D&D General Is Appendix N Still Relevant to D&D?

[bsss]

I think the big difference is that most people coming to the hobby now are more influenced by video / multimedia than books that didn't have many pictures in them. And this despite ttrpg being a hobby with quite a few people who enjoy reading. We all have way more pictures to look at than when these games were designed.

I have been in the hobby since the 90s and this is still overall true. I was putting together stuff for a Session 0-ish introduction, and realized that my background influences are barely affected by Appendix N pulls anymore, and more:

• D&D itself (in its AD&D and on mishmashy glory)
• Anime, both D&D-inspired (Record of Lodoss War) and not (Trigun)
• JRPGs (Final Fantasy, which is also all over the place thematically, Persona, or Trails)
• Visual Novels (Zero Escape)
• random pieces of movies
• any good idea I can pillage

It's not that I wasn't well-read, once, it's just there's so much other media I also grew up with and love to this day, that are just as valid (and I mean this --- novels, especially Appendix N titles, are not some ascended form of media above the others) to pull from.

 

[Willie the Duck]

popular music hasn’t been any good since the 1960s. And, since that was before I was born, it must be objectively true, not nostalgia.

This is a perfect example of what we were just discussing. 1969, the last year of that decade, know what was the most popular song (according to billboard top 100)? Surly something by the Beatles, right? Or Stones? Maybe Marvin Gaye? The Supremes & The Temptations? Nope, it was a fictional novelty band's song about how a woman is like candy (following the fictional group's previous 'hits' "Bang-Shang-A-Lang" and "Feelin' So Good (S.K.O.O.B.Y.-D.O.O.)"). So again, nostalgia a curated list, everything else memory-holed.

 

[nyvinter]

The foundation of the fantasy boom happened in the 70s.

Le Guin's Wizard of the Earthsea and Moorcock getting metatextual with Jerry Cornelius just before and then Amber, The Princess Bride, Riddle-Master of Hed, Shannara, Thomas Covenant, The Dark is Rising, Deryni Rising, Gloriana, Kindred, Charmed Life, and many Moorcock non-Elric Eternal Champion books.*

A mix of young adult literature becoming an actual thing as opposed to a book here and there, and fantasy stretching and wanting to be more than just adventure books. The 80s boom is a continuation of this when this mixed reached critical mass.

*) It's ironic that a few of these are in the better Moldvay list but we're always talking about Appendix N because that was collected by Gygax so it has bigger "status".

 

[SothFan]

1969, the last year of that decade, know what was the most popular song (according to billboard top 100)?

Without looking, I will say, Archies, Sugar Sugar.

The foundation of the fantasy boom happened in the 70s

I would say it happened in the 60s, but not produced until 70s. The Hippies were fond on the halfling leaf, as are many today.

 

[nyvinter]

In the 60s fantasy was to a large degree either books for kids or pulps or science fantasy that leaned more towards the science — understandable since new wave was mostly on the science fiction side still. Of course there were exceptions, Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror was from the 60s after all.

Most of the hippies impacted sales numbers and not the actual writing as such.

 

[CleverNickName]

Well, it's still relevant to me and how I write/play the game, and I'm still writing and playing D&D 5E, so I guess my short answer is "yes." Heroic characters, mysterious magic, fantastic settings, overwhelming odds, character growth arcs and formulaic plotlines and all.

I think an updated Appendix N would still have all of these entries in it; it would just be expanded to include dozens more.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Aside: in what world is A Princess of Mars a "young adult fantasy"? Just because it was old?

Welcome to the 70s and 80s! Ironically I would deliberately skip those books marked in these appendices as young adult when I was an actual teen and young adult because I assumed they would be juvenile in nature. And this exact list is the exact reason I didn't try reading Burroughs until my 30s.

 

[Autumnal]

So the answer is clearly yes and no, and yes but and no but, and yes and and no and. Perfectly clear and simple.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

As a guy who still prefers older appendix N style fantasy and fiction, I still find it easier to model all the weirdness in modern D&D than in the original editions. so I think it is relevant, if only in that D&D never left any of it behind, and only added to its range of choices. In fact I'd argue a lot of contemporary fantasy is currently ignored by the current edition, especially the current trends toward romantasy and the newer subtrend of grimdark fantasy.

 

[Willie the Duck]

So the answer is clearly yes and no, and yes but and no but, and yes and and no and. Perfectly clear and simple.

It sounds like a silly response, but when you start with a premise using a word as nebulous as 'relevant,' it's not wrong either.

I mean, fewer people are reading Andre Norton or Margaret St. Clair than were in 1970, 74, or 77-79. Certainly fewer people are reading it and discovering A/D&D (in whichever order), and deciding 'I will put stuff I picked up from this literature and put it into my game.' At the same time, there is still plenty of stuff from this material in the game. So it really becomes a rabbit hole of 'what do you mean by relevant?' and 'what does something have to do to be relevant?'

My position: I drink broadly from the well of TTRPG options. I have active/recent games that are using D&D/D&D-alikes, Traveller/Cepheus engine, Powered by the Apocalypse/Forged in the Dark games, stuff from the Champions/GURPS/Heroes family line, Monty Cook's stuff, standalones and homebrew. If I choose to play D&D at all, it is because I want something of the "D&D feel." That's going to include some of the old pulp magic and Tolkien energy and other things I pulled from Appendix N -- either directly or from my time playing a BX/BECM/AD&D mashup from when the game was more directly influenced by those works. So yes, those books do still have some relevance for me.

Here's the other part: this comes up for me whenever people (inevitably) debate whether older D&D was heavily Tolkien influenced or whether it was (as Gygax at least sometimes claimed) really more sword&sorcery/sword&sandals influenced, just with elves and dwarves and ent/balrog analogs because people would expect them. The answer to me is that it wasn't really either -- it was a team-effort treasure-hunting game based off a miniatures wargame* with a play-pattern formed when it was discovered experimentally that that's the part of a scenario players were actually interested in. It was that first and any given fantasy literature or genre second. So the question of whether specific fantasy literature is 'still' relevant today is complicated because it often was only relevant back then at a relatively light level unless you specifically wanted it to be so.
*the fantasy part itself something of a mild overlay/mod of a general medieval wargame for those who might be interested.