I’ve posted a few times before about going back to books that are classics of genres I enjoy, like I did with Winds of Gath or with Snow Crash. One thing I did at the start of January is pick up some pocket notebooks to carry around in case inspiration about one of my games strikes when I’m away from my usual A5 journals or a laptop. And one of the first things I did to look for inspiration is to copy some of the “Inspirational Reading” sections from TTRPGs I enjoy into the notebooks. The biggest, most-known, of these lists is probably Advanced Dungeons and Dragons’s Appendix N, listing the pulp adventure inspirations that led Gary Gygax to take D&D in the directions it went.

Having multiple giant lists of books, the next step was to figure out where I should start with reading them. Once I looked a bit closer, a good candidate stood out to me. A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool appears on both AD&D’s Appendix N and D&D 5e’s Appendix E, as well as in Pathfinder’s Appendix 3. And then I saw a post from Grognardia describing A. Merritt as “The Original Dungeon Delver.” While I was reading the book, Goodman Games even added their own discussion of A. Merritt to their Adventures in Fiction series of posts. So, with those endorsements, I’m going to go on a limb and say I picked a good candidate of where to start.

The Moon Pool is framed as a report by a Dr. Goodwin to a scientific board recounting an expedition he went on. He got sidetracked from his original goals when he encountered his old friend Dr. Throckmartin who recounted a strange tale about an island in the Pacific that the natives would not go near and then is before Dr. Goodwin’s eyes abducted by the creature from the tale. So, of course, Dr. Goodwin starts provisioning himself for a trip to the creepy island with the radiant being who abducts people, like you do.

In heading to the island, Dr. Goodwin gathers more friends, the brave viking Olaf, and the silver-tongued Irishman Larry O’Keefe. On the island, they find their way to subterranean caverns where they discover a people who have been hidden away from the world for ages. These people are also split into two factions: one worshiping “The Shining One”, our radiant abductor; and one worshiping “The Silent Ones.” As the book goes on, the conflict is expounded on and eventually threatens to escape the bounds of the caverns and harm those of the surface.

The book is pretty swiftly paced, though Merritt is not afraid to slow down and chew some scenery when it can be mined for some awe in the reader. I also got a laugh about a device used a couple times where a section has an in-universe redaction from the scientific board where Dr. Goodwin’s explanations about how a given fantastical science works could “get into the wrong hands.” I thought it was a clever way to handwave fantastic tech.

As a D&D player, I especially enjoyed the early scene where Dr. Throckmartin is recounting the fate of his own expedition and the trouble they had with a door. A magical door. One they were trying to get open. Gamers, stop me if you’ve heard this scene before at your tables. The way things change and evolve as Dr. Goodwin moves from place to place really did resonate with me as someone who’s been playing tabletop RPGs for close to two decades now. I can definitely see the DNA of this story in a lot of the dungeons I’ve played in or run for my groups. Also, Larry O’Keefe’s love for beautiful women being simultaneously a thing that gets the group into trouble and providing the solution to a couple problems definitely felt like many of the party bards I’ve played with over the years.

Overall, this one was a good story. I’m glad I read it, and hope that the rest of the books on the lists give me half as good a time as this one.