Bill Ward’s Gateways to Sword-and-Sorcery by Bill Ward My mind quests back to the hazy era of orange shag carpets and fondue parties, to an age that saw the Dawn of the Chia Pet, the Rise of the Rubik’s Cube, and the Coming of the Walkman. It was a time of social and technological transformation, not that the child-sized version of me cared, because it was also the beginning of a boom in popular entertainment that saw fantasy and science fiction achieve new levels of sophistication and cultural significance and I was much too busy sucking it all in like a sponge. But where along the line did I yank the Sword from the Stone, pocket the One Ring, or discover the Book of Gold in Ultan’s Library? From whence came this predilection for tales of savage lands and dark imagination? When Brian Murphy devised our Gateways to Sword-and-Sorcery series, the prospectus was clear: reminisce about the childhood books that sparked your love of the sword-and-sorcery genre, those books that, while most likely not sword-and-sorcery themselves, captured our young imaginations and gave us all a permanent itch that only a bloodied saber could scratch. But in tracing my way from my earliest enthusiasms to now, from Stegosaurus to Stormbringer as it were, many of the most significant influences came from the worlds of film and gaming. Film, because it was something of a Golden Age for entertaining science fiction and fantasy cinema, the zeitgeist-shifting breakout explosion of Star Wars heralding an age of heroic storytelling and the next level of practical special effects. When John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian smashed its b-movie chains and saw a good return at the box office, the film industry went through a similar Conan-imitation phase as had the paperback industry in prior decades, and my movie-going and video-renting youth would forever be enriched by titles such as The Beastmaster and Deathstalker. But even the bigger budget films of the era succumbed to fantasy fever, and the decade of the 80s produced an array of dark fantasy classics in Dragonslayer, Excalibur, Krull, Clash of the Titans, Ladyhawke, The Neverending Story, Legend, and Willow; and I loved all of ’em. But when I wasn’t watching animatronic monsters and corn syrup blood effects on screen, I was pouring over the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide with all...