In “Advanced Readings in D&D,” Tor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode take a look at Gary Gygax’s favorite authors and reread one per week, in an effort to explore the origins of Dungeons and Dragons and see which of these sometimes-famous, sometimes-obscure authors are worth rereading today. Sometimes the posts will be conversations, while other times they will be solo reflections, but one thing is guaranteed: Appendix N will be written about, along with dungeons, and maybe dragons, and probably wizards, and sometimes robots, and, if you’re up for it, even more. Welcome to the fourth post in the series, featuring a look at Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser.
Guys, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are basically the bee’s knees. In fact, I might go so far as to say they are the most Dungeons and Dragons of anything on the Appendix N list. Leiber obviously couldn’t have known that when he was writing the duo—at least not at first, starting them in 1939, but I guess perhaps he found out along the way, since he wrote them until 1988—but more interestingly, I don’t think Gary Gygax could have known, either. Now, obviously he knew that it influenced him in creating the game, but the thing about the Lankhmar stories is that they are actually how people play the game as well.
You know, I saw a funny image recently that had a picture of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and the Rohirrim all posed like a bunch of cool looking tough guys, all epic in scope, with a caption of “How Most D&D Groups Begin” and then it cuts to an image below it labeled “How Most D&D Groups End” with a picture of the Monty Python crew in Holy Grail. Snerk. Still, I do find that most roleplaying groups have a strong element of black comedy running through them, along with a charming sort of nihilism. They aren’t all flowery speeches to elf queens; in fact, more often they are sarcastic quips to bartenders. Which, in a nutshell, is Fafhrd and Gray Mouser’s game.
Where to start on Fafhrd and Gray Mouser? Well, you might as well start at the beginning, with Swords and Deviltry, the first collection, since it has their meeting and each of their prologues. Let me illustrate it thus: Fafhrd straps fireworks to his skis at one point in order to rocket across a jump. That sort of insanity is just so…well, so Dungeons and Dragons; I don’t know how Leiber does it. I mean, I just had an AD&D campaign end when our bard, after crowdsurfing a horde of damned and demons, delivered the killing blow to Zuggtomoy with a roll of a natural 100 on a rod of wonder, which on the alternate table we were using was “death ray, no save.” It was epic, in the truest sense of the term, and was only possible thanks to the critical mass of multiple players, a convoluted prior history of adventuring, random number generators, and sheer dumb luck. That makes sense, but Leiber’s imagination is so fruitful that…well, it is like he has a chaos theory generator in his head. Billions of flapping butterflies.
Personally though, Swords Against Wizardry is my favorite omnibus, because it has the story “Stardock” in it, which is my favorite Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story by a mile (even if it doesn’t have Lankhmar in it). In short: the pair decide to climb the highest mountain in the world. You know; like if Everest came complete with the boilerplate fantasy hyperbole—like if Olympus Mons was on Earth. On a rumor, a riddle…because of course these two adventurers would undertake a task no one has ever accomplished because of a poem. With a snow leopard as a companion. Sounds like Mouser took a level in Ranger to me; it explains why he can dual-wield Scalpel and Cat’s Claw, too, for that matter.
Of course, just climbing an impossible mountain is almost too easy! So we get to have giant invisible flying manta rays trying to eat them, while invisible demigods riding on the giant invisible flying manta rays are trying to murder them. Well of course, you are saying, that is just obviously what happens when you try to climb past the rime and ice of a primordial peak. What else would you expect? Weird gnomes? We’ve got them too! Also, and perhaps most crucially, there are also invisible demigod ladies who’ve taken a fancy to our heroes.
We’ve talked about ladies and their representation in the pulps that influenced Dungeons and Dragons. They’ve ranged from the rotten to the pretty solid, but most fall into a big box labeled “problematic.” Leiber’s ladies (should that be Leiber’s Ladies, as a sort of fantasy Charlie’s Angels? I’d read it!) are generally on the positive end of the spectrum. They are defined by their roles as romantic foils, but they aren’t negative roles. They have agency, but typically in service to either narrative fiat or the agenda of the antagonists…and are almost always weird.
By way of example: here, the women in question are the invisible, nude godlings who live on the mountain. They “reveal” themselves to Gray Mouser and Fafhrd by covering themselves in paint or in lace. Pin up, sure, but not offensive. They aren’t even the weirdest ones; for a while Gray Mouser is involved with an albino were-rat, and Fafhrd dates a ghoul whose flesh and organs are transparent, leaving only her skeleton visible. Eventually the two settle down with two female counterparts, Cif and Afreyt, who are the best of Leiber’s women; as his Lankhmar stories evolved, so too did his characters.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my personal favorite thing about the books: the wizards. Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. Think of them as if Gandalf had a baby with Wilbur Whatley. You know, they sort of show up, meddle, display a casual alienation and inhuman form that makes you shudder at the indifference of the universe, make a few cheap jokes, and then exit from the story. Like if Guillermo del Toro got his art team together to brainstorm new faceless creatures for a Baba Yaga movie (I’d watch it!). Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, on the other hand, aren’t playing Call of Cthulhu. They’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, sword and sorcery style. SAN checks? No sweat. These are guys who clawed their way from first level to twentieth. They can handle some tentacles and a few eyes too many or two few. What’s the big deal?
Mordicai Knode is leaving diligent markings on the dungeon wall with chalk and a series of thieves’ cant markings so that the absent Tim Callahan can catch up with the rest of the party.
My favourite short story so far is “The Bleak Shore” from Leiber.
Now I can’t stop thinking of their monster girlfriends, the albino were-rat & the invisible ghoul lady. Fun.
Admittedly, their original girlfriends get shuffled offstage pretty fast (in the timeline), so that Leiber can and does concentrate on the bromance, as it were, in most of the stories.
I do think, on that note, Ill Met in Lankhmar fully deserved the sheaf of awards its got, even if it comes late in publication.
“Lean Times in Lankhmar” is one of my all-time favorite fantasy short stories.
Michael Chabon’s GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD is, in large part, a homage to Fafhrd and the Mouser.
I didn’t take to F & GM at first, but in a while became convinced that you could pile up all the talent and intelligence of other sword and sorcery/fantasy writers and it wouldn’t reach as high as Leiber’s. The people aren’t cardboard, the settings are very memorable…Stardock was my favorite. I remember whenever I run across that saying, “The early bird gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse gets the cheese.”
Don’t forget that the story “Sea Magic” appeared in issue #11 of The Dragon (later just “Dragon”) magazine.
This was high quality adventure, pure and simple. Lieber had a dark and sardonic sense of humor, and the characters, despite the fantastic settings, felt more real than most characters I enountered in books. I can’t recommend these tales highly enough.
I loved these stories; have all the collections. Am not sure they’d stand up to a re-read – not that the Suck Fairy would in any way touch them, but just in the ways my tastes have changed. (Though those books are in my apartment and not the storage locker…)
[edited for coherence; the heat has eaten my brain *wry*]
6. Angiportus
That is all well & good…BUT WHAT IF YOU ARE THE WORM?
I think the series would hold up really well on a re-read. I am sure that there was lots that went right over my young head when I read the stories back in high school and college.
For a class assignment requiring us to write a letter to our favorite author, my friend and I wrote Fritz Leiber. He wrote a letter back thanking us and included a personal picture of himself (a polaroid if I remember correctly–this was many years ago). I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for him and especially the Mouser (I was a small kid).
By coincidence I just finished Swords and Deviltry last week, so an article on Leiber, Fafhrd, and the Gray Mouser is most welcome. I noticed the bromance angle right away; midway through “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” I was convinced that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser loved each other more than Vlana and Ivrian. I also noticed Leiber’s generally favorable treatment of his female characters, especially in “The Snow Women” and his skill at world-building. Lankhmar is quite a place and is clearly the template for Greyhawk City.
You had at me see-through-ghoul-girlfriend.
Thanks for bringing these two to my attention. It’s my first time hearing of them and they sound amazing.
My favorite is the Quarmall story- Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser have had a temporary disagreement and find themselves on opposing sides. Quarmall is all……
And add in Leiber’s handling of religion, which polytheistic sophistication (the gods in Lankhmar not to be confused with the gods *of* Lankhmar) is the basis for a thousand-and-one RPG pantheons.
My favorite of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales is the unprepossessing “The Cloud of Hate”, for its minimalist look at their bromance and its dynamic, never quite catching either of them in a fixed role:
[i]
“My noble comrade, shall we make a betrothal gift of it to sweet Innesgay?” he asked liltingly. “And rekindle the dear little brazier and end this night as we began it, savoring all the matchless joys of watchmanship and all the manifold wonders of – ”
“Give it here, idiot boy,” Fafhrd snarled, snatching the clinking thing for all his burnt fingers. “I know a place where they’ve soothing salves – and needles too, to stitch up the notched ears of thieves. And where both the wine and the girls are sharp and clean!”
16. Eugene R.
Yeah, that is true! Very shades of Planescape.
Gary Gygax was a huge influence on my own writing and was my first read into the Fantasy world. I will definitely delve into this treasure trove of literary wealth. Thanks for an excellent article.
18. Gus Gallows
I actually haven’t read Gary Gygax’s fiction, though I have a copy of The Anubis Murders here on my bookshelf. Maybe that is a good “endcap” for this series!
@19: Paizo released four of Gygax’s novels from the now-cancelled “Dangerous Journeys” setting including, for the first time, Infernal Sorceress. They tend to be mysteries, decent enough but nothing classic. Still, I suppose they give something of an insight into the way his mind worked.
My favorite of Leiber’s Lankhmar stories is “The Sadness of the Executioner” from Swords and Ice Magic. I offer no apologies for this.
20. SchuylerH
Speaking of Gygax’s books just makes me remember, “oh yeah! We totally killed Zuggtomoy this spring!” as I mentioned, which…heck yeah we did.
I love Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Part of what makes them so enjoyable as characters is that they are partners, not hero and sidekick. They are individuals not cliches stamped out to fit a formula.
Fritz Leiber wrote stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser from the beginning of his career to the end. You can see them growing and evolving over the decades. Personally, the ones I like best are what I think of as “the middle period stories” (those collected in the Ace paperbacks “Swords in the Mist”, “Swords Against Wizardry” and “Swords of Lankhmar”).
It is worth noting that the characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were not Leiber’s sole creation but came out of an exchange of letters with his friend Harry Otto Fischer in the 1930s. A big chunk of “Quarmall” was written by Fischer and incorporated by Leiber in the finished story.
This series includes one of my all time favorite openings (it comes from “Adept’s Gambit” where our heroes are adventuring on Earth in the Hellenistic Era):
“It happened that while Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were dallying in a wine shop near the Sidonian Harbor of Tyre, where all wine shops are of doubtful repute, a long-limbed yellow-haired Galatian girl lolling in Fafhrd’s lap turned suddenly into a wallopingly large sow. It was a singular occurrence, even in Tyre.”
22. JohnnyMac
Quarmall! The megadungeon complete with megadungeon politics, like we were just talking about regarding Conan & the megadungeon!
23. Mordicai
Quarmall certainly looks like a classic D & D set up. I would not be surprised if more than one first time DM took the setting, filed off the serial numbers, changed the names and ran with it.
Of course, an important question if one did so, how would one fit Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser into the D & D character classes? Fighter, barbarian, rogue, thief or some combination? It has been long years since I played and my knowledge of the rules of the game is decades out of date, so I would be interested to hear from those who are up to date on this.
24. JohnnyMac
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser didn’t fit too well into the AD&D class system, but their stats were published in the 1e Deities & Demigods/Legends & Lore and the 2e Legends & Lore. I can’t find my 1e books, but in the 2e L&L Fafhrd is a ranger 18/bard 5/thief 15 while the Gray Mouser is a fighter 13/wizard 5/thief 19. I’m assuming these stats describe the end of their career and I’m not sure if it reflects the proper 2e human dual-classing rules (it’s been too long).
24. Tim_Eagon
Thanks for the stats on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser!
24. JohnnyMac
&
25. Tim_Eagon
Well putting aside Deities & Demigods, I think it is fun to think about it on our own; that is just what someone else thought they should be, right? Anyhow, let’s start with this: based on their origin stories, I think we can say Fafhrd started as a Barbarian 1 & Gray Mouser started as a Wizard 1, right? Then obviously they both gain levels of thief. Maybe fighter. Mouser has a pet leopard & fights with two weapons a lot, as I mentioned in the article, so maybe some ranger there?
27. mordicai
Though in the “Snow Women” Fafhrd is also described as a skald…it’s why I don’t think the AD&D class system works too well to describe them. I think perhaps the 3e optional gestalt rules or the 4e hybrid rules plus multi-classing would be the best way to stat them out if you were going to try to do it.
27. Mordicai, 28. Tim_Eagon
Just to complicate things further, remember that in one story, “Lean Times in Lankhmar” (referenced above by 4. colomon), Fafhrd spends a season serving as acolyte to the priest Bwadres, preaching in the Street of the Gods. So, perhaps, he should have a level in cleric as well?
Of course, this also serves to illustrate why we should not get too serious about trying to shoe horn literary characters into a game system they were never intended for.
27. Mordicai; 29. JohnnyMac
The same applies to squeezing literary characters into the D&D alignment system!
By the way, does anyone know if Fritz Leiber ever played any RPGs himself? I know he was a serious chess player (rated as a master at one time) and he used that game in his stories several times (e.g. “Midnight by the Morphy Watch”, “The Sixty Four Square Madhouse”). And he had both talent and some experience as an actor.
This could start us off on another round of speculation: would the authors we are discussing have played D & D and, if so, what classes would they have played?
28. Tim_Eagon
Bard?
29. JohnnyMac
Yeah but being reasonable is no fun! I say we let the motion carry & give Fafhrd a level of cleric. I for one have always been a fan of 3e style multiclassing. Let him have a weird grab bag!
30. Tim_Eagon
Awkwardly shoehorning things in based on the DnD alignment system? I wouldn’t know anything about that!
31. JohnnyMac
I think we can safely put Lieber, at least as far as Lankhmar goes, into the “rogue” camp– whether those rogues are thieves or bards or whatever. Which, then, obviously Howard corners the market on barbarians. Poul Anderson, again obviously paladin.
32. Mordicai,
Like your suggestions! REH would have made an excellent barbarian (assuming he could have been held back from going berserk and knocking the table over midgame).
Maybe Sterling Lanier could play a cleric; Heiro was an ordained priest as well as a fighter.
By the way, “…but being reasonable is no fun!” would make a great T-shirt slogan.
I’m interested in which authors actually played role playing games.
I know that George R. R. Martin did. According to what he wrote at the beginning of GURPS Wildcards, Wildcards was created when he and several other authors were playing superheroes RPG.
According to the Wheel of Time d20 game, published by Wizards of the Coast, Robert Jordan also did. He was a miserly master, not giving much magic items to his players. That’s what he wrote at the beginning of that book, at least.
Any others?
34. Ryamano
The proliferation of angreal over the course of the series makes me seriously doubt Ser Jordan’s statement. Mister Martin, on the other hand, strikes me as the sort of guy who would kill the PC that you’d played for two years, on your birthday, because he failed a save vs. death saving throw.
31. JohnnyMac,
I’m not sure if he ever played, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all, considering he expressed interest at the very beginnings:
http://www.dundracon.com/DDC_History.php
And created his own RPG-like wargame:
http://blogofholding.com/?p=161
And wrote the opening piece for Dragon #1, a first-person account of trying to explain wargaming to the skeptical Fafhrd and Gray Mouser:
36. Shimrod
Oh man, I sort of want to run a Lankhmar game where Fafhrd & Mouse are the annoying high level DM characters who show up & railroad the PCs occasionally. You know, basically, Gandalf.
36. Shimrod
Thank you for the links! That was very interesting. Perhaps in some alternate world line Fritz Leiber invented and sucessfully marketed RPGs starting in the 1930s.
By the way, your screen name reminds me of a question I have been meaning to ask mordicai: Jack Vance is going to be included in this series I trust?
38. JohnnyMac
You betcha Vecna…I mean Vance…is on here! The list is from Gary’s famous “Appendix N.”
I started reading Swords Against Death this week and I’m enjoying it more than Swords and Deviltry; I think it’s because Leiber’s prose is less baroque in his earlier stories. I liked Swords and Deviltry too, but I sometimes found passages in “The Snow Women” and “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” hard to read or they were kind of unclear because of the way Leiber wrote them. Does anyone else feel that way? At first I thought it was because I wasn’t used to his prose style (something that happened when I first read Fletcher Pratt and A. Merritt), but then I started reading his earlier stories and I didn’t have the same issues.
39. mordicai
Good. Now I have to go over and dig through the archives at The Order of the Stick. There is a line in there about Jack Vance that calls out to be quoted when we discuss him in this context.
40. Tim_Eagon
I do agree that I find some of Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories less enthralling than others. I think that this is an effect of how long he kept working with the characters; he invented them back in the 1930s and he was still writing stories about them five decades later. Over time he took different takes on them. As I said above at #22, the stories I like best are those collected in Swords in the Mist, Swords against Wizardry and Swords of Lankhmar. Probably that is, at least in part, because those were the ones I read when I first discovered the series circa 1970.
Of course, this is a hazard to any author who has a long running series. If your characters do not change over time, some readers will start grumbling about how you are just grinding out formulaic hack work. And if you do change them, hear the fans howl about the desecration of beloved characters. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
41. JohnnyMac
It wasn’t the characterizations or plot, it was the prose style itself that threw me for a loop. I felt that some of the sentences were very long and strangely constructed in the later stories I’ve read.
That could be a function of either changing writing styles, or the influence of different editors. Also, the stories may have been written for different markets or magazines, who had different house styles.
@Tim_Eagon; Yes! I’m glad I have found someone who agrees with me! I found the writing style unnecessary, and it was one thing that made me find reading the stories a bit of a chore. That kind of prose works (for me) when it can build a rythm while harnessing clever imagery through the use of evocative or suggestive words, but I found myself simply confused much of the time; the flow of the story disrupted by a need to baffle over some obscuring phrase. Often they are clever, but maybe only for cleverness’ sake.
I have a love-hate relationship with these stories. The series has frequent scenes of long, drawn out grey dreary Dostoyevski-esque misery which I found painful to read; off the top of my head, the main culprits are The Mouser’s terrible plight when he “Goes Below”, but particularly The Bleak Shore and Stardock. I thought these kind of personal, grinding ordeals were just too drawn out, especially when compared to REH, for example, in his Frost Giant’s Daughter who manages to portray to us exactly and precisely Conan’s ordeal as he races for hours in the snow in but a few paragraphs. It is succinct and powerful, while balanced perfectly with the length of the story’s format.
I was also surprised that noone has mentioned the gratuitiousness of particular scenes, especially considering the recent review of Red Nails! Some stories, particularly The Mouser Goes Below left me feeling positively uncomfortable and as embarrassed as if I’d been reading some dude’s fantasies!
My love for the stories was bouyed, however by stories such as The Lords of Quarmall, with its factioning and its enigmatic characters, Sea Magic, The Mer She and my all time favourite, the haunting Adept’s Gambit.
44. Dwimmerlied
I’m not having many issues with the prose in the earlier stories featured in Swords Against Death. However, I thought that “The Bleak Shore” was like a hybrid between a sword & sorcery story and a Bergman film; it wasn’t completely successful IMO.
My opinions on how the stories relate to D&D; I agree that it is a good example for capturing all the over-the-top and unlikely swashbuckling action that a typical D&D game is likely to have a fair dose of. Also, it has that quality of the S&S genre of having the action localised and largely personal, as it was said above, the gritty exchanges with the barkeep rather than the flowery pose of heroes as they dally with elven nobles and such. Of course, many games attempt to emulate the latter because it puts the epic in epic fantasy, and many fail under the weight of the undertaking; I love epic fantasy, but I think that many gamers would profit from gaining inspiration from these stories, particularly that in terms of awesomeness, scope (measured by the number and length of plots, sub-plots, meta-plots, etc) should not equal epic.
Another trope element of D&D, at least in the past, is that bizzarity and weirdness, which was probably early on inseperable from sword and sorcery because of its pulpy origins. Unfathomable Ningauble and Enigmatic Sheelba, melting towers, creeping insanity, bizzare bazars and much more feature prominently in these stories, and likely inspired a certain degree of old school play and elements of game design that would be frowned on these days as DM fiat. In modern gaming, the trend toward (at least in 3ed) having a consistent internal physics where the rules of nature were rational and accessibly equitable (if not predictable) probably trump much opportunity for these kinds of things. They still appear though, and can be pidgeon-holed into things like the book of abberations, lovecraftian, or cthulu gaming.
Magic in Nehwon is very interesting, and as far as I can tell, comes in two varieties; there are the charms and enchantments that the womenfolk use (for example Fahfrd’s clan and the priestesses of Rime Isle), and the truly creepy darker magics used by Lord Quarmal and his son; Hristomillo and The Mouser himself. These are magics of the mind, of secret fears, terrors, insanity and death. It might be read that they often work by the planting of suggestion, and the effects themselves are actually manifest by the victim by means of pre-existing vulnerabilities. Unlike in D&D they are rarely spectacular; the affects are subtle but the effects are often terrible, questionable at best and truly evil at worst. I think that D&D has over the years moved away from this element of wrongness of magic.
An interesting contrast between Lahnkmar and a typical d&d game is the lack of the demi-humans and races of monsters. Monsters seem to be frequently one-off’s contrived by the author for a specific situation and described for their horriffic effect, just ambiguoulsy enough so that the reader can fill in the terrible blanks for him or herself.
Magic items seem to be rare, the antagonists never really possessing any magical weapons or such. Treasure is hard to come by but easy to lose again.
Fritz Leiber was at GenCon 9, back in 1977, the year it was at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club. I remember seeing his name in the program book as being on a panel with two other authors who I can’t remember on Sunday afternoon. Alas, though, I was doing something else at that time.
You’ve just made me realize that I’m pretty sure all of my Fritz Leiber books were lost in one of my many moves. Either that, or they were all borrowed and returned in the first place. Hmm.
In either case, I MUST re-acquire them!!!
48. Tabbyfl55
Dang! That is what happened to my Prisoner DVDs! Either that, or I lent them to someone & forgot who!
[…] Tor.com — “Where to start on Fafhrd and Gray Mouser? Well, you might as well start at the beginning, with Swords and Deviltry, the first collection, since it has their meeting and each of their prologues. Let me illustrate it thus: Fafhrd straps fireworks to his skis at one point in order to rocket across a jump. That sort of insanity is just so…well, so Dungeons and Dragons; I don’t know how Leiber does it. I mean, I just had an AD&D campaign end when our bard, after crowdsurfing a horde of damned and demons, delivered the killing blow to Zuggtomoy with a roll of a natural 100 on a rod of wonder, which on the alternate table we were using was “death ray, no save.” It was epic, in the truest sense of the term, and was only possible thanks to the critical mass of multiple players, a convoluted prior history of adventuring, random number generators, and sheer dumb luck. That makes sense, but Leiber’s imagination is so fruitful that…well, it is like he has a chaos theory generator in his head. Billions of flapping butterflies.” […]