Corum by Michael Moorcock

As a preteen, I read a lot. My father lived by Diversy and where Clark and Broadway merged. There were several bookstores and used bookstores in the area.  Mind you, this was before Barnes and Noble and even Borders. We had Crown, Waldenbooks, Barbarba's Books, and the bookstores that were used, among others.

So I was always buying books and back in those days at least, reading them.

The above picture is the one I picked up for Corum. I was a fan of Michael Moorcoc, via Elric like many before me.

Corum, though, is a bit different. 

I've reread the original a few times and read the First Comics adaptation, now available via Titan in the Michael Moorcock library. We readers didn't know how lucky we were to have Mike Mignola, famous for his creation Hellboy, on hand for those earlier volumes.

I'm lucky enough to have an hour lunch and I've been listening to audio books so I figured it was a good time to revisit Corum.

What's the old saying?

No man steps in the same river twice for the river has changed and so has he?

Some themes were far more obvious to me this time around, and I was just scratching my head at how dumb Corum appeared to be. 

The writing is evocative and I recommend anyone interested in the history of fantasy read it as it was written in 1971 so in and of itself stands as a historical artifact. It's also not by an American author and while we can argue a man of England isn't that far off, the author has always brought his own viewpoint to things.

As a youth, when I first started in TRPGs, when playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st ed, one of the things that was fascinating about Corum, was the hand and eye he bore in the first trilogy. In AD&D, we had the hand and eye of Vecna. Clearly Gary had been reading Moorcock as well eh?

Corum even had a one book TRPG products that was licensed from Chaosium who had the rights at the time. I do not recall it with any fondness as I remember reading it and it didn't have details on the  Eye of Rhynn and the six-fingered Hand of Kwll. It would be like buying the Stormbringer TRPG and it not having states on Stormbringer. 

Like some of the works of Robert E Howard, the author famous for Conan, but also the creator of Kull, Solomon Kane, and others, these books fall in and out of publications with some frequency.

The last hardcover I have is of the White Wolf edition when they were doing a 'library' collection, and they did Moorcock's worst as well as Fritz Leiber, known for his tales of 'the Twain'.

Corum has a new collection out, though, with a cover that's cropped from an older cover. I love the design on the original cover. It reminds me of the Ace versions of the Elric paperbacks I had, with the design and art style. Strangely enough, there's no e-version so if you read things in e-version like I do these days, to say on space mostly, you're out of luck.

I'll try to return to some actual gaming throughs on Corum. Having listened to all six of the novels recently and back to back, a lot of things really stand out in terms of how the author handles quests and whats expected of the hero. Some of it might be useful for gaming both in terms of what not to do and what to take inspiration from.