RPG books that inspired your D&D campaigns

Nick Polotta's Bureau 13 books for me. I'm sure they're based on the RPG to begin with, but it wasn't an RPG I had heard of until I read the books. I still wind up reading them at least one a year. They're the Savage Worlds in book form: Fast, Fun and Furious.
 

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2e
Hellbound: The Blood War
Faces of Evil: The Fiends

3.x
Fiendish Codex I
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting
Pathfinder Chronicles Gazetteer
Beyond Countless Doorways

Non-D&D
Horrors (Earthdawn)
The Book of Madness (oWoD Mage)
 

Mostly my D&D-specific inspiration comes from sources outside RPG books. (Some of these sources have inspired RPG books I've worked on, so there's kind of sort of a synergy there: my wife's current assassin character and her origin are very Changeling: The Lost-inspired, but does that count? Technically we both are familiar with the sources that inspired C:tL, so...)

Damnation City, for Vampire: The Requiem... that book made me look differently at how I handle urban games in all kinds of genres. Normally cities are something I have a hard time wrapping my head around, but this really reminded me of the strengths to be gained from making districts in a city characters in their own right.

I picked up a couple of Pathfinder volumes lately, and the description of the city of Westcrown in one of them was a favorite. Again, I liked the emphasis on landmarks and districts rather than specific alehouses and inns. I've seen some fun and interesting monsters in Pathfinder as well; I do like reading about monsters that feel like they could have come out of myth.

I quite like Ari Marmell's Dragon articles on devils and demon lords. I'm generally a sucker for RPG infernalism (infernalists being perfect for players to remorselessly kill the living crap out of and make the world a better place), and his treatments of fellows like Beleth and Geryon are very enjoyable.

4e's DMG2 exudes love for running games, which is very nice. The Monster Manuals usually provide inspiration one way or another, sometimes with flavor text but most often (since I write my own flavor) in stat blocks and unusual power sets that I gleefully pillage and reskin. I may never use a krenshar per se, but that stat block is easily tweaked into an interesting scarecrow.
 

The three that most inspired me were:
  • Star*Drive Campaign Setting book
  • D20 Wheel of Time Campaign book
  • Dark Ages setting in Dragon issue #257
 

Ya know, when I read this I thought he was talking about RPG Novels, not sourcebooks... but I went back and re-read his topic. I would fork this if I could figure out how, because that is something I would like to hear, having recently read 3 hearts and 3 lions and getting all inspired for something a little off the wall.
 

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