The Doom That Came To Sarnath By H.P. Lovecraft & Rememberances of The Stormbringer rpg Campaign

" here is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.

It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the gray stone city of Ib, which was old as the lake itself, and peopled with beings not pleasing to behold. Very odd and ugly were these beings, as indeed are most beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned. It is written on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings of Ib were in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it; that they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice. It is also written that they descended one night from the moon in a mist; they and the vast still lake and gray stone city Ib. However this may be, it is certain that they worshipped a sea-green stone idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard; before which they danced horribly when the moon was gibbous. And it is written in the papyrus of Ilarnek, that they one day discovered fire, and thereafter kindled flames on many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written of these beings, because they lived in very ancient times, and man is young, and knows but little of the very ancient living things.

After many eons men came to the land of Mnar, dark shepherd folk with their fleecy flocks, who built Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai. And certain tribes, more hardy than the rest, pushed on to the border of the lake and built Sarnath at a spot where precious metals were found in the earth." 

The Doom That Came to Sarnath
by H. P. Lovecraft 
Written on December 3, 1919. Published June 1920 in The Scot.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath by H. P. Lovecraft was published in June of 1920 & it ranks up there within H.P.L's Dreamlands cycle. Why is it important for my old school & OSR leanings?! Because of the fact that we used a ton of  The Doom That Came To Sarnath  for our Sword & Sorcery Stormbringer rpg campaign. 

The Land of Mnar was pretty much a blank canvas for our group. According to the HP Lovecraft wiki entry; " Mnar is the land where the doomed city of Sarnath was located.The river Ai runs through the territory. Successive waves of inhabitants have come and gone over its long history.

"Originally inhabited by the amphibious Thuum'ha who constructed the city of Ib, these creatures were displaced and then rendered extinct in a deliberate genocide by a race of humans who followed the river Ai into the region. These humans built Sarnath on top of the location of Ib." A close reading of the Doom That Came to Sarnath doesn't actually put the land of Mnar into HPL's Dreamlands. And so we treated the lands before the doom that came to Sarnath as Earth's prehistory before the lands of Mnar slipped into the Dreamlands. 

For our Scale Ship the lands of Mnar offered two very distinct things a place where we could do some hunting of prehistoric & minor Lovecraftian entities. And where we could get a line on other Chaos powers & artifacts as well as Lovecraftian knowledge. Now remember we were using a combination of Runequest Third Edition & the Stormbringer rpg. The real kick in the pants for using these with the lands of Mnar were Sandy Petersen's RuneQuest Gateway Bestiary. Which while not as extensive as his later work on Call of Cthulhu is none the less pretty solid. While the RuneQuest Gateway Bestiary doesn't have stats on the ghosts & peoples of Ib it does have stats for Deep Ones. 

We'd use guides from Sarnath to lead our party deep into the wilderness of Mnar for delves into huge sprawling prehistoric ruins that belonged to lost & forgotten tribes and then sell the treasures onto Haven and Sanctuary. Only once or twice did we encounter cultists of  Bokrug, the great water-lizard. And we made offerings to the Great Old One. 
And I believe that the ghosts of Ib later on spared our party when things got very nasty in Sarnath. We left Sarnath went back to a much more primitive land of Mnar later on. All of the old NPC's were dust and lands were quiet sheep country.. The doom didn't just over take Sarnath.  Bokrug, the great water-lizard's wrath over took Mnar as well. And the lands faded into the unreality of the Dreamlands.. 

Giants of Chaos - Giant Chieftains, The Forces of Chaos, & B2 Keep on the Borderlands -ACK's Stormbringer Campaign

Eric Pape's illustration for Lyrics and Old World Idylls by Madison J. Cawein (1907).

"...so King Arthur shook
And headlong flung Sir Accolon. Then took,
Tearing away, that scabbard from his side
And hurled it through the lists, that far and wide
Gulped in the battle breathless. Then, still wroth,
He seized Excalibur; and grasped of both
Wild hands, swung trenchant, and brought glittering down
On rising Accolon. Steel, bone and Brawn
That blow hewed through. Unsettled every sense.
Bathed in a world of blood, his limbs lay tense
A moment, then grew limp, relaxed in death."

(Cawein's "Accolon of Gaul" (1889), p. 285)

Could the B2 The Keep on The Borderland By Gary Gygax have an Arthurian mythological reflection?!  I believe that the keep is near Bedegraine within the Arthurian legends & mythos. Bedegraine wiki entry goes deeper into where & why this important; "Bedegraine is a location featured in some tellings of the Arthurian legend. Its chief importance is as the site of a battle where King Arthur solidifies his reign in a victory over rebel kings.

Bedegraine is first mentioned in the French Prose Merlin, a work eventually incorporated into the Lancelot-Grail cycle.^[1] The Merlin refers to Bedegraine as the chief city of Britain and Carmeliard, the kingdom of Guinevere and Leodegrance, and describes Arthur's victory over the rebels there.^[1] Though his force is outnumbered by the rebels led by King Lot, Arthur carries the day with the secret aid of the French kings Ban and Bors. The rebel kings must retreat to their own territory to fend off Saxon invaders, and eventually recognize Arthur as their rightful overlord.^[1] The Livre d'Artus, a continuation of the Merlin, also mentions Bedegraine and places it on the border between Logres and Cornwall.^[1] "

Rhead, George Wooliscroft & Louis. "Arthur Leading the Charge at Mount Badon" from Tennyson, Alfred. Idylls of the King: Vivien, Elaine, Enid, Guinevere. New York: R. H. Russell, 1898. This picture illustrates the lines from Tennyson's "Lancelot and Elaine" idyll


^"Bedegraine is an important location in the Vulgate Lancelot, another section of the Lancelot-Grail.^[1] The city, here located on the border of Ireland and Carmelide, serves as one of Arthur's court cities, and becomes the setting of most of the "False Guinevere" episode, in which an impostor usurps the Queen's place and the real Guinevere must flee with Lancelot.^[1] The Battle of Bedegraine episode is an important event in Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, which describes Arthur's defeat of the eleven rebel kings as his final step towards undisputed kingship.^[1] The 13th-century French writer Baudin Butor, who wrote on the legendary kings preceding Arthur, mentions Bedegraine as one of Vortigern's court cities" 

If we get into one monster element that causes chaos within Arthurian myth & literature. And this element has to be the Welsh giants which were at the forefront of causing Camelot lots of destruction & dangerous. 

The Giant by the artist Goya 

In the Welsh literature giants such as the following are very dangerous; "In the Mabinogi of Branwen ferch Llyr, Britain is ruled by the giant Bran the Blessed, who has never been able to fit inside any dwelling. In Culhwch and Olwen, giants feature as antagonists throughout. Ysbaddaden, chief of giants, is the father of Olwen, a beautiful maiden sought by Culhwch fab Cilydd, a cousin of King Arthur's. He is slain at the tale's close by his nephew Goreu fab Custennin,^[2] while Wrnach, another giant, is killed by Cei."  And this is also  concerns Rhitta (or Rhudda) Gawr a very destructive giant; 'A well-known tale concerns Rhitta (or Rhudda) Gawr, a giant who held court in Snowdonia. He marched against warring kings Nyniaw and Peibaw, overwhelmed their armies and took their beards as trophies of his victory and fashioned them into a cap for himself. The twenty-six kings of Britain assembled their armies to destroy Rhitta but were vanquished by the giant, who cut off the kings' beards and fashioned a great cape out of them to protect him from the cold. Sometime later, as Arthur "washed his hands after slaying the red-eyed giant of Cernyw", he received a message from Rhitta, demanding his beard to patch his cloak. Arthur refused, and Rhitta marched south with his armies to claim it from him. In the resulting confrontation, Rhitta is forced to shear his own beard, and retreats "much humbled in stature but much wiser in knowledge". A variant tale claims that after receiving the demands, Arthur marched furiously up to Snowdonia and fought against the giant in a duel, in which he "lifted up his sword and struck Rhitta on the crown of the head a blow so fiercely-wounding, severely-venomous and sternly-smiting that it cut through all his head armour and his skin and his flesh and clove him in twain.",^[3] According to the story, Arthur commands that a cairn be built over his body which forms Gwyddfa Rhudda (Rhita's Cairn). Over the intervening centuries the name of Rhudda was forgotten and Gwyddfa Rhudda became known as Yr Wyddfa."  These giant chieftains are going to be at the head of many of the armies of Chaos something that fits quite nicely with Adventurer, Conqueror, King rpg. Especially some of the articles that appeared in the AXIOMS ACK's house organ magazine. 

All of the above fits the Chaos of Chaos area found within B2 & it also fits the general adventure principles found within AX1: The Sinister Stone of Sakkara. And if we use B2 Keep on the Borderland as the campaign adventure basis then we have the fact that the Keep is on the outer edge of such a campaign. The Welsh Arthurian legends crossover into Michael Moorcock's Corum books & the fact that humanity as a whole in Athurian legend is barely hanging on. Both against against itself & the forces from Outside. B2 could be seen as one of the great pushes of Chaos against humanity. 

The chaos god thing that we see within AX1: The Sinister Stone of Sakkara reminds me of the Gygax's Tharizdun.  And this is where we see Robert Kuntz's article sited in the OSR Grimoire "The Dark God: Historical Content, Developer Commentary, and an Ode to the Dark God" by Robert J. Kuntz (El Raja Key's Magical Emporium #4, 2003), republished in "Dark Druids" by Robert J. Kuntz (2006, 2015). All of these chaos things are survivors from the first or second great Biblical flood that have survived into Arthurian times. 
And Arthur is perhaps laying the ground work for humanity to move forward. The dark empire of Granbretan would love nothing more then to be able to examine these entities or harness their power. 

The Keep on The Borderlands of Realities - Law, Chaos, & the Holy Grail In ACK's Stormbringer

 Let's once again step onto the moonbeam paths of the Holy Grail & Chaos with continuing our discussion of The Fisher Kings & the Michael Moorcock mythos of Law & Chaos right from here. This brings everything home with  Adventurer, Conqueror, King Heroic Fantasy  Handbook. And ACK's makes a perfect alternative rpg to create an alternative Stormbringer rpg campaign. And this dove tails into the legends of the Holy Grail & the Fisher King. 

So what does any of this have to do with Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon's 'Tragic Millenium' Europe?! The Dark Empire of Granbretan (the name given to what was once Great Britain) is engaged in a campaign to collect any & all items or artifacts of power super science or otherwise. And we know that 'the Dark Empire's super science had  deeply dived into the realm of 'time travel' and alternative dimensions. They have zero reason not to dip into an alternative dimension or two to retrieve items of myth & legend. 
And this includes the Arthurian mythos items. The Molten Sulfur blog includes an interesting but brief overview of such items here. 

One such item which has appeared over & over again is the 'Bleeding Lance' which according the Fisher King's Wiki entry; "The bleeding lance has taken numerous forms throughout the Arthurian literature chronology. In the earlier appearances of the lance, it is not represented as a Christian symbol, but morphs into one over time. In Perceval and Parzival, the lance is described as having "barbaric properties" which are difficult to associate with Christian influence.^[6] Chretien describes his lance with "marvelous destructive powers", which holds a closer connection to the malignant weapons of Celtic origin.^[7] In Chretien's Perceval, the lance takes on a dark and almost evil persona^[7] and also seems to overshadow the Grail, which if this was a Christian story would be rather odd.^[8] Wolfram's tale also treated the lance in a similar dark manner. In Parzival, the lance is "poisonous" which contrasts sharply with the general trend of healing Christian themes. This lance is plunged into the Fisher King's wound at different times to continue his pain, for having sought forbidden love.^[6] This lance is considered significant because it is most often associated directly with the wound of the Fisher King, which is demonstrated both in Chretien's and Eschenbach's versions of the tale.^[9]

The more recent writings have the lance presented in the Fisher King's castle with Christian theology. More specifically, it is supposed to be the lance that pierced Jesus Christ while on the cross. This is seen in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In Malory's version the Fisher King is healed with the blood from the lance, signifying it as a good, holy, Christian object. In Corbenic we see the procession at the Fisher King's feast, featuring heavily on the Holy Grail, which is a strong Christian artifact. It can be extrapolated that in the same procession, the accompanying lance is the lance that pierced Jesus Christ." 

If the  Dark Empire of Granbretan gets ahold of the Lance?! Then Arthurian England could be in serious  trouble. But the Sword of the Fisher King is even more dread of an item; "The sword is commonly thought to be a gift from the Fisher King to Perceval. This is then followed by Perceval's cousin's prophecy that the sword will break at a crucial moment. In two cases, the writers tell us that Perceval broke the sword: in Eschenbach, it fails him in his battle against his half-brother at the end of Parzival; and Gerbert de Montreuil describes how he shatters it on the gates of the "Earthly Paradise".^[10] The adventure of the broken sword is a theme originally introduced by Chretien, who intended it as a symbol of Perceval's imperfections as a knight.^[11] The major example for his imperfection is that Perceval refused to ask about the Grail. This concept of punishment is also seen in Eschenbach's tale where Perceval is told: "your uncle gave you a sword, too, by which you have been granted since your eloquent mouth unfortunately voiced no question there."^[12] The sword remains as a plot device to both remind Perceval of how he failed to ask the healing question and as a physical reminder of the existence of "Munsalvaesche" (Eschenbach's name for Corbenic)." 

What does this have to do with D&D?! A bit of everything there was when I was in college a piece of Arthurian artwork that looks exactly like B2  The Keep on the Borderlands By Gary Gygax's famous module Keep.  For many years I've been searching the interwebs for that piece of artwork. 

Map of the Keep, from module B2 "The Keep on the Borderlands" (1980).  Scale: one square equals 10 feet

According to the OSR Grimoire blog there are any number of variant keeps. And this what we recently used as the Fisher King's abode. But who would be villainous enough to leak the location of the 'Broken Lance' & one of the two Fisher King swords?!  Why the queen of Light & Darkness of course who has an instinctive in disrupting the Holy Grail's role in the planes. All of this ties back into Original Dungeons & Dragon's Greyhawk's magic section where there are several minor details that will be worked into our campaign coming up.