Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2010 8:45:49 GMT -6
I'm not sure which forum heading this should be posted under - at least 4 different places look appropriate to me - so I am posting it here and Fin can move it, if needed.
I have been reading "The Horror Stories of Robert E Howard" when I got to the story "The Dwellers Under the Tomb" which was first published posthumously in "Lost Fantasies" in 1976. Since it was not published until after D&D was written, it was not a source, but it is, I think, a literary use of a mega-dungeon written during the 1930's and had it been published then and read by Gygax or Arneson it clearly would have been an inspiration.
This story also raises for me the question, "Was Robert E Howard the inventor of the Mega-Dungeon?"
I have been reading "The Horror Stories of Robert E Howard" when I got to the story "The Dwellers Under the Tomb" which was first published posthumously in "Lost Fantasies" in 1976. Since it was not published until after D&D was written, it was not a source, but it is, I think, a literary use of a mega-dungeon written during the 1930's and had it been published then and read by Gygax or Arneson it clearly would have been an inspiration.
This story also raises for me the question, "Was Robert E Howard the inventor of the Mega-Dungeon?"
"I wonder how old Jacob Kiles discovered these subterranean ways. He did not construct them. They were carved out of dim caverns and sold rock by the hands of forgotten men - how long ago I dare not venture a conjecture."
... ...
"I have found that they are far more extensive than I have suspected. The hills must be honeycombed with them, and they sink into the earth to an incredible depth, tier below tier, like stories of a building, each tier connected to the one below by a single stairway."
... ...
"I have wondered much as to the identity of the race which must once have inhabited these labyrinths. ... ... One gets a fantastic impression of an emprisoned race burrowing deeper and deeper into the black earth, century by century, and losing more and more of their human attributes as they sank to each new level."
"The fifteenth tier is without rhyme or reason, the tunnels running aimlessly, without apparent plan - so striking a contrast to the top-most tier, which is a triumph of primitive architecture, that it is difficult to believe them to have been constructed by the same race. Many centuries must have elapsed between the building of the two tiers, and the builders must have become greatly degraded. But the fifteenth tier is not the end of these mysterious burrows."
... ...
"For some reason, the realization that the fifteenth tier is not the ultimate boundary of the labyrinths was a shock. The sight of the unstepped shaft gave me a strangely creepy feeling, and led me to fantastic conjectures regarding the ultimate fate of the race which once lived in these hills."