Wrote non-fiction articles examining roleplaying games and other genre concepts.
Alan Moore illustration by Amber Harris
Tim Mucci: The theme…is villains.
Alan Moore: Villains. I can handle villains.
T.M: People who may not be up to speed on some of the less-than-fair treatment you’ve been made to endure might perceive you as this crabby hermit that surfaces once in a while to yell about the movie industry. There’s always been the intimation that somehow it’s you who’s being petty by not playing ball with the big movie studios and the comic studios. How do you respond to something like that?
A.M.: I’m pretty much past the point where I even feel that I need to respond. I mean, I simply do not care about the mainstream entertainment industry. It doesn’t really seem to be the kind of place where I am comfortable working, or where I feel that my work is best represented. This is pretty much up to me and I’ve never demanded that of my collaborators…The reason that I have explained my position, perhaps in a cranky way, is because people have asked me.
One of my first experiences with the idea of role-playing games was the 1982 movie, Mazes and Monsters. The film was loosely based on the real-life case of James Dallas Egbert III where, supposedly, a mentally unstable young man who was playing a live-action game of D&D went missing and was believed to have committed suicide in the steam tunnels beneath Michigan State University.
There’s a scene in the role-playing documentary The Dungeon Masters where one of the subjects, Scott, is sorting and arranging his hundreds of dice. As Scott’s doing this, he’s talking about how the dice need to be touched so that they’ll gain some of your personal vibrations and roll well; then he starts to talk about the die that roll poorly. Those die are separated from the rest, dipped in water and put in the freezer. Once the offending die is frozen, all of the other dice are lined up and the frozen die is placed in the middle so the others can “see” it. Scott then smashes the frozen die with a hammer as a lesson to the rest of his dice. “This is what happens when you roll poorly!” he shouts at the rows of unshattered dice.
H.P. Lovecraft illustration by Mike Mignola
LOVECRAFT MUST DIE!
On March 15, 1937 arguably the most influential writer in the field of science fiction and horror lay dying of kidney disease and intestinal cancer, thrashing alone in a hospital bed in his beloved city of Providence, Rhode Island. When the thrashing stopped, weird fiction author, H.P. Lovecraft was dead. While Lovecraft was not widely published during his lifetime, he was a master epistolarian; penning thousands of pages of letters to other writers, and through those letters he created a tight knit circle of literary friends, supporters and followers. Some of whom would go on to become well known authors as well; luminaries such as Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, and August Derleth. After Lovecraft’s death, his friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei gathered his writings, edited them, and formed Arkham House, a publishing company specifically created to publish the works of H.P. Lovecraft.