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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gorice" data-source="post: 9302712" data-attributes="member: 7032863">This is a really hard list to write. Based purely on what I'm thinking of at this moment:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I second (or third) the Earthsea books. Especially the second one. The later books (I'm halfway through the 5th) are criminally underrated, and give you a magnificent, naturalistic, morally- and politically-charged approach to fantasy that is somehow still whimsical, and exactly what I want from RPGs.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Fighting fantasy books were literally the first books I ever read of my own accord. I'd completely forgotten about them until they came up in this thread. There was something about a dungeon with skeletons in it. I died a lot. Sold me on dungeons with skeletons for life.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Lord of the Rings is kind of an anti-influence. Fellowship was the second book I ever read, but the movies had an aesthetic and cultural impact that was simply wrong and kind of soured me on the whole thing. I'll mention the Hobbit instead. Dragons, spiders, trolls, spooky forests, annoying elves, and treasure!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Morrowind. This one is heavily derivative of a bunch of other stuff I also like, like Dune, Dark Sun, and Heavy Metal comics. The thing with Morrowind is that it's weird and full of cool freaky stuff, but it also makes sense as a world. You feel like real people with real lives can and do actually live there. It's that combination of high weirdness and ground-level politics and history that makes fantasy really sing for me.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Dark Souls. This game is a miracle: it took a bunch of hackneyed D&D tropes and somehow breathed life into them, making them completely its own, turning them strange again. It's an object lesson in not taking generic tropes for granted. Also, it's interesting that it took a Japanese studio to really nail the aesthetic of medieval-inspired Western fantasy and make it look cool again. To me, most Western fantasy art done by Westerers looks like garbage by comparison.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The Birthgrave, by Tanith Lee. Currently reading this (I'm near the end), and I can't believe I never read it sooner. It's got Lee's usual dreamlike, gothic feel of disassociation and psychosexual weirdness, married to old-fashioned sword & sorcery action, a bleakly colourful surrealist planet, and a protagonist who might or might not be a female Thulsa Doom. This book somehow articulates so much of what I want from fantasy RPGs, in ways I've never seen before.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Mad Max. All of them, especially Fury Road. What if your entire game was a car chase, and the car chase told a story? What if there was no hope, and you just kept going anyway?</li> </ol></blockquote>

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