In Defense of the Genius of HPL

James over at Grognardia reminded me that I missed HPL’s birthday, so I was inspired to go to our local library to borrow the recently published (2014, 2019) annotated volumes of his short stories. Edited by Leslie S. Klinger, the first has an introduction by the comic book legend Alan Moore. Unfortunately, Moore’s contribution to the project was more that a little disappointing.

While acknowledging HPL’s undeniable cultural influence, Moore found himself surprised at the “sheer unlikelihood of his ascent into the ranks of the respected U.S. literary canon.” This is, in part, due to the fact that HPL was only published in the “sensational and stigmatized pulp magazines,” although I would argue that we should look to these publications to find the Great American Writer because there is nothing more American than those same pulp magazines of the early twentieth century.

Then we get to the real reason Moore is so surprised by HPL’s ascent:

“acceptance of his output as substantial literature has undeniably been hindered by his problematic stance on most contemporary issues, with his racism, alleged misogyny, class prejudice, dislike of homosexuality, and anti-Semitism”

As a reminder, when HPL published his first story in 1916, Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. For those unaware, the 28th President of the U.S. not only screened The Rise of a Nation in the White House, but re-segragated it. I think it safe to forgive HPL for many of his unsavory views simply due to context. Indeed, if we were able to look at our own time through the lens of our progeny some hundred years from now, we might find ourselves unfairly judged for various -isms that we take for granted that they will see as vital as we see the various -isms we accuse HPL of.

Unfortunately, Alan Moore can’t bring himself to be so forgiving. Instead he tries to justify HPL’s ascent:

…it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American Dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generated Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world.

In Moore’s desperate attempt to separate himself from the various -isms associated with the environment HPL grew up in, he exposes his own small minded-ness and bigotry. In doing so, he not only misunderstands Lovecraft's appeal, but exposes just how nasty and severely limited a world-view dominated by the -isms we find so important actually is.

Given the presuppositions that fuel philosophies like intersectionalism and CRT, the color of one’s skin is determinative of just about everything in our life. If Moore’s assessment of HPL is correct, the only people who can really enjoy Lovecraft are those that share his fears as “white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant descended males who [are] … threatened by the shifting power relationships” and the very institutions that are now lifting HPL’s canon into the heights of the American literary canon are a bunch of -ists of various flavors.

What I find so disappointing about this vicious bile is not only that Moore’s canon largely exists within the direct descendent of the pulp magazine —the comic book — but that he comes so tantalizingly close to hitting upon the real reason HPL deserves to be among the literary greats of the American canon. Moore notes;

…advances in humanity’s expanding comprehension of the universe with its immeasurable distances and its indifferent random processes had redefined, dramatically, mankind’s position in the cosmos. Far from being the whole point and purpose of creation, human life became a motiveless and accidental outbreak on a vanishingly tiny fleck of matter situated in the furthest corner of a stupefying swarm of stars, itself one of many such swarms strewn in incoherent disarray across black vastness inconceivable.

While I vehemently disagree with this understanding of creation and of humanity, it accurately describes the harsh reality of the atheist position — and HPL was an atheist. It is in this that we can begin to appreciate Lovecraft’s appeal and his genius.

Despite the materialism that undergirds the atheism of the modern era, elves, dwarves, faeries, and dragons are very real things. Not in a material sort of way, of course. Rather, they are the imaginative and symbolic manifestations of our fears. These creatures represent the Other and the Outside and the fears that surround these things in the narrative way that we, as human beings, experience the world. Except that, in HPL’s lifetime, dragons were beginning to lose their narrative power. Dinosaur fossils were being found all over the world. Scientists appeared to be able to explain a materialist origin for creatures who very much looked like the dragons of our imagination. The universal fear of the Other and the Outside, however, never wanes.

The genius of HPL is that in the vastness of the meaningless cosmos that his atheism demanded, he found a new way to manifest the dragon. In the various elder gods, aliens, and malformed creatures that drive his characters to and over the edge of the madness that haunted his own family, he found a new way to narratively manifest the fears that always accompany humanity as we navigate the realities of our own existence. The reason HPL’s imagination has resonated as much as it has is due largely to the fact that, as hard as we try, the reality of his literary dragons cannot be so easily explained away as the ones that occupied the faerie tales of our childhood. This is made all the more true by the fact that his fears were prescient.

HPL died before the horrors of communism and fascism were widely known. These monstrous children of the materialist world-view truly drove humanity mad. These fevered fantasies and utopian nightmares driven by what could be called a Call of Cthulhu, killed tens if not hundreds of millions. The realities of Hitler’s concentration camps, Stalin’s gulags, Mao’s cultural revolution, and so many other crazed and vain attempts at altering reality creep at the back of our imagination. Like the dragons that fill the narrative fears of our forebears, HPL’s monsters fill ours. The horrors that Lovecraft describes in his stories are all hauntingly real. Lovecraft’s genius is that the monsters of his imagination are indeed cosmic and we are not likely to be able to explain them away anytime soon.

Thus, Alan Moore not only does a disservice to himself and his art, but to the genius of HPL.

As a final aside, I realize that it might seem strange that someone like myself would pen such an adamant defense of someone I so vigorously disagree with. In his own way, HPL is an honest atheist. The horrors that he describe are indeed very real. That kind of honesty is something to not only admire, but treasure. Additionally, that honesty was, in part, one of the reasons I was able to step away from the madness of atheism and its utopian nightmares and be able to see how very real Christ actually is.

On Playing a Cleric

Yesterday, there was a very interesting turn of events at Jeff's Gameblog. Jeff made (from my perspective) a wonderful journey from specifically excluding the cleric class from his Surfeit of Lampreys campaign to an understanding that they are, in fact, a perfect fit for his Wessex setting. As usually happens, however, when one starts talking about clerics and their place in D&D, the comments were a mix of those of us who like clerics and those who as yet can't get their head around them for a variety of reasons. As I've been meditating on this, I am beginning to wonder if (as more than one commenter and Jeff himself implied) the reason for the level of discomfort with the cleric is cultural more than anything else.

Most of us live in a largely secular and pluralistic society that is quite comfortable with the schizophrenia of 30,000+ denominations of Christianity, let alone all of the different flavors of other religions that coexist within our communities. Very few of us have any experience with the shared and assumed daily rituals of Medieval Christendom. Virtually none of us know the monastery and the Church as the center of civilization and learning. [As an aside, a good deal of what we know about classical philosophy and science was bequeathed to us by Christian monks.]

Jeff nicely sums up an outsider's view of the role of the cleric with this observation:

Have we crossed all the i's and dotted all the t's so that God doesn't get mad at us and sends us blessings rather than curses?

Being more an insider who has spent time living in and studying places where there is a shared cultural daily Christian ritual, I thought I'd dedicate some time to help shed some light on what it might mean to be a cleric in a D&D context.

Central to understanding the role of the cleric is the fallenness of man. We know good and evil — where evil is the absence of God. We are intimately familiar with a world that has no God — it is full of misery, disease, decay and death. In Goblinoid Games' Realms of Crawling Chaos, Daniel Proctor and Michael Curtis outline several literary themes found in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. They include:

• The Insignificance of Man — man is nothing in context of the infinite sea of space and time.
• The Vastness of the Universe — we are truly alone in an incomprehensibly large and unknowable cosmos.
• An Uncaring Natural World — nature will kill us many times over before it shows one ounce of compassion for our existence.
• The Reality of Man as an Animal — we are no better than the basest of animals.

In a world where there is no God, all of these things are true. More than that, all of the misery, disease, decay and death that overwhelms the world are all evidence that we are careening towards nothingness. These are the cold, hard facts of the fallen world.

Standing in defiance of this reality is Christ — where God and His creation are united in one person. He is the one point of historical reality where man is no longer insignificant, but the center of God's plan for salvation; where we have Emmanuel (God is with us) and man is no longer alone; where all of creation can and should be sanctified by the presence of Christ and His Church; and where man is the mechanism by which God works His salvation in the world.

The role of the Church in society is to bring the very presence of God into all of creation — to stem the tide of the fallen world by reuniting it with Christ. We do this by the ritual worship of everyday life. The curses that befall us all are not a result of God, but rather the absence of God. The blessing we experience and the miracles that we behold are the result of the intimate presence of God.

The cleric is the one who is trained in all of the prayers and rituals that the Church has to bring about this presence. His role is to teach and lead the people in these rituals and prayers. As an adventurer, the cleric would see it his duty primarily as stemming the tide of Chaos (the fallen world) by making the wilderness safe for Christian civilization and the sanctifying rituals that it brings with it.

Let me present a couple of examples of what I am talking about. Because Jeff is dealing with a fantasy version of England, let me present a couple of prayers found in the Carmina Gadelica — a collection of Gaelic prayers compiled by Alexander Carmichael.

PRAYER FOR TRAVELLING

Life be in my speech,
Sense in what I say,
The bloom of cherries on my lips,
Till I come back again. 

The love Christ Jesus gave
Be filling every heart for me,
The love Christ Jesus gave
Filling me for every one. 

Traversing corries, traversing forests,
Traversing valleys long and wild.
The fair white Mary still uphold me,
The Shepherd Jesu be my shield.
The fair white Mary still uphold me,
The Shepherd Jesu be my shield.

INVOCATION FOR THE BLESSING OF A HOUSE

God bless the house,
From site to stay.
From beam to wall.
From end to end,
From ridge to basement.
From balk to roof-tree,
From found to summit.
Found and summit.

INVOCATION FOR THE BATTLE TO COME

Jesus, Thou Son of Mary, I call on Thy name,
And on the name of John the apostle beloved,
And on the names of all the saints in the red domain.
To shield me in the battle to come.

To shield me in the battle to come.

When the mouth shall be closed,
When the eye shall be shut,
When the breath shall cease to rattle.
When the heart shall cease to throb.

When the heart shall cease to throb.

When the Judge shall take the throne,
And when the cause is fully pleaded,
O Jesu, Son of Mary, shield Thou my soul,
O Michael fair, acknowledge my departure.

O Jesu, Son of Mary, shield Thou my soul
O Michael fair, receive my departure!

St. George and why I Love Lovecraft

Yesterday, James over at Grognardia did a piece on August Derleth and his (albiet small) contribution to the heroic aspects of the Call of Cthulu RPG. Yesterday was also the Feast of St. George the Great Martyr. These two seemingly unrelated topics are deeply connected in my mind and in the way I understand and play RPGs.

Of all the authors listed in Appendix N that we old timers like to point to as our inspiration, HPL looms very large in my own formation as a person and as a player. The images he uses to describe the nothingness that looms in the dark just beyond our awareness and the words he gives our fears about these lurking dooms are not only hauntingly beautiful, but empowering.

We live in a fallen world filled with decay, disease and death. We are all doomed to die. We can live in denial and try desperately to ignore our own mortality only to find ourselves getting closer to our inevitable end every day, despite our best efforts at holding on to our youth. Death is alway crouched just over our shoulder, ready to strike at a moment's notice. To live in this shadow is terrifying. HPL names this fear and gives it form. Thus, though we are in the midst of fighting the long defeat our own life, HPL allows us to come face to face with that defeat and march forward in spite of it.

St. George was a Roman soldier from Cappadocia in modern day Turkey. He proved to be a charismatic leader and quickly rose in rank. By his twenties he was a tribunus and later became a comes. Eventually, he was stationed in Nicomedia as a member of the personal guard attached to Emperor Diocletian. In 303, the Emperor issued an edict authorizing the systematic persecution of Christians throughout the Empire. St. George faced his own end and he bravely walked through it. Instead of participating in the persecution of his own people, he confessed to be a Christian and openly criticized the imperial desicion. Diocletion ordered his torture and execution. He was eventally beheaded in front of the defensive wall of Nicomedia on Apri 23, 303.

St. George looked at the creeping doom described so evocatively by HPL and did not flinch. He chose to do the right thing — the heroic thing — despite his full knowledge that he would not do so without suffering and dying. Of course, from a Christian perspective, death no longer has any sting because Christ has risen from the dead, trampling death by death and to those in the tombs he has granted life. That belief, however, still requires a tremendous amount of faith and courage in the face of certain toture and death. St. George had that faith and that courage and he stood up in front of the looming darkness in an effort to stop it. In the short term, he failed.

Emperor Diocletian, and Galerius after him, systematically sought out and killed Christians throughout the Empire for eight long years. The Synaxarion of the Church is littered with martyrs from this era. In the long run, however, St. George's faith, courage and sacrifice changed lives. Diocletian's own wife became a Christian as a result. She stood in the breach and gave her life as well. Others followed day after day fightng the long defeat. Except that in the larger Christian world-view, though our own battles will end in defeat, the war belongs to Christ, and He will be victorious.

In 311, Galerius gave up on his quest to purge the Empire of Christianity and issed an edict of toleration. When St. Constantine became the first Christian Emperor in 313 initiating a Christian empire that would last a thousand years, Christianity, through the martyrs like St. George, conquered the known world without lifting a sword. Armed against the slithering darkness with only the words, "I am a Christian," St. George succeeded where the Gauls, the Dacians, the Greeks, the Persians, the Egyptians and countless others failed.

Though we die, we fight the darkness with good cause knowning that our King will come again and grant us citizenship in the New Kingdom where Cthulu, Yog Sothoth and the Elder Gods will be no more.

Thus, I love to play the low level characters who are up against seemingly unconquerable evil and leap into the breach though it may very well be their end. I do it, because in a small way I can emulate St. George knowing that though I suffer this tiny defeat, I make it possible for the next character/generation to have that faith and courage to do the same.

Happy Birthday to H.P. Lovecraft

James over at Grognardia reminded me that today is H.P. Lovecraft's birthday. If you couldn't already tell by the quote over on the right side of this page and the use of Lovecraftian images and quotes in my adventures and worlds, I am a big Lovecraft fan. Much as he has influenced science fiction and fantasy through the quiet background noise of the desolation he depicted in his writings, he has influenced the way I game. Chaos and evil have always passively or explicitly used Lovecraftian imagery in my worlds.

The irony is that I have a much deeper appreciation for Lovecraft and his world-view (with its belief that humanity and their works are, in the great scheme of things, insignificant) now, as a Christian, than I ever did when I first read his work and fell in love with it. The reason is simple: I agree with HPL and he illustrates it in a way that makes the reality of it truly horrifying.

I beseech you, my child, to look at heaven and earth and see everything in them, and know that God made them out of nothing; so also He made the race of man in this way. — 2 Maccabees 7:28

The grand sum total of everything humanity has ever done or will ever do sans God is nothing. I was personally confronted with this reality while wandering around Castle Siklos in southern Hungary on an overcast October day during the Yugoslavian Civil War. Just south of me, the Croatian stronghold of Osijek was under siege by Serbian forces. I felt the shock wave of each artillery shell rip through my gut and shatter my heart. In a world without God, all that remains is the endless struggle for power, at the of which is that black nothingness of a forgotten death. The typical response of an HPL character to such a reality — mind crushing despair — actually seems reasonable. Any one who actually has the fortitude to stand up in the face of this chaos truly is a hero.

Into this mess— this bleak, meaningless exercise in futility — came a babe who 33 years later would boldly march to Golgotha with a cross on His back. Willingly, He embraced the nothingness that is death. In so doing, He brought life, light and hope to those in darkness. He went to the very depths of where evil lay, looked the devil in the eye and said not here, not today. He snatched our very being from the jaws of absolute nothing and took us back with Him as a highly-valued treasure and presented us to His Father.

This is why I love the metaphor of delving into the depths of a megadungeon to face off against some vile spawn of chaos to steal away treasures to further the fight against forces of evil. This is why I love HPL so much. His imagery truly captures the utter terror and mind-dumbing despair of a world without God. Standing up to that horror and surviving to fight another day — that's a perfect expression of the hope I have in Christ.

Happy Birthday HPL.

Yog-Sothoth

Being a Lovecraft fan, I plan on sprinkling the wilderness of Erimia with quotes like this:

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate.

One might be surprised that I intend to include H.P. Lovecraft's insidious creation, Yog-Sothoth, in my Erimia campaign. When I first considered the idea, I was a tad bit uncomfortable. Reading Lovecraft's own description, one is struck by how powerful Yog Sothoth seems:

It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self — not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep — the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign...

However, upon a bit of reflection, I realized that from a Christian point of view, Yog-Sothoth is a brilliant cipher for the Devil. According to Christian cosmology, the Devil is an angel who rebelled against God:

How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High." (Isaiah 14:12-14)

The word "angel" itself means messenger, and they are also known by the title "the bodiless powers." Thus, they are part of the invisible creation. In his pride, the Devil sought to be greater than God. He tried to wrest power from God by by destroying the image of God in humanity. He first tried to destroy the relationship of God and humanity through tempting Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. Then he tried to destroy humanity's relationship to itself by tempting Cain to murder his brother Abel. Though he ultimately failed to destroy the image and likeness of God within us, he did succeed in introducing sin and death into the world. In so doing, he gained control of humanity through death and sin.

Thus, when Yog-Sothoth is described as one with space and time and yet somehow beyond space and time, this describes the Devil's being as a bodiless power. He is part of creation — space and time — at yet can move through space and time in a way incomprehensible to us — he is part of the invisible creation. Lovecraft says of Yog-Sothoth that:

he knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

The Old Ones become a cipher for the fallen angels that the Devil took with him in his rebellion. They broke through when humanity turned its back on God, and they strive for control of creation — a task they can never succeed at because they are part of creation. God, who is by nature something completely other than creation, sustains creation by His will. The irony is that without God's will, creation will return to the nothingness from which God created it — should the Devil and his fallen angels ever succeed in wresting complete control from God, they will cease to exist.

There are also Gnostic overtones with the description of Yog-Sothoth. Gnosticism is a heresy that claims that the creator God is really a selfish and evil demiurge that has trapped the true essence of human beings in creation. Only through "secret knowledge" does one discover their "true nature" as a spark of the "true god." One aspect that I love about Lovecraft's description of the "secret knowledge" of the Old Ones is that it leads to insanity — a fair description of anyone who willingly chooses nothingness over the eternity of life that God offers His creation.

Thus, Yog-Sothoth and the secret knowledge he offers is the patron of the forces of Chaos that inhabit the wilderness of Erimia.

Erimia Campaign

I have been working on a campaign that satisfies a desire to pay homage to three influences — Pulp Fantasy, Christianity, and the Retro-Clone. I want to share some of my thinking on this campaign, and briefly outline how it interacts with its influences.

Pulp Fantasy

Alternate World: This campaign takes place on an alternate earth that shares the same basic timeline as our own up until the fall of Rome. At this point our paths diverge.

Battle in Space: The Fall of Rome coincides with a battle between two Chaotic factions of inter-galactic/inter-dimensional beings within the solar system. Several ships fall to earth as casualties in the battle.

The Great Cataclysm: During the battle, a device is used in the proximity of earth that causes a violent reaction in its crust and its energy fields. Immense earthquakes, flooding and volcanic activity devastate the planet as the crust shifts almost 90 degrees. Civilization collapses, whole environments change over night, life as we know it is forever changed. An energy field surrounds the world, flowing in constantly changing rivers of energy and pooling in more permanent energy nodes. This energy, when tapped, allows survivors to use what we call magic. The nodes provide beneficial magic, and survivors flock to the few that exist. The rivers are forces of chaos. They sweep across the earth, transforming the natural world and causing all kinds of mutations. The world is now a very dangerous place.

Alien Survivors: The ships that crashed to earth had survivors. Most of their technology is lost, and they are stranded here on earth. So, they make the best of it, and begin burrowing deep within the earth. Sometimes they wait, sometimes they conquer, sometimes they cooperate with each other, sometimes they wage the same war that brought them to earth. They are always alien, and always hate their terrestrial prison. At least one of the factions will be inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. I also love the idea that one of the aliens used to look like this.

Human Survivors: What remains of humanity lives around the few energy nodes that exist. They have built great walled cities to protect themselves from the chaos that reigns in the world outside. However, the journey through the chaos to the energy nodes has left its mark. There have been many mutations, and humanity is much more diverse than it used to be.

We are in the Future: It has taken a couple thousand years to recover from the Great Cataclysm. The technology available is akin to Medieval Europe. This allows for a fantasy setting within a classic pulp fantasy future when compared to our own earth time-line. It also ensures that all of the various elements surrounding the Great Cataclysm are distant memories, the stuff of legend, and ancient.

Christianity

The Geography of Eden: For the land of Eden, the Book of Genesis gives us a basic geography of concentric circles. At the center is the Tree of Life. Around that is a fenced garden. Around that is the plain of Eden. Beyond Eden is the the land of Nod, also known as the Wilderness, where demons live.

Metaphoric Geography: The campaign world is modeled after the concentric circles of Eden. At the center is the energy node, which gives life to those in its proximity. Around the node is the City, a walled metropolis ever watchful for attacks from the outside world. Around the City is a plain, kept open and free by the soldiers of the City to enable a clear view of any invading monsters that crawl out of the Wilderness. This Wilderness, where monsters, demons, and creatures of chaos live, lies beyond the plain.

Monasticism: The name of the campaign, Erimia, is derived from the Greek for wilderness or desert. It is also the origin of the word hermit. In the Christian tradition, the first monastics were hermits who wandered out into the desert in order to combat demons where they lived. To carry the metaphoric geography to the PCs, they become these hermits — they are the first adventurers who seek to confront the monsters where they live.

St. Basil the Great: At the time of the Fall of Rome, the liturgy of St. Basil was commonplace in Eastern Christendom. The Anaphora of St. Basil makes this statement:

Through Him the Holy Spirit was manifested, the spirit of truth the gift of Sonship, the pledge of our future inheritance, the first fruits of eternal blessings, the life giving power, the source of sanctification through whom every rational and spiritual creature is made capable of worshiping You and giving You eternal glorification, for all things are subject to You.

I wish to highlight the words every rational and spiritual creature. This demonstrates that Christianity is easily adaptable to include beings that are non-human into its fold and is immune to destruction in the face of intelligent life from another planet. Thus, as humanity mutates, Christians are the most likely to welcome those who are different. Historically this is demonstrable. When plagues hit major population centers in the ancient world, pagans with the means to do so fled, leaving the poor and sick to die. When the plague ran its course, they returned. In contrast, Christians stayed and nursed the sick no matter the race, color or creed.

Thus, it is the Christians who come out of the Great Cataclysm in the best shape. It is Christianity that forms the foundation upon which the City is built. It is Christianity that has allowed humanity to survive in all its mutated diversity.

Retro-Clones

Mutant Future: This campaign is in many ways inspired by Section 9 of Mutant Future. The controlled gonzo effect of this attempt at making it possible to place Mutant Future characters in the middle of a fantasy setting is very much the tone I want for this campaign. Both Mutant Humans and Replicants will be available as PC classes, and Mutant Future's rules on exposure to radiation can be easily adapted for use with exposure to the chaotic energy rivers of the Wilderness. Additionally, with all of the various mental mutations available, Mutant Future makes it easy to create Psionic special effects without having to come up with or use a Psionic system.

Labyrinth Lord: Although I prefer the simplicity of Swords & Wizardry, which invites the use of house rules, for this campaign I will use the Labyrinth Lord rule-set. Mutant Future was built upon these rules. Thus, using large chunks of Mutant Future material will require little or no conversion.

Sandbox: This campaign is designed very specifically to be a classic hex and dungeon crawl. The Wilderness is vast and ready to explore. Housed within the Wilderness are dungeons — ruins from past civilizations, abandoned outposts of alien survivors, and dwelling places of things dark and evil. In order that the metaphor of monasticism and Eden be consistent, the City must remain a safe haven without conflict or adventure possibilities. There are no politics to be had, no plots to uncover, no puppet master pulling strings. The adventure is always out in the Wilderness. The adventurer is always fighting the monsters where they live.

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks: This is one pf my favorite modules of all time. The way this module blends genres is exactly the pulp feel I want for this campaign. The retro-clone movement allows me to ask the question, what if this kind of adventure was more popular or common in the D&D universe? Though not representative of every dungeon that lies in the wilderness beyond the City, there will be more than one opportunity to encounter the remnants of the space battle that created this age.

Here There Be Monsters

In discussing monsters, I feel it necessary to actually ask the question: What is a monster? Being an Orthodox Christian, to answer this question, I'd like to go to Scripture and one of the original languages of Scripture, Greek. Looking up the word "monster" in a Greek dictionary reveals the word teras. I never trust language dictionaries when only going from English to another language, so I went to my handy Liddel & Scott Greek-English Lexicon, which gives teras two definitions:

1) a sign, wonder, marvel
2) in a concrete sense, a monster

These two definitions are not unrelated. There are other words in Greek that denote signs, wonders, and marvels. The word teras, being related to the English word terror, indicates that the sign, wonder or marvel brings with it a sense of fear.

Teras is not used in the New Testament, but is found in Greek Translations of the Old Testament. It is used to denote the revelatory aspect of certain events — the event somehow reveals that God makes concrete decisions in the present, that He is in control, and these affect not only the present, but the future. In other words, they are frightening events that remind us that God is the master and creator of the universe, not us. I find this fascinating because of the ramifications it has on role-playing.

In my own experience, the most terrifying opponents in RPGs are humans. The reason for this two-fold. Firstly, having humans as the primary bad guys engenders fear and paranoia because they are not easily identifiable. Whereas an orc is easy to spot, an evil human can be anywhere and be anyone. The second, and more important for this discussion, is that they serve as mirrors — they reflect back at us what is worst in us.

In Orthodox Christian theology, this revelation of sin is understood to be a blessing. It allows us to take control of what is sinful in us, and repent — turn back towards God. This is an unending process that continues until we die and has been compared to purifying gold with fire.

For the purposes of D&D, monsters can be understood as the concrete consequences of sin. God, being creator of everything, including monsters, allows them to exist in order for us to come face-to-face with our own sins — to confront our own monsters and demons, as it were. This brings to life one of my favorite passages from the OT — Genesis 4:6-7 (NJB):

The Lord asked Cain, 'Why are you angry and downcast? If you are doing right, surely you ought to hold your head high! But if you are not doing right, Sin is crouching at the door hungry to get you. You can still master him.'

The word for "sin" in the Hebrew denotes a demon or a monster waiting to devour. This is a marvelous image of our life-long struggle with sin.

Also related to this image is the monastic tradition of Orthodox Christianity. In the Hebrew mind, the desert or wilderness was where demons lived. Thus, monastics would wonder into the deserts and wilderness in order to take on the demons in their own territory — to be that expeditionary force to tame the wilds for the rest of us.

This image, of course, brings to mind the traditional dungeon crawl and hex crawl of old-school D&D. It also reinforces the idea that PCs are that part of civilization whose calling is to go out into the wilderness to confront the demons and monsters in their own territory. In doing so, we are confronted by our own sin and are afforded an opportunity to turn back towards God.

Let me give you a concrete example. One of my all-time favorite pulp authors is H.P. Lovecraft and my favorite monsters in D&D are those that pay homage to Lovecraft's dark vision. For me, these grotesque, hungry, consuming, terrifying creatures and their call represent what awaits creation without God. At the heart of Lovecraft is this sense of inevitable decay, madness and destruction from beyond. At the heart of Orthodox theology is the belief that God created everything from nothing. Without God, all of creation will return to nothing. Lovecraft's call of Cthulu is a personification of this reality. Thus, in terms of D&D, an adventure where PCs enter into a dungeon controlled by Cthulu-inspired monsters is a concrete expression of our own struggle against the nothingness that awaits us if we do not have God to sustain us into eternity.

In other words, these are teras — they are frightening events that reveal to us God and that without Him, we are doomed to the creeping nothing embodied by Lovecraft's horrific visions.