Our Appendix N Archeology and Adventures in Fiction series are meant to take a look at the writers and creators behind the genre(s) that helped to forge not only our favorite hobby but our lives. We invite you to explore the entirety of the series on our Adventures In Fiction home page. Appendix N Archaeology: Clark Ashton Smith by Michael Curtis Gamers often point to Appendix N and decry the absence of a particular author (or three, or seven, or…), declaring Gygax’s omission of them to be a literary crime of some sort. Putting aside the unbelievable idea that gamers may complain about things for the moment, we must realize that Appendix N is not a list one can argue with. It is a catalogue of all the literary influences Gygax chose to recognize as wellsprings from which Dungeons & Dragons flowed. Since it is representative of one man’s work, we can’t claim he made the error of excluding a particular author, even if we believe we can see their influence in the final product. Game design, like art, is a subjective process and one tends to see what one is inclined to see. While we cannot fault Gygax for not including certain names, we can, however, dig deeper into the authors he does list and examine where they drew their influences from. In the process, we discover that some of the names that people grumble about over their absence, are in fact representative in the works of those that are present. One of these influencers of the influencers is the third name from “the big three of Weird Tales”—Clark Ashton Smith. Clark Ashton Smith is a name that has only recently begun to creep back into the consciousness of the fans of genre fiction. Despite his amazing productivity in such a short period—he wrote more than a hundred short stories in the “weird fiction” vein in only about five years—circumstance precluded him from enjoying the prolonged popularity and public recognition that his colleagues and constant correspondents Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard enjoyed. Unlike Lovecraft, Smith lacked the cadre of devoted fans and writers dedicated to keeping his work in print or expanding on the concepts he created. And whereas Howard’s signature character of Conan the Cimmerian would captivate imaginations and be raised back into the public eye by the efforts of a devoted...