What is Ramsey Campbell’s Demons By Daylight doing in the Recommended Reading section of Moldvay?
I was struck by that question while perusing Moldvay Basic recently. Sure, I’ve seen it there before, but I had dismissed it at the time as a mere curiosity instead of giving it proper thought. Lots of supernatural horror and weird fiction in that list. It’s a noticeable part of D&D’s DNA. However, one of these mornings, I was doing a cursory reading in search of something and came across it again. And it strikes me how weirdly it fits there.
Ramsey Campbell: An Insufficient Introduction
Ramsey Campbell stands by many critics as one of the leading voices of horror in the English-language for the last sixty or so years. His bibliography is ridiculous in both length over the decades without showing any stops in productivity and the high standards for literary merit that he keeps. I would deem Campbell a must read for anyone interested in the field, and obligatory studies for anyone planning on writing weird fiction. A horror writer’s horror writer, in a similar capacity as (heavily promoted by Campbell as a new writer) Thomas Ligotti.
The traits of Campbell’s writing that are most remarkable, in a very short and shallow list, are his halogenic and endlessly inventive prose of synesthesia, his disturbed paranoid characters, a relentless look at the social and political conditions of urban life that lead to horrific mindsets, and an encyclopedic knowledge of horror fiction history that is used to reintroduced old concepts of supernaturalism in new lights.
His work has many literary phases that aren’t very easily to dissect in separate spaces, but we generally trace his early period as one of earnest, talented Lovecraftian pastiche (down to being published by Arkham House at seventeen and having Derleth as mentor), followed by a break from the Mythos milieu and style. Under the influence of punk rock, Vladimir Nabokov, Alain Resnais and other filmmakers associated with the French New Wave, and many others, Campbell publishes Demons by Daylight. A hugely experimental collection that cements both his standing and influence over the whole field, the characteristic we will associate with him through the rest of his oeuvre, and simply a gigantic aesthetic splash.
Demons by Daylight and Moldvay
Each corridor of trees seemed made to be explored, each green shadow promised mystery. He slid down the smooth grass to the first trunks. The sun’s rays shaded into a submarine twilight. Above his head each leaf was brilliantly depicted, like an image of the piercingly precise birdsong which punctuated the afternoon. On his left a track led deeper. He avoided it: he sought mystery, the fulfillment of adventure.
The Enchanted Fruit by Ramsey Campbell, Demons by Daylight.
While the above quote captures rather nicely the idea of adventure, it is the only passage I could find on re-read that most promptly relates to D&D. The stories of rampant drug use, sexual and gender confusion, fluid time, existential nausea, fever dreams of class paranoia, noir malaise and general obtuse nature that leaves most of the narrative untold stick out among the recommended readings in the horror field. It took me a while to exactly put my finger on why that’s the case, but I was reminded of an interview with Ligotti that states it up nicely when he tries to differentiate his own aesthetic pursuits from Lovecraft’s:
(…) in Lovecraft’s defining stories, meaning such later works as “The Shadow out of Time” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” there is a sense of adventure. In his letters, Lovecraft often wrote of experiencing moments of what he called “adventurous expectancy,” by which he meant feeling oneself on the brink of some weird and hyper-exciting revelation that is always held in suspension and never known in its particulars.
(…) My focus has fairly consistently been on what I have thought of as an “infernal paradise,” a realm where one wallows in something putrid and corrosive that lies beyond exact perception. In his stories, Lovecraft’s adventurous expectancy ultimately has its origin in something terrible, and not the child’s picture-book wonderland you find in the work of a lot of writers of fantastic fiction. But it’s still thrilling in its own way. It isn’t purely hellish, as is the case with my stories (…)
Ultimately, the difference I’m trying to articulate between Lovecraft’s adventurous expectancy and my infernal paradise may seem superficial. I would say as much myself. But it seems to me that what captivates a reader’s interest in one writer’s work as opposed to another’s is quite often based on superficial qualities, even when there are deeper likenesses. Anyone can think of examples among both popular and literary writers. Lovecraft’s defining works portray a variety of monsters. Mine seldom do. What’s the difference? Not much on the deepest level. But monsters are a great literary hook and there is necessarily a surface adventure in dealing with them.
Thomas Ligotti
Campbell’s work stands out among other horror recommended reading in Moldvay because of this distinction between infernal paradise, influenced by the history of horror but also developments of avant-garde literature at the time and his own interests in human interiority in capitalism, and the Adventure that influences to one degree or another the other writers. This is not to say that they lack interiority or social aspects, but the pulp horror tradition that D&D takes from that list certainly puts the adventurous expectancy described by Ligotti at the forefront.
Let’s talk about movies for a second. D&D was influenced by the horror movies Dave Arneson was watching. You ask a bunch of people which horror movies you should watch to run D&D. The movies recommended will likely be those in the tradition of Universal and Hammer, monster movies, slasher movies, movies that have aspects of medieval and folk horror, so it goes. Movies that you can take not only the plots and props, but also fairly well integrate their atmosphere in your narration without deviating from immediate physical conflict and adventurous expectancy as Ligotti puts it. Those are, in their own way, adventure movies.
The inclusion of Campbell strikes me as me answering someone with “well, you should watch Kairo, Possession, Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive, Dead Ringers and Begotten”. I did answer the question and gave them horror films, and quite good ones, and they could certainly take plots and props from them. How to integrate their moods and philosophical themes into adventurous expectancy is not impossible, but certainly less intuitive than the traditional D&D experience. A B/X dungeon crawl centered around the players experiencing their gender identity and the fluidness of it while having sex with monstrous beings that lie down there and cogitating the state of their marriages is possible, and an interesting proposal, but I think it isn’t as close to what people see as integrating horror fiction in D&D compared to the romp of a Hammer Horror film, you know.
Possible, but less intuitive.
All the movies I gave above as examples have very strong parallels with subjects and plots Campbell has explored, and they’re an apt comparison. Compared to the other pulp horror works, he sticks out to me. Especially because Moldvay doesn’t add an “et al.” note (a weird choice, shouldn’t it be “etc.” since it’s referring to further books by the author and not more people?), which would direct people towards his lovecraftian work that is much easier to integrate. It’s specifically Demons by Daylight. Just like the Lovecraft recommendations are specifically related to the Dreamlands or, in the case of The Dunwich Horror, relatively heroic and pulpy.
If Campbell is in there, so is Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, Robert Aickman (I believe Cold Hand in Mine was in circulation on the USA at the time despite Derleth failing to publish Arkham House’s own collection), Gene Wolfe’s Peace, Ray Bradbury’s October Country, Wuthering Heights, The Master and Margarita, Gogol and others.
So how do we integrate Campbell in our D&D?
Down to Goatswood We Go
The Campbellian campaign would, first of all, be overwhelmingly urban in gameplay. Campbell’s vision of urban horror, following the lead of Fritz Leiber, is a defining feature. Even his work centered around rural spaces has a focus on the community intrigue, and the effects of this environment upon the individual mind. The town, instead of the hub where adventurers rest and sell what they get, must be run as rather hostile, spiteful of the adventurers and the bad aura they carry from the dungeon, filled with petty criminals and class threats. Possibly such a dour nightmare of existential malaise the adventurers choose the dark depths rather than exchanging words with their neighbor. And of course there’s the inexplicable eldritch thing walking through the walls at night, reaching from the sewers and which’s laughter is confused with the wind’s howl.
An (perhaps unnatural to most adventure games) overwhelming focus on the PCs personal flaws would be important (for better integration in that play culture, likely through very specific carousing tables that reinforce their worst urges, as well as introducing drug use as a recurrent theme for changing scores and the like). The Campbell staple of paranoia as the ruling state of human existence is, interestingly, already covered by the style: players are naturally acting like paranoid dysfunctional people due to the gameplay loop and that naturally extends to urban play, one would just put an emphasis to it for mood.
I’d be foolish to not blow my own horn here about Demesnes, as well.
Campbell’s technique of reintroducing old gothic concepts under a societal and experimental narrative is also, broadly, applicable to the OSR ethos and a tendency of introducing old, traditional monsters under new motifs. Timekeeping would be better served by an abstract approach that rewards the existence of specific holidays and cosmic seasons through the year that affect moods, social organization and faction movement (cults, of course).
Regarding the issue of classes in standard D&D, there’s the strong possibility of excluding magic classes. Clerics would be excluded simply because there’s an unfathomable quality to Campbell’s approach to the supernatural and entities, and of an universal order, that Clerics run against in most cases. Magic Users, while permissible in theory, are tricky in implementation. Weird fiction has a history of sorcerer protagonists (Ashton Smith, Edward Wagner, Bloch’s early Mythos work, W.H. Pugmire), but sorcery in Campbell is pretty much the realm of the other in the protagonist POV, much like Lovecraft (and without the forays Lovecraft characters have in using sorcery such as Dunwich’s climax), and that power is best reserved to NPCs, possibly. Which would lead us to Fighters and Thieves being the available classes for a more purely Campbellian game. Likely just Fighters knowing the flame wars around Thieves.
I don’t necessarily think Moldvay had that in mind when including that most notorious collection into the list; perhaps he was just indicating nice inspiration for unconventional traps and enemies.
Addendum on Far Away and Never
“But what about-”
I know, I’m getting to it now. Campbell has a sword & sorcery collection named Far Away and Never that is an excellent piece of work, highly recommended, and that meshes seamlessly with D&D and the other recommended authors. However, it wasn’t published by the time, and even if it were, Demons by Daylight alone is what appears in the list. Even if Far Away and Never were published and included, Demons would still call much more attention.
But Far Away offers us a little paradigm of Campbellian sword & sorcery worth analyzing. While it isn’t the same breed as his other collections and it’s clearly Campbell in a different milieu, there’s a rather striking prevalence of elements I suggested for D&D with Demons, at least to a point. The protagonist, mercenary sellsword Ryre, is motivated by survival and for reputation, as a prototypical OSR PC. Sorcerers and those who worship the Lovecraftian entities are exterior to Ryre (suggesting Fighters as the only possible class for such a game). The themes of alienation from communities and weird urban spaces are there. Ryre explores a few places that could be defined as Demesnes.
So perhaps Campbell has already, to some extent, given the answer.
Roll to Doubt 