Happy Birthday to Michael Moorcock, a Big Writer with Big Ideas By Terry Olson “I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I’d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas—or ideas that have gone bad.” – Michael Moorcock, 1963 On the 18th of December, we celebrate the birthday of Michael Moorcock—a big writer with big ideas (regardless of what he thought a handful of decades ago). It’s difficult to rank Moorcock’s diverse achievements in terms of importance or influence. He’s impacted gaming through his Elric stories, he’s been a prolific writer of the Eternal Champion and Multiverse themes, he’s been an influential editor that helped change (dare I say, “improve”) the face of Science Fiction, he’s written comics, and he’s written lyrics for and performed with major rock bands!  Perhaps most important of all, he’s inspired generations of great writers, such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Thomas Pynchon. Michael Moorcock is one of my favorite authors, not just one of my “favorite Appendix N” authors. His imagery and themes are so inspiring that I refer to them again and again. In the 2014 DCC Free RPG Day adventure, Elzemon and the Blood-Drinking Box (reprinted in Chaos Rising), I wrote of a long spiral stairway descending around a seemingly bottomless shaft for hours (actually days) in darkness; the idea was to make PCs question whether they were making any progress at all. This was inspired by a passage in the Elric story “While the Gods Laugh”: “For several hours they pressed onwards in pitch darkness, clinging to one another as they reeled forward, uncertain of their footing and still aware that they were moving down a gradual incline. They lost all sense of time and Elric began to feel as if he were living through a dream. Events seemed to have become so unpredictable and beyond his control that he could no longer cope with thinking about them in ordinary terms. The tunnel was long and dark and wide and cold. It offered no comfort and the floor eventually became the only thing which had any reality. It was firmly beneath his feet. He began to feel that possibly he was not moving—that the floor, after all, was moving and he was remaining stationary. His companions clung to him but he was not aware...