The beauty of being a dungeon master is that you never have to worry about copyright infringement. That’s why the Dungeon Master’s Guide comes with a list of books to read on the last page. If a character from another medium inspires you and ignites your imagination, you can pluck it from its source and drop it into your campaign world without so much as changing their name to “Schmauron, Lord of Schmordor.” The same is true of plot points, items, and even dungeons. Dungeon masters are creative Jawas: we see something we like, and we strip it for parts.

Or at least, we would, if not for our players.

If you’re anything like me, you will go to great lengths to avoid cliche. I never want to lift anything that’s too recognizable, lest it immediately lead to a chorus of groans and eye-rolling from my adventuring party. That’s why you’ll never catch me using a band of nine riders in black, a queen with three pet dragons, or a taciturn white-haired monster hunter. As a result, I’ve had to be a little creative with my thievery.

I read as much genre fiction as I can get my hands on in order to build a deep and esoteric bench of references. After all, if your players don’t know where you’re lifting ideas from, what they experience in the game is, to them, as original as if you’d created it yourself. You should feel no shame about borrowing extensively from fiction for your games. There are countless authors and screenwriters who have put truly masterful work into the world, and there is no reason why your players can’t see some version of it.

Thus, I intend, every so often, to feature a novel or comic book that some of you may not have heard of and that contains characters, worldbuilding, or set pieces that I think are ripe for the picking. And if I happen to signal-boost a great piece of narrative fiction by an underappreciated writer in the process, so much the better. First up:

Melmoth is the spiritual sequel to Sarah Perry’s last critically-acclaimed novel, The Essex Serpent. It is a loose re-imagination of the nineteenth-century gothic horror tale Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin. The central story is that of Helen Franklin, an English expat living in modern-day Prague. Through the research of an acquaintance of hers, Helen draws the attention of Melmoth the Witness, a being of ancient legend who is drawn to shameful secrets and unspoken sins. As Helen seeks to unravel the mystery of her friend’s disappearance, Melmoth draws ever closer. Watching. Waiting.

It’s a dark, cerebral read, and not overly long, clocking in at just shy of three hundred pages. The story is told through a mix of confessionals, old journals, and fables woven through the main structure of the plot. I think that the book is well worth a read no matter who you are, but the part that inspired me as a dungeon master was the title character herself.

Melmoth the Witness

There’s a lot that I could say about Melmoth herself, but I think that Ms. Perry describes her better than I ever could:

There were accounts of her all over Europe and the Middle East, he said, and it’s always the same: a woman in dark clothes seen just at the very corner of your eye, slipping from view when you turn your head. It is Melmoth the Witness, wandering the earth until she’s weary and her feet are bleeding—in some countries they leave out a chair, just in case she happens to pass by. And she’s lonely, and she wants a companion, so she goes to cells and asylums and burned-out houses and gutters—and she whispers, and croons, and always knows your name. Or she’ll follow you down paths and alleys in the dark, or come in the night and sit waiting at the end of your bed—can you imagine it, feeling the mattress sink, and the sheets move? When she turns her eyes on you it’s as if she’s been watching all her life—as if she’s seen not only every action, but every thought, every shameful secret, every private cruelty… Melmoth, p. 70-71

I’ll not mince words: Melmoth is terrifying. If you’re anything like me, you’ll expect her in every reflection, every whisper, every dark corner. When I read that passage, my first thought was “banshee.” My second thought: “archfey.”

In the novel, Melmoth isn’t really evil per se, but neither is she good. She seems to have her own singular morality that’s hard for mortal characters to pin down. She does not punish the sinners she preys upon, but neither does she attempt to redeem them. She simply takes them. The archfey are similarly peculiar in that their motivations are almost unfathomable, even when their desires seem simple.

The superstitions surrounding Melmoth also remind me of European folktales about the fey. Just as you might leave food out for the fairies, you leave a chair out for Melmoth. When she appears, time seems to distort around her. She comes and goes between moments, but each visit feels like an eternity. She is entirely unbound by mortal limitations, just as an archfey would be. Even before I finished the book, I knew that I wanted to include her in my game in some way.

Using Melmoth in Your Game

Thankfully, once I made the decision to use Melmoth, I didn’t have to wait long for my chance. One of my players, Dan, who I’ve written about previously, asked me if I could engineer a graceful exit for his character so that he could start anew. A few sessions previous, he had mentioned to one of the other party members that he had made a deal with an archfey years before. I let the moment pass without comment, but I knew that that was going to come back to bite him someday.

The more that I thought about the entity he had bargained with, the more she looked like Melmoth. Not only did I love her character, but Dan’s old conjurer was exactly the kind of old sinner that she would come for. I started leaving random chairs in places, then giving him nightmares full of ice and crows. I ratcheted up the tension on him over several sessions, until one night, Melmoth came to him and offered her hand. To my great surprise and delight, he took it, and the two of them disappeared from the world.

A week later, I was on vacation with my playgroup and our respective partners in wine country. My players got me a little tipsy, and then started asking me about our game; it’s the proven method of getting me to divulge information I shouldn’t. They were telling me about how much they enjoyed the final scene of our last game, and I, fairly deep in my cups, told them that Melmoth was pretty much a straight lift from a book. They seemed almost disappointed, like they were sad that I hadn’t come up with something so fun and interesting on my own.

I’m not bothered. The best moments of Dungeons and Dragons are the ones that are memorable, the ones that stick with you after the game is done. I know that Melmoth gave us one of those moments. That same weekend, while my playgroup was sitting in the hot tub at dusk, a murder of crows flew overhead. One of my players threw up his hands and shouted, “Melmoth approaches!“

You don’t have to steal from this book to create moments like that. But it helps.

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