Posting & reading the thread on world building got me to thinking about how I got into RPGs in the first place.

My brother got an illustrated copy of The Hobbit with the images from the Rankin-Bass movie for Christmas one year.  But he was a bit young for it and sometime that following year I took it with me to our family cabin in the mountains of Pennsylvania and read the whole thing in a weekend. At the time, being around 10, I had no idea Tolkien had written other books.  A year or so later, I stumbled across The Two Towers in our school library.  Not knowing it was the middle of the story I read it and really fell in love with Middle Earth.  I read Return of the King next and Fellowship of the Ring last.  FWIW Legolas was (and remains) my favorite character.  I asked for the boxed set of the four books and got it the following Christmas.  Meanwhile, I had heard about D&D as a few friends played, but knew little about it.  Then, the year after I got LOTR, I got the Moldvay magenta box.  So my first character, as you know, was an elf, modeled after Legolas, of course.

Subsequently I devoured all kinds of fantasy fiction as I gamed and the two interests really reinforced one another.  Of course I got some stuff from Appendix N, but a lot of it was just going to Walden Books and grabbing whatever had a cool cover.

So how about you?  Were you a fantasy fiction fan or gamer first?  Or some other media, like comics?  Or all of the above?

My first expose to RPGs was the AD&D Coloring Album.

https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2011/10/greg-irons-advanced-dungeons-and.html

I was fascinated both by the incredible art, and the sample dungeon game. I was 10 years old at the time, so my memories of what I was into are hazy. I don't think D&D got me into fantasy literature, so much as I was interested in the genre and it was an obvious fit.

Mom bought us a Red Box from a toy store when I was 9 or 10. It wasn't until I was 12 that I read my first proper fantasy novel, Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist. Funnily enough, I think Feist created the setting of the Riftwar Saga based on his home D&D game.

I wouldn't say that one lead to the other at all but I will say that books I've read shape my gaming with ideas and flavors.

My mom started reading me books almost immediately after me being born.  Reading and stories have been a part of my life from the beginning.

My first brush with gaming was when I was a 2yo.  My two youngest uncles were examining a hand drawn map of a dungeon and were discussing how to deal with a monster.  I remember them talking about maybe trying to tunnel round it.  I was utterly fascinated by it and started to ask a lot of questions.  (yes, I was two and yes, I understood a lot of it)  They showed me a monster manual afterwards.  It all lead to me playing RPGs myself as soon as I could.

First came the Conan Movies.
Then, some history with D&D.
Then, the Lord of the Rings movies.
Then, I read the Lord of the Rings books.
Etc.

I had been reading a few "adventure books" like Mutiny on the Bounty when I was a kid. Then, I got into fantasy through my first TTRPG (Drager & Demoner, Norwegian version), I remember seeing a John Howe Tolkien calendar in the bookstore, then I picked up Lord of the Rings, and I was hooked.

Definitely books first.  D&D was barely a thing at the time

I'd read Narnia, Prydain, Oz, and others, was attempting Tolkien, and started in on Dragonlance before I ever got the chance to play D&D.

I got into RPGs after I read Salvatore's Drizzt and Greenwood's Elminster books and found out they were all part of the same game setting. I liked the idea of the shared world where a bunch of people could have shared adventures.

I'd read Narnia, The Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion, some Fritz Leiber, several Arthurian versions, a little Zelazny, including the first Amber novels, Dragon Riders of Pern, more fairy tales and myths than I can count, and probably a bunch of other things that I've since forgotten when and where I read them.  Oh, and a ton of Andre Norton, almost none of which I remember now, but did make a big impression on me at the time.  I think I read a Jack Vance or two before D&D, but I didn't know about Dying Earth until Appendix N.

I didn't even know that D&D was a thing, until late 1980.  I had the cheap paperback American edition of LotR that was released in the mid 1970's, that I had read so many time it fell apart.

That was one side of the coin.  The other side was that the Appalachian story teller "tall tales" tradition wasn't quite dead yet when I was young.  So there was a lot of time spent on front porches to get out of the heat while people took turns telling the "Jack" stories, and making up their own.  Our school library had quite a collection of them, along with Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and several other things of that kind. Plus, I loved board games.

Put all that together, and the appeal of a game where you participate in a fantasy adventure that is akin to the stories, but can go off the rails quickly like a made-up tall tale, was not something that I could ignore.  Or at least I rolled a 1 on my save.

I got into reading when my uncle gave me a grocery bag full of sci-fi paperbacks all with their covers ripped off. But my favorite out of that was a bunch of John Carter books.

I never read any actual fantasy until after I started playing D&D.

Thinking about it now, my love of John Carter is probably why I was never satisfied with D&D combat and switched to Runequest very shortly thereafter.

Yes, and Yes.

I recall being an avid reader when I was 14-16, cutting my teeth on H.P lovecraft and Orson Scott Card. which made me aware of call of cthulhu and then by extension D&D.

After getting annoyed with 5e, I discovered the OSR, and Appendix N, and started reading that stuff, so my tabletop and book collection kind of go hand and hand.

I've read the lion's share of Appendix N before I got into D&D.

I was a voracious reader. I read all my dad's Louis Lamour books. The adventure, excitement! Then I think it was The Hobbit. But it wasn't until a friend lent me Dragons of Autumn Twilight and there was an advert at the end of the book and I'm like, oh crap, I can play this game. And that was the beginning.

For me, it was comic books first, then Time Life books and some mythology, next RPGs (D&D, Star Frontiers, and FASERIP Marvel) then "real" literature.