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

[occam]

Book of Swords in book club hardcover rings a bell since you mention it. Now you've got me googling images of the old full-page comic books and magazine ads.

Edit: Not 9, that's D&D. Saberhagen's trilogy had 12 artifact swords.

That Book Club edition hardcover is right behind me in a bookcase.

 

[occam]

I dunno, man. I was a pretty vigorous user of used bookstores toward the end of the 70's, and I don't recall every seeing anything by Dunsany, Weinbaum or Wellman there

I remember Weinbaum on bookstore shelves, but the only places I encountered Dunsany and Wellman when I was young were in hardcover story collections from Alfred Hitchcok published in the 1960s and 1970s. They were aimed at kids, strangely enough, and IIRC they were sold in department stores like Sears.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'd occasionally see isolated Wellman stories in collections here and there, but they were unpredictably scattered.

The problem in general with the SFBC books was a generic one: they were hardcovers. Even at a reasonable price accumulating too many hardcovers was always a problem. I mean, by the time I hit my 40's I couldn't afford to accumulate paperbacks any more.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Sorry, I have just arrived now and I haven't read the previous posts but I dare to say today the new generation of players have got their own AppendixN and even other TTRPGs could be source of inspiration. And now Japanese speculative fiction could be too serious influence.

Lovecraft's work arrived in the pulp age but it was weird-fiction.

Classic adventure literature (the three musketeers, Sandokan, the Island of the Threasure, Michael Strogoff..) wasn't written for children but today they are read mainly by preteens.

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

Something to keep in mind is that YA fiction, particularly after the Harry Potter boom, isn't really kids stuff anymore. There typically isn't much of a gap between YA fiction and "adult" fiction now. Conan, for example, is perfectly placed in the YA fiction section today. There's no graphic violence. No swearing. High adventure. Yeah, that's YA fiction. YA doesn't mean pre-teen.

 

[Mannahnin]

That age I was reading McCaffrey and Niven, and a year or two later Robert Anton Wilson. I am probably on watch lists.

Ha! Yes, I bounced off McCaffrey young and got to Niven a couple of years later, as well as Illuminatus! The latter at least in part because it was a favorite of my dad's and my brother was named after a character from it.

 

[Reynard]

Something to keep in mind is that YA fiction, particularly after the Harry Potter boom, isn't really kids stuff anymore. There typically isn't much of a gap between YA fiction and "adult" fiction now. Conan, for example, is perfectly placed in the YA fiction section today. There's no graphic violence. No swearing. High adventure. Yeah, that's YA fiction. YA doesn't mean pre-teen.

If all "YA" means is "clean" it is a pretty useless sub-category.

 

[Reynard]

Also, let your kids read the "dirty" stuff. It builds character.

 

[Mannahnin]

Pretty ambiguous category, but my understanding is that some of its most common elements include being aimed at readers 12-18 and normally featuring a teenage protagonist undergoing relatively universal adolescent developmental and relationship challenges and milestones, alongside whatever else is happening in the story. Growing up and approaching adulthood is usually a big part of YA fiction, though I get the sense that it's not always as central as it once was.

When I was a kid, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books (especially the last two, Taren Wanderer and The High King, where the first three are more children's lit) and A Wizard of Earthsea were some of the gold standard classics.

Wikipedia:​

Definitions​

According to author and academic Michael Cart, the term young adult literature "first found common usage in the late 1960s, in reference to realistic fiction that was set in the real (as opposed to imagined), contemporary world and addressed problems, issues, and life circumstances of interest to young readers aged approximately 12–18". However, "The term 'young adult literature' is inherently amorphous, for its constituent terms 'young adult' and 'literature' are dynamic, changing as culture and society — which provide their context — change", and "even those who study and teach it have not reached a consensus on a definition".

Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill, in "The Young Adult Canon: A Literary Solar System", note that in 2019 there was no consensus on the definition of young adult literature and list a number of definitions, including:

• Books that readers aged 12 to 20 chose independently
• Literature written for young people aged 11 to 18 and books marked as "young adult" by a publisher
• Literature including a teenager who is the main character and who, as the center of the plot, engages in problems related to and relatable to the lives of teenagers
• Novels told by "a teen protagonist speaking from an adolescent point of view, with all the limitations of understanding that implies"

This provides an overall consensus in the literary world that the definition of young adult literature is unique to the author, reader, and publisher. There are common themes and tropes seen across young adult literary work that lead a piece to be classified as young adult literature as a general classification with some aspects that may fall into adult literature as well as children's literature.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Peter Watts (Blindsight) attended a panel once where very sympathetic writers tried to define the beast known as 'young adult':

Finally the panel came up with a checklist they could all agree upon. To qualify as YA, a story would have to incorporate the following elements:

• Youthful protagonist(s)
• Youthful mindset
• Corrupt/dystopian society (this criterion may have been intended to apply to modern 21rst-century YA rather than the older stuff, although I suppose a cadre of Evil Cheerleaders Who Run The School might qualify)
• Inconvenient/ineffectual/absent parents: more a logistic constraint than a philosophical one. Your protagonists have to be free to be proactive, which is hard to pull off with parents always looking over their shoulders and telling them it’s time to come in now.
• Uplifting, or at least hopeful ending: your protags may only be a bunch of meddlesome kids, but the Evil Empire can’t defeat them.

Accepting these criteria as authoritative—they were, after all, hashed out by a panel of authorities— it came to me in a blinding flash. The archetypal YA novel just had to be— wait for it—


Don’t blame me. The shoe fits.