The Kiwifarms Unofficial Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club

Dante Alighieri said:
Well they have Kender... but it makes up for it by having Raistlin and Fizban.
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Kender in the novels aren't bad. They're not good for tabletop, being a magnet for retards and a prompt for bad behavior.

Dragonlance has three comic relief races (three is admittedly too many), out of which Kender are the only playable one. In the books, kender are trickster characters (think baby Loki), most things a kender character does are haha funny but also helpful because the story is written to accommodate a trickster. People playing tabletop can't pull this off. In the books, when you discover the party kender stole your spellbook to look up a cookie recipe, you're being stop and frisked by the inquisition, so they let you go. In the game, it happens when you fight a troll, and the whole party dies.

(yet another edit) : Dragonlance the roleplaying setting was supposed to be an alternative to Greyhawk and greyhawking, focused on dragons, as opposed to Greyhawk's dungeons. You're the good guys, you perform heroic epic deeds. As a fighter, you get to climb ranks in an occult bureaucracy and ride your own dragon. As a cleric, you're Jesus or at least an apostle. As a magic-user, you can travel in time and open the gates of hell. As a thief... well, "theft is a crime, criminals can't be heroic". The setting designers were too autistic to think navy seal or spetsnazovec, so they went with "inherently innocent childlike kleptomaniac". Therefore kender.

Allied-Mastercomputer said:
How are the dragonlance novels when compared to non-dnd fantasy stories?
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Depending on what you mean by "non-dnd". Fantasy is huge. Shardik is technically fantasy.

If "contemporary": they're fast-paced, there's always stuff happening, and "the good guys" never achieve definite victories. Alignment is fucky, it's the opposite of how it is in Tolkien. In Lord of the Rings, orcs, Sauron and maybe Solzhenitsyn are inherently evil and you can't reason with them, and everyone else is just misguided; Evil is inimical to Creation, it doesn't belong in the world and must be destroyed. In Dragonlance, the biggest war of Good vs Evil was singlehandedly won by an Evil character for Team Good. Evil is an integral part of the world, it means "I do whatever the fuck I want", and "fight for Team Good" is the quintessential "whatever the fuck I want". There's a lot of preaching because the lead designer is a (liberal, woke) Mormon. The first trilogy is lichrally Mormon Narnia. They also wrote a series about the Troubles, it's titled "Death Gate" and is great fun, you should jump there if/when you're done with mainline Dragonlance.

If "modern": they're less "cinematic". There's a lot of authors' narration telling you infodumps about the world, rather than let it be revealed organically or (like bad modern books do) in dialogue. Because they're older books, they're written for the lowest common denominator to be able to "catch up" if s/he ends up picking book 2 of a trilogy, this gets annoying, especially if you read the books back to back. There's no emo shit or edginess, the edgiest thing is one of the party members is a rape baby (a later book by a different author rewrites this to some sort of BDSM colonial monster-fucking thing, a civilized woman loves savage cock and her evil racist relatives claim it was raep), and in one of the splatbooks his ex was statutorily raped by a nigger when she was 13.

There's some genuinely stupid stuff that may or may not make you very mad on the online. One of the biggest is they have steel coins instead of gold coins, because, you see, steel is more valuable than gold in wartime (nigga please). The timeline is fucky. This doesn't really matter much for the kind of story Dragonlance is, just think "gold piece" when you read "steel" and "500 years ago" when you read "2500". One of the big bads is named "Verminaard", not as a slur, it's actually his name.

Something that can't be easily ignored is this: in the setting, big events happened about 300 years ago, they're now legendary, and the legends are very much in line with real-world tales and legends and likewise don't make much sense. As worldbuilding details, they're cool! Authors can use them for flavor and plot, characters for intel and propaganda. (Consider the IRL Sodom and Gomorrah: there are normal people who say fags bad and wokes who say the Sodomites' real sin was lack of hospitality and you should let in a billion Indians.) But later, TSR on its deathbed and WotC decided to sell tell-all books about what "really" happened. Those are INCREDIBLY terrible, I might even make a thread. It turns out that the most evil guys in the history of the world, those who deserve eternal torture for their sins, are
1. a robber baron who killed his wife for cucking him with a lesbian demon worshipper and trying to pass off their demon baby as his
2. a senile narcoleptic post-wall former twink who was somehow the only person granted healing touch by the setting's overgod(?)

Finally:
the very last trilogy is terrible. There were rumors that WotC refused to publish it because it wasn't woke enough: the real reason it was garbage. The original authors don't care or remember anything about the world and the characters. A jeet named Shivam Bhatt "helped" them with setting details, displaying typical jeet diligence and care. Worse, it resets the timeline yet again. Dragonlance as a setting is pretty much done, which is a shame, because the early books are great. You should read them.
 
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Allied-Mastercomputer said:
TLDR. This is what I got. Thanks mate.
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If the books involve Raistlin by any means, they are worth reading. He is the central figure in the OG trilogy, and a few others. If he isn't involved, the books may be good but are likely boring.

Edit: By central, I mean... shit I already gave it away. DO NOT FUCK WITH HIS TEA. Just a general safe statement.
 
The voot is up, and the theme is "March Madness". Eldrich horrors, insanity, beings beyond comprehension, men with funnily named cats, and worst of all Neil Gaiman, the selection is pretty stacked and I'm certain all the choices are more interesting than Tomlinson.
 
Just so I don't clutter up the voot announcement I'll doublepost, but bros I have been trying but I swear Fatrick himself shoots me a tranq dart every time I open his book. It's the literary equivalent of white noise, it's so boring and unfunny and I just can't even remember what's happening half the time because this fucking retard thinks a great way to build his world is dropping everything to explain some piece of tech for a few pages, and by that point the reader forgets what the characters are actually doing because we have to stop every five seconds and read Fatrick's half-remembered physics classes.
It's clearly lifting it's humor from Douglas Adams, but the big failure in that is that Adams would use a turn of phrase or concept so perfect yet so out there the reader immediately understands what he means. Whenever Tomlinson tries that it falls flat because too many quips blend into each other and they just aren't good.
 
VeteranOfTheRetardWars said:
Just so I don't clutter up the voot announcement I'll doublepost, but bros I have been trying but I swear Fatrick himself shoots me a tranq dart every time I open his book. It's the literary equivalent of white noise, it's so boring and unfunny and I just can't even remember what's happening half the time because this fucking retard thinks a great way to build his world is dropping everything to explain some piece of tech for a few pages, and by that point the reader forgets what the characters are actually doing because we have to stop every five seconds and read Fatrick's half-remembered physics classes.
It's clearly lifting it's humor from Douglas Adams, but the big failure in that is that Adams would use a turn of phrase or concept so perfect yet so out there the reader immediately understands what he means. Whenever Tomlinson tries that it falls flat because too many quips blend into each other and they just aren't good.
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He lost me completely when he started peppering in alien language and did the cliche of having the aliens butcher human idioms.
The humans have a saying—‘That dog is already out of the sack.’
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made me roll my eyes so hard I think I got whiplash. It's very frustrating because I can see myself really enjoying this story if it was in the hands of a better author.
 
CIS White Droid said:
It's very frustrating because I can see myself really enjoying this story if it was in the hands of a better author.
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That’s the big theme in Patrick’s writing. His concepts are decent enough but his execution is uniquely terrible.

A murder mystery on board a generation ship is a solid premise. Then he messes it up with his shitty self-insert sports hero, lady captain and underaged girl. After that trilogy he branched out into sci-fi humor about joining the galactic society but we’re seen as savages and a starship repossession company. That’s a nice couple of ideas but between his accidentally heroic Zapp Brannigan character and his underage girl and trans space crabs he again squandered a decent premise for a story.

I wish we’d gotten the full Herd Immunity novel because it’s dire. The pitch is okay but full of his usual dumb stuff. The sample chapters are laugh out loud terrible. It’s too bad he’s busy fatly oinking on Twitter rather than finishing that piece.

I’m sure his Tiny Tim Kills Christmas book is going to get published any time now so we will finally have something new to mock.
 
VeteranOfTheRetardWars said:
The voot is up, and the theme is "March Madness". Eldrich horrors, insanity, beings beyond comprehension, men with funnily named cats, and worst of all Neil Gaiman, the selection is pretty stacked and I'm certain all the choices are more interesting than Tomlinson.
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Whenever I see "The King in Yellow" I first think of Raymond Chandler, not Robert Chambers. I really need to read the OG story to see what the connection is, if any.

Also I'm sorry famers, I tried a bit of the Tomlinson book but I just couldn't. There are too many good things out there to spend even a second reading something I don't like.
 
Greedy Fly said:
Also I'm sorry famers, I tried a bit of the Tomlinson book but I just couldn't. There are too many good things out there to spend even a second reading something I don't like.
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I’ll be real with you man I feel that.
But hey, we went where few have before and we tried, and that’s what matters at the end of the day. And when you really think about it, ‘author’ is not nearly the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the great Patrick S. Tomlinson.
 
VeteranOfTheRetardWars said:
The voot is up, and the theme is "March Madness". Eldrich horrors, insanity, beings beyond comprehension, men with funnily named cats, and worst of all Neil Gaiman, the selection is pretty stacked and I'm certain all the choices are more interesting than Tomlinson.
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Get your books on the MEGA folder for the month, get them while they're hot


I shoulda said this before but if any version of the books I put up is bad in some way, let me know and I'll fetch a different one
 
We really need to read Hardwired for this sometime. It’s like Neuromancer as a sleazy, pulpy 80s action film, it’s great. One of the main characters is a cyborg hooker-assassin who in the opening chapter yeets a pornsick AGP troon.
 
Randall Fragg said:
We really need to read Hardwired for this sometime. It’s like Neuromancer as a sleazy, pulpy 80s action film, it’s great. One of the main characters is a cyborg hooker-assassin who in the opening chapter yeets a pornsick AGP troon.
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Neuromancer already is a sleazy, pulpy action film. Having spent the last few weeks reading and watching a lot of cyberpunk shit I want to stop calling the subgenre cyberpunk and call it Gibsonpunk instead, everyone just ripped off his steeze and Blade Runner's aesthetics to a greater or lesser degree until the two finally merged into Johnny Mnemonic and everyone finally decided to move on.
 
The vote had finished, and The King In Yellow by Chambers has won out for March.
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I was honestly expecting Lovecraft to win, but hey close enough I ain’t complaining.
 
Dan Simmons has passed away from complications of a stroke. We talked about his Hyperion series not too long ago. 😢
 
Prehistoric Jazz said:
This made me want to reread the Dark Sun novels. Ordered fresh copies.
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I reread Lynn Abbey's trilogy this January. I forgot how woke it was, especially the final book. One of the previous books has a decent depiction of domestic slavery and then book 3 goes "reeeeeee naughty word! prostitution and starvation are so much better than the icky s word!" And even that was "too rightwing" for WotC

I'm still wrestling with Fat. Gate Crashers is a difficult book, Fat is gay, dumber than a YA author, and really hates America (the latter would be a plus if he weren't gay, stupid, and American). I'm almost halfway through and encountered 1 (one) correct instance of fictional science (gravitational containment). The science is wrong. The tone is wrong. The basic English words are wrong. There are repeated words and unfortunate alliterations, clearly no one else read the book before publication. There's burgers. @VeteranOfTheRetardWars please no more deliberately bad books.
 
𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤 ℑ𝔫 𝔜𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔬𝔴

An Effortpost In Two Parts

I really like this book. Half of it, at least.

Robert W. Chambers was born in 1865 as a New Yorker in an age where New York was still rightfully seen as the center of American culture. The son of a lawyer, Chambers studied medicine as his primary and more respectable field of study at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering) before transitioning into the Art Students League of the American Fine Arts Society. Like many young, rich people in his social circles, he went to Paris to display his art in the Salon, to be the week's flavor and talk, and probably to drink himself silly while chasing beautiful French girls. His later stories, as described by a critic appraising his legacy, were largely centered around caddish men chasing sexually willing women (their words, not mine), which seems about standard for a Bohemian wannabe from New York.

Chambers had made a respectable living during this time publishing his illustrations in magazines, but for reasons undisclosed in diaries or later testimonies, he suddenly went in a different direction from the bougie Parisian happy art of the Belle Epoque. One day when he was living in Munich, Chambers sat down and he wrote a collection of short stories which would cement his legacy for the next hundred and a half years. The King In Yellow was not his most popular work of his career, but it was the most important. It would go on to permanently alter the landscape of supernatural horror, but not in the epic stride of Lovecraft or the commercial appeal of King. The King in Yellow remains as Chambers' legacy, persisting beyond all his other efforts. But why? I submit that he tapped into something beyond normal perception. Whether or not he knew it, and like many young, rich people in this time period, Chambers' entire life was poised on the precipice of and the conclusion thencforth of the Gilded Age.

The Gilded Age, characterized as the roughly thirty-year period between the American Reconstruction and the Progressive Era leading up to WW1, ran roughly contemporaneously with the Parisian Belle Epoque. Both of these periods are characterized, nostalgically, as a flourishing of the arts and culture. Realistically, more upper middle class people were wealthy enough to be 'poor' artists with daddy's money. The lot of the poor didn't change, despite the vast breadth of invention and the massive influx of wealth into American and European wallets. Conveniences became standards. Devices meant to ease work were used as justifications to increase productivity. I offer no commentary, save that the Gilded Age is called thus because of the thin golden veneer across the continued mistreatment of workers and the lower class, lit by the yellow filaments of the brand new light bulb. Yellow light. Yellow journalism. Yellow people. An age spiraling and wheeling into delirious visions of the future and the oncoming shadow of war, captured in a fleeting glimpse of madness.

We begin with an invocation in the style of the Greek choruses, titled Cassilda's Song. In the author's day and age, poetry and prose of this kind was labeled under the domain of the Weird, weird fiction and weird poetry. Its primary definitors were artists like Edgar Allen Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, and most critically to Chambers himself, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce. It is from Bierce that Chambers directly takes two words which haunt the dreams of men: Carcosa and Hastur. The former is taken from the poem An Inhabitant of Carcosa, a poem about returning home to find everything you knew has been long since destroyed, and that it would have been better if you never came back, and the latter from Haita the Shepherd, both written by Bierce. Hastur goes unmentioned in Cassilda's Song, but Carcosa rings as the final dread word of every line in this strange, lamentous poem. Twin suns set and black stars rise over a lake of clouds. Stars sing songs to a tattered king. Tears dry and words die in lost Carcosa.

The stories that follow this song of doom would serve as the prototype for a genre that bears another artist's name.

The King In Yellow is a collection of short fiction. Half of these stories are completely unremarkable except as an insight into an American expat boheme's view of the world and the future. Thankfully, whoever edited the book at F. Tennyson Neely recognized the eerie quality and clear passion put into the first four. The prose, however, remains a 6 or a 7 out of ten on the Dexter-McCarthy Scale (patent pending to Neverender Publishing, using Timothy Dexter as a -1 and Cormac McCarthy as a 10.) It has been said by other critics, and I find myself echoing their words, that Chambers is capable of better writing but just didn't do it for whatever reason. As an artist, I can understand coming up with a rad idea and having to gussy it up to make people interested. But gussied it remains, like a thin line between normalcy and whatever inspired Chambers to pen the stories. There is one element that unites all these stories, one common factor, one place where the walls come down. Let me break each one of them down and show you what I mean.

Hildred Castaigne lives in a world that is not our own. America has recently made peace with Germany in a conflict over the Samoan Islands. Suicide booths have been installed in New York. We have mounties, like we're some kind of fucking CANADIAN derivative culture. The Jews have been kicked out for the 110th time. Blacks have been resettled. Is Mr. Chambers based or are we just cringe? But most importantly, a Congress of Religions has declared international sectarian divisions null and void, and many people are calling this the Millennium promised in scripture.

This is not so. Certainly not to Hildred, not since he read the play. He cannot forget what he read there, or what it revealed to him. Now he means to take the crown of the Imperial Dynasty of America as a servant to an Emperor whom kings have served.

Castaigne's story is one of rampant paranoia and delusions of grandeur. A former gentleman who was committed to a sanitorium and treated for mental wellness, he now bears a burning hatred of doctors, diagnoses and not being acknowledged as a rightful heir to the great legacy of his house. Assisted by an insane blackmailer (who 'repairs reputations' as kompromat in exchange for funds), Hildred has supposedly been putting men of all stripes, stations and statuses into his pocket to aid in a coup to oust the President and declare himself Emperor. Every day he takes a gold (or is it brass?) crown from a safe with a timer alarm and imagines himself at the apex of the world. In the meantime, he must endure the slovenly, ignorant and impertinent notions of his remaining family and their acquaintances that he is off his fucking nut. He hates being called crazy. He isn't crazy. The doctors just said he was to keep him contained. Hildred has a crown and that means he is king over the world which his master has given him.

Murder, madness and suicide follow him, a deranged game to position himself on a board only he and his conspirators can see. At the conclusion of all, he reveals his maddened plan to his cousin, the sole other male inheritor within the twisted genealogy of his line, offering only exile or death after having killed his doctor and claimed the death of his cousin's beloved. In his haze of suspicion and vile hatred, he has no idea that anyone could simply counterplay his grab for power by calling the cops. As Hildred is dragged away, things click together for him. Him, and no one else.

“Ah! I see it now!” I shrieked. “You have seized the throne and the empire. Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!”

Hildred dies in an insane asylum, believing to the last that he has been masterfully manipulated into seizing control of an empire that doesn't exist in the name of a king he has never met. What remains of Castaigne is a haunting condemnation to a character with significant standing in the United States Army, and a legion of agents trembling under the whip of an unknown master. Hildred might be right. Or he might be a crank. We don't know. We can only imagine what might happen next.

"I wear no mask," a stranger whispers. A highborn lady screams as she realizes he's telling the truth.

The Mask is much more in line with Chambers' usual ouevre. It is, at its heart, a weird romance story. An alchemistic artist has discovered a compound that allows living matter to be transmuted into a strange kind of stone. He will not say where or from whom he learned this secret.

Then it kind of devolves into a bohemian retard's cuck chair story.

Alec, the speaker, has long been enamoured of the beautiful Genevieve, yet her heart is given to BIG BORIS. Described as a Madonna in perfection of form and youthful grace, Genevieve is the fire in our Alec's heart, and it is like a slow death to him that she loves another and cannot love him as she does Boris. Yes, you may laugh at the in-your-face parallel to Lancelot and Guinevere. Boris makes a living as an artist by selling his horrible sculptures of petrified animals to the galleries, which are treasured because of their lifelike precision. None of them have any idea he's a foul heretic who concocted a swimming pool full of lethal Medusa juice. Here we find normalcy, Chambers' world of artists and the demi-monde of their existence, brushing up against true madness. No one seems to realize what having this open pool can do to someone if they fall in. And one day, Alec makes the mistake of picking the wrong play to read, and his world comes crashing down.

Surprise. Genevieve falls in, and is petrified. This does such a mortal blow to Alec's health and sanity that he is incapacitated for months by grief, and slowly his world begins to empty and hollow out around him. Boris leaves, then dies, leaving his possessions (including Genevieve...) to Alec. The servants remain, but are sorrowful and distant. Every day, Alec gazes on the still and perfect idealization in stone of the woman he loved and more of him falls away.

Until one day the spell is undone, and The Madonna wakes, her face pale and serene.

Taken as is, his reunion with her seems borderline anticlimactic. Or rather, by current standards it is. This was sort of the expected outcome in romance stories. Who doesn't love it when love conquers all? But I have to wonder if she came back exactly the same. I have to wonder if a woman described as an icon of holy perfection didn't carry something back with her from beyond. We don't know. We can only imagine what might happen next.

This time, we begin with an admonishment. Do not pray for those in Hell. God has put them there for a reason, and you are not the one who knows why.

The shortest and the least related to the core device, In The Court of The Dragon reads much more like a typical horror story. A man at prayer in Catholic vespers is gradually assaulted by a rogue organist playing awful chords of doom, a decay of normalcy which only the speaker seems to notice. He is hunted by a terrifying specter of menace through the last rays of sunset under some of the most famous landmarks of Paris as he tries to make his way back to his home in the Court of The Dragon. He almost makes it home, only to find the doors shut and barred to him and his hunter at his back, promising no escape-

And then he wakes up. Or did he wake up? Is he still in vespers? The clergy are filing out, and the hunter is there with them, and the speaker realizes that in his sleep something has hunted him down and penned him in in the Court of The Dragon. Now the game is done. The world falls away and he falls into Hali, washed with flame and immersed in the voice of The King, who speaks to him the words of Hebrews 10:31 as he drowns and burns.

In The Court of The Dragon has a quick and terrible punchiness to it, but suffers from a kind of disconnection that comes from not fully developing an idea with the amount of prose it requires. But within this short, short story is a terrible implication, one that will be revealed to you soon.

Let the dawn see what we have done when the stars are fallen and the night is gone.

We're suddenly back in Chambers' familiar world of art and artists. Frankly, I don't care about summarizing these two beyond the fact that they occupy the typical position of a rich boy artist and his favorite doll. Yes, I am reducing these characters to stereotypes. That is, however, a consequence of how art and artists have changed since Chambers' time. Their flirtation and dalliance is seen as creepy and weird now, but the relationship between them was likely seen as romantic. The speaker is a dissolute Catholic who wants to settle down someday, and lingers at the periphery of Tessie's world. He refuses to commit sexual sin with her, but not because he's not horny. To him it's about preserving her virtue, even as he pays her to get naked so he can paint her. Paradoxes and hypocrisies stack over and over in his head until, quite suddenly, the real world intrudes.

One look is all it takes. A strange man sitting on the steps of a church with a face like a maggot, an eater of death (perhaps, metaphorically, a devourer of sin.) The speaker is haunted by dreams and visions and the same words over and over again.

“Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

No matter how many times he tries to run from it back into his dreams and fantasies of Tessie and of his artistic life, the dreams return to him. Soon enough, Tessie starts to share them. The speaker denies reality, returns to his life, and is thrust back beyond his half-world into the darkness of what lies beyond.

Then his beloved Tessie finds the Yellow Sign on the black onyx clasp that holds shut a terrible secret.

Time decays. His world flees away, his art fails him. He cannot ignore what is waiting for him. Tessie is consumed by it, and so he is consumed with her, and they fall together into the darkness of the words they have read. In the end, they are closer than they've ever been, so mingled that their thoughts seem to pass seamlessly between each other. That's when He comes for them both, and all he can do is cry out to God.

The speaker is left dying with Tessie dead beside him, A heap of rotted filth, the remains of a long-dead man, marks the presence of that vessel or agent of their destroyer, or maybe their liberator. The speaker will tell no more of what he saw because it would do no good for anyone. The rituals of the priest and the doctor that attend on him cannot approach the truth. He's seen it, and it is not what we imagined.

So... What's actually happening under all this?

Ultimately, I think Chambers might have been consciously or subconsciously reacting to the outwardly glamorous and inwardly squalid soul of his time and culture. The life of a boheme could be both spiritually fallow and artistically fulfilling by turns. Art turns into material for condemnation if its soul is foul and sinful. He seems to be struggling between his upbringing and the culture that gave him his adult life. And everything that follows that conflict manifests as and takes a life of its own within TKIY.

There has been much obfuscation on the nature of the titular King In Yellow. His nature is threefold: he is a King, and the Play is his thing, and the Sign is his mark. The Play is a forbidden work of art, printed in French (of course the French would bring about the doom of man) and distributed in many languages before authorities realized that the play drives people insane. The Sign is an unknown mark with a strange shape that infects everyone who sees it. More importantly, as evidenced by the stories contained within this world (or many worlds?) the Play and the Sign are the vectors through which the King enters the human mind and soul and wreaks infectious, spreading havoc through the world. There is a bit of lifting being done here to justify the petrifying solution and the protagonist of In The Court of The Dragon, but in the former case, BIG BORIS just had TKIY sitting on his library shelf. It's not a stretch to imagine that the speaker of ITKOTD read the play prior to his destruction.

The play itself is incomplete, per Chambers' construction and the excerpts given. It seems to imply the destruction of the society of Carcosa through the introduction of The Pallid Mask, a terrifying envoy of doom. Carcosa is now the domain of The King, and from Carcosa he reaches out through his tools to draw people into his influence.

The King is a virus. A genuine infohazard. And who better to begin the infection with, to make into spies and unwitting vectors of transmission, than the curious, uninhibited and attention-seeking artist?

He wants you to read, to write, to paint, to create. Everything you do amplifies the message before you're used up, making your greatest works or final testaments in an episode of sheer horror. Meanwhile, every unexplained death or supernatural occurrence leads back to a single root. A book with a black clasp and a yellow sigil. A play about a dead civilization. A pallid mask. A Phantom of Truth. It's all meant to open the way for a King to conquer your mind, your body and your soul, to add you to the tapestry of Carcosa's history and make you serve the dread emperor that waits beneath black stars.

But why?

Only a King can know. The rest of us tremble and die.

Have you found The Yellow Sign?

 
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It's pretty good. He talks about where he started each story, the influences behind the stories and times in his life, and of all the friends and mentors of years past. He speaks of August Derleth's encouragement, editorship, and mentorship. He speaks of his friendship with Manly Wade Wellman and L. Sprague de Camp a bit.
 
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