Phoenix on the Sword

Gygax put Robert E. Howard in Appendix N, the reading list printed in the 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide, and named him among the authors of "immediate influence". The Phoenix on the Sword is the first Conan story, published in Weird Tales in December 1932. What Howard supplies:

• The fighting man as a viable protagonist without magic, which is the fighter class and the reason D&D is not only a game about wizards. Gygax has said the fighter was built to be Conan
• The adventuring premise itself: a wandering outsider entering ruins and cities for treasure, with no kingdom to defend and no destiny to fulfil
• A world of fallen empires with usable ruins in them, rather than a stable setting
• Sorcery as something dangerous and other, practised by people the heroes fight rather than by the heroes

Gygax also named the thief class as Howard's and Leiber's, and the Hyborian Age as the model for a campaign world assembled from historical analogues.

⚠️ This is about HOWARD'S CONAN STORIES, and it is aimed at The Phoenix on the Sword (1932), the first of them, because the graph's other Conan row is a 1967 collection that postdates Elric. Moorcock built Elric as the inversion of Howard's hero and has said so for sixty years. Where Conan is a healthy barbarian with no use for sorcery, Elric is a sickly albino emperor of a decadent civilisation who cannot stand without drugs or the sword, and whose sword eats the people he loves. The relationship runs both ways in the pulp tradition: Moorcock was editing and writing inside the sword-and-sorcery Howard had invented, and Elric only reads as a negation because everything he is not was already the default. Filed MEDIUM because Howard's own influence on the machinery is genuine, and it is the moral shape that is being argued with.