This gives an option for a “relationship rating” that can be tracked for friends, family, allies, rivals, and enemies. This is probably the area where I least see the need for a system, but I could see some cases where it comes in very useful. Again, though, even if you don’t adopt the system, this section has some great tips for incorporating family, spouses, and other relationships into the game.

Reputation and Fame: A system for tracking a character’s fame and reputation within the adventuring world, as well as options about how to spend the accumulated “prestige points” to gain long-term titles that give benefits in game, such as joining an organization, or short-term benefits like being able to get out of trouble with the local constabulary.

Retirement: This includes some tips for how to handle things when you’re ready to retire an adventurer and move on to a new character.

Retraining: Rules for retraining during downtime, so that you can lose skills, feats, and abilities that you don’t use as much as you expected to and replace them with ones that are more in line with your character. You can even lose levels in a class to gain levels in another class!

Taxation: The only two things in life that are certain are death and taxes. Adventurers may be able to cheat death, but … well, you get the idea. This section has rules on how to deal with taxation and taxation-related factors, like corrupt tax collectors.

Young Characters: Rules for starting characters who are younger than your typical starting adventurer, as well as the dangers of doing so.

As you can see, there’s really a plague of riches here. Each system on its own is quite good, but I think that taken together it’s just too much logistically for any campaign to probably handle well. Of course, the intention isn’t really that anyone will incorporate all of this anyway! The nice thing is that you certainly don’t have to take any systems that you don’t find useful.

For example, the Honor system just doesn’t make sense for my group, which contains a mix of mostly chaotic and neutral character alignments, and I’ve decided that the Relationship system is too formal for me as well. We have, however, adopted the Fame system and, should anyone want to use it, I would allow them to use the Investment system, and I am tracking out-of-character actions that cause shifts in alignment.

Kingdoms and War:

This chapter is divided into two sections – Kingdom Building and Mass Combat.

The Kingdom Building section mixes some of the earlier systems in new ways. The buildings from the Downtime section take on some new importance when viewed as part of a complete Settlement, providing various benefits to the settlement and to the kingdom as a whole. (Of course, for the PC to gain the benefits of Capital from them, they’d have to be the one who owns the building.) And the Exploration system mentioned above provides the basis for exploring new terrain and claiming it as part of your kingdom.

The Kingdom Building section provides some interesting opportunities, as you have to keep a lot more track of the mood of the people to avoid an uprising. You can put money into the treasury and later take it out (although this tends to aggravate the people, who would like their rulers to focus on keeping the coffers full). And it does take time away from adventuring in a way that not all players would find appealing.

However, even if you aren’t building a kingdom of your own, you might be working for someone who is, or become enlisted in the military as a means of helping to combat a foe that’s too powerful for you alone to stop. In these situations, the Mass Combat rules can still be quite helpful, providing a means for massive conflicts to play out.

Conclusion:

As a fan of quality rules systems, Ultimate Campaign (Paizo, Amazon) is truly a pleasure to behold, but it’s really in the implementation within a given gaming group that these different systems will flourish or flounder. If any one of these systems is shoved onto the players as a mandate that must be used to play in a way that doesn’t mesh with their goals, then it’s going to be a problem. As with all things in roleplaying games, the rules are a guide, but a good story is key. Ultimate Campaign, leveraged properly, can be a guide to a great storytelling experience for everyone involved, and in giving the players a real role in creating part of the world they’re adventuring in.

Related Links:

• Pathfinder ‘Ultimates’ Both Combat and Magic
• Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Pathfinder Supplement
• Art of the Genre: Game Review, Paizo Bestiary Collection

Disclaimer: Review copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

Andrew Zimmerman Jones is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. He has been a finalist in the Writers of the Future contest and received Honorable Mention in the 2011 Writer’s Digest Science Fiction/Fantasy Competition. In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Gate magazine, Andrew is the About.com Physics Guide and author of String Theory For Dummies. You can follow his exploits on Facebook, Twitter, and even Google+.

The second book in the series, Fiery Edge of Steel, has now arrived and it looks even more intriguing. It tosses an unusual mystery, a remote outpost, and an ancient and evil foe into the mix.

Lucifer and his army triumphed at Armageddon, leaving humans and demons living in uncertain peace based on sacrifice and strict laws. It is up to those with mixed demon and human blood, the Host, to prevent society from falling into anarchy.

Noon Onyx is the first female Host in memory to wield the destructive waning magic that is used to maintain order among the demons. Her unique abilities, along with a lack of control and a reluctance to kill, have branded her as an outsider among her peers. Only her powerful lover, Ari Carmine, and a roguish and mysterious Angel, Rafe Sinclair, support her unconventional ways.

When Noon is shipped off to a remote outpost to investigate several unusual disappearances, a task that will most likely involve trying and killing the patron demon of that area, it seems Luck is not on her side. But when the outpost settlers claim that an ancient and evil foe has stepped out of legend to commit the crimes, Noon realizes that she could be facing something much worse than she ever imagined…

Fiery Edge of Steel was published by Ace Books on May 28. It is 330 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.

Now I’m not saying that New Zealand isn’t gorgeous, but there is a big part of me that believes literature should stay more firmly based in fantasy, thus real actors and real sets somehow diminish the very nature of the words and images that helped define them in the first place.

In the case of The Hobbit, computers, no matter how sophisticated, couldn’t rekindle the joy I feel from the images I’ve seen painted and drawn concerning Tolkien’s world throughout my youth.

And speaking of youth, I’m constantly reminded that I’m from a quickly aging generation that now seems incredibly antiquated in the world. Technology is moving so fast, it sometimes makes my head spin to think that I grew up without cable television, cell phones, computers, the Internet, microwave ovens, and a plethora of other standard issue American items in today’s world.

I’d like to say that color was something that was always present in my favorite pastime, gaming, but again that would be fooling myself. It wasn’t really until the turn of the millennia that interior color pages were standard issue in gaming. I well remember, back in the late 1980s, how revolutionary FASA was for bringing out color interior images for games like Battletech and Shadowrun, the latter of which actually used glossy pages now found standard on all gaming material.

Still, the trend didn’t catch on until the D20 boom and the proliferation of digital art that made rendering images in color just as inexpensive to commission as black and white pieces.

But I digress, my real point here is that at one time, black and white illustration was ALL one could find inside gaming books, and that meant that artists had to hone their skills with ink and pencil more than we see today.

Of these black and white illustrators, some of the more refined individuals to ever grace the pages of any RPG could be found in I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Role-Playing, or MERP. Today, I will show you a bit of the art that most captured my imagination from three seminal interior artists for the game. So without further adieu, away we go to Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, sans the addition of a rabbit-drawn sleigh.

PART THREE

When one looks inside the pages of any, and I mean ANY, MERP supplement from the 1980s, you are going to find a Liz Danforth illustration inside.  Liz started defining black and white art (and still does so today) with Tunnels & Trolls, but it wasn’t until the regality of MERP aroused that her true character shown through.

To quote myself, because I’ve already said it too well,

I find her lines both regal and refined. She captures beauty in a distinct light, her characters revolving around a true sense of chivalry and almost Arthurian purpose. She creates trimmed beards, flowing gowns, and steady brows. She presents a serious demeanor that becomes infused in her characters, each portraying a look of carrying the weight of the world on their broad shoulders.

The nobility in each piece suggests more than role-playing as she blends the truism of real history with her creations. Perhaps you could call Liz the first ‘realist’, but the absolute facts lean more toward a creative spirit born from an education reveling in the tales of the past.

She once confided in me that she learned to read from Tolkien at her mother’s knee at the age of five, and I think that echoes in her imagery. Such an experience has provided her art with an unmistakable flare, and the touch of her guiding hand helped define genres such as Middle-Earth.

While Liz was taking on the world with characters drawn from the literature, artist Stephan Peregrine was doing the same by recreating the geography in exquisite ink-wash. Painting with ink is no easy skill, yet Stephan makes it look effortless with his brush, the world becoming so rich and tactile that you soon forget what you’re looking at is even black and white.

Peregrine is an absolute ink master, and if you ever get a chance to see his full interior work for Hillmen of the Trollshaws, don’t miss out because it will leave you shaking your head in quiet wonder.

He contributed to dozens of MERP supplements throughout the 1980s, but most of these were found prior to 1985 when his work began to dwindle and his love for the genre failed. Today, little is known of Stephan other than he withdrew from the society, and as the world was getting smaller he wasn’t part of that puzzle.

When I spoke about to him to Rick Britton, former Art Director of I.C.E., he told a tale of Stephan having become disillusioned with fantasy art, like so many great artists have over the years, and the last time I saw anything of his was in an estate sale from several years back where some non-MERP illustrations had been sold from a private collection.

The final talent in this wonderful triumvirate is artist Charles Peale. His work is a flowing wonder that changes in style throughout the supplements he did art for, but still manages to draw the eye no matter what he sets his pen to.

Charles’s work is seminal in most of the early MERP supplements and there are several that simply take your breath away.  When I decided to do this series, I set about to contact Charles and found that he’d actually worked for many years in a studio with Gail B. McIntoch, who is the primary focus of my first article in this series.

I was able to not only find Charles, but also get a few pressing questions answered about a handful of pieces I’d sent to him. What follows is his reply concerning a couple pieces you can find in this article.

At the time that I was working on them, I didn’t know much at all about the role playing games. I was an admirer of comic books like Conan, Kull & Red Sonja. I was certainly influenced by the illustrations of Barry Winsor-Smith & Howard Chaykin. Jeff Jones & Frazetta. I do not remember where the idea for the Nazgul came from, I think that Rick or someone from Iron Crown must have suggested the character’s features & look. The dragon was drawn to be a similar sort of visual compliment to the old tree in the picture. I must have had some “dragon sources” but I don’t recall what they were. The Sorceress was somewhat different in style, as you noticed. There was an artist back in the seventies who drew sort of sexy women and his lithograph prints were everywhere!  His name was Patrick Nagel and that was most likely my influence for that figure. Also, I used a stippling technique which I used quite often. I used to admire the stippling effects by a science fiction illustrator named Virgil Finley.

In the above, Charles runs the gamut of incredible artists that have helped define both his own techniques as well as fantasy, comic, and science fiction art for the past five decades, so you can well see why his work still resounds with emotion and wonder today.

With these three talents helping define the universe for players, there is no doubt why this game burst onto the 1980s gaming scene with such profound force, and again, proving rather definitively that, when taken as a collective whole, why Middle-Earth Role-Playing was indeed the prettiest RPG ever created.

You can check out Part One of this series here and Part Two here

If you like what you read in Art of the Genre, you can listen to me talk about publishing and my current venture with great artists of the fantasy field or even come say hello on Facebook here. And my current RPG Art Blog can be found here. Also, for my hardcore fans and those that love small press books, I’ve launched my latest crowd-sourcing campaign that I’m determined to see become the most successful fantasy fiction Kickstarter of all time, so come help me and all my artist and writer friends create a franchise to remember!

Luckily my earliest talent, which later turned out to be pretty much my only one, was that I took to reading like a cultist takes to, well, cults! This opened up a whole new world for me, as our elementary school had a well stocked library.

And it didn’t take long to catch on that the best books didn’t have any pictures in them. Sure, they had great covers, but inside there was nothing but words! Lots and lots of wonderful words that helped me fill my mind with images that no film or comic could match.

Another important thing that I learned was that adults didn’t care what you read as long as it was a genuine book. Comics brought only disdain and suspicion.

Especially those wonderfully gory black and white comics published by Warren, Skywald, and Eerie Publications, those you had to hide from the adults. My dad always called those comics “Doug’s damned weirdo books.”

[Click on any of the images in this article for larger versions.]

Nightmare #18 (Skywald Publications, 1974)

But books? Those were something different. Adults would look and say “How wonderful” He’s reading!”

And since these were books from the school library, then they just had to be safe, mundane, and respectable. They were so secure in these beliefs that they never ever bothered to take a good look at what I was actually bringing home.

That was their tough luck. I could parade these books around, read them when and were I wanted, and I never ever had to justify it. This was what I later learned to be “hiding in plain sight.”

Even after more than 41 years, I can tell you exactly which horror collections we had at the Johnny Clem Elementary School library.

We had all 3 of the Alfred Hitchcock horror collections for young readers (Haunted Houseful, Monster Museum, and Ghostly Gallery), both volumes of the Tales to Tremble By collections, Robert Arthur’s Ghosts and more Ghosts, and lastly Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural.

And to this day I still have copies of every one of these books. Back then, I loaned them out so much that I considered them to be my own private property.

Even though at the beginning I had to convince the librarians that I was a good enough of a reader that I could handle the “big kids” books and read them by myself.

Now it’s that last book, Hauntings, which I’d like to tell you about.  What attracted me immediately was its genuinely creepy and atmospheric cover by the late, great Mr. Edward Gorey.

Now Mr. Gorey is a genre in himself, who deserves an article dedicated to his work alone.  Mr Gorey’s dust jacket and interior illustrations combined with the choice of stories between the covers makes this, in my opinion, one of the most perfect reading experiences you could have.

Hauntings appears to be the only book ever edited by Henry Mazzeo, which is a real shame considering the quality of the collection he put together. The rear dust jacket flap states that he was a copywriter for Scholastic Books and was, at the time, working for Esquire and Gentlemen’s Quarterly.

This has to be one of the finest collections that I’ve ever read. And when you consider that it was also one of the first horror collections I ever read, you have to believe me when I say that it was a life changing experience.

I can’t decide if young people’s literature has been dumbed-down or not, but how many 10 year olds are cutting their teeth on such authors as Manly Wade Wellman, William Hope Hodgson, Joseph Payne Brennan, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, M.R. James, Henry James, and H.G.Wells?

This is literally a Who’s Who of horror literature.

I keep using the term literature when describing this collection, and that’s 100% accurate — but still slightly misleading. All of the tales included here are so well written that even the pulp stories in the collection qualify as literature. Yet every single one is also entertaining as all hell. So we end up with a collection of stories that seems imposing when looking at the list of authors, and yet all are such page turners that you will devour the collection in one evening.

Now let’s take a look at some of them there stories!

The collection opens up with August Derleth’s “The Lonesome Place.” Now I know that it seems to be a trendy Internet pastime to pick on Mr. Derleth. I know that his posthumous collaborations with H.P. Lovecraft aren’t collaborations, or even of the highest quality, and that many people take issue with his interpretation of the Cthulhu Mythos. He did divide the Mythos into good guys and bad guys, which doesn’t sit well in some circles.

What he did do though, which makes every other transgression forgivable, is co-found Arkham House, which saved Mr. Lovecraft from obscurity. Now let us all hail August Derleth!

So even though he’s praised as editor/publisher and damned as “Mythos mutilator,” he was also an outstanding story teller when he wanted to be. And “The Lonesome Place” is an excellent example of how well he could write.

“The Lonesome Place” tells of a small boy’s fear of walking down the street at night. A very long, tree-lined street without lights. He imagines what horrors are waiting for him in the darkness. This horror might just be real.

We are never sure though, and that’s what makes this one of the finest horror tales ever published. It frightens me even today.

I grew up on a very long street that was so heavily lined with trees that they met side by side and even arched over to meet in the middle of the street. Those were some scary walks home. The story is truly an all time classic.

“Where Angels Fear” by Manly Wade Wellman actually gave me nightmares back then. These days, Manly Wade Wellman is mostly remembered for his Silver John tales, which happen to still be in print. He also wrote dozens upon dozens of other regional horror stories that are very hard to come by.

“Angels” take place in the Appalachian area of North Carolina and tells of what befalls two ghost hunters who decide to spend the night in a suicide/murder house.

The story has one of the most awfully messed up endings ever! It pretty much lets you know that you should be extremely careful when picking a spot to sleep in.

“Levitation” by Joseph Payne Brennan was another doozy of a story to mess with a 10 year old kid’s mind. It is also a teaching story.

What does it teach us? Be polite, never heckle a hypnotist, and make sure he stays alive long enough to wake you back up from the trance! I just know that that hypnotized guy is still floating around somewhere out there.

“In the Vault” is not only one of Mr. Lovecraft’s best non-Mythos stories; it is simply one of his best stories, period. It’s a lovely black comedy that could have starred Vincent Price under the direction of Roger Corman.

A greedy and stingy undertaker finally ends up cheating the wrong dead guy and ends up being locked in a vault with him overnight. The poetic justice ending appealed to me so very much back then. Even if you know HPL inside and out, this is still worth rereading every couple of years.

Robert Bloch’s “The Man who collected Poe” takes obsessive book collecting, the cult of personality and the black arts to their logical end. Not as much scary as it is creepy in an EC Comics kind of way. But then, I never read a Robert Bloch story that I didn’t enjoy on one level or another.

“The Whistling Room” is one of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder stories. Carnacki was an Edwardian ghostbuster invented by Hodgson for a series of stories when he wasn’t busy writing about proto-Lovecraftian nautical horrors.

It seems that an acquaintance of Mr. Carnacki needs help solving the mystery of a horrible whistling emitting from a room in his country estate. Everyone who tries to spend the night there dies horribly.

This story has the strangest ghost that I’ve ever read about. And as ridiculous as it turns out to be, Hodgson manages to still make it scary and pulls it all off with a straight face.

The Carnacki stories are also still in print. They are well worth checking out.

Well, I had better close before this post becomes a doctoral thesis. Hauntings is a wonderful collection that is well worth seeking out. You can find it on Abebooks for a very reasonable price.

Every story is a winner. Every single one of them! The stories I covered are simply those that made such an impression on me, that even after 41+ years I can still vividly recall the plots.

I still own and treasure a copy of this book. Any efforts you make to find it will be well rewarded. This is truly a must-have collection no matter how old or jaded you’ve become.

Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural was edited by Henry Mazzeo, with drawings by Edward Gorey. It was published in 1968 by Doubleday.

Contents

Introduction: The Castle of Terror by Henry Mazzeo
The Lonesome Place by August Derleth
In the Vault by H. P. Lovecraft
The Man Who Collected Poe by Robert Bloch
Where Angels Fear by Manly Wade Wellman
Lot No. 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Haunted Dolls’ House by M. R. James
The Open Door by Mrs. Oliphant
Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier
Levitation by Joseph Payne Brennan
The Ghostly Rental by Henry James
The Face by E. F. Benson
The Whistling Room by William Hope Hodgson
The Grey Ones by J. B. Priestley
The Stolen Body by H. G. Wells
The Red Lodge by H. Russell Wakefield
The Visiting Star by Robert Aickman
Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes

All illustrations by Edward Gorey

My favorite recent Lovecraftian horror RPG is Kenneth Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu, from the marvelous Pelgrane Press. They’ve been supporting it with a series of terrific PDF releases, including The Repairer of Reputations a massive 44-page adventure based on the classic story of the same name by Robert W. Chambers, in which the alien beings described in the play are as real as the players believe them to be. And the 40-page Hell Fire, set in the seedy underclass of 18th century London, where a horrifying plague is ravaging the city, its victims in the grip of a sinister entity bent on engulfing the world in disease and death.

Now Pelgrane Press has assembled both of those adventures, and three more — Flying Coffins, set in Winter 1918 above the skies of France, as players take the role of members of the Royal Flying Corps stationed near the Front, confronting rumors that the next big push is about to begin… and that recent Germany victories in the air are due to supernatural assistance; Many Fires, in which the Investigators take on Pancho Villa’s bandit army in the mountains of northern Mexico, as well as something ancient and obscene that lies smoldering among ruins older than the Aztecs; and finally The Millionaire’s Special, which invites the players to travel first class on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, where they are invited to a private viewing of one of the world’s great curiosities, a cursed Egyptian mummy.

The adventures in Out of Space were created by Gumshoe designer Robin D. Laws, Adam Gauntlett, and Jason Morningstar. It also features extensive player handouts, pre-generated characters and exclusive new essays from the authors. It follows the Trail of Cthulhu collection Out of Time, which collected four earlier adventures. We last covered Pelgrane Press with their ENnie Award-winning Ashen Stars, their epic fantasy release 13th Age, and one of my favorite RPGs, The Dying Earth.

Out of Space was published by Pelgrane Press in January, 2013. It is 182 pages, printed on glossy paper with black and white illustrations. It is priced at $24.95. Cover art by Phil Reeves. Read more at the Pelgrane Press website.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

First, a series of snapshots. These will get at the “Why me?” part, I think:

* I am lying in a hammock outside my grandparents’ cabin, nestled in the ponderosa pine forest on the Mogollon Rim of Arizona…White clouds skim across a blue sky, so close you can almost reach up and touch them… The smell in my nose is pine mixed with the crisp scent of newsprint, courtesy of a Marvel Comics Star Wars and a DC House of Mysteries.

** I am curled up on the top bunk of my bunk bed (bunk beds rocked! — they were like having a tree-house/fort in your own bedroom), home sick from school. My dad (Happy Father’s Day, Dad!) walks in bringing the latest bounty from the mailbox: the new G.I. Joe comic. I eagerly rip off the plastic bag, anxious with bated breath to find out if Snake Eyes escaped the exploding bunker at the end of last month’s issue.

*** I am pedaling my bicycle down to the local gas station, eager to check the revolving display stand to see if the new installment of ROM or Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew has hit the stand (and, damn, I was in good shape back then, pedaling hither and yon. It was all downhill once I got my driver’s license).

**** I am entering a strange, mysterious place with my Nan and a bevy of rambunctious cousins, encountering shadowy aisles of knick-knacks and bric-a-brac, doo-dads, tools, and unidentified objects in the junk store christened Trifles ‘n Treasures. When I ask “Mister, do you have comics?”, the grizzled old man gives me a knowing look (and a wink?), reaches behind the counter, and pulls out a dusty box full of yellowing specimens, from which I procure a couple trifles that, for me, are definitely treasures: old Stan Lee-Jack Kirby monster comics. As an adult, I have occasionally had a dream in which I come across those comics, now long gone, stashed away in some forgotten drawer — and it is like I’ve rediscovered a treasure because, even though they are not worth much in dollar value to a collector, in the dream it is like I have recovered some hidden secret of my childhood. Then I wake up, and I am bummed.

When I cast my mind way back, my most nostalgically pleasing memories are wallpapered in four-color paneled pages.

What I mean to say is…Well, I don’t know if the next generation after mine will look back, when they reach my age, with a similar sort of fondness for Nintendo Gameboys. But, man, comics are great. For me, they’ll always conjure up good feelings of days gone by.

So, why Arak?

Arak was a character first introduced in DC’s Warlord comic (another one I often picked up, because of the hook I’ll get to in a moment). He got spun off into his own series, that improbable Native American-cum-Viking, back in the early ‘80s (my formative years) when fantasy comics were having a heyday spurred by the success of Marvel’s Conan comics. When DC wanted to cash in on this success with their own fantasy barbarian hero, they were able to tap the man who wrote all those Conan books for Marvel, Roy Thomas (thanks to a temporary falling-out Thomas had with that publisher). Decked out in his new DC duds, Thomas (along with co-creator/illustrator Ernie Colón) scribed the exploits of the other son of a thunder god (in this case He-No, a Native American deity) for a healthy 50-issue run.

ARAK, Son of Thunder is one of the lost comics, a mostly forgotten comic book from that era when I was cutting my eyeteeth. Which is not to say it was just another among literally hundreds of titles that flooded the market during the late ‘80s and ‘90s comics boom, most of which were churned out by obscure, long-forgotten independent publishers. No, ARAK is in another category: that of once-popular titles produced by one of the two comic-book-publishing juggernauts, a title which is now only to be found moldering away in 25-cent clearance boxes in the back rooms of comic-book stores next to issues of ROM, Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, and Atari Force (because those boxes, you know, often aren’t alphabetized).

Thing is, some of those old titles had special appeal, a certain je ne sais quoi — all those I just mentioned were ones I read and followed for a while during impressionable years of preadolescence. Perhaps that was the “something special” about them: not necessarily something inherent in the stories themselves, but in me and others my age — ten or eleven years old and especially susceptible to the four-color adventures they served up.

In all objectivity, I must confess that when I recall such comics I am seeing them through a powerful, and sometimes distorting, lens of nostalgia. I haven’t read them in thirty years, so what I remember are impressions. A feeling, really — a frisson.

I remember little about ROM, but a two-page spread that opened one issue certainly lingers: human carcasses suspended like butcher’s meat in a sewer, the culprits — aliens that ROM has come to Earth to oppose — lurking in the shadows (man, how did that get past the Comics Code Authority?).

And I remember Arak leaping from the pages of his comic, looking bad-ass with his sinewy muscles and his tomahawk and his mohawk and his pet hawk (did he have a pet hawk? Because that would be funny: a trifecta of ‘hawks.)

Let’s get this out of the way: what drew me to such comics — the hook — was always, first and foremost, monsters. Dinosaurs and aliens fell into this category. I was psyched for anything that was not part of the world we know, and the stranger the better. Giant animals, like when characters are shrunk down to the size of LEGO figures and the household cat is suddenly a menace, didn’t count: it was still just a cat. I wanted things that didn’t really exist in any size, except in the fossil record or in my imagination. And the more the merrier. I wanted “The Monster Mash,” All Monsters Attack mayhem. If you wanted to market a comic to the young Oz, slap several distinct monsters on the cover. You got me.

And ARAK often did.

So now, thirty years later, an older (and somewhat wiser — but still crazy for monsters) Oz is going to revisit his old friend Arak. I picked up the complete run for a smokin’ deal on eBay.

Join me here next week for the reunion.

Man, the years are flying by. Soon I’ll be in a wheelchair in a retirement home, playing checkers with Howard Andrew Jones and shouting at kids to keep their hoverboards off the lawn. Which — now that I think about it – doesn’t sound too bad, as long as they have cable. And smothered chicken for lunch.

But back to the Awards. Sorry, your mind wanders at my age. Here’s the complete list of winners:

Superior Achievement in a Novel:

The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)

Superior Achievement in a First Novel:

Life Rage by L.L. Soares (Nightscape Press)

Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel:

Flesh & Bone by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster)

Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel:

Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton (McFarland and Co., Inc.)

Superior Achievement in Long Fiction:

“The Blue Heron,” by Gene O’Neill (Dark Regions Press)

Superior Achievement in Short Fiction:

“Magdala Amygdala?” by Lucy Snyder (Dark Faith: Invocations, Apex Book Company)

Superior Achievement in a Screenplay:

The Cabin in the Woods by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (Mutant Enemy Productions, Lionsgate)

Superior Achievement in an Anthology:

Shadow Show edited by Mort Castle and Sam Weller (HarperCollins)

Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection (tie):

New Moon on the Water by Mort Castle (Dark Regions Press)
Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco Press)

Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction:

Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton (Reaktion Books)

Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection:

Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls by Marge Simon (Elektrik Milk Bath Press)

The complete list of winners is here, and the complete list of nominees is here. Congratulations to all the winners!

We reported on the 2011 Bram Stoker winners here, and we covered the 2010 nominees here.