Revisiting the Underworld
Pages and pages of old D&D material available, paths crisscrossing the landscape of my childhood memories lined with images and flashes of text that reveal vibrant and squirming emotions and fantasies still lingering beneath them. Those little dreamy ecosystems often hide behind creatures, objects, and places that infest, infect, possess, control, or otherwise transform characters. While the game itself plays this toward lethality, debilitation, and deformity, I fantasized toward a form of vulnerability and intimacy that I can only describe now as initiatory.
As I let the dream of Zoa Tan play through its variations, I notice the return to mysterious and ominous figures like the Headless King or the Piper that initiate or oversee the characters' entry into a wondrous world. Their alien nature belongs to another level of reality, one at odds with the mundane. They are underworld powers, and what I am after is a sort of underworld experience.
There is a quite robust strand of megadungeons as underworlds in the OSR. Miranda Elkins's Nightwick Abbey goes back more than a decade and Josh McCrowell's more recent His Majesty the Worm. Here is James Cone framing the notion back in 2008's "The Dungeon as Mythic Underworld":
There might be a reason the dungeon exists, but there might not; it might simply be. It certainly can, and perhaps should, be the centerpiece of the game. As for ecology, a megadungeon should have a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it is an underworld: a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken. Not merely an underground site or a lair, not sane, the underworld gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer. It is inimical to men; the dungeon, itself, opposes and obstructs the adventurers brave enough to explore it.—James Cone, Philotomy's Dungeons and Dragons Musings (archived here)
"Gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer" calls up my first discovery of Warhammer in the local Smyrna, Georgia, Titan's Games & Comics shop. In my visits, I return often to one book detailing the legions of Chaos that provided a d1000 chart of mutations for the servants of Chaos. A thrill still clings to the memory. Here was vulnerability and openness of the body to mind-altering change and the sense that it opened the door to other modes of experiencing the world.
Those Lords of Chaos sure look like darker and more hostile versions of the underworld powers I am dwelling with in Zoa Tan, and I am coming at them from a very different angle than Cone. The fantasies I keep returning to involve submitting to the underworld's peculiar and "inimical" logics rather than risking them for the sake of what wealth can be extracted from them.
"Gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer" also puts me in mind of the book I just finished reading, Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation. It definitely belongs on my personal Appendix N, but it probably belongs on more OSR reading lists in general. The way in which the realities of exploration are handled (rations, inventory, mapping) sit well with OSR aesthetics, and the way in which Area X is slowly eating and transforming the world around it fits Cone's definitions of the underworld quite well.
And yet the narrator's personal trajectory follows more closely the fantasy I am after. She undergoes a transformation within Area X that increasingly puts her at odds with the extractive nature of her expedition team.
An underworld inimical to those brave enough to explore it. But what about its relationship to those who undergo it?
It puts me in mind of a book I haven't picked up for decades, James Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld. Fragments of his arguments there form old layers in my way of thinking:
The villain in the underworld is the heroic [Herculean] ego, not Hades....Let's not underestimate Hercules' propensity to violence....[the heroic ego] is a killer among images....lack[ing] the metaphorical understanding that comes with image-work, it makes wrong moves, and those violently. (113–15)
Since reaching this point, I have begun a reread of The Dream and the Underworld. There is a lot in the book that I chafe at, but some of what glimmered for me when I was young does still have shine on it. I am going to finish rereading that and revisit this. I am fairly sure that once I complete a reread and have reassessed my relationship to this book that I will have a clearer idea of the work I am doing here.