Patrick Stuart joins us to discuss Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan”, oral traditions, lush prose, taking pride in working as a servant, the sun as an old cake bun, Peake's popularity, Cormac McCarthy, Gormenghast as a demiplane, maintaining status quo as a party goal, the court of Melniboné, physical differences as "monstrous traits", going back in time to support expired Kickstarters, and much more!

Appendix N Book Club

Episode 103 – Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan” with special guest Patrick Stuart

Andy from Breakfast in the Ruins joins us to discuss Poul Anderson's "Operation Chaos”, homemade ginger beer, Moorcock's influence on the fantasy genre, frothing latter-day conspiracy theorist wet dreams, the limitations of the word lycanthropy, main characters who suck, heroes defending the military industrial complex, Anderson's influence on Moorcock, Van Helsing the Cleric, werewolves as player characters, Gygaxian naturalism, statting up Christian mythology, and much more!

Episode 133 – Poul Anderson's "Operation Chaos” with special guest Andy from Breakfast in the Ruins

Brad Kerr joins us to discuss Jack Vance's "Cugel's Saga", virtual tabletops, Brom, pompous vocabulary, whimsical characters, world-class worldbuilding, being nickel-and-dimed by the boss, moving from one grift to the next, interesting mounts, making monsters more mysterious, D&D 4E, being your own boss, and much more!

Episode 138 – Jack Vance's "Cugel's Saga" with special guest Brad Kerr

Becky Annison joins us to discuss Lloyd Alexander's "The Book of Three", the Dungeons and Dragons movie, dwarven guides, Welsh myth, characters with firm personality hooks, spaghetti westerns, the Black Cauldron, clear linear mission paths, giving each character their moment, changing the stakes of successes, horror mechanics, destroying books or cards for art, and much more!

Episode 140 – Lloyd Alexander's "The Book of Three" with special guest Becky Annison

This episode is dedicated to Rick Byrne. Please consider sending a gift to support Leukemia research at UCSF: UCSF Foundation, PO Box 45339, San Francisco, CA 94145 or make a gift online at makeagift.ucsf.edu. Please be sure to note that the gift is in memory of Rick Byrne to support the Leukemia research of Dr. Neil Dunivan.

Episode 146 – Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "A Canticle for Leibowitz” with our Patron Book Club

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Dan Simmons's "Hyperion”, listening to audio books at work, Vaults of Vaarn, prescient fiction, choosing whether or not to continue on with fiction series, the Dying Earth, ambiguous endings, failed attempts at humor, the author's current politics, chase scenes, Shadowdark, roasting bestsellers, reading books outside of our comfort zone, plans for the future of the show, and much more!

Dan Simmons's "Hyperion” with our Patron Book Club

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss James Enge's "Blood of Ambrose", obscure words from classic languages, Scooby Doo episodes, slowing down for character development, The Book of the New Sun books, magic from alchemy, flying horses, world maps, DCC spell corruption, blood that catches fire, other notable works by the author, trial and error, and much more!

James Enge's "Blood of Ambrose" with our Patron Book Club

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Katherine Kurtz's "Deryni Rising", sarcophagi, achieving literary liftoff, the Brandon-to-Demos scale, fantasy worlds with real-life historical cultures, female fantasy authors writing under their own names, scattered hidden magical races, Empire of the Petal Throne, AD&D psionics, counterspells, adventure hooks to clear a character's name, Dragon Magazine and White Dwarf Magazine on archive.org, and much more!

Katherine Kurtz's "Deryni Rising" with our Patron Book Club

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Gretchen Felker-Martin's "Manhunt", visceral horror-thrillers, section transitions, interchangeable characters, physical descriptions of characters, depictions of trans genitalia, sexualizing a wide varieties of body types, TERFs and anti-vaxxers, replacing PCs with NPCs, the Broo in Runequest, overland exploration in Forbidden Lands, parental access restrictions in libraries, and much more!

Gretchen Felker-Martin's "Manhunt"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Jack Vance's "Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden", incorrect uses of words or advanced neologisms, having less reading time in our adult lives, feeling like anything can happen, the Brothers Grimm, worlds where horrific things happen, toxic masculinity, Tolkien's influence, creating a sense of peril in combat, attacking the character sheet, the Dying Earth setting, proto-Arthurian stories, and much more!

Jack Vance's "Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Howard Andrew Jones's "The Desert of Souls", Hannibal from Carthage, first-person narratives, medieval Baghdad, Harold Lamb, the outsider vs the insider as the protagonist, making prayers at the proper times, fire magic, Oriental Adventures, historically-grounded fantasy, using perspective to spice up situations, Sign of the Labrys, and much more!

Howard Andrew Jones's "The Desert of Souls"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", independent presses, Victorian architecture, one-thing-after-another type of books, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom books, Edgar Allan Poe horror stories, graphic novel adapatations, recurring dreams and locations, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, weird townsfolk, barrel monsters, the Hexcrawl of Unknown Kadath, Gene Wolf and the Book of the New Sun, and much more!

H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss C.J. Cherryh's "Gate of Ivrel", healing salves, claustrophobic third-person narratives, planetary-scale, parallels to Elric and Birthgrave, focusing on interiority over physical descriptions, precise and consistent language choices, endings that work, the Glorantha setting in Runequest, moving campaigns to different settings, hunger as a riveting threat, Night of the Leepus, and much more!

C.J. Cherryh's "Gate of Ivrel"

Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita", random treasure tables, books in translation, blending the fantastic and the political, Russian fiction, the adventures of the head of secret service in Jerusalem, transcending the world, flying around naked on a broom, pranking theater crowds, voluntarily requesting to be locked up, stuffing dumplings in your jacket pockets, the limits of what characters find outrageous, and much more!

Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Karl Edward Wagner's "Dark Crusade", French military lingo, eruptions of chaos and evil, trying to fight the entire world, editorial meddling, fantasy drug use, domain-building, using war game rules for larger battles, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the grandeur of Wagner's stories, bullywugs, the Chronicles of the Kencyrath, and much more!

Karl Edward Wagner's "Dark Crusade"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Lloyd Alexander's "The Black Cauldron", the case of Joseph's unreturned hardback, the unsuccessful animated adaptation, the advantage of nostalgia, complaining about invisibility, the butchering of the Welsh language, annoying anatogonists, a horse's suicide, Thor's hammer, bringing relatively low-level characters into a big epic continent-spanning war, contacting the Alexander estate, and much more!

Lloyd Alexander's "The Black Cauldron"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss China Miéville's "Perdido Street Station", dreamlike states, the Wizard of Oz, being held at arms' length, shapeless books, dropping the true identity of a serial killer, customizing characters, coming out of deep freeze, DMs using PC ideas, the Godfather, illustrations of moments from the novel, baroque and florid language, and much more!

China Miéville's "Perdido Street Station"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss Roger Zelazny’s “Dilvish, the Damned”, military words, short stories from the 60s-80s, Jack of Shadows and the Amber books, how easy it is to lose invisible swords, tagging along like a squire to a knight, wizards in fish-shirts, half-elves in literature, sorcery requiring the assumption of an artificially-constructed personality, escaping death traps, breaking locks, assassins climbing mountains of ice, and more!

Roger Zelazny's Dilvish, the Damned

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss A. Merritt's "The Face in the Abyss", reading a book for the first time that has been owned for decades, classical headgear, the differences and similarities between A. Merritt and H. Rider Haggard, science-fantasy, losing track of characters, non-villainous snakes, protagonists surrounded by dangerous characters, spider-people, playing with the infrared spectrum, gating in gods from other planes, the Princess Bride, and much more!

A. Merritt's "The Face in the Abyss"

Our Patron Book Club joins us to discuss William Goldman's "The Princess Bride", straight-forward language, Buttercup's baby, comparisons to the film, bitching about trees, DCC 0-level funnels, twists on resurrections, using character backstories, the QuestWorlds RPG, love between the most attractive people in an area, dithering players, and much more!

William Goldman's "The Princess Bride"

Hoi and Jeff explain what the Appendix N is and why they care.

Episode 0 - The Appendix N (and why we care)

The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is a compilation of the first three novellas in the Harold Shea/Enchanter series, “The Roaring Trumpet” (1940), “The Mathematics of Magic” (1940), and “The Castle of Iron” (1941, revised 1950). The Compleat Enchanter was first published as a Nelson Doubleday/Science Fiction Book Club hardcover in 1975 before being released as a Del Rey paperback in 1976, featuring a charming Brothers Hildebrandt cover painting.

The three adventures in this book take place in the worlds of Norse Mythology, Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, and Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso.

De Camp and Pratt would later team up for two more Harold Shea stories, “The Wall of Serpents” (1953), and “The Green Magician” (1954). These stories fall outside of the Appendix N Book Club reading list since they were not collected in paperback until 1979, but Gary Gygax and Tim Kask must have been big fans since “The Green Magician” made its first reappearance in print since 1960 in issues 15 and 16 of The Dragon (1978)!

In any case, the Harold Shea series undoubtedly left its mark on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, most obviously in the magical spell component requirements in The Players Handbook and the Against the Giants series of modules.

Episode 1 - L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt's "The Compleat Enchanter"

Conan (Lancer Books, 1967) by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter was part of first comprehensive paperback edition of the Conan saga. Conan was the fifth volume published, although it is first in the internal chronology--later printings of the series numbered the books in chronological order. When Lancer when out of business in 1973, Ace Books picked up and completed the series, keeping it in print until the mid 1990s.

In a now controversial move, series editors de Camp and Carter filled in gaps in Conan’s timeline by expanding Howard’s unpublished notes and fragments, re-writing non-Conan stories, and writing entirely new stories, thus jump-starting the Conan pastiche era.

For the purist, the Howard-only stories in this collection are “The Hyborian Age, Part 1” (1936), “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933), “The God in the Bowl” (1952, Howard’s original version first published 1975), and “Rogues in the House” (1934).

Regardless of the editorial controversies, the Lancer/Ace series was the only widely available source of Howard-penned Conan stories for nearly three decades, sustaining the sword and sorcery boom from the late ‘60s to the mid ‘90s. Robert E. Howard’s furious prose and the now-iconic Frank Frazetta cover illustrations on many of the volumes have cemented Conan the Cimmerian in popular culture. Frazetta had clearly read and internalized the dynamism of the Conan stories, as shown by his cover painting of Conan’s epic struggle with Thak the apeman from “Rogues in the House”.

As Dungeons & Dragons was created in the era of peak Conan, it is natural that Conan’s presence would be felt, starting with a write-up in Robert Kuntz and James M. Ward’s OD&D supplement Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes (1976). Gary Gygax himself would write up Conan as he appeared in various stages of his career in Dragon magazine issue 36 (1980)--a treatment that presaged the eventual AD&D Barbarian class in Dragon issue 62 (1982) and Unearthed Arcana (1985).

Conan the Cimmerian has since remained a perennial roleplaying game property, both with TSR and other publishers, but that’s a story for another day….

Episode 2 – Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, & Lin Carter's "Conan"

Swords and Deviltry (Ace Books, 1970) by Fritz Leiber was originally published in paperback as part of Ace Books’ complete seven volume saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Although Swords and Deviltry is first in the series chronology, it was actually the fourth book published. 

Leiber and his lifelong friend Harry Otto Fischer created Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in an exchange of letters in 1934, basing the pair loosely on their own friendship, with Fischer as the diminutive Mouser and Leiber as the towering Fafhrd. The first story featuring the Twain (as they are often called) to appear in print was “Two Sought Adventure” AKA “The Jewels in the Forest” in 1939 in Unknown magazine. A handful of further Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories trickled out over the next two decades until Cele Goldsmith commissioned brand-new stories for Fantastic magazine starting in 1959, which lead to the Ace paperback collections of the late 1960s. 

Other than the continued interest in Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, this new appreciation of Leiber’s fantasy fiction was one of the biggest contributors to the sword and sorcery renaissance of the 1960s. In fact, Leiber is credited with coining the term “sword and sorcery” in 1961 when Michael Moorcock called for a name for the type of fantasy fiction that Howard, Leiber and others were coming to exemplify. 

By the time Swords and Deviltry was published Leiber had been writing tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser for over 30 years, but it is only in this book that he revealed their full origins in the stories “Induction” (1957), “The Snow Women” (1970), “The Unholy Grail” (1962), and “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” (1970).

Swords and Deviltry featured a typically moody Jeffrey Catherine Jones cover, although the effect is compromised by the trade dress of later printings:



Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s gaming history actually predates their first publication, as Leiber and Fischer created a complex three-dimensional board game in 1937 to amuse themselves and help them visualize the Twain’s stomping grounds of the city of Lankhmar and the world of Nehwon. This game was later re-developed and published by TSR as Lankhmar in 1976. 

Leiber and Fischer weren’t mere hands-off IP licensors, however. Leiber would contribute a witty conversation with Fafhrd and the Mouser about wargaming in the very first issue of The Dragon (1976), followed by the short story “Sea Magic” in issue 11 (1977). Fischer’s short story “The Childhood and Youth of The Gray Mouser” then appeared in issue 18 (1978). 

Lawrence Shick and Tom Moldvay gave Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser their first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons write-up in issue 27 of The Dragon (1979). The Twain and various other denizens of Nehwon were given a whole chapter in James M. Ward’s and Robert J. Kuntz’s Deities & Demigods (1980), with memorably gritty illustrations by Jennell Jaquays.

Future notes on the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series will cover later TSR Lankhmar publications, post-TSR licensees and other games that have been directly influenced by the city of Lankhmar. Stay tuned!

Episode 3 - Fritz Leiber's "Swords and Deviltry"

Special guest Gavin Norman (author of The Complete Vivimancer and Theorems & Thaumaturgy) joins us to discuss Jack Vance‘s The Dying Earth!

Jack Vance originally wrote the loosely connected stories that comprise The Dying Earth while serving in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. Vance’s fiction had started appearing in pulp magazines as early as 1945, and The Dying Earth marked his first book publication when it was released in digest-sized paperback in 1950 by Hillman Periodicals, best known as a comic book and magazine publisher.

The Dying Earth appears not to have been particularly successful at first, as it was not reprinted even as Vance’s career went on an upswing in the late 1950s & early 1960s. Hillman ceased publishing in 1961 and Lancer Books snapped up The Dying Earth, reprinting it in paperback in 1962 with a cover by the ever-versatile Ed Emshwiller depicting the denouement of the story “Ulan Dhor”.

The Dying Earth did well enough that Lancer kept it in print until they went bankrupt in 1973, by which time its reputation was such that it has remained in print to this day through a series of different publishers. No doubt the continued success of The Dying Earth led Jack Vance to revisit the setting starting in the mid 1960s. These new stories that would eventually be published as The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), followed by the post-Appendix N books Cugel’s Saga (1983) and Rhialto the Marvellous (1984).

Gary Gygax wrote in issue 2 of The Excellent Prismatic Spray (2001) that he first became a fan of Jack Vance after reading The Big Planet (1957) in the pulps in the early 1950s and then was “absolutely enthralled...as no work of fantasy had done for a long time” with the publication of The Eyes of the Overworld in 1966. The Dying Earth further cemented Gygax’s love of the setting.

When it came time to devise a magic system for Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax felt that a “Vancian” system of memorized spells that are expended when cast and that then must be re-learned before casting again was the best way to provide flavor and balance the magic-user against other classes. The Enchanter series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt would provide the situational pre-conditions for spellcasting in D&D, but these spell components were often glossed-over, as Gygax laments as early as 1976 in issue 6 of The Strategic Review, the predecessor to Dragon magazine.

Oddly, D&D’s publisher TSR appears never to have tried to license the Dying Earth setting even though Gary Gygax remained a huge fan of Jack Vance and actually had significant contact with him after Dungeons & Dragons took the world by storm. The first time gamers would get to officially adventure in the Dying Earth was with the publication of Pelgrane Press’ The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game in 2001. Goodman Games has since licensed the Dying Earth setting for its Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, with a target release date of late 2017.

Episode 4 - Jack Vance's "The Dying Earth" with special guest Gavin Norman

The Hobbit first came to Oxford University professor J.R.R. Tolkien when he was grading papers in the early 1930s. Coming upon a blank page in an exam book, he suddenly wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Tolkien worked on The Hobbit for the next several years before submitting it for publication in 1936 as a children’s book to George Allen & Unwin, then known mainly as an academic publishing house. The publisher Stanley Unwin paid his ten-year-old son Rayner a shilling to review the manuscript, which he reported on as follows:

"Bilbo Baggins was a Hobbit who lived in his Hobbit hole and never went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his Dwarves persuaded him to go. He had a very exiting (sic) time fighting goblins and wargs. At last they get to the lonely mountain; Smaug, the dragon who guards it is killed and after a terrific battle with the goblins he returned home — rich!

This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9."

Young Rayner Unwin’s recommendation convinced his father to publish The Hobbit in hardcover in 1937, to strong sales and critical acclaim. Stanley Unwin asked Tolkien for a sequel to The Hobbit as early as December 1937, a request that would take over 15 years to come to fruition as The Lord of the Rings. During that long process, Tolkien would revise The Hobbit for the first time to bring it into closer agreement with developments in The Lord of the Rings, especially in the depiction of Gollum and the One Ring. 

Although The Hobbit had been available in the U.S. from 1938 in hardcover, it had not been published in U.S. paperback by the mid 1960s, partly because of Tolkien’s distaste for the “degenerate” paperback format. This all changed when Ace Books put out an unauthorized U.S. paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1965 after finding what they perceived to be a copyright loophole. Ballantine Books rushed to put out authorized U.S. paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in 1965. Tolkien made additional revisions to both works both for his own satisfaction and to cement their U.S. copyright status, with The Hobbit’s third edition appearing in 1966.

The most common version of The Hobbit available during the Appendix N era would have been the 45th printing and onwards of the Ballantine Books revised paperback, featuring a lovely watercolor cover illustration by Tolkien himself of Bilbo’s escape from Mirkwood astride a barrel.

Gary Gygax denied that Tolkien’s works were a particular influence on the development of Dungeons & Dragons, but he certainly would have been conscious of the desire of prospective players to experience the trappings of Middle-earth. Many denizens of Middle-earth including Hobbits, Ents, Orcs, and Balrogs were present in the “Fantasy Supplement” of Chainmail (1971), Gary Gygax’s medieval miniatures wargame that was the immediate predecessor to Dungeons & Dragons. 

The Tolkienian references continued in Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s original Dungeons & Dragons (1974) box set until the Tolkien estate caught wind of this. To avoid copyright and trademark violations, TSR modified or removed Tolkienian references from Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons in 1977, with Hobbits becoming Halflings, Ents becoming Treants, and Balrogs becoming Type VI Demons, etc.

Episode 5 – J.R.R. Tolkien's “The Hobbit"

J.R.R. Tolkien and perhaps Robert E. Howard aside, no Appendix N author has had as a large a pop culture footprint as Gardner F. Fox, but not for any of the works cited by Gary Gygax. Although hardly a household name today, Gardner Fox was among other things one of the most prolific comic book writers of the 20th Century. Fox was originally a practicing attorney in New York City, but still must have found it hard to make ends meet during the heart of the Great Depression--in 1937 he began writing for DC comics as well as contributing stories to many of the pulp magazines of the era. Over the course of his 30 year career with DC Comics Fox was responsible for such seminal creations as the Golden Age Flash, the Sandman, Doctor Fate, Hawkman, and the Justice Society of America. During the Silver Age of the 1960s, he would help re-vamp the Atom and Hawkman, create the Justice League of America, introduce Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, and write his most famous story, “The Flash of Two Worlds!” (The Flash #123, 1961), which introduced the concept of the Multiverse to DC Comics.

Fox left or was cut loose from DC Comics in 1968 when the company shamefully declined to give health insurance and other employee benefits to its older writers and artists. He then turned to writing novels and short stories full-time, churning out tales of all genres both under his own name and under at least 15 pen names. Fox’s works included science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, historical fiction, and the sexploitation spy series Lady from L.U.S.T. (as Rod Gray) and Cherry Delight (as Glenn Chase).

Among the over 100 novels that Fox would pen over the next decade and half was the first of the Kothar series, Kothar Barbarian Swordsman (Belmont Books, 1969). Kothar Barbarian Swordsman was clearly meant to cash in on Conan/swords and sorcery boom of the era, but an old pro like Fox couldn’t resist having a little fun along the way, such as with the absurdly pompous introduction by “Donald MacIvers, Ph.D” which leaned heavily on the theories of the obscure German philosopher “Albert Kremnitz”. One can’t help but think that Fox was tweaking the likes of L. Sprague de Camp and other well-educated writers who were insecure about toiling in the vineyards of fantastic fiction. Fox by contrast wears his learning lightly, throwing in a myriad of historical but obscure terms such as “hacqueton”, “athanor”, and “cotehardie” more to amuse himself and because he may have liked their sound in a sentence than as a means to place himself above the material.

The Kothar stories are presented with economy, craft, and imagination, so it’s not surprising that they stood out to Gary Gygax amidst all of the other derivative swords and sorcery in print at the time. The most well-known borrowing from Kothar in Dungeons & Dragons would be the lich, a powerful sorcerer who has prolonged his life into undeath--Gygax confirmed this borrowing here. Liches made their D&D debut in the Original edition’s Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975) by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. The lich would then appear in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual (1977) and as the demi-lich in the notorious deathtrap module S1: Tomb of Horrors (1978).

Gardner Fox and Gary Gygax became friends somewhere in this time period, paving the way for Fox to create the third of his swords and sorcery heroes, Niall of the Far Travels for Dragon magazine. Niall of the Far Travels premiered in issue two of The Dragon (1976) and would eventually appear in 10 stories over the next five years. 

Gardner F. Fox was a man of many interests and it ultimately fitting that his presence is felt in a broad swath of pop culture from comic books to fantastic fiction to roleplaying games and all the media that have derived from them.

Episode 13 - Gardner F. Fox's "Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman"

Hoi and Jeff discuss H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness & Other Tales of Terror with special guest Bob “The Voice” Brinkman!

Given H.P. Lovecraft’s omnipresence today, it’s easy to forget that he had largely faded out of reading public’s mind within a few years of his death in 1937. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei did their best to keep Lovecraft in print by founding the small press Arkham House in 1939, but the publishing house’s output for its first 20 years was mostly limited to high quality hardcovers in short print runs.

Arkham House was often on tenuous financial footing from its very founding, but the snowballing revival of interest in Lovecraft’s Weird Tales compatriot Robert E. Howard in the 1960s seems to have also raised Lovecraft’s visibility. Arkham House seized the opportunity by releasing three newly re-edited omnibus volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction, The Dunwich Horror & Others (1963, revised 1985), At the Mountains of Madness & Other Novels (1964, revised 1986), and Dagon & Other Macabre Tales (1965, revised 1986) and then licensing the stories for paperback publication.

At the Mountains of Madness & Other Tales of Terror (Beagle/Ballantine Books, 1971) was a slimmed-down version of the Arkham House hardcover and featured the novel At the Mountains of Madness and the short stories “The Shunned House”, “Dreams in the Witch-House”, and “The Statement of Randolph Carter”.

Episode 23 - H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" with special guest Bob Brinkman

Hoi and Jeff discuss Michael Moorcock's "Stormbringer" with special guest Terry Olson

Episode 35 - Michael Moorcock's "Stormbringer" with special guest Terry Olson

Hoi and Jeff have the supreme pleasure of interviewing Michael Moorcock, author of the Elric and Hawkmoon stories among many others, and the youngest and only living author from the Appendix N list, who is also celebrating his 80th birthday in Dec 2019!

An Interview with Michael Moorcock

Jeff, Hoi, and a rotating roster of special guests discuss the adventure, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and weird fiction that inspires our gaming

Appendix N Book Club

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