The Truth Found in Death: Robert E. Howard and Pulp

 

I’ve heard a lot about Conan the Barbarian and Robert E. Howard. I’ve been told his prose is like a fever dream, lurid and crazed. I’ve been told his work is the true inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons, and that Tolkien's influence is but a skin over the Howard skeleton built.  I’d mostly written the author off, just because I don't like DnD all that much. Murder hobos aren't my thing. And DnD takes some real work to not be about murder hobos. So if Howard is the origination of murder hobos? No thanks.

Well one night I got bored. So I decided to listen to two of Howard's stories, one about Conan (see above) and the other about Solomon Kane (see below):

And, since I like Solomon Kane more than Conan:

I get it now.

Howard's stuff is about strong, already-formed characters running into a world that is on the verge of complete and utter chaos. Or maybe it's there already. No, I don't mean the nicely-held "I'm so chaotic!" personality that people like to think is cute. It's not, and that's not chaos. Chaos is when you can trust nobody because nobody is actually out to help. You are faced with a scenario where the law of the jungle prevails. Nobody can handle true chaos long. Ever. True chaos is so bad that anything, even slavery, is preferable to it. True chaos creates situations so desperate that to judge the solution is not just silly, it's arrogant. You either go into a state that's so awful that it's almost beyond imagination or you don't. There isn't a question of what lessons the character needs to do to evolve into the person who is going to handle that chaos. The character can already handle it. It's now a question of how far the character will go and what his process is in handling said chaos.

Oh wait, that's exactly what The Truth Found in Death is about! I mean, granted, the goriness and the eulogies from The Iliad is in there too, but at its core that's what I want TTFID to be about.

...

Reinventing the wheel is a bitch, ain't it?

So, I got some research to do. A lot of it. But what have I gotten out of my two pulps so far? Well, characters are integrated, the chaos is eldritch and sapient, the people are brutal, and all previously held notions of morality need to go out the window. Because yes, it is that desperate.

The biggest thing that jumped out at me was Howard's character work. Conan and Solomon were not people in flux. They were not changing. And it was because they didn't need to. They had what they needed to face the problems at hand. That didn't mean they were cookie cutters, quite the contrary! Conan had his particular sense of honor up until a point, and he stuck to just that sense of honor and nothing else. Solomon routinely questioned his own actions but always deferred on the side of what was going to work, right then and there; Solomon actually cared for life itself ideologically, something Conan did not inherently seem to have regard for.  I could feel who the characters were and, while I wouldn't necessarily be able to break it down into Traits or whatever, I would be able to ascertain if the characters were acting like themselves. There's a consistency to the characters that's simple and direct, but deep enough to where you can always have a decent idea of what they'd do.

There's something lacking in modern DnD discussions that I've poked my head in on: the evil of pulp isn't a common thing, it's an eldritch awfulness. This isn't the type of evil that one can convert or do anything really about, other than kill. The problem isn't "what is there to do?" but "how can we get rid of this virus without losing too many human lives?" Even when the foes are human, they're of a moral calibre so incredibly low that there's nothing else that can be safely done. There's a desperation in these tales that I feel is missing. And I really like having it in there. It makes gameplay much more interesting.

And of course, the main thing I'm really liking about these stories is just how amoral they are, at least by my modern sensibilities. Ever since Wolfe I've developed a bit of a taste for seeing fictional scenarios where "good" solutions are simply impossible. How characters handle these stark scenarios I find really interesting! What does the character value? Why? What will they do? The actions then raise questions, ones of which I find stick with me for awhile. Could I have done better? Could I have made choices in that situation that were of a more moral bent? Is my desire for a "moral" answer coming from a post-Enlightenment  mindset, where abstract principles are more important than what's right in front of my nose, or from an actual sense of right and wrong (and yes there is a difference)?

I'd really like to throw things like this at players and GMs. To see situations where people have to go "Well, this is what's in front of me, and I have to act", and then to process what that looks like. Most of us in the West have forgotten what chaos, real chaos, actually looks like, and why people are so afraid of it, and why we should be afraid of it still! In the face of the real law of the jungle, where only the strong rule and it just so happens that the threat is stronger than most people, there's only opposition. Argue about how the weaker should be treated all you like, that's an abstract problem, and not the problem that I'm getting from pulp, at least so far. And I find it really compelling.