Teletubbies went off the air 22 years ago and the reboot went off the air 8 years ago.
You can, in theory, find all of them today, but some of them will involve a lot of work.
It’s aged a lot better than some of the stuff in Appendix N though. Hey, gay romance, who needs ice hockey when you have messing about in boats!
It's ubiquitous mostly because a lot of the original work became public domain ten years or so back when the copyright ran out, leaving it open to plunder by anyone so inclined.
Posts like this one are why I desperately want you to get back into the game and bring me along.Appendix N reflects a subculture of sf fandom that flourished in the ‘50s-‘70s. Gygax and Arneson shared their entertainment tastes with a bunch of others, mostly not exclusively guys, of their vintage. It’s not a remarkable collection for its time and circumstances.
It’s not relevant now. Hasn’t been for a long time. D&D became enmeshed in the broadening of fantasy. It’s the decade when Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks debuted, when the Ballantines went looking for new visions of fantasy and found them, when Pern and Darkover became entrenched staples in print and at cons, when artists like Wendy Pini and Frank Miller brought contemporary manga techniques to ignorant Americans like me, when Heavy Metal blew many tiny minds including mine, when Star Wars gave new life to different legacies of pulp than the ones Gygax and Arneson dug. D&D is less than a decade older than Neuromancer and Blade Runner and the Voyager missions. Watergate was an active thing all through its production.
And all of that was a long time ago.
Appendix N has a lot of stuff from 10-30 years before. The equivalent would be a list heavy on stuff from the 1980s through 2010s. Stiff from the 1920s then would be stuff from the 1970s now - Conan is closer to Appendix N than Star Wars is to this thread. It’s later than you think.
If I were assembling a list of inspirations, I’d be looking to get as current as possible and back the last few decades. I have a bunch of favorites from D&D’s first decade, but I wouldn’t put them on the list - I’d put more modern authors who’ve been influenced by them.
Elric occupies an interesting spot in all this. He first appeared in 1961, more than a decade before D&D. But Moorcock is still alive and working. Elric is in print. Moorcock has never been enveloped in scandal like McCaffrey and Bradley, he’s not a sexist or racist toad, and all like that. And the idea of a deeply conflicted antihero who struggles to know what’s right and why is obviously a hardy perennial kind of concept with lots of contemporary examples.
As Moorcock wrote sixty years ago, “FOR TEN THOUSAND years did the Bright Empire of Melniboné flourish—ruling the world. Ten thousand years before history was recorded—or ten thousand years after history had ceased to be chronicled. For that span of time, reckon it how you will, the Bright Empire had thrived. Be hopeful, if you like, and think of the dreadful past the Earth has known, or brood upon the future. But if you would believe the unholy truth—then Time is an agony of Now, and so it will always be.” So let’s agonize together and dice our way to some unholy truths.
First, I would ngoe they aren't in contradiction. And sex dn, I would be careful to assume too much about "msot games". I always thought my College group had weird games reading forums in the Aughts, then streaming games came along and...turna out maybe we weren't that unusual.
And who influenced Brandon Sanderson and his peers...?
Robert Jordan.
If it becomes possible, you will for sure hear about it.
And Anne McCaffrey, Barbara Hambly, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelanzy, etc. It's all in a chain.
(Dungeons & Dragons)
Rulebook featuring "high magic" options, including a host of new spells.
