This post is part of the Appendicitis N blog bandwagon, originally put forth by Marcia of Traverse Fantasy. The challenge to bloggers was to compile a list of inspirations that impact their game design, akin to Gygax's APPENDIX N: INSPIRATIONAL AND EDUCATIONAL READING, originally found in the AD&D 1e DMG.
An alternative option was to write about the DMG appendix corresponding to the first letter of one's own name. That would have me writing about APPENDIX A: RANDOM DUNGEON GENERATION. While I would love to write about this at some point, I couldn't quite figure out what the angle might be, so that will have to come some other time.
I considered writing about some other appendix from the DMG, but I've already done a lot of that on this very blog, so inspirations it will have to be. In no particular order, I present the APPENDIX N OF FORLORN ENCYSTMENT:
Everyone has their favorite of these movies, but Fellowship will always be mine. I love that the gang is all here together. It feels the most like a D&D adventure, with a big group of disparate personalities embarking on a dangerous wilderness adventure and dungeon crawl together. The subsequent movies only become more epic in scale, but they never feel the same. I love Gandalf the Grey, and Rivendell, and Moria, and Boromir's heroic redemption and death. I love how sad it is. This movie has always inspired wonder in me, and is probably the single biggest reason I'm a fantasy fan today.
This is more of an honorable mention, since I'm not sure how much this inspired my game design, but thirteen-year-old me loved DM of the Rings. I always loved reading and drawing comics when I was a kid. I wanted so badly to be a webcomic creator. I was playing D&D by this time (and had been for a while - although 3rd edition was out by now, with 4th around the corner, 2nd was our game of choice) and this was more or less my introduction to the idea that playing D&D was a specific type of experience that allowed you to relate to total strangers who also played D&D.
As a weird aside, I was really into Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake at the time and briefly worked on a DM of the Rings ripoff where Dawn of the Dead was instead used as the framing device. I have no idea how far I made it with that idea. It is (perhaps thankfully) now lost to time.
I loved LEGO as a kid (and, let's be realistic, probably until I was in high school and maybe a bit later). I had a castle. I don't remember which one, but I spent hours devising little adventures to happen in and around that place using whatever I had on hand. LEGO was the ultimate imagination fuel and physical outlet for that same inspiration.
LEGO was always a part of D&D for us. Every D&D character needed a representative minifigure. When my paladin got a new magic suit of armor or sword, you bet the corresponding minifig was getting an upgraded loadout as well. LEGO minifigs and Pokémon figures were the only miniatures we had, until...
...Heroscape came along! This game was very D&D, with dragons and elf archers and Vikings and whatnot, but it also opened my mind to the idea that D&D could be weird. Sure, you can have standard orcs, but what if they road dinosaurs? What if skeletons had plasma rifles? What if there was a killer robot army? Throw in samurai, World War II soldiers, and guys from the Matrix for good measure. There's a Monster Manual-sized trove of inspirational material here to mine for your next bestiary.
Heroscape also caused tactical combat, for better or worse, to worm its way into my brain. We mostly played a theater of the mind-style game in my youth, but laying down different types of terrain with their own variable movement costs and rules associated with them, walls and trees for cover, and elevation differences convinced me that a game which made these factors worth considering was something that appealed to me.
My burgeoning fascination with tactical combat exploded when I played XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This game (and especially the hugely popular, awesome, challenging, and exhausting Long War mod) consumed my life for longer than I'd like to admit. XCOM feels very much like modern D&D. It's squad-based tactical turn-based combat with a class-based roster of randomly-generated playable characters with lots of fun powers to unleash.
XCOM is a game about emergent storytelling. You never know which of your new recruit soldiers will survive to rise to the top, who will unlock their psionic potential, and - spoilers for a thirteen-year-old game - sacrifice themselves to save the planet. You have to make peace with the idea that these characters are expendable, but they become less expendable the more powerful they become, and the more attached you get to them. You have to learn to make peace with the RNG and move on. Sound familiar?
XCOM is also great fodder for your next bestiary. For your consideration:
- Weak little guys with psychic powers that are little danger on their own, but can inflict temporary status effects on your characters and form psychic networks to bolster one another and more powerful enemies
- Fast little jumpy guys with deadly aim, who can quickly flank you or gain a height advantage, with a long range AoE poison debuff attack
- A slow, floating automaton which is highly resistant to damage when its shell is closed, but extremely vulnerable when it opens to fire
- Very fast melee units which are either hard to kill or come in overwhelming numbers, who run right at you and can nearly instantly kill you if they get close enough - one of which becomes more dangerous when injured, the other of which turns those it kills into zombies
- Units with invisibility cloaks that lie in wait until they can emerge from hiding and strangle you
- Mechas with forcefields - if you want to damage them, you have to kill the little guy hiding way in the back of the combat area
Every XCOM fight is a puzzle to solve. You have to think very carefully about how to use each and every one of your characters' abilities in the correct order to the maximum possible effect if you want to survive. I really wish modern D&D's tactical combat was more like this.
Civilization V is another game by Firaxis which feels worth mentioning. While I've only gotten into it fairly recently (and have only played this installment in the series), it has, like XCOM, consumed more of my time than I'd like to admit.
I'm not really sure how much it has informed the way I approach D&D. If anything, it's made me think about why cities are where they are (mostly resources, and access to rivers and the sea - obvious stuff really, but somehow playing the game has enforced it for me), and how the desire for certain land and the clashing personalities of a civilization's leaders can lead to conflict.
There are odd tidbits to be taken from this game. One could easily take the social policies and victory conditions and translate them into ideals or personalities of a given civilization. Is this civilization expansionist? Warlike? Pious? Artistic? Seafaring? Mercantile? Technological? I like to think about how I might run mass combat based on my experiences playing Civ. I also really like the idea of playing a game of Civ up to the Medieval or Renaissance Era and then using the map and political history of that world (or some approximation of it) in a D&D game.
I felt this list wouldn't be complete without some blogs, and Welsh Piper's Hex-Based Campaign Design definitely deserves a mention. I love procedures in my games, and prep procedures are little games the DM can play on their own. Although my methods have changed over the years, it should be clear that I love playing this game.
This post was my introduction to Hexographer (and creating hex maps in general). I can't count the number of sandboxes I've created without ever intending to use them for a game (for better or worse), and every game I've run since discovering this post has been facilitated by such a map because this procedure (or at least my version of it) is so much fun.
If Welsh Piper deserves a shoutout, so does The Original D&D Setting by Wayne Rossi. I love implied setting stuff! I probably wouldn't be writing so many blog posts about one or two throwaway sentences from the AD&D DMG if this hadn't originally sparked my imagination.
I would be remiss not to mention Web DM. My interest in D&D is somewhat cyclical and periodic. I recently got back into it in 2018, after not playing for several years. Around the time I started playing again, I discovered Web DM. I'm not one for watching a lot of D&D content on YouTube, but something about Web DM has always captured my attention and imagination.
It's a very 5e-heavy channel, which was great for me at the time because I was just getting into 5e, but Jim is also an OSR guy who reads blogs, and he brings many of those sensibilities to his approach to 5e. As someone who came from playing older editions and has always been a bit dissatisfied with 5e, this really resonated with me. When Jim and Pruitt aren't talking pure game mechanics, they really dig into the tired tropes of D&D and try to breathe new life into them, which has been a constant source of inspiration since I got back into the hobby.
Unfortunately Web DM no longer makes YouTube content, but they do have a podcast which you can access via their Patreon. They talk about other games too, like Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and Mothership. It's not my favorite show anymore, but I do feel like they deserve some recognition for rekindling my interest in the hobby most recently.
By the way, here's their excellent video on Appendix N literature.
My list would not be complete without at least one item from Gygax's Appendix N, and for me it's got to be The Dying Earth stories by Jack Vance. These are stories about D&D wizards, full stop. Cugel the Clever is the prototypical D&D player character. D&D does not make sense until you read these stories. While Gygax listed plenty of inspirations in Appendix N, I'm fully convinced that he was injecting this stuff directly into his veins.
The Dying Earth is a weird world inhabited by petty and selfish protagonists (not heroes) and megalomaniacal wizards. It is an antisocial world filled with difficult people. It provides this blog's name. Need I say more?
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