Half A Can of Whoop Ass - Another Ecology of the Half Orc For Old School Campaigns

Ever since I was a kid I've had to deal with the ins & outs of the ;real world; vs  'table top world of original Dungeons & Dragons. Everything from the Satanic panic to the full on nose sticking fun of folks delving into the 'true' meaning of Dungeons & Dragons. The game I love in all of its editions & incarnations has endured despite the attempts to the contrary. Which brings me once again the orc race wiki entry. This time I dive back even earlier into the mythology;

"The Latin: Orcus is glossed as "Orc, þyrs, oððe hel-deofol"^[a] ("Goblin, spectre, or hell-devil") in the 10th century Old English Cleopatra Glossary, about which Thomas Wright wrote, "Orcus was the name for Pluto, the god of the infernal regions, hence we can easily understand the explanation of hel-deofol. Orc, in Anglo-Saxon, like thyrs, means a spectre, or goblin."^[3][4][b] The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal defines ork in the closely related Old Dutch language as a verslindend monster ("devouring monster"),^[5] and points at a possible origin in the Old Dutch nork "petulant, crabbed, evil person".^[6]

The term is used just once in Beowulf as the plural compound orcneas, one of the tribes alongside the elves and ettins (giants) condemned by God:

þanon untydras ealle onwocon eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas swylce gigantas þa wið gode wunnon lange þrage he him ðæs lean forgeald —Beowulf, Fitt I, vv. 111–14[7]

Thence all evil broods were born, ogres and elves and evil spirits —the giants also, who long time fought with God, for which he gave them their reward —John R. Clark Hall, tr. (1901)"

"Orcneas is translated "evil spirits" above, but its meaning is uncertain. Klaeber suggested it consisted of orc < L. orcus "the underworld" + neas "corpses", which the translation "evil spirits" failed to do justice.^[9][c] It is generally supposed to contain an element -né, cognate to Gothic naus and Old Norse nár, both meaning 'corpse'.^[10] The usual Old English word for corpse is líc, but -né appears in nebbed 'corpse bed',^[11] and in dryhtné 'dead body of a warrior', where dryht is a military unit. If *orcné is to be glossed as orcus 'corpse', the meaning may be "corpse from Orcus (i.e. the underworld)", or "devil-corpse", understood as some sort of walking dead creature"



"A monster called Orcus is mentioned in Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene.^[12] The Oxford English Dictionary records an Early Modern period orke, meaning "ogre", in Samuel Holland's 1656 fairy tale Don Zara, a pastiche of Spanish romances such as Don Quixote.^[d][13] It is presumed that 'orke'/'ogre' came into English via continental fairy-tales, especially from the 17th-century French writer Charles Perrault, who borrowed most of his stories and developed his "ogre" from the 16th-century Italian writers Giovanni Francesco Straparola (credited with introducing the literary form of the fairy tale) and Giambattista Basile, who wrote in the Naples dialect, stating that he was passing on oral folktales from his region. In the tales, Basile used huorco, huerco or uerco, the Neapolitan form of Italian orco, "giant" or "monster", to describe a large, hairy, tusked, mannish beast who could speak, lived in a dark forest or garden and might capture and eat humans"

Humanity as we know it has nothing to do with the mockery of the orc race as a whole & far more to do with the demon lord Orcus. That's right I'm connecting orcs with the demon lord who loans out his mace to ever Tom, Dick & high level evil cleric. The demon lord spreads his evil across dimensions & planes planting seeds of evil where it will made from the evil essences of the long evil dead. Warped, traded, & moved from one prime material plane to the other half orcs emerge from the pits & caverns of long forgotten evil lairs of orcs. Not so much the products of 'forced matings' but the spawning of half formed mockeries of mankind.



These essences are sewn throughout the multiverse to spread the corruption & the 'marketing' of the demon lord. And these are used by demon, devil, & evil cleric alike. There is a basis for this within the writings of Tolkien & his critics;"

The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey writes that the orcs in The Lord of the Rings were almost certainly created just to equip Middle-earth with "a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction",^[24] or in Tolkien's words from The Monsters and the Critics "the infantry of the old war" ready to be slaughtered.^[24] Shippey states that all the same, orcs share the human concept of good and evil, with a familiar sense of morality, though he notes that, like many people, orcs are quite unable to apply their morals to themselves. In his view, Tolkien, as a Roman Catholic, took it as a given that "evil cannot make, only mock", so orcs could not have an equal and opposite morality to that of men or elves."
But what of the troubling origin of the half orc? Troubling to today's gamers possibly but are they really?! Pig Faced half orcs have been with original Dungeons & Dragons killing characters from the shadows since the early days of 'The Dragon' magazine. All of the way back in 'The Dragon' magazine issue number 62 'The half orc outlook' By Roger E. Moore. Yes that Roger E. Moore whom readers of this blog will recognize as one of the other author's & designers who doesn't get half of the credit he deserves by D&D gamers. 

HT3a – Pig-faced Orc I By Otherworldly miniatures an old favorite of mine to use for half orc assassins. 

 In 'The Dragon' magazine issue number 62 'The half orc outlook' By Roger E. Moore he takes on the culture & dynamics of orcish society;

"Half-orcs, as everyone knows, are what you get when you cross orcs and humans. They are not uncommon in the world of the AD&D™ game, and they do not enjoy good reputations among most populations. One well-known authority describes most half-orcs as “rude, crude, crass, and generally obnoxious.” Why do half-orcs seem to turn out this way? What makes them tick? To better understand half-orcs, one needs to understand the non-human aspect of their nature. Orcs are probably the most common sort of humanoid creatures. They vary widely in physical appearance, but generally seem to retain a vaguely human look, tinged with a hint of something . . . else. In nearly all orcish societies, the social philosophy is the same. Orcs are the ultimate social Darwinists; only the strong and the clever survive, and the strongest and cleverest orcs are the ones who manage to reach the upper social levels of their cultures: Orcs have no respect for those weaker than themselves, and are quick to step-and-fetch for those stronger than they. They distrust all overtures of friendship and love, seeing these as a cover for other, baser intentions; if they discover feelings of friendship to be quite genuine, they immediately attempt to manipulate events to take the best advantage of them and gain the upper hand. Orcs are like this because of the influence of their deities (discussed in the companion article to this one) and because of their own past. Sages have uncovered much evidence showing that orcs developed in regions generally hostile to life; survival was difficult, and only if a group worked closely together could it hope to collect enough food to get even a part of its numbers through the year. While the group would have to work together to collect food, distributing it was another matter. The strongest orcs got the most food, and the weakest ones got none at all. (They were probably going to die anyway, right?). "

These monsters are not stand ins for some real world racial type but the product of their own demonic evil gods that howl for the blood & entrails of humanity around them. The article goes on to bring the half orc world view into a lens of their own culture & society. Its not a pretty one at that ; "The very toughest orcs managed to receive more than just the bare minimum of nourishment, enough to make life more comfortable for them and give them a certain degree of personal security. This also gave them the chance to explore more intellectual occupations than food-gathering, like figuring out how to get more food and living space. The easiest opportunity to be realized was to take food and/or living space away from other folks, and these other folks were usually other orcs. Intertribal competition became fierce, and over the centuries many of these conflicts have “evolved” into what seem to be eternal states of war between various tribes. Orcs are nocturnal by nature. They prefer to catch prey when it is asleep and less able to escape. Orcs have done this for so long they’ve developed infravision, the ability to see living objects in darkness by their body heat. The development of infravision was assisted by the orcish habit of living in caves for protection. Orcs tend to live in wilderness areas where the sky is heavily overcast and direct sunlight is non-existent or rare at best. In magical universes such regions are frequently found, their twilight perpetually maintained by the forces of magic cast by mortal or godling. In these places orcs will be much more active than is customary in the daytime, even to the point of conducting raids and hunting, but it is at night when orcs really become dangerous."
Humanity as a whole doesn't really do well in the areas that orcs & even to a certain extent half orcs thrive. But for me 'The half orc outlook' By Roger E. Moore humanizes the half orc a bit too much but that's a personal preference.  If you are a conasuir of anything orc then seek out 'The Dragon' issue #62 with the orc gods & 'The half orc outlook' By Roger E. Moore. These really are classic articles & still very useful at the table top level.


Larry Elmore artwork with an awesome cover for classic Dragon magazine.

For me its back to the original mythology & Tolkien where the half orc is indeed an inhuman product of some ancient & other evil. I do not at all see these Porky Pig faced bastards as anything other then evil horrors spawned by ancient & demonic gods. They do not & will not represent anything or anyone other then what they are monstrous spawn waiting for PC's to slaughter them. Half orcs give nor  ask for any quarter & neither should your PC's!



Pig-faced orcs assault the outer walls (Doug Chaffee, 2nd ed AD&D Player’s Handbook, TSR, 1989)

William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, the ghost detective tangles with an incredibly dangerous psychic entity that may be responsible for the swine things seen in The House on the Borderland in 'the Hog'. But could these psychic entity god things be far more responsible for the gods of the orcs? Are these things the spawn of such otherworldly entities merely repeating the same cycle of alien ecological devastation that we see in places like Greyhawk over and over again? All of the tropes that we find in Dungeons & Dragons are there again & again otherworldly forces, hybrid anomalies deep underground, ruins, dangerous sanity blasting monsters, & even the dungeon as place of misfortune.


The half orc doesn't represent any Earthly racial type at all but humanity's worst aspects mixed with the 'alien other'. That other is always lurking close within a party of adventurers who dally with such creatures who may or may not be aware of the murderous intent from within. Instead I think that half orc 'represents' the dungeon master waiting for the right time to murder the party members!

Otherworldly Miniatures Pig Faced Orcs. 

Blood for Bacon - Another Ecology of the Orc For Old School Campaigns

Much of what follows in my wake is taken from the Wiki entry on orcs
Ever since I was growing up going up in the Seventies I've been hearing about how 'orcs are racist' & how its wrong to paint them as merely evil's cogs & parts that act as a mechanism for slaughter of PC's & the forces that commit genocide on campaign settings. To which I say, "bull shite". Orcs have been with the grand game since its beginning in original Dungeons & Dragons. I know that these have been there because I've had countless PC's slaughtered by the Porky Pig faced bastards. But the origins of these pig faced horrors goes back into the dark recesses of mythology besides Tolkien;"Tolkien began the modern use of the English term "orc" to denote a race of evil, humanoid creatures. His earliest Elvish dictionaries include the entry Ork (orq-) "monster", "ogre", "demon", together with orqindi and "ogresse". He sometimes used the plural form orqui in his early texts.^[f] He stated that the Elvish words for orc were derived from a root ruku, "fear, horror"; in Quenya, orco, plural orkor; in Sindarin orch, plurals yrch and Orchoth (as a class).^{[T 2][T 1]} They had similar names in other Middle-earth languages: uruk in Black Speech (restricted to the larger soldier-orcs);^{[T 1]} in the language of the Drúedain gorgûn, "ork-folk"; in Khuzdul rukhs, plural rakhâs; and in the language of Rohan and in the Common Speech, orka.^{[T 2]}

Tolkien stated in a letter to the novelist Naomi Mitchison that his Orcs had been influenced by George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin.^{[T 1]} He explained that his "orc" was "derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability",^{[T 3]} and

I originally took the word from Old English orc (Beowulf 112 orc-neas and the gloss orc: þyrs ('ogre'), heldeofol ('hell-devil')).^[g] This is supposed not to be connected with modern English orc, ork, a name applied to various sea-beasts of the dolphin order".^{[T 4]}

Tolkien also observed a connection with the Latin word orcus, noting that "the word used in translation of Q[uenya] urko, S[indarin] orch is Orc. But that is because of the similarity of the ancient English word orc, 'evil spirit or bogey', to the Elvish words. There is possibly no connextion (sic) between them."
That's right going all of the way back into the beginning of Tolkien's work. But for me orcs have always been the 'other'. The other in this instance isn't a particular race,person, or thing but something utterly alien. Orcs to me are the inversion of mankind & a mockery of everything that it means to be human. This all comes down for me in Gary Gygax's B2 Keep on the Borderlands. 

Orcs are the evil monsters that along with a slew of other evil humanoid monsters in the Caves of Chaos are intent on slaughtering every human they can get a hold of. Its almost as though the orcs were created & bred for murder whole cloth. And that's exactly what they are. Don't believe me?! Again from the wiki on orcs; 


"The scholars of English literature William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood note that a widespread element of late 19th century Western culture was fear of moral decline and degeneration; this led to eugenics.^[17] In The Two Towers, the Ent Treebeard says:^{[T 16]}

It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman's Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it. I wonder what he has done? Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!^{[T 16]}

The film-maker Andrew Stewart, writing in CounterPunch, cites this speech as an instance of "mid-twentieth century scientific racism .. which alarmingly spells out the notion of 'race mixing' as a great sin".^[18] Stewart notes, too, that the geography of Middle-earth deliberately pits the good West against the evil East;^[18] John Magoun, writing in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, concurs, supposing that Middle-earth has a "moral geography".^[16] Any moral bias towards a north-western geography, however, was directly addressed by Tolkien himself in a letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had recently interviewed him in 1967:

Auden has asserted that for me 'the North is a sacred direction'. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man's home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not 'sacred', nor does it exhaust my affections. I do have, for instance, a particular fondness for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil [ie. Morgoth].^{[T 17]}

In a private letter, Tolkien describes orcs as:^{[T 18]}

squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.

 A variety of critics and commentators have noted that orcs are somewhat like caricatures of non-Europeans. The journalist David Ibata writes that the orcs in Peter Jackson's Tolkien films look much like "the worst depictions of the Japanese drawn by American and British illustrators during World War II."^[19] The literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, endorses Andrew O'Hehir's comment on Salon.com that orcs are "by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about".^[20][21] O'Hehir describes orcs as "a subhuman race bred by Morgoth and/or Sauron (although not created by them) that is morally irredeemable and deserves only death. They are dark-skinned and slant-eyed, and although they possess reason, speech, social organization and, as Shippey mentions, a sort of moral sensibility, they are inherently evil."^[21] He notes Tolkien's own description of them (quoted above), saying it could scarcely be more revealing of his attitude to the "Other", but excuses him saying that "it is also the product of his background and era, like most of our inescapable prejudices. At the level of conscious intention, he was not a racist or an anti-Semite" and mentions his letters to this effect.^[21] In a letter to his son, Christopher who was serving in the RAF in the Second World War, Tolkien wrote of orcs as appearing on both sides of the conflict:

Yes, I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in 'realistic' fiction ... only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For 'romance' has grown out of 'allegory', and its wars are still derived from the 'inner war' of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels.^{[T 19]}

The scholar of English literature Robert Tally describes the orcs as a demonized enemy, despite (he writes) Tolkien's own objections to demonization of the enemy in the two World Wars.^[22] The Germanic studies scholar Sandra Ballif Straubhaar however argues against the "recurring accusations" of racism, stating that "a polycultured, polylingual world is absolutely central" to Middle-earth, and that readers and filmgoers will easily see that.^[2] The historian and Tolkien scholar Jared Lobdell likewise disagreed with any notions of racism inherent or latent in Tolkien's works, and wondered "if there were a way of writing epic fantasy about a battle against an evil spirit and his monstrous servants without its being subject to speculation of racist intent""

The origins of the 'Orc' for me are much deeper stretch back further then Tolkein & his works of high fantasy. No for me the orcs go all the way back to William Hope Hodgeson's 'House on the Borderlands'.
"The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions."

The swine things that ravage, plague, & harrow the recluse are the perfect demonic Lovecraftian or is it Hodgesonian monsters that would be progenitors for the orc race. These are not a race that can be reasoned with or sat down to have tea with. These are murderous things intent on corrupting, destroying, & ravaging everything around them. Nightmare given flesh!



In 2000, DC Comics’ mature reader imprint Vertigo published a 96-page color graphic-novel adaptation The House on the Borderland, with story by Simon Revelstroke and art by Richard Corben.

The Vertigo imprint version of The House on the Borderland by Simon Revelstroke and art by Richard Corben takes some very heady liberties with the original source material. There's a very good review of The House on the Borderland & the Vertigo version of The House on the Borderland by Simon Revelstroke and art by Richard Corben on the Old Wine in New Wine Skins blog here. 
The truth is that we get a very alien & utterly demonic horror that seems at times to be a reflection of the evil or perversion of man. This is the other that William Hope Hodgeson brings to bare on his protagonist in the House on the Borderland. Wayne Douglas Barlow does an incredible job in his Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy portraying the Swine Things. Its implied in The House on the Borderland & The Hog both by William Hope Hodgeson that the Swine Things are appendages for some greater cosmic being or god.

For my campaigns the swine things are the 'other' & their rutting, invading, etc. are the source for the orc infestation across the multiverse. Want an OSR set of stats for the Swine Things the Throne of Salt blog has those here.  How are the orcs getting across planes?! Wizards, dark clerics, necromancers,etc. use the essence of the Swine Things & then begin spawning orcs in gene pools & the like. These things are programmed for destruction straight outta the artificial womb. They don't care about the niceties of mankind only its destruction!
“I’ve heard it. A sort of swinish clamouring melody that grunts and roars and shrieks in chunks of grunting sounds, all tied together with squealings and shot through with pig howls. I’ve sometimes thought there was a definite beat in it; for every now and again there comes a gargantuan GRUNT, breaking through the million pig-voiced roaring—a stupendous GRUNT that comes in with a beat. Can you understand me?”William Hope Hodgson’s “The Hog,” first published in Weird Tales in 1947 but certainly written much earlier since the author died in 1918.

Orcs are not simply evil but the essence of it. Their life is anti nature & they are hell bent on your PC's destruction. Make no bones about it. There's no racism about it only bloodshed, murder, & mayhem of any adventuring party that enters their domain. And if you think that this has nothing to do with Tolkien may I refer back to the orc wiki entry & what follows;"The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey writes that the orcs in The Lord of the Rings were almost certainly created just to equip Middle-earth with "a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction",^[24] or in Tolkien's words from The Monsters and the Critics "the infantry of the old war" ready to be slaughtered.^[24] Shippey states that all the same, orcs share the human concept of good and evil, with a familiar sense of morality, though he notes that, like many people, orcs are quite unable to apply their morals to themselves. In his view, Tolkien, as a Roman Catholic, took it as a given that "evil cannot make, only mock", so orcs could not have an equal and opposite morality to that of men or elves.^[25] Shippey notes that in The Two Towers, the orc Gorbag disapproves of the "regular elvish trick" of seeming to abandon a comrade, as he wrongly supposes Sam has done with Frodo. Shippey describes the implied view of evil as Boethian, that evil is the absence of good; he notes however that Tolkien did not agree with that point of view, believing that evil had to be actively combatted, with war if necessary, the Manichean position"

There's good reason to slaughter those Pork Pig faced bastards in your Dungeons & Dragons games. Don't let orcs gain an inch in your campaigns or you may be dealing with a far greater & deadlier evil then your party of adventurers expects!


Otherworld Miniatures Orc Warband 

Beyond Appendix N Mail Call - Night Land and Other Perilous Romances: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 4

Today has been mail call day! This isn't your usual mail call though. This is for the William Hope Hodgson Nightlands book that's been missing from the archives for a very long time. This past Christmas my wife grabbed me a first edition Hodgeson book for me. But who was William Hope Hodgson; "William Hope Hodgson (15 November 1877 – 19 April 1918) was an English author. He produced a large body of work, consisting of essays, short fiction, and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction, and science fiction.^[2] Hodgson used his experiences at sea to lend authentic detail to his short horror stories, many of which are set on the ocean, including his series of linked tales forming the "Sargasso Sea Stories". His novels, such as The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), feature more cosmic themes, but several of his novels also focus on horrors associated with the sea. Early in his writing career Hodgson dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his poems were published during his lifetime. He also attracted some notice as a photographer and achieved renown as a bodybuilder. He died in World War I at age 40." 

 William Hope Hodgson was an incredible writer of horror,cosmic horror, romance, fantastic fiction, & science fiction. He's work often blurred those themes as he tried his hand at every one of these genre's. But his work for me that reflects perfectly the lens of his literature in the field of cosmic horror is  The House on the Borderland (1908) and its squeal in spirit  The Night Land (1912). The House on the Borderland (1908) serves as both a predecessor & book end squeal to the The Night Land (1912). 


The Nightlands is everything I love about the Dying Earth genre, a doomed protagonist who is the reincarnation of an early Nineteenth century man whose love is taken from him. Finds himself astrally projected into a post terrestrial landscape millions of years into the future. The sun has almost burnt itself out as a red star, most of the oceans have dried up, the landscape is dotted with millions crammed cities, there are energy weapons, knightly orders of monster hunters, & even minion like Lovecraftian horrors lurking at the corners of a pitch black darkened world.



This particular collection is part of the Nightshade book series & I picked this collection for very specific reasons; "Night Shade Books’s five-volume series presents all of Hodgson’s unique and timeless fiction. Each volume contains one of Hodgson's novels, along with a selection of thematically-linked short fiction, including a number of works reprinted for the first time since their original publication. The fourth book of the five-volume set, The Night Land and Other Romances, collects all of his romances and women’s fiction, as well as the entirety of his classic 1912 dying-earth novel The Night Land.

The Complete Fiction of William Hope Hodgson is published by Night Shade Books in the following volumes:
The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” and Other Nautical Adventures
The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places
The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea
The Night Land and Other Romances
The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions"

The Nightlands true horrors are the Watchers towering horrors from beyond the bounds of time & space. The Earth's last residence huddle in the Redoubts ( million strong city colonies that house the last true humanity descendants. The Watchers ( really Outer Gods given towering form feed on human souls & other less identifiable substances) wait & wait for the Redoubt's force fields to fall. Then its lunch time!  


The far future Earth has its share of paladin & knightly orders which fend off the lesser monsters of the darkness & the cults belonging to Watchers. There are even other alien entities that were mixed from humanity & things much less distinct out in the darkness waiting to get their claws into any juicy humans. My lovely wife had gotten me for Christmas a first edition of The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 5. 

This volume contains The Dream of X a cut down chap version of The Nightlands which Amazon reviewer 

Michael Battaglia has an excellent break down of ; ""The Dream of X" but instead of being presented front and center as the other ones were, its buried a good chunk of the way down in the table of contents, leaving plenty of room for everyone else. Magnanimous perhaps, but what gives?

The truth is, "The Dream of X" is basically a streamlined version of the last collection's "The Night Land", written for the purposes for securing a copyright for the story and later turned into a separate illustrated piece all its own (the illustrations, alas, do not make the collection). Yet, for those people sighing under their breath and thinking "Not this story again" you can actually make a serious case that the cut down version is in effect a stronger work than the unabridged version. While it strips away some of the story's hallucinatory feel and woozy sense of distance, it also cuts the plot to the bone, putting the rest of the land into the realm of mystery and retaining the best parts of the story anyway, which were the beginning and the end. Even more thankfully, it not only gives us less of that archaic prose to wade through but also leaves out almost all the middle chunk of the novel where the narrator and his true love Mine Own eat tablets, walk, romantically bicker, unromantically bicker and repeat those things for what feels like three hundred straight pages. It also mercifully eliminates roughly a hundred references to her pretty feet. The original epic length does make the ending feel slightly more earned (at least for me, because I managed to chug through it) but getting to the still powerful ending faster does reward those who are more into instant gratification.

That said, "The Dream of X" only takes up about forty pages of a four hundred page collection, leaving the rest of the space to be filled with lots and lots of short stories, all of which dubiously fall under the umbrella of "Fantastic Visions"".

So what does the Nightlands have to offer the old school or OSR dungeon master?! Everything actually! They have incredible vistas & visions of thousands of future ruins, dungeons, and hundreds of possibilities for a DM to take his or her games into a very alien realm almost entirely unknown to many players today! Thankfully I have a fantastic wife who understands & shares my passion for the OSR & table top hobby! I've got a ton of reading to do & more OSR campaign planning which I will share in up coming blog entries!

Thanks honey for the fantastic gift! 

The OSR Campaign Apocalyse - The Battle Lines of Ragnarok

When I wrote about Algernon Henry Blackwood's blog entry yesterday I wrote about his reality of fiction merely being the beach head into our world. In the far future the opening chess moves for the battle of humanity's place in the multiverse & its very soul's very existence. Ragnarok is not merely one event but a multitude of mini events leading up to the final confrontations;
The völva describes the state of humanity:

Brœðr muno beriaz ok at bǫnom verða[z] muno systrungar sifiom spilla. Hart er í heimi, hórdómr mikill —skeggǫld, skálmǫld —skildir ro klofnir— vindǫld, vargǫld— áðr verǫld steypiz. Mun engi maðr ǫðrom þyrma.	Brothers will fight and kill each other, sisters' children will defile kinship. It is harsh in the world, whoredom rife —an axe age, a sword age —shields are riven— a wind age, a wolf age— before the world goes headlong. No man will have mercy on another.
—Old Norse[14]	—English translation[14]

This brings me to William Hope Hodgson's House On The Borderlands, Hodgson was a contemporary of Algernon Henry Blackwood. The novel The House On The Borderland transcends mostly anything that H.P Lovecraft put out. And the cosmic themes of the novel are very close to the weird tales material that Arthur Machen wrote. 
We are merely tenants on this Earth & there have been multitudes of races before us many of which weren't human & these were very alien beings. These are the themes of these giants of the literature of the weird tale whose boundaries cross the definitions of science fiction, fantasy, horror, & cosmic horror spun.The House On The Borderland  weaves these themes into " a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions."

Sunrise in the Woods By George Inness

The Ragnarok comes in the last great days of the Earth when the heroes & gods of Earth are murdered & killed across countless cultures. Among countless worlds this happens  in the far future of Earth thousands or millions of years in our future. The recluse sees the victors of these events in The House on The Borderland;

 

"And then, as I peered, curiously, a new terror came to me; for away up among the dim peaks to my right, I had descried a vast shape of blackness, giantlike. It grew upon my sight. It had an enormous equine head, with gigantic ears, and seemed to peer steadfastly down into the arena. There was that about the pose that gave me the impression of an eternal watchfulness—of having warded that dismal place, through unknown eternities. Slowly, the monster became plainer to me; and then, suddenly, my gaze sprang from it to something further off and higher among the crags. For a long minute, I gazed, fearfully. I was strangely conscious of something not altogether unfamiliar—as though something stirred in the back of my mind. The thing was black, and had four grotesque arms. The features showed indistinctly, 'round the neck, I made out several light-colored objects. Slowly, the details came to me, and I realized, coldly, that they were skulls. Further down the body was another circling belt, showing less dark against the black trunk. Then, even as I puzzled to know what the thing was, a memory slid into my mind, and straightway, I knew that I was looking at a monstrous representation of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death.

Other remembrances of my old student days drifted into my thoughts. My glance fell back upon the huge beast-headed Thing. Simultaneously, I recognized it for the ancient Egyptian god Set, or Seth, the Destroyer of Souls. With the knowledge, there came a great sweep of questioning—'Two of the—!' I stopped, and endeavored to think. Things beyond my imagination peered into my frightened mind. I saw, obscurely. 'The old gods of mythology!' I tried to comprehend to what it was all pointing. My gaze dwelt, flickeringly, between the two. 'If—'

An idea came swiftly, and I turned, and glanced rapidly upward, searching the gloomy crags, away to my left. Something loomed out under a great peak, a shape of greyness. I wondered I had not seen it earlier, and then remembered I had not yet viewed that portion. I saw it more plainly now. It was, as I have said, grey. It had a tremendous head; but no eyes. That part of its face was blank.

Now, I saw that there were other things up among the mountains. Further off, reclining on a lofty ledge, I made out a livid mass, irregular and ghoulish. It seemed without form, save for an unclean, half-animal face, that looked out, vilely, from somewhere about its middle. And then I saw others—there were hundreds of them. They seemed to grow out of the shadows. Several I recognized almost immediately as mythological deities; others were strange to me, utterly strange, beyond the power of a human mind to conceive.

On each side, I looked, and saw more, continually. The mountains were full of strange things—Beast-gods, and Horrors so atrocious and bestial that possibility and decency deny any further attempt to describe them. And I—I was filled with a terrible sense of overwhelming horror and fear and repugnance; yet, spite of these, I wondered exceedingly. Was there then, after all, something in the old heathen worship, something more than the mere deifying of men, animals, and elements? The thought gripped me—was there?

Later, a question repeated itself. What were they, those Beast-gods, and the others? At first, they had appeared to me just sculptured Monsters placed indiscriminately among the inaccessible peaks and precipices of the surrounding mountains. Now, as I scrutinized them with greater intentness, my mind began to reach out to fresh conclusions. There was something about them, an indescribable sort of silent vitality that suggested, to my broadening consciousness, a state of life-in-death—a something that was by no means life, as we understand it; but rather an inhuman form of existence, that well might be likened to a deathless trance—a condition in which it was possible to imagine their continuing, eternally. 'Immortal!' the word rose in my thoughts unbidden; and, straightway, I grew to wondering whether this might be the immortality of the gods."
Its not merely these powers of chaos & evil that wait patiently for the cracks in the universe & the stars to come right. But its their followers that work from within the confines of our own home universes. For example the Egg of Coot whose followers work for one of the multiplicity of pieces of the higher dimensional planar aspects of the entity. An entity that wants nothing more then to tear apart the dimensional structure & replace it with its own flawed order.

Even in worlds such as Bruce Heard's Calidar there are always those who act to unwittingly to allow powers from beyond the Outer Darkness into the realities of humanity. Take for example the Guild of Demonologists. These people have truck with demons from beyond the pale;

"craft is tolerated in Caldwen because of local culture and faith in deities with demonic ancestry. This stance is rooted in the knowledge that the darkest of evils can be redeemed. Demonology does not limit itself to such values, however: it is also about knowledge and power."


Symbol & Seal of The Guild Of Demonologists
copyrighted & trademarked to Bruce Heard.

Knowledge & power are the two watch words that have allowed others such as the Hyperboreans to ascend to power on Earth in the eons  after the events of Ragnarok. Long before the coming of the empires of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique , Hyperborea was wretched into space.
How could these powers come back into the world & gain such a following among mankind? Through the power of men's dreams & those worlds where they touched. The only thing that prevented the complete extinction of mankind were heroes! Heroes & gods whose sacrifice at every turn secured the continued legacy of humanity.


The Hyperboreans were only a part of the events & after a span of thousands of years did their ancient gods return to Earth stirring even more destruction. The Earth's subjugation under their yoke was dark & very dire.


Hyperborea Players' Manual front cover pencils by Val Semeiks

Heroes & newer gods sacrificed themselves for the fate of humanity as the immortals watched from Mystara & beyond into Greyhawk. Time & space meant nothing to the gods whose lives were snuffed out like candles in the wind of the apocalypse. Only a few heroes & adventurers were left after the cycles completed themselves. They would train another group of heroes as dark powers watched from the shadows.


The victors would sit smug in the knowledge that they would have the upper hand for a while. The ever changing landscape of the planes insured that balance was forever out of reach. Across time & space the next stage was setting itself up. Heroes of course were not confined merely to the dreams of men but across many battle fields.Troubling nightmares plagued the undead dreams of an ageless villain roiling in the depths of a dungeon ancient beyond reckoning.