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: Margaret St. Clair by Michael Curtis Margaret St. Clair was born on February 17, 1911. Her work appears in Gary Gygax’s Appendix N, and is important for lending a crucial concept to the D&D game: the idea of dungeon levels. Here is Michael Curtis with more information on this important writer… The titles and authors appearing on the Appendix N list are varied. Some are fantasy, others science fiction, and they range in time period from works contemporary to when Gygax was designing D&D to much earlier stories. While some of the Appendix N authors’ contribution to fantasy role-playing are obvious, not all lend themselves to easy discovery. One such example of the occluded contributions to the hobby is the subject of this column, the author Margaret St. Clair. Two of St. Clair’s works are specifically named in Appendix N and this column focuses on one of them, The Sign of the Labrys. This novel, like its Appendix N companion, The Shadow People, had a subtle influence on D&D, one which lingers to this day in that and other fantasy RPG titles (such as the excellent Dungeon Crawl Classics). Margaret St. Clair is an interesting figure, one whose work is largely overlooked in the present age. St. Clair was one of only three women authors who appeared on Gygax’s list of influential writers and their works. During both the Golden and Silver Ages of fantasy fiction, the field was dominated by white males, so much so that the now-often derided pronouncement on the back cover of the Bantam Books 1963 printing of The Sign of the Labrys (“Women are Writing Science Fiction!”) was actually somewhat shocking. The fact that Appendix N includes three women authors is a testimony to the breadth of Gary’s reading. Largely private about her personal life, rare autobiographical writings and interviews with friends reveal Margaret St. Clair to be a woman who was ill-suited to the limitations imposed on women by the social expectations of her times. She and her husband, Eric St. Clair, were...