tolkien as an intro...

[alsih2o]

several folks in my game group seemed shocked when i revealed that i had never read any tolkien.

they wanted to know how i had gotten into d+d without it..... i found my way to loving it thru conan.

what literary inspiration helped to draw you into the game? which books? were they all tolkien? anything else?

 

[Tsyr]

Tolkien, mostly. The DragonLance novels were what finaly did it, though.

 

[Frosty]

Ivanhoe. Back home they always show a British Ivanhoe movie on New Year's Day. I guess I wanted to be a knight when I was a kid.

 

[kengar]

Don't feel bad, I started D&D when I was 11 (over 20 years ago, oy!) and didn't read Tolkien until my mid-20's. I got into D&D through Mythology (Greek, Norse and King Arthur, mostly), but mainly it was something me & my friends did together after school.

 

[thalmin]

Actually, it was D&D that got me into reading fantasy. I had tried to read LotR, but it didn't hold my interest. After my first game, finding out it was based on Tolkien, I went back and read The Hobbit and then the trilogy.

BTW, "A DIRE woodchuck would chuck all the wood he DARED."
(Sorry, I'll go away now.)

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone and their Fighting Fantasy books. Closely followed by the same things as Tsyr.

 

[Wicht]

Tolkien here. I read all of his books when I was fairly young, around nine and then started playing D&D shortly thereafter.

 

[Furn_Darkside]

what literary inspiration helped to draw you into the game?

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe- as well as the rest of the narnia series.

I would never suggest Tolkien's FOTR as a primer for D&D- I might never see the player again.

The Hobbit would be good.

FD

 

[spunky_mutters]

None. I was introduced to it by friends (I was mostly reading SF at the time), and read Tolkien, etc. in the year or so that followed my introduction to RPGs.

 

[Desdichado]

Tolkien for me. Although I also read Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber, Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, etc. fairly young, so it was all a big stew of influece as I was starting D&D. It's hard for me to place chronologically what happened when, though.

My first D&D game was before I was reading much of anything other than The Hardy Boys but I'd read most of what I noted above before I became really serious about it.