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. Adventures in Fiction: Fritz Leiber By Michael Curtis We’ve talked a lot about Fritz Leiber, whose birthday we’re celebrating today, over the last few years. Leiber, born December 24th, 1910, is most widely known among gamers as the man responsible for the fantastic Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. In the years running up to DCC Lankhmar, a lot of ink has been spilled discussing Leiber’s most famous creation. Today, however, we’re going to examine some of Leiber’s other work and see how we can apply it to our games—especially DCC Lankhmar. In addition to writing science fiction and fantasy, Leiber also penned a number of short stories and novels that fall into the categories we now call “urban fantasy” and “urban horror.” These tales occur against the backdrop of the modern world, examining what happens when the supernatural intrudes on the everyday. The stories helped pave the way for the explosion we’re now witnessing in these genres, and much like Dungeon Crawl Classics itself, we see that going back to the beginning of the genre pays us great dividends. The first story of merit is “Smoke Ghost,” published in 1941. It concerns the woes of a man who believes he’s seeing a sooty, sack-like form manifesting on a rooftop as he takes the train home each night. He speculates that what he is seeing is a form of modern haunt, a ghost not of a deceased soul, but a composite of “the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns.” What would an entity like this crave? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? Before long, he realizes that this urban spirit is actively pursuing him for its own dark ends. The idea of a spirit manifesting from the emotional landscape of a city is an intriguing one, a sort of...