This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.
Manly Wade Wellman
Wellman was born in Angola, spent some time in London, and was educated in Washington DC, Salt Lake City, Kansas, and Columbia University. He spent a lot of time living in New York, where he published much of his earlier work, then in North Carolina, which informed much of his later work steeped in the folklore of the Appalachians. His wife Frances was also a writer of SF, under a pseudonym. Alfred Bester described Wellman as a “professional Southerner” with Confederate sympathies, but this doesn’t come through in the works that I read (quite the opposite). What he does have, though, is a keen ear for American folklore, especially that of the Ozarks, which lend his writing a sense of authenticity.
Appendix N (1st Ed.) has no specific recommendations, while Appendix E (5th Ed.) recommends The Golgotha Dancers. Gutenberg has quite a few Wellman stories online for free and, since The Golgotha Dancers is probably the shortest story among them, once again I read all the ones available. Broadly, I found that they could be divided into two categories – horror (which includes The Golgotha Dancers) and science fiction, and I’ll address them in those groups.
The Science Fiction Tales
For the most part, Wellman’s science fiction tends towards the hard end of SF, like a 1930s Arthur C Clarke. Half Around Pluto for example, is a shipwreck tale of three spacefarers left behind on a reasonably plausible Pluto, trying to travel across a hostile landscape to their base in the hope of rescue in another twenty years. The Invading Asteroid has hints of The Expanse series (and reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem). Earth and Mars are in cold war, and three Earth astronauts discover a Martian base hidden inside an artificial asteroid, sneaking towards Earth. It’s a fairly exciting thriller, although the ending is a bit trite.
Wellman does veer towards Planetary Romance, but even then he tries to keep the science relatively hard. In this, he’s a lot like A Merritt who would usually have some kind of explanation for the fantastical, even if it was a little shaky. The Devil’s Asteroid is not the same as The Invading Asteroid, but again it features an Earth-Mars conflict. The protagonist is a man facing the usual punishment for Earthmen convicted of crimes on Mars: he is sent to a small inhabitable asteroid that exudes a power that gradually regresses anyone who stays there too long into an atavistic bestial form. This turns into a power struggle within those colonists who have yet to devolve, and then those who have. What’s quite pleasing with this one is that the protagonist Fitzhugh Parr keeps losing despite all his efforts – no pulp hero prevailing against all odds, this one. He’s a desperate man in desperate straits, and not especially heroic.
Venus Enslaved sounds like the title of one of Andrew Offutt’s erotic stories or something by the Marquis De Sade, but it’s a planetary romance where again the three protagonists are men of dubious moral character conscripted on a dangerous mission to Venus, the tenth after nine previous missions failed to return. They discover a jungle world, inhabited by warrior women (of course) in a fight for survival with a dominant frog-like species (the Skygor). Although this is the most Edgar Rice Burroughs-ish of the lot, its closer again to A Merritt with some pleasing depth to the characters on top of a good adventure story.
Warrior Of Two Worlds feels at first like it’s going to be one of those “Earth man becomes a hero in a fantastic realm” stories. The protagonist wakes up with no memory of who or where he is, and learns that he is the legendary hero Yandro on the planet Dondromogon. This world is a tidally locked planet where two groups inhabit each side of the inhabitable terminator line between hot and cold, mostly living underground and meeting each other in battle at the poles.
Yandro is supposedly prophesied to lead his people (who strictly limit their number through Malthusian population control) against the Newcomers, and their feared champion Barak. But there are some great twists to this one which I won’t give away; suffice it to say, like most of Wellman’s writing it’s pleasingly more complex than it first appears.
The Horror Stories
Wellman had several recurring characters in his stable, but of the works on Gutenberg there’s just a couple of stories that feature one of them – Judge Pursuivant. Pursuivant is a retired judge, a jovial bear of a man with luxuriant moustaches and a silver sword cane, coming across like a mix of Orson Welles, Colonel Sanders, and Van Helsing. He crops up in both The Black Drama and The Hairy Ones Shall Dance, but he’s not the main protagonist in either, rather appearing midway in both to help the hero and heroine.
The Black Drama revolves around a lost Byron play that is secretly a magical ritual designed to transfer a curse, to be performed by the narrator as lead, in a mysterious theatre that’s also a cabin in the woods. Meanwhile, The Hairy Ones Shall Dance (an alternative translation of a Psalm) is about werewolves formed of ectoplasm, set in a very Lovecraftian remote location of insular folk. They’re both pretty good and atmospheric.
Another of Wellman’s recurring figures is Silver John, aka John the Balladeer, from his later works. John is the owner of a silver-stringed guitar, and a collector of folk tales and folk music which leads him into encounters with the supernatural. The only one of the Silver John stories that I had access to was The Desrick on Yandro (Yandro again), found within the same Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum anthology as Margaret St John’s The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles. Wellman himself built a cabin on a mountain he called Yandro, so there’s something autobiographical about this. John sings a song about the desrick (a kind of fortified log cabin) on Yandro Hill, intriguing a rich and powerful man also by the name of Yandro. What I recalled from reading this aged about 12 were the various weird creatures said to live on Yandro Hill – the Flat that slithers along the ground, the Culverin that spits pebbles, and so on. But it’s really a tale of revenge long in planning, with the obnoxious and entitled Yandro, a type of whom there seem to be a lot about these days, meeting a just fate.
Bratton’s Idea features the titular character as an eccentric and disturbed Frankenstein figure, whose attempts to bring life to the unliving ends with him animating a ventriloquist’s dummy named Tom-Tom, and before you can say “Chuckie”, Tom-Tom has killed his creator and set himself up as a sinister underworld figure bent on revenge and chaos. Only the ventriloquist who once gave him voice is able to stop him. This was a fun take on a classic horror story trope.
The Hairy Ones has werewolves, The Black Drama has a vampire feel to it, Bratton’s Idea is a classic Frankenstein/haunted doll story. And my favourite, Fearful Rock, is a zombie story set amid the Civil War. This is where I wonder about Bester’s contention that Wellman was pro-Confederacy, since the hero, Lt. Kane Lanark, is a Union soldier, albeit raised in the South, and the initial villain is a Confederate bandit who the hero tracks to a strange country in the shadow the Fearful Rock. Here he becomes embroiled in the schemes of the mysterious Persil Mandifer, seeking to sacrifice his adopted daughter Enid to a supernatural entity known only as The Nameless One. The setting really makes for a good, unusual, feel for the story, especially as a wounded, war-weary hero returns to the area after the war for the story’s climax. My one quibble with the plotting is that it would have worked better if one of the slain Confederates soldiers returned to undeath had been the leader Quillion, I think it would have made things more closely personal for Lanark.
And so, finally, we get to the one recommended title – The Golgotha Dancers. This is the shortest of all the stories listed above. The narrator visits his favourite art gallery, to find that his favourite painting has been replaced by the disturbing image titled Golgotha, which portrays twelve twisted figures dancing around a crucified central figure. According to the museum security guard, the unknown painter hung it in the gallery without permission – I'd like to imagine it was Lovecraft’s Pickman. Our hero buys the painting, only to discover that it becomes a reality for him every night, haunted by twisted figures (that sound to me like Francis Bacon’s work) that try to torture him.
One thing that Wellman does throughout his stories is a tendency to end abruptly on the hero and heroine falling in love. In some of them, such as A Warrior Of Two Worlds, Venus Enslaved, or The Black Drama, this at least feels earned and telegraphed. In others, such as The Golgotha Dancers, it suddenly appears from nowhere, as if he didn’t know how else to finish the story.
Inspirations
I didn’t come across anything in Wellman’s works that was obviously a direct inspiration for anything in Dungeons and Dragons, but aside from the strange creatures of The Desrick on Yandro, most of his works tended to borrow and repackage from existing folklore.
You could certainly use elements from them for the basis for adventures, especially the small town with a werewolf problem in The Hairy Ones Shall Dance, or the remote forboding rock with dark rituals in Fearful Rock. The play that’s secretly a ritual is potentially a good source for a scenario, although players may think you’re ripping off the Doctor Who story The Shakespeare Code instead.
Of the science-fiction stories, the devolution effects of The Devil’s Asteroid could easily be a magic effect as scientific one (it’s “magic” to all intents and purposes anyway). The setting of Dondromogon could be a demi-plane, or the basis for an Underdark scenario, and the frog-folk Syngorns and their swamp city would work well for the fortress of bullywugs or similar creatures.
A couple of Wellman’s stories – The Desrick on Yandro and Fearful Rock of the ones I read – mention a pamphlet called The Long Hidden Friend which is a collection of folk remedies, spells of protection, Biblical snippets, and other miscellany. This is based on a real work, but would not only work well in a Cthulhu campaign but could perhaps be adapted to a fantasy setting as a protective charm.
For me, though, the main reason to read Wellman is that his stories are solid and enjoyable reads.
Manly Wade Wellman
Wellman was born in Angola, spent some time in London, and was educated in Washington DC, Salt Lake City, Kansas, and Columbia University. He spent a lot of time living in New York, where he published much of his earlier work, then in North Carolina, which informed much of his later work steeped in the folklore of the Appalachians. His wife Frances was also a writer of SF, under a pseudonym. Alfred Bester described Wellman as a “professional Southerner” with Confederate sympathies, but this doesn’t come through in the works that I read (quite the opposite). What he does have, though, is a keen ear for American folklore, especially that of the Ozarks, which lend his writing a sense of authenticity.
Appendix N (1st Ed.) has no specific recommendations, while Appendix E (5th Ed.) recommends The Golgotha Dancers. Gutenberg has quite a few Wellman stories online for free and, since The Golgotha Dancers is probably the shortest story among them, once again I read all the ones available. Broadly, I found that they could be divided into two categories – horror (which includes The Golgotha Dancers) and science fiction, and I’ll address them in those groups.
The Science Fiction Tales
For the most part, Wellman’s science fiction tends towards the hard end of SF, like a 1930s Arthur C Clarke. Half Around Pluto for example, is a shipwreck tale of three spacefarers left behind on a reasonably plausible Pluto, trying to travel across a hostile landscape to their base in the hope of rescue in another twenty years. The Invading Asteroid has hints of The Expanse series (and reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem). Earth and Mars are in cold war, and three Earth astronauts discover a Martian base hidden inside an artificial asteroid, sneaking towards Earth. It’s a fairly exciting thriller, although the ending is a bit trite.
Wellman does veer towards Planetary Romance, but even then he tries to keep the science relatively hard. In this, he’s a lot like A Merritt who would usually have some kind of explanation for the fantastical, even if it was a little shaky. The Devil’s Asteroid is not the same as The Invading Asteroid, but again it features an Earth-Mars conflict. The protagonist is a man facing the usual punishment for Earthmen convicted of crimes on Mars: he is sent to a small inhabitable asteroid that exudes a power that gradually regresses anyone who stays there too long into an atavistic bestial form. This turns into a power struggle within those colonists who have yet to devolve, and then those who have. What’s quite pleasing with this one is that the protagonist Fitzhugh Parr keeps losing despite all his efforts – no pulp hero prevailing against all odds, this one. He’s a desperate man in desperate straits, and not especially heroic.
Venus Enslaved sounds like the title of one of Andrew Offutt’s erotic stories or something by the Marquis De Sade, but it’s a planetary romance where again the three protagonists are men of dubious moral character conscripted on a dangerous mission to Venus, the tenth after nine previous missions failed to return. They discover a jungle world, inhabited by warrior women (of course) in a fight for survival with a dominant frog-like species (the Skygor). Although this is the most Edgar Rice Burroughs-ish of the lot, its closer again to A Merritt with some pleasing depth to the characters on top of a good adventure story.
Warrior Of Two Worlds feels at first like it’s going to be one of those “Earth man becomes a hero in a fantastic realm” stories. The protagonist wakes up with no memory of who or where he is, and learns that he is the legendary hero Yandro on the planet Dondromogon. This world is a tidally locked planet where two groups inhabit each side of the inhabitable terminator line between hot and cold, mostly living underground and meeting each other in battle at the poles.
Yandro is supposedly prophesied to lead his people (who strictly limit their number through Malthusian population control) against the Newcomers, and their feared champion Barak. But there are some great twists to this one which I won’t give away; suffice it to say, like most of Wellman’s writing it’s pleasingly more complex than it first appears.
The Horror Stories
Wellman had several recurring characters in his stable, but of the works on Gutenberg there’s just a couple of stories that feature one of them – Judge Pursuivant. Pursuivant is a retired judge, a jovial bear of a man with luxuriant moustaches and a silver sword cane, coming across like a mix of Orson Welles, Colonel Sanders, and Van Helsing. He crops up in both The Black Drama and The Hairy Ones Shall Dance, but he’s not the main protagonist in either, rather appearing midway in both to help the hero and heroine.
The Black Drama revolves around a lost Byron play that is secretly a magical ritual designed to transfer a curse, to be performed by the narrator as lead, in a mysterious theatre that’s also a cabin in the woods. Meanwhile, The Hairy Ones Shall Dance (an alternative translation of a Psalm) is about werewolves formed of ectoplasm, set in a very Lovecraftian remote location of insular folk. They’re both pretty good and atmospheric.
Another of Wellman’s recurring figures is Silver John, aka John the Balladeer, from his later works. John is the owner of a silver-stringed guitar, and a collector of folk tales and folk music which leads him into encounters with the supernatural. The only one of the Silver John stories that I had access to was The Desrick on Yandro (Yandro again), found within the same Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum anthology as Margaret St John’s The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles. Wellman himself built a cabin on a mountain he called Yandro, so there’s something autobiographical about this. John sings a song about the desrick (a kind of fortified log cabin) on Yandro Hill, intriguing a rich and powerful man also by the name of Yandro. What I recalled from reading this aged about 12 were the various weird creatures said to live on Yandro Hill – the Flat that slithers along the ground, the Culverin that spits pebbles, and so on. But it’s really a tale of revenge long in planning, with the obnoxious and entitled Yandro, a type of whom there seem to be a lot about these days, meeting a just fate.
Bratton’s Idea features the titular character as an eccentric and disturbed Frankenstein figure, whose attempts to bring life to the unliving ends with him animating a ventriloquist’s dummy named Tom-Tom, and before you can say “Chuckie”, Tom-Tom has killed his creator and set himself up as a sinister underworld figure bent on revenge and chaos. Only the ventriloquist who once gave him voice is able to stop him. This was a fun take on a classic horror story trope.
The Hairy Ones has werewolves, The Black Drama has a vampire feel to it, Bratton’s Idea is a classic Frankenstein/haunted doll story. And my favourite, Fearful Rock, is a zombie story set amid the Civil War. This is where I wonder about Bester’s contention that Wellman was pro-Confederacy, since the hero, Lt. Kane Lanark, is a Union soldier, albeit raised in the South, and the initial villain is a Confederate bandit who the hero tracks to a strange country in the shadow the Fearful Rock. Here he becomes embroiled in the schemes of the mysterious Persil Mandifer, seeking to sacrifice his adopted daughter Enid to a supernatural entity known only as The Nameless One. The setting really makes for a good, unusual, feel for the story, especially as a wounded, war-weary hero returns to the area after the war for the story’s climax. My one quibble with the plotting is that it would have worked better if one of the slain Confederates soldiers returned to undeath had been the leader Quillion, I think it would have made things more closely personal for Lanark.
And so, finally, we get to the one recommended title – The Golgotha Dancers. This is the shortest of all the stories listed above. The narrator visits his favourite art gallery, to find that his favourite painting has been replaced by the disturbing image titled Golgotha, which portrays twelve twisted figures dancing around a crucified central figure. According to the museum security guard, the unknown painter hung it in the gallery without permission – I'd like to imagine it was Lovecraft’s Pickman. Our hero buys the painting, only to discover that it becomes a reality for him every night, haunted by twisted figures (that sound to me like Francis Bacon’s work) that try to torture him.
One thing that Wellman does throughout his stories is a tendency to end abruptly on the hero and heroine falling in love. In some of them, such as A Warrior Of Two Worlds, Venus Enslaved, or The Black Drama, this at least feels earned and telegraphed. In others, such as The Golgotha Dancers, it suddenly appears from nowhere, as if he didn’t know how else to finish the story.
Inspirations
I didn’t come across anything in Wellman’s works that was obviously a direct inspiration for anything in Dungeons and Dragons, but aside from the strange creatures of The Desrick on Yandro, most of his works tended to borrow and repackage from existing folklore.
You could certainly use elements from them for the basis for adventures, especially the small town with a werewolf problem in The Hairy Ones Shall Dance, or the remote forboding rock with dark rituals in Fearful Rock. The play that’s secretly a ritual is potentially a good source for a scenario, although players may think you’re ripping off the Doctor Who story The Shakespeare Code instead.
Of the science-fiction stories, the devolution effects of The Devil’s Asteroid could easily be a magic effect as scientific one (it’s “magic” to all intents and purposes anyway). The setting of Dondromogon could be a demi-plane, or the basis for an Underdark scenario, and the frog-folk Syngorns and their swamp city would work well for the fortress of bullywugs or similar creatures.
A couple of Wellman’s stories – The Desrick on Yandro and Fearful Rock of the ones I read – mention a pamphlet called The Long Hidden Friend which is a collection of folk remedies, spells of protection, Biblical snippets, and other miscellany. This is based on a real work, but would not only work well in a Cthulhu campaign but could perhaps be adapted to a fantasy setting as a protective charm.
For me, though, the main reason to read Wellman is that his stories are solid and enjoyable reads.
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