22 February 2010

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net

ROGUE FEED here; and those that we have summoned from the tomb shall
move and breathe only at our dictation, and may not rebel
Pulp Fantasy Library: The against us.”

Empire of the Necromancers This being a Clark Ashton Smith story, things don’t go quite as the two
FEB 22, 2010 12:01A.M. necromancers have planned, resulting in a tale that some have
reasonably called Smith greatest prose work. I’m unwilling to make such
a bold claim myself, but there’s no question that “The Empire of the
Necromancers” is one of Smith’s best fantasies and certainly a good
contender for the best story of the Zothique cycle.

It’s one of my personal favorites too, serving as inspiration for a

necromancer-ruled city-state in my own Dwimmermount campaign,
where the risen dead, from the mightiest sorcerer to the lowliest street
urchin, serve and protect it in one capacity or another. It’s a gloomy and
unpleasant place but nevertheless a bastion against Chaos, its unliving
armies regularly doing battle against demons and their earthly thralls.
Brother Candor, Dordagdonar, and the other Fortune’s Fools have yet to
venture there, but they know of its existence and may well do so one day.
I rather look forward to that, since it’ll give me an opportunity to inject a
little more Smithian black humor into the game — an opportunity I
rarely pass up.

The legend of Mmatmuor and Sodosma shall arise only in the

latter cycles of Earth, when the glad legends of the prime
have been forgotten. Before the time of its telling, many
epochs shall have passed away, and the seas shall have fallen
in their beds, and new continents shall have come to birth.
Perhaps, in that day, it will serve to beguile for a little the
black weariness of a dying race, grown hopeless of all but
oblivion. I tell the take as men shall tell it in Zothique, the last
continent, beneath a dim sun and sad heavens where the
stars come out in terrible brightness before eventide.

So begins the inaugural story of Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique cycle,

“The Empire of the Necromancers,” which was first published in the
September 1932 issue of Weird Tales. As its opening paragraph — one of
the most potent CAS ever wrote in my opinion — makes clear, it’s the
story of two necromancers, driven from country to country for their
practice of the dark arts, before they at last decide to set out for the
defunct land of Cincor, now a corpse-filled desert whose inhabitants
were slain some centuries past by a plague.

“It’s a goodly land,” said Mmatmuor, “and you and I will

share it between us, and hold dominion over all its dead, and
be crowned as emperors on the morrow in Yethlyreom.”

“Aye,” replied Sodosma, “for there is none living to dispute us