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Solomon Kane had to die. I really had no way around it. Would Solomon leave a task like this undone? By the same token, could I really leave a nuclear weapon of an NPC like that in my grubby hands? Writing down all of his edges on that character sheet gave me a cramp! I ran out of lines, and had to start doubling up! But more importantly, and the only reason that deserved real consideration, the story required it.
In the mythic journey through the Savage World of Solomon Kane, the eponymous hero plays the archetypal role of the wise old man or mentor, like Chiron, Merlin, or Obi Wan Kenobi. His obsessive example inspires the characters with the novel, paradigm-shattering notion that we should not simply accept the everyday injustices and iniquities of the world around us, but that we should expect a just world, and we should feel an incredibly keen sense of vengeance against even the most mundane violations of that expectation. Kane’s obsession makes the peoples whose paths he crosses wonder, if the rangy Puritan can dedicate so much to right even such passing wrongs, maybe they shouldn’t accept things the way they seem, either.
The mentor sets the heroes on the path to adventure. Merlin raises Arthur, sends him to the sword in the stone and then the lady in the lake, and fashions the Round Table; Chiron teaches the heroes of Greek myth; Obi Wan Kenobi takes Luke Skywalker from Tattooine and brings him into the Rebellion. In our case, Solomon Kane’s example turned Content Not Found: jack-quick from a fairly opportunistic treasure hunter, into a hero, and pulled both him and White Doe out of their normal lives, and into an epic adventure that would send them across the Elder Peaks.
But the mentor can’t stick around. To come into their own, the mentor has to go away. Nimue locks Merlin away; Heracles accidentally shot his old teacher Chiron with a poisoned arrow; Darth Vader kills Obi Wan Kenobi. The hero often needs a strong, wise elder to point him in the right direction, but the elder goes away, the hero never has the chance to prove himself—he just spends his whole life obscured in the elder’s shadow. Could Jack or White Doe ever really prove themselves, even with the epic adventure ahead of them, if they always have Solomon Kane to save them? He has to die, or they cannot inherit his mantle of heroism.
But how do you kill someone like Solomon Kane? Only an epic death would do. I wrote before about Kane’s wanderings, and how it had to end with him finally coming home, as Howard’s last poem, “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming,” implies. Coming home, as this campaign will dig into deeper later on, means finding a land that you connect to, and defend. Kane represents an American mythos, so he has to die in the New World, defending a new land where his wandering could come to an end.
I stand in a good tradition when it comes to the Howard/Lovecraft cross-over, dating back to Howard and Lovecraft themselves, who incorporated elements of each other’s stories in their own. Lovecraft did suppose a copy of the Necronomicon in John Dee’s possession; for my main villain, a connection to Kane (his mentor, Roger Simeon, from “The Right Hand of Doom”), and getting his hands on Dee’s Necronomicon, seemed essential (though I did retcon in the name of the specific great old one, Yig, later on—I think the Father of Serpents fits my requirements perfectly). But it also made the perfect adversary to kill Kane; not just because of the Howard-Lovecraft antecedent going back to the original stories themselves, but also the incredible ambiguity of it.
In Africa, Kane begins to discover himself. Or maybe it would be more precise to say that he begins to discover how little he knows himself. He is drawn to Africa and wanders it, but not as the self-possessed superhero of the European stories. He is, instead, treading into the Lovecraftian territory of the mind. Everything is weirder in Africa (to use the adjective favoured by both authors). Scarier. Older. No wait: more ancient. More vital. More primal. ...Kane’s alienation from himself and self-perception are frequently expressed through his belongings. In one story, it is noted that he wears a dashing, green sash around his otherwise Puritan-drab waist. The most interesting example of this device, however, is his ju-ju stick. Kane is initiated into his African sojourn by the gift of this weird (there it is again), arcane item. What this thing really is remains a mystery (although one story purports to explain it). He never knows what is does or why. More importantly, he really doesn’t know why he carries it. Kane realizes that as a good Puritan, he ought to ditch the witchcraft-spawned, magic device, but he doesn’t.
And that’s Solomon Kane. A mystery. An powerful artifact with an imagined origin. Almost a void who tries to fill himself with zealotry and violence and never succeeds.
Ultimately, I think that Kane is a man at war with the emptiness of the cosmos. He repeatedly stares into the Outer Darkness to discover cold, empty stretches of Time and Space. Mankind’s journey is a cosmic accident; morality a sham; religion a play. What makes Kane intriguing is that he fights against this knowledge. He is a Gnostic who rejects the gnosis. He wears his black, Puritan garb against the emptiness of the universe. He risks his life to defend the innocent as a challenge to God and his absence, and then he interprets his own actions as proof of God’s existence. His fury and self-righteousness in the face of oppression stem not from God’s vessel (as his says repeatedly), but because God allows these things to happen by his absence.[1]
Kane doesn’t die in battle with a demon, nor amidst choirs of angels; he dies fighting a Lovecraftian abomination, a god of the outer darkness. The god swallows him, and by submitting himself to consumption, Kane succeeds in sealing it once again within the earth, inside the land he dies defending.
He had to die, and I can’t think of any better way to see him off.
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