In 1996 Mortiis, the former bassist of Norwegian black metal band Emperor, released an instrumental dungeon synth compilation titled “Crypt of the Wizard.” While not my favorite work from dungeon synth’s OG weirdo, I was always struck by how evocative the title is — the dank and buried crypt, full of weird but wondrous vibes; the wizard implying magic, the lefthand path, a world behind the veil. In the vein of all fantasy, the curious mind wants to delve into that crypt and see what horrors await inside. To me, peeking inside the wizard’s crypt might reveal a putrid, punk, and delightfully dark world not unlike the heavy metal fantasy created by famed illustrator, artist, editor, and board game designer Sean Äaberg.

When I was a baby punk, I was lucky enough to come across a random copy of Pork Magazine, produced by Sean and his wife Katie from 2010 to 2018. It scratched multiple itches for me, having grown up on a steady dose of metal with a burgeoning interest in fantasy and a deep appreciation for a tongue-in-cheek “fuck you!” attitude. Having followed Sean’s work over in the 10+ years since then, I see him as that wizened wizard who was kind enough to give me a view into the crypt.

Chainmail Fantasy: You’ve said you were drawn to the art of TTRPGs as a kid, before you could read, when you discovered role-playing games around age four. But you didn’t decide to draw for games until much later. By then you’d been a professional illustrator for decades, spent years playing these games hard from age 10 to 15, and had designed four of your own. Can you paint a picture of what that arc looked like?

Sean Äaberg: I was sitting there drawing and I was like, “Why can’t I draw for a roleplaying game? There’s no reason I can’t do that.” So I contacted Labyrinth Lord. It was the biggest—kind of a D&D clone—the biggest clone at the time. I did two books for them, but it came out like, why can’t I do this thing? I’d basically been stuck in this world of Ed Roth monsters, ‘60s stuff, “Mad Magazine” stuff. And I was like, what would really make me happy is to draw a bunch of fucking orcs and shit and make them more degenerate, make them more fucked up.

Chainmail Fantasy: Your newsletter is a great archive of fantasy from a bygone analog world. The early ‘80s feel like a real takeoff for fantasy media, with all the accoutrement TTRPGs brought: manuals, figurines, monthly play magazines. First, how did you discover fantasy? And does that whole analogue world still exist in the digital age, or does the tension between physical IP and cheap, easy digital production change what gets made and taken seriously?

SÄ: My dad read me “The Hobbit.” He was decidedly bohemian — both my parents were. Tolkien came in on that very boomer-ish, ‘60s countercultural cusp thing, always associated with drug music, for lack of a better word. Rock and free jazz, fusion jazz in particular. I was probably four or five when he read that to me. Then I watched the Rankin/Bass [“The Hobbit”] cartoon a million times. Before we even had a VCR, I had it on record, and I’d listen to the soundtrack over and over. This was before I could read, so I knew how to identify the fonts. I could make out, “Oh, this funky-looking one must be ‘The Hobbit.’” My grandma gave me this big Rankin/Bass “Hobbit” book, fully illustrated with pictures from the movie. I might not have actually watched the movie for a while, until we got a VCR, but I had so much exposure to it from the book and the record.

So that was my introduction, “The Hobbit” and the Rankin/Bass movie. That gave me the bug. And before I could read, I played D&D with one of my dad’s friends’ kids. I didn’t even know what polygonal dice were at that point; I ignored the numbers. But the idea of being able to play a structured game conjured out of books, instead of, like, we’re going to play with our little action figures and recreate scenes, that shit.

Then I’d see AD&D [Advanced Dungeons & Dragons] books at bookstores. Again, before I could read, I’d see the artists, the Erol Otus artwork on the covers, and just be like, “Oh, this is crazy. This is way more interesting than everything else.” But I didn’t buy them. I was way too young; I didn’t have control over my own or my parents’ money at that point. It took until I was like nine to buy a Red Box edition of D&D, in Montana, on sale. I was like, “Well, I can spend some of my vacation money on this thing.” And then I got snookered into the fucking world completely. At that age I felt like the sword-and-sandals stuff was old-fashioned, because I’d grown up on all the Ray Harryhausen art, like “Jason and the Argonauts,” so I’d already decided that’s stuff I liked when I was a little kid. And I was like eight, you know.

But back to your question, I think it could seem like there’s a tension. There’s such a disjoint between what breaks through, what cuts it in the shops, versus what’s actually being done. Right now the amount of stuff being done is crazy; there’s really interesting art, miniatures, zines, games, everything. As far as what’s being produced, it’s a fucking golden age. The thing is, basically none of the good, interesting things have good distribution, so they don’t have representation in stores. There’s this disjoint between what is seen — because everything’s fucking algorithmic, and there’s niches. When I look at my Instagram feed for my Dungeon Degenerates account, it’s everything I want to see. But the amount of interesting stuff being done is just nuts. You’ve got so many sculptors doing miniatures and directly selling their stuff as 3D prints. It’s not cool blister-packs with cool art in the shops, but they’re doing their little niche creations, and frequently they’re doing better in life than the big sculptors back in the day, just because the economics of it all is weird and everything is topsy-turvy.

We’re in this age of both crumminess and insanity of, like, klepto, clown, con artist stuff. People don’t feel ownership in the system, so con artists just run in and go, well, I’ve got an idea. Some people buy into it, but most people don’t, even though they get taken advantage of. That’s going on, and you have a beige McDonald’s thing going on at the same time. We’re not going to go out on a limb about what we are; we’re going to make it as bland and boring as possible, because it’s boardroom-controlled. I think about ‘70s McDonald’s, that H.R. Puff N’ Stuff, psychedelic insanity, versus what it is now, where it looks more boring than a school. But then at the same time, McDonald’s is releasing this fucking Hello Kitty slash-Godzilla thing. Their toys have been continuously uninteresting my whole life, but the transforming burgers, the McNuggets and stuff, the Spaceman erasers they released early on were fun. A Hello Kitty/Godzilla crossover, that’s about as good as you can get as far as corporate tie-ins.

So it’s part of this totally schizophrenic period where nothing makes sense. There’s no narrative, because it’s hard to make a narrative out of ultra-individualistic, algorithm-driven stuff. Everything’s very individualistic, and everything collective is falling apart — and kind of boring, because they’re trying to make it okay for everybody, so therefore it’s okay for nobody.

CF: Oh man, I didn’t have cable growing up, so I watched “Jason and the Argonauts,” “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad” — a lot of those stop-motion clay movies. How did discovering D&D shape your approach to drawing, thinking about art, thinking about aesthetics, creating characters from the “Pork [Magazine]” era, Dungeon Degenerates, and up to today?

SÄ: I started doing zines in 1988. I really liked the suggestion of possibility, the feeling that you could put anything into this little zine and then go photocopy it off. I’d get photocopies for free at my mom’s work, or my friend Danny Shoup’s parents bought a photocopier for their work, which was in their basement, so having access to that was like, okay, now I can just publish whatever the fuck I want.

Me and my wife always talk about how the artist is a goldfish: You grow to whatever size bowl you’re placed in. For me, it’s always if I can see a bigger thing to fill, I’ll try to fill it. With zines in general it was the possibility of what I could do, even though it took me three or four years to actually make one that was good. But I didn’t care, I’m shameless and I was more excited about the process of doing it and getting it out there and trying stuff out.

Then “Pump Up the Volume” came out with Christian Slater, and zines were “hot.” This was when I was between 14 and 17, which was perfect, because I was in high school and it was the cool, rebellious thing to do. People understood it. They were reading about them in teen magazines, there were newspaper articles about these things. It was good for a little period. Doing zines and magazines was just my thing for a while.

With “Pork,” I saw the gaps in time line up perfectly, and I was like, now is the right time to release the magazine, right at the end of when doing a magazine seemed feasible. Like the perfect thing: “Oh, you’re doing a print magazine, now? I thought print was dead. Print’s been dead for 10 years.” But people still understood the idea of what a magazine was. Now people are kind of like, “What the fuck is a magazine?” If they’re into it, it’s very retroactive. I like it just for the aesthetics of the idea of a print magazine. It doesn’t necessarily have to be good quality, it just has to look like it’s kind of that quality. I’ve always been the opposite. I want the stuff inside to be really good, and I don’t care if it seems good. The “PORK” aesthetic is trash-forward, but the trash is disguising a lot of really in-depth, smart stuff — hiding it in there.

I was talking with my brother about this last night: There was this big rock-and-roll revival boom, a punk revival, around 2000, 2010, 2011. There was this echo of the boom where people were sad about what they’d missed and were trying again. “Let’s go for it.” And the other thing was, the boomers were 65 instead of 80. They’re not so threatened by young rock-and-roll energy that they’re terrified of it, which I think they are now. When you’re 65 it’s like, “Oh, let’s try this underground thing again. You’re doing an underground magazine, it’s like the newspapers I used to be into in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. Oh, you’re a radical, that’s cool, you were talking about acid.” So “Pork” fell into that perfectly in terms of timing.

Dungeon Degenerates was similar. For a little bit there GOBLINKO was the only company, or one of five, doing patches and pins. Then the next year a thousand people were doing patches & pins. I was like, we were the only game in town, but now we’ve got to do something else. And that’s when we did Dungeon Degenerates. It was so fun that I was kind of surprised it was successful. Six printings in, and it’s showing that it’s getting bigger, not smaller, even though it’s 10 years old, which is insane.

It was a totally new thing, untested waters. I was hopeful it would work out, but I had no idea. I had this intention in mind: What I could do with it is like the “Ninja Turtles,” where first it was an underground comic, then it could be picked up, it could have a full range of underground stuff, then be an artsy comic and a TV show, then a Jim Henson movie. I was like, I know I’m thinking big, but I can pick this up more as an IP — as a large umbrella, an expanding project that way.

CF: I was listening to “Bolt Thrower” the other day while looking for a new Warhammer set at Guardian Games and it reminded me of your Substack tribute to John Blanche [1948 – 2026] (art director for Warhammer publisher Games Workshop). You draw this really cool connection between metal and fantasy RPGs. Both are young mediums in the grand scheme. Do you think they feed off each other?

SÄ: They do, because both of them—it’s being fought against now—but a lot of them are used for power-fantasy stuff. Just thinking about the idea of power, which is why I think both – their focus point is war. Being like, when their music is an exploration of war, how do they make music sound like machine guns and stuff? It evokes something very strong, and that’s the eternal human thing. It’s part of our deal, the eternal conflict, the eternal competitiveness.

Warhammer stresses that. I was talking to my kids about this because they’ve gotten really into Warhammer lately. I was like, well, it’s a war game, it’s called War Hammer — it’s war, and a hammer is something you hit somebody in the head with. There’s no fucking around. And in terms of 40K, it’s in the future, so there’s guns. There’s not a lot of nuance there. My kids are trying to get nuance out of it and I’m like, what it’s doing is pressing this one button and going, okay, let’s take it up to 11. That’s what it is at its core: “How much can you make this?” The line is, in the grim darkness of the future, there is only war. It strikes on a primal tone, except right now people are like, well, “War is bad,” so they want their story to be not just, it’s horrible. Which is hard to find when the whole thing is grimdark, the whole aesthetic of misery, when the Space Marines are a fascist, theological society of humans devoted to war and their necrotic emperor. That’s not a story of good guys and bad guys. It’s bad guys and bad guys. It’s interesting to see kids so trying to make everything fucking moral, instead of, well, that’s not the point of the story.

But to go back to your original question, do roleplaying games and metal, because they’re about the same age, get associated with each other? One thing I found really interesting—because I do these research pieces basically every day, I’m constantly looking at stuff, going, “Oh yeah, I remember that thing, why is it interesting, let me do some research”—I was reading about the history of roleplaying games in Japan, and the reason TTRPGs didn’t pick up originally was because the Japanese don’t have the converted “rumpus rooms” Americans would have, like the finished basements and stuff. I feel like the American garage—as the place where the band is—is very similar: The place where you can make a lot of noise and the boys can go off and smoke weed and be off doing their own shit for three hours, the sound bleeds over a little but not too much. Same with roleplaying: you’ve got the kids exploring these fucking crazy worlds, and the parents don’t hear anything about these rules or whatever. They’re nine, ten, eleven years old, they have their power fantasies, and the parents don’t want to hear it.

There were a few times when we played games with people’s parents actually listening, and they were disturbed. We were playing the “Ninja Turtles” roleplaying game, and we were always the most antisocial criminals possible; killing people, bank robbers, whatever. They were like, this is not what roleplaying games are for. So there’s a lot to it. When you’re young, the way you observe power is one way, and then a space to explore that largesse of power is another thing. Roleplaying games and metal are very similar that way.

CF: I love that your kids are trying to find morality in something so gnarly. They probably have a really good moral compass, which is great. I’ve always loved how punk, metal, D-Beat, and the like allows itself to be so fucking evil, and there’s something really interesting in that it doesn’t apologize for that. The recent edition of Dungeon Degenerates is called “Hand of Doom,” which I read as a nod to “Black Sabbath” (RIP Ozzy). The connection between “Sabbath” and fantasy makes sense. Is there a single artist or band that feels like the ultimate expression of fantasy to you, in any medium?

SÄ: I really feel like the “Wizards” movie, the Bakshi “Wizards” movie, is the pinnacle of fantastic exploration to me. Even though it’s got lots of lacking stuff, that ramshackle nature actually improves on it. There’s space, especially when stuff doesn’t make sense, where your brain tries to make sense of it, tries to fill the gaps. If it had been done “perfectly” — which is one of the reasons I don’t like the Peter Jackson movies, I feel like they’re done so well there’s no holes — you don’t have that space to fill in the gaps, like, “What the fuck was that about?” Those are successful popcorn movies; you watch them, they make sense, they make emotional sense, normal people can watch them and obsess over them, fine. 

But I like “Wizards” because it’s weird enough. That space of being weird enough gives you the place of, why is that? It’s part of the reason surreal art works: It gives you a point where your brain is trying to make sense of the fucking thing. Why are there rabbis in this apocalyptic setting, why are they bashing boards on their heads? So “Wizards” is that way. But honestly, it’s the same with Sabbath, like on the fourth record, where they introduced very ‘60s horns sections and stuff.

CF: Conversely, is there anything outside the framework of punk / Bakshi / Lord of the Rings lane that would be surprising, that inspires you? I ask because I think about seeing the album covers for the band “Enigma” — that New Age, Gregorian chant music — for the first time. Once, we were visiting my boomer hippie uncle and he was playing their first album. I saw the album cover and I was like, “This is so sick.” There was something witchy and mystical about it, despite the music being kind of goofy.

SÄ: I actually really loved that record when it came out. But the main thing I listen to nowadays is fucking dub. You can go with the weed as a connector, and the space. It’s very similar to metal in terms of just being the space, especially doom metal. Big space, big bass. And lots of stuff, the space to go off in weird noises, echoes and stuff.

But I also read a lot. I’ll probably read four books a week at this point, which is wonderful, because I finally got off of being a fucking computer brain. I started reading the old spiritual books I tried to read when I was 13: “Tao Te Ching,” and I recently read “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.” I’ve probably read 500 Western occult books, but I really like Eastern mysticism, specifically the philosophical ways of looking at the world where it’s more whole. The entire picture, trying to understand contradictions and not going into us-versus-them, even though a lot of my favorite things are us-versus-them stories. I don’t view them that way. That’s part of the reason GOBLINKO is called what it is. Even though goblins are “bad,” I also love them, and I don’t need to pretend to create a moral reason why they’re good. They’re just like people, they deserve everything, they’re nice but they also do whatever goblins do: shitting in the corner, picking their nose with their jagged fingernails so violently they’re bleeding, throwing your cat in the well.

Being able to understand that there’s philosophical value to bad stuff as well as good stuff – because the ultimate thing, trying to make sense of the world, is trying to understand the world, not trying to make a judgment of the world. People get way too into the judgment part. I feel like the main problem—I know I’m ranting at this point—is there are so many bad actors who try to utilize an us-versus-them mentality. People don’t understand how you can go into something not coming from a side, not coming from a place of judgment, not in the endless ping-pong game. I just try to understand things as they are, for their essential value in existence. That’s also the reason for jazz fusion: There are no rules, but there is a structure, and you have to be good. You can play in our game, and it’s totally free, but you also have to be good enough to do it in the first place. A lot of people try to make too many rules in the game and not be good, which to me is the opposite of what I’m going for.

Other weird things I love are cuckoo clocks and marionettes. You can’t have too many cuckoo clocks. Well, you can, but I love them. I love things that are clockwork but also made out of wood.