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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9302246" data-attributes="member: 18">I'm going to include a couple of actual D&D books because I got into D&D aged 10 or so and hadn't read a huge amount of fantasy prior to that, so they were very impactful.Taladas - Zeb Cook's amazing setting, which avoided most of the classic fantasy fallbacks. Featuring playable and non-evil minotaurs, goblins, ogres and lizard men, wonderful cultures based on Byzantium, parts of the Pacific Rim/Islands, multiple powerful steppe tribes (notably elves and half elves in the barbarian role!), various Finno-Ugric equivalents, the late Western Roman Empire and just a lot of pure fantasy cultures like non-dumb tinker gnome machinists living in a lava sea, Fremen-esque "glass sailors", a sort of fantasy apartheid situation that was gradually collapsing under its own contradictions, a vibrant fantasy melting pot of various refugees, and so much more. It was a huge cut above other settings in every way I could care about, and unfortunately I saw it before most other settings because it came out in 1989 and I got it in like 1990. Absolutely fundamental to how I see D&D.Forgotten Realms Adventures - from 1989 or 1990, this was supposed to update FR DMs on the FR but it was my introduction to D&D settings even before Taladas and had nearly as much impact. The FR is beautiful to me because of the way it was presented in this book.Greek mythology - I had been read or read a huge amount of Greek myth, including the risque stuff, and this definitely impacted how I saw polytheistic religion and the gods and heroes and monsters, though not always in a pro-Greek-myth way. Including the illiad and Odyssey.Arthurian myth - in various forms, it was hard to escape in the UK. Excalibur particularly.Conan the Barbarian - The film not the books. Still one of my top movies honestly.Disney fantasy depictions including Gummi Bears - I'm being real here because whilst I didn't seek this out particularly, I have siblings and saw a lot of this and frankly, liked most of it and it definitely had an impact.Various grim 70s and 80s British kid-oriented fantasy novels, not sure exactly which but I know one of them involved a teenage girl killing an adult man with a heel-palm strike to the nose!A Wizard of Earthsea - Huge influence - I was kind of unimpressed with fantasy including The Hobbit, until I read these, which really spoke to me and my vision of fantasy.Anti-influence: CS Lewis' fantasy novels - I was made to read them by adults and I came.to loathe most of the characters (not Aslan so much but all the humans we were supposed to like or agree with). Made me want to actively not do fantasy like that.Maybe add more later.</blockquote>

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