poll: What has most influenced your conception of fantasy?

[deurbroucq]

Magician by Raymond E. Feist. I read it every year! The rest of the Riftwar Saga was okay. I enjoyed some of his other titles, but Magician is, by far, the best of his works IMHO.

deurbroucq

 

[I'm A Banana]

The Final, My First

My first exposure to anything D&D-esque was Final Fantasy. Maybe I'm in the minority, with my epiphany happening during a videogame. But, to this day, FF defines some aspect of my games. I suppose you could call it Anime-esque...after that, I got into mythology, and spliced Final Fantasy half-baked philosophy and melodrama with that. THEN I discovered D&D, and the range of fantasy out there. I still find more inspiration in Anime, legends, fairy tales, and Final Fantasy than I ever did in Tolkien, but that may be just because Tolkien is a mine that everyone taps.

....and, yes, chocobos have replaced horses.

 

[Harlequin]

...

Hi

My first exposure to Fantasy was purely by accident, or was it fate

I stumbled across this red box with a huge red dragon about to do battle with a fighter clad in armour and wielding a sword...

As a 12 year old it blue away my mind and i 'borrowed' it and took it home to read thru...

It was the first fantasy thing i have ever read and after introducing the game to a friend he handed me a huge book and said 'hey this game is the same as my fav book, here read it!'

It was Lord of the Rings...

After reading that and then reading many many other Fantasy books i can say that those two were my first introduction the wonderful genre of Fantasy...

The 'Basic Red Box DnD Game' and 'Lord of the Rings'


Harlequin

 

[CRGreathouse]

LotR all the way!

 

[novyet]

For me it would be a mix of chivalric poetry and norse mythology.

 

[Guacamole]

LoTR

LoTR is quite possibly one of the strongest influences in my life, let alone, my gaming.

My second strongest influences is probably a little remembered computer game called temple of Aphsai by Epyx, which was little more than a dungeon romp. I used to play for hours.

 

[birdboy2000]

Dragonlance and Lodoss are both huge influences, but Lodoss is a bigger one.

 

[Ysgarran]

I was raised on Tolkien. My older brother is 17 years older than I am and some of my earliest memories are of him reading the Hobbit to me when I was about 6 or 7 years old and he was at the University of Michigan.

From there I moved into mythology. From Mythology I started reading the Chivalric tales.

I've never enjoyed any of the RPG novels.

 

[The Green Man]

I chose myths (Greek in particular), although they're only part of the triad of elements from my early life the kick-started me on the fantasy route. Those other two things were an interest in dinosaurs (especially a love for "Lost World" scenarios), and a love of Godzilla movies. Because of those three things, I was attracted to monsters at an early age. Monsters are what originally got me into DnD and fantasy as a whole; I remember wanting to get a copy of the Fiend Folio when I was 4, just because of all the monsters, but my parents wouldn't buy it cause the early 80s was the height of the "work of the devil" craze. Of course this led me to Nintendo RPGs, reading my dad's old copies of The Hobbit and LOTR, and eventually DnD itself (started on the old Red Box).

So there ya go. Mythology, dinosaurs, and Godzilla.

 

[Hand of Evil]

What about Pulp Movies, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tarzan...

Saw those old B&W films and started to read the books, everything came after.