So I was at Jolly Olde Books today, an excellent used books store in Port Moody with a super friendly and helpful owner, and picked up quite a few volumes. A few Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters, Jack Vance's Lyonesse, the last three volumes of Hawkmoon I was still missing in English, the Broken Sword of Poul Anderson and others.

This got me thinking about the Appendix N of the First Ed DMG again, and that thread here that talked about what it would look like for the modern amateur of fantasy getting into D&D.

Now, this is a spin-off of this idea. I would like you to list for me what YOUR Appendix N would look like. Imagine, you are writing your own fantasy RPG and you are coming up with a list of writings that will inform others of where your inspiration, your imaginary landscape comes from, who your fantasy literary heroes are, which works you consider seminal to your own conception of fantasy.

Who and what figures on your own Appendix N? I'm curious.

Quote from: Benoist;565485Who and what figures on your own Appendix N? I'm curious.

From my reply to the recent What would today's Appendix N look like? thread, slightly adjusted, I would recommend movies and television shows:

Recommended:

Record of Lodoss War
The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and this when it's released)
Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Legend of the Seeker
Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God (not the first movie)
Jason and the Argonauts
Willow
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Xena: Warrior Princess
Dragonheart
Hearts and Armour
The Scorpion King
The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King
Korgoth of Barbaria (whole episode - NSFW)
The Pirates of Dark Water

Useful (not perfect fits or of questionable quality):

John Carter
Excalibur
Camelot
A Game of Thrones
The Last Unicorn
The Black Cauldron
The Beastmaster
The Sword and the Sorcerer
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
Fire and Ice
Conan the Destroyer
Kull the Conqueror
Red Sonja
Hawk the Slayer
The Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon

(And, yes, I know plenty of those were influenced by or based on D&D and works in the original Appendix N to one degree or another.)

Vance: all especially the first Dying Earth book, the second Demon Princes novel and the first two Lyonesse books.
Howard: Conan, Black Vulmea, Kull and Kane
Wolfe Book of the New Sun
Norton: Star Man's Son, Breed to Come
Lanier: Heiro's Journey
A.A. Attanasio: Radix (an awesome, but little read gonzo post apoc novel)
ERB: Pellucidar books, especially the Tarzan one, and the first Barsoom book.
Kirby: Kamandi
Corben: all
Mobius: Azrach, the Garden of Adena, and the Incal to a lesser extent, but really, fuck Jodowski.
Myuzaki: Nausica of the Valley of the Wind
A billion dry and technical archaeology/biology/geology books and articles especially stuff regarding paleoclimate, extinction, the Aegean Bronze Age, Human Evolution, the Peruvian Andes (everybody should read The Social Life of Numbers).
Otomo: akira

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Dark Crystal
Conan the Barbarian (1981)
King Kong (1932)
Land of the Lost
Logan's Run
Planet of the Apes

Gamma World
Dark Sun


I'll add to this as i remember.

I look at Wilhelmina Baird, Tad Williams, and Robert Jordan.

You know most of the classical fantasy stuff is in there, for me.

Moorcock, Tolkien, Vance, Howard, Leiber, all that, yeah it's there for me.

Not so much MAR barker and Lovecraft.  I love Lovecraft (as it were) but Barker ... eh.  It's one thing to throw a few "Fantasy words" around in your stuff but god if you want me to read your RPG or book based on it this "Learn Tslanyoi in 10 weeks or less" shit has got to go.  That is the WORST writing ever.  "They are xyschaghkslgi fish, they are like trout" means you are a shitty, shitty author because what you should say is "they are trout".  Tolkien gets a pass because again I don't have to buy the Rosetta Stone CDs for Quenya just to get through even The Silmarillion (which is a much easier read than I ever thought it'd be).

So yeah, barker's gone off any "app. N" list.

Who else.  Oh, I was saying Lovecraft, yeah, no tentacle rape in my games, sorry Phil.

I would put GRRM on it, his books are porny trash but I think there's a lot of good AD&D type stuff there.

Oh andre norton, darling, you were a neighbor of mine but Quag Keep is awful...but as awful as it is the fucking talentless nobody you got to do Return to Quag Keep actually managed to besmirch a book that was terrible to begin with so I guess we'll keep the original.

Oh did I say Poul Anderson?  Because without that, no D&D.

I would throw...who else in there...david eddings is shit, so's jordan...Feist, haven't read anything of his but I *do* have some of his game notes for Krondor around ehre, good D&Dish stuff so I would throw him in.

guess that's about it.

Fuckin...read poul anderson's broken sword and three hearts and three lions and high crusade and tolkien and vance (for spells) and moorckock and you're basically there

I like to think of influence for a particular campaign rather than an entire supergenre.

Currently: Dunsany, Borges, Baum, Seuss, historical frontier accounts, Grimm, Arabian Nights, Burroughs, tall tales.

http://wampuscountry.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-appendix-n-as-random-table-ooh-meta.html

yeah sure dunsany he's like to fantasy lit what gygax is to frpgs but honestly that other stuff you're just being artsy

i mean come on doctor seuss you really put the butter battle in your dungeons?

Actually, Suess should be on my list too- especially for the visuals. I even stole a place name for him on my first Metal Earth map (The Jungle of Nool).

And Andre Norton should not be judged by Quag Keep, she wrote some really kickass imaginative books, and were we talking about my appendix N for space games she would be half my fucking list.

For the game I'm tinkering on it would at least include the following:

Cartoons, Anime, and Comics
Fullmetal Alchemist
Hellboy
Princess Mononoke
Samurai Champloo
Avatar: the Last Airbender

Fantasy Lit
(The Appendix N stuff I've read so far)
Dunsany
The King in Yellow

I'm sure there's more, and to be honest I pull more setting-wise from existing games and whatever myth and history I know.

With no particular order or sorting pattern:

Lord of the Rings
The Legend of Zelda
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Conan The Barbarian/Red Sonja
Star Wars
Discworld
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Full Metal Alchemist
Planescape: Torment*
Neil Gaiman
The New Gods (Jack Kirby)
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer

*I'm including this because though it's a D&D branded game, it's very different than what's typically considered D&D.

I would include some other RPGs in my Appendix N.

We all love us some D&D, but it is not the Ultimate Fantasy RPG (that has not been created yet). So to broaden your horizons and see how others have done it may help you become a better D&D Player/DM. So I would include the games listed below in my Appendix N.

d6 Star Wars, Revised and Expanded
Middle Earth Role-Playing
Basic Role-Playing/Runequest

Quote from: thedungeondelver;565527yeah sure dunsany he's like to fantasy lit what gygax is to frpgs but honestly that other stuff you're just being artsy

i mean come on doctor seuss you really put the butter battle in your dungeons?

No, not literally.  The current game I'm running pulls a lot from fairy-tales, storybook logic, and the weirdness/wonder is sometimes more childlike or "silly".  That's the tone of the campaign.  I invite you to poke around the blog and get a better vibe, maybe it makes more sense with object-lessons rather than as some kind of fairly-abstract list.  I pull from Dr. Seuss when looking for inspiration in some naming practices, and for weird creatures.  I like 'The Wind in the Willows' and badger-men in waistcoats, too, although I didn't mention Grahame.  A lot of classic children's lit in the background of my brainpan for this campaign.

What the hell is so "artsy" about the Wizard of Oz?  Or were you complaining about the Borges?  We're all influenced by what we read, and reread, and that's that.  Compared to a lot of gamers, I came to Vance and Moorcock comparatively late, so that's had an effect, perhaps.  There's a lineage-line from Dunsany to Lovecraft and Howard that gets a lot of mention, but there's also a lineage-line from Dunsany to Poe and Borges.

Look, the entire 'Appendix N' thing tends to be masturbatory and pseudointellectual in the first place, but don't pin that on me.

Quote from: jeff37923;565727We all love us some D&D, but it is not the Ultimate Fantasy RPG (that has not been created yet).

I guess that depends what one means by "ultimate," and from there, how personal feelings and experience (i.e. subjectivity) play into it. If "ultimate" means "a fantasy role playing game that makes ALL the others next to useless" then I'll personally agree that I have not found such a game, especially compared to others I own and played. If we mean something like "the absolute best, the most rewarding in play" and the like, then things start being debatable, from my POV. See what I mean?

Quote from: Benoist;565744I guess that depends what one means by "ultimate," and from there, how personal feelings and experience (i.e. subjectivity) play into it. If "ultimate" means "a fantasy role playing game that makes ALL the others next to useless" then I'll personally agree that I have not found such a game, especially compared to others I own and played. If we mean something like "the absolute best, the most rewarding in play" and the like, then things start being debatable, from my POV. See what I mean?

Yes, and since you already got my point, why the deconstructionism?

Quote from: jeff37923;565777Yes, and since you already got my point, why the deconstructionism?

Well I didn't, actually. I'm guessing from that answer you meant "a fantasy role playing game that makes ALL the others next to useless" then?