Advantage on Arcana

The AOA Fiction Bookshelf

Prismatic Wasteland, perhaps on behalf of Marcia B. of Traverse Fantasy, has announced an Appendix N (or other letter) blog bandwagon. An Appendix N, I only recently learned, is a list of works that a TTRPG takes inspiration from, so named for the Appendix N in an early edition of Dungeons & Dragons. As it happens, I already have a list of non-fiction works that influence my playing and writing; it makes enough sense to make a list of fiction influences, too.

cristina-gottardi-8hJQKRIQZMY-unsplash Source: Cristina Gottardi, 2017.

Or, it would, if I thought about things in that way. The truth, though, is that I struggle to see a relationship between what I do at the table and the books, films, television, and other media that influence me. In terms of setting details, I draw quite a lot from the sourcebooks themselves, filtered through my own anthropological sense. Although presumably I must interpret those sourcebooks by the light of other work, I don't notice doing so. Of course there are exceptions; the Fallout franchise significantly impacted the All-Out Apocalypse sessions I ran for my brother and niece, as one example. Usually, though, I struggle to connect elements I have imagined with some source in previous fiction I've encountered. (It is much easier for me to see how episodes from the news or from my own life influence my games, especially the horror ones.)

Perhaps in an Appendix N, people are not exhaustively accounting for their own influences so much as they are pointing at certain books and films to say, "I'm aiming to do something like that." I, however, would be more inclined to point to something and say, "I'm aiming to do something not like that." That's a kind of influence too, though, isn't it? The goal for my cosmic horror / post-apolyptic setting is more grounded than most weird or post-apocalyptic fiction; there I am heavily influenced by the Gamma World and (again) Fallout franchises, in that I could point to them and say, "I'm aiming to do something like that, but also much different." As another example, the geminites are my attempt to do what books like Heather Spears's Moonfall seem to promise but don't quite deliver.

Or maybe an Appendix N is meant to show how you came to know the genre you're working in, rather than capture your whole literary history. Maybe it even creates a genre by drawing boundaries around certain work (I am thinking a little of Borges's essay, "Kafka and His Precursors"). Each of the games I run fits into a genre or two or four, and it was only through engaging with work in those genres that I developed a sense of what each of those genres is and can do. This might be worth recounting, at the very least as a matter of citational honesty.

Finally, there are of course a few particular details I know I took from one source or another. In my main campaign an NPC named Celia goes by the alias Aliena, like in Shakespeare's As You Like It, and in an early trial run of a Lakelands game the messy relationships between some missing teens were lifted wholecloth from the Archie Comics. These examples are small but concrete.

Altogether, then, I can probably make a thorough Appendix N after all, and I therefore will.

Like my non-fiction bookshelf, this post is a living document, which I'll update as I notice or remember new influences; it is not, and will never be, complete. I can't, of course, include the half-remembered books of my childhood, borrowed from a school library or picked up in short-lived mall bookstores and the used book tables at craft fairs, formative to my sense of a genre's possibilities but now impossible for me to find again. Nor does it include the things I've only heard or read about but which nonetheless influence me, like William Blake's more mythopoetic writing. What it will include are works that I know, concretely, are the source of some particular detail (like As You Like It or Scooby Doo, Where Are You!), which I suspect have informed my understanding of a genre (like Majesty: A Fantasy Kingdom Simulator or Fallout 4), or which are so completely a part of the furniture of my mind that they simply must show up somewhere without my knowing it (like Calvin & Hobbes or 1 Henry IV). As a consequence, putting some of these items next to each other on the list suggests an equal weight that isn't accurate, but there's no avoiding that.

I've divided the list by genre: post-apocalyptic and weird fiction / cosmic horror / gothic fiction for my Lakelands games, fantasy and supernatural horror for the other games I run, and a "general" category for anything else. For all my fretting in this post, I've produced quite a long list.

Appendix N

General

Fantasy

Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Weird Fiction / Cosmic Horror / Gothic Fiction

Other Supernatural Horror / Occult Detective Fiction

  1. I'm aware this isn't even one of the good Musketeers films. It's just the one that solidified the main characters for me.↩

  2. Roboquest has a post-apocalyptic setting, but it hasn't especially influenced how I think of post-apocalyptic fiction. It's given me ideas for game mechanics and interactions, however, so it's going on the "General" list.↩

  3. Camelot provided the germ of the idea for my main Dungeons & Dragons campaign, about a newly-crowned monarch's attempts to create political legitimacy in the eyes of the people.↩

  4. It was bound to come up: we are all, likely, influenced by someone who we would now prefer to distance ourselves from. I think we must nonetheless include such people's work on lists like these, as a matter of citational honesty. Bibliography is autobiography, not endorsement.↩

  5. A tip for GMs: your players almost certainly will not recognize characters, plot points, and images you steal from any 16th-century plays or poems that weren't written by William Shakespeare (and more than a few that he did write). I highly recommend it.↩

  6. Is Priest really post-apocalyptic? At any rate, I think of it as post-apocalyptic, and my Lakelands setting has roots in a previous idea I had for a cyberpunk / post-apocalyptic / western / horror hybrid, which is how I think of Priest.↩

  7. Of course, the Dark Tower series is as much dark fantasy and post-apocalyptic fiction as it is cosmic horror; I am placing it here only because I think it influences my sense of the cosmic horror genre more than it influences my sense of those other genres.↩

  8. Despite the fact that I have only read it once, From a Buick 8 is one of the most important books to me personally, and not just because it fundamentally changed what I thought cosmic horror could be and do. I might feel this way because it is a book about the death of a father, and I read it not long after my own father died.↩

  9. For whatever reason, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were more appealing to me than the regular books were, and had the greater influence on my horror sensibilities as a child.↩

#books #high fantasy #horror #post-apocalyptic #weird fiction