What literature influences your games?
- Thread starter RangerWickett
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Oni
First Post
There are some authors that really resonate with me, and have bled over into my approach to games.
Junji Ito - Creator of horror manga. I think comics are a particularly hard medium to create horror for, but his stuff can be downright unsettling. His work is weird, capricious, and cruel. I highly highly recommend you check him out, even if you don't like comics or manga in general. The Museum of Terror collections from Dark Horse are a good start.
The rest of the fellows probably don't need introduction.
Mike Mignola
China Miéville
Howard
Lovecraft
And although not a literary source, there is another I feel I should mention, because he tempers a lot of the darkness of the above creators, that is Hayao Miyazaki.
Also I've also just started reading some Clark Ashton Smith and I can already tell he's going to be staking out some real estate in my mental space.
Special shout out to Tolkien and Wendy and Richard Pini for being the first points of contact when it comes to fantasy. Though less of an influence on my gaming these days, I owe my lifelong love of fantasy to the Hobbit and Elfquest.
Junji Ito - Creator of horror manga. I think comics are a particularly hard medium to create horror for, but his stuff can be downright unsettling. His work is weird, capricious, and cruel. I highly highly recommend you check him out, even if you don't like comics or manga in general. The Museum of Terror collections from Dark Horse are a good start.
The rest of the fellows probably don't need introduction.
Mike Mignola
China Miéville
Howard
Lovecraft
And although not a literary source, there is another I feel I should mention, because he tempers a lot of the darkness of the above creators, that is Hayao Miyazaki.
Also I've also just started reading some Clark Ashton Smith and I can already tell he's going to be staking out some real estate in my mental space.
Special shout out to Tolkien and Wendy and Richard Pini for being the first points of contact when it comes to fantasy. Though less of an influence on my gaming these days, I owe my lifelong love of fantasy to the Hobbit and Elfquest.
Well, I try to avoid directly taking things from any source but I draw inspiration from both TV and books.
The main inspirations for me as a GM are
Books:
Lois Mcmaster Bujold's fantasy series (curse of chalion, hallowed hunt, etc).
Lord of the Rings (of course).
Wheel of Time.
Anything by David Gemmel.
The Dresden Files.
The Prince by Nicoli Machiavelli.
Art of War by Sun Tzu.
History of Christianity in the West (a history textbook).
Some other textbook on Jungian psychology that I can't think of the name of.
The Exalted rulebooks (I don't run the game, but they're full of inspiration)
New World of Darkness rulebooks (as above).
TV:
Legend of the Seeker.
Regenesis.
Star Trek.
Babylon 5.
Supernatural.
The 4400.
I'm not much of a player of video games. The elder scrolls and ultima series had very enjoyable fantasy worlds, but honestly they weren't as involving or developed as the fantasy novels I enjoy. Dragon Age: Origins is quite good though, it has some very strong fantasy elements while maintaining a unique feel of its own in some ways.
Well, baring the obvious exception that one is an interactive game and the other is non-interactive fiction, then yes. Because of their nature they need to be a little different, but ultimately I like to capture the mood and style of the best elements of the fiction I like.
Jack7
First Post
Rather than mentioning individual works I thought I'd just mention types.
Roman, Greek, and Byzantine. Romance and Arthurian literature. Provencal. I also like Indian and Chinese literature. mainly Ancient or Medieval. I also very much enjoy the Eddas, and Beowulf, that kinda thing.
It depends on the type of gaming though. Fantasy gaming, older stuff influences my games more.
Modern games or futuristic games and the more modern literature influences me more.
But fantasy per se has never influenced my gaming much, even fantasy gaming, with the exception of a few small group of authors. Otherwise things like myth, history, religion, science, exploration, literature, have all influenced my gaming far more than the fantasy genre. There's not a lot of modern fantasy I like at all, though some of the newer stuff (in the past five years or so) is pretty darn good, sometimes, I gotta admit.
My personal and on-line libraries tend to be filled with works on architecture, science, art, religion, ancient and Medieval texts, foreign languages, poetry, history, psychology, philosophy, archaeology, stuff like that.
Those are the kinds of things that tend to influence my games.
No. Not to me. They tend to modernize and commoditize fantasy to make it much more about technology and science dresses in a thin veneer of fantasy motifs than being about fantasy, or to be more accurate the myths form which fantasy evolved or devolved, depending on your point of view. (I think in some ways fantasy evolved myths, and in other ways they devolved myths.)
When it comes to modern fantasy I like the approaches of both the Harry Potter Books and the Harry Dresden books. Both are interesting takes on how "fantasy and myth" can be addressed when set in the modern world without debasing and devolving fantasy into a mere disguised form of technology, science, and industrialized societies (though I got nothing against any of those things, they are all supremely useful, they just bear no real, or at least very little, resemblance at all to the worlds out of which myth and fantasy developed - those worlds had almost entirely different concerns and ways of looking at life). That's why I don't think a lot of fantasy gaming is really about "fantasy" gaming at all, it's about how modern cultures imagine fantasy cultures would be if they just evolved a different technology than us (magic being the primary different technology). It's really more a fantasy of a fantasy. That is to say most fantasy gaming is not about cultures really different form our own, but just appearing different than our own because it is dressed in a different costume.
It would be nice if there were more fantasy games that went into developing cultures radically different from our own, rather than just different at the margins, but that would require an emphasis on far different things than are usually used to develop fantasy games.
That's a sort of tough one. Yes and no depending on the media form and how the work such as on TV or in film goes about portraying the subject matter. I might really like the subject matter and techniques used in a TV or film or game work (such as Lost), but not the pacing so much. It's just relative to the actual details of exactly what is being discussed I reckon.
Roman, Greek, and Byzantine. Romance and Arthurian literature. Provencal. I also like Indian and Chinese literature. mainly Ancient or Medieval. I also very much enjoy the Eddas, and Beowulf, that kinda thing.
It depends on the type of gaming though. Fantasy gaming, older stuff influences my games more.
Modern games or futuristic games and the more modern literature influences me more.
But fantasy per se has never influenced my gaming much, even fantasy gaming, with the exception of a few small group of authors. Otherwise things like myth, history, religion, science, exploration, literature, have all influenced my gaming far more than the fantasy genre. There's not a lot of modern fantasy I like at all, though some of the newer stuff (in the past five years or so) is pretty darn good, sometimes, I gotta admit.
My personal and on-line libraries tend to be filled with works on architecture, science, art, religion, ancient and Medieval texts, foreign languages, poetry, history, psychology, philosophy, archaeology, stuff like that.
Those are the kinds of things that tend to influence my games.
No. Not to me. They tend to modernize and commoditize fantasy to make it much more about technology and science dresses in a thin veneer of fantasy motifs than being about fantasy, or to be more accurate the myths form which fantasy evolved or devolved, depending on your point of view. (I think in some ways fantasy evolved myths, and in other ways they devolved myths.)
When it comes to modern fantasy I like the approaches of both the Harry Potter Books and the Harry Dresden books. Both are interesting takes on how "fantasy and myth" can be addressed when set in the modern world without debasing and devolving fantasy into a mere disguised form of technology, science, and industrialized societies (though I got nothing against any of those things, they are all supremely useful, they just bear no real, or at least very little, resemblance at all to the worlds out of which myth and fantasy developed - those worlds had almost entirely different concerns and ways of looking at life). That's why I don't think a lot of fantasy gaming is really about "fantasy" gaming at all, it's about how modern cultures imagine fantasy cultures would be if they just evolved a different technology than us (magic being the primary different technology). It's really more a fantasy of a fantasy. That is to say most fantasy gaming is not about cultures really different form our own, but just appearing different than our own because it is dressed in a different costume.
It would be nice if there were more fantasy games that went into developing cultures radically different from our own, rather than just different at the margins, but that would require an emphasis on far different things than are usually used to develop fantasy games.
That's a sort of tough one. Yes and no depending on the media form and how the work such as on TV or in film goes about portraying the subject matter. I might really like the subject matter and techniques used in a TV or film or game work (such as Lost), but not the pacing so much. It's just relative to the actual details of exactly what is being discussed I reckon.
pawsplay
Hero
I used to read the heck out of Edith Hamliton's Mythology, and I was also fond of adaptations of the Arthurian stories. I read The Hobbit three times when I was nine, although that was after I started playing D&D. LOTR is a big influence, also Three Hearts and Three Lions.
Recently, I've been really inspired by Vance's Lyonesse, Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion, and Moorcock's Corum stories (honestly, not that fond of the Elric stuff, so it took me a while to get to it).
Recently, I've been really inspired by Vance's Lyonesse, Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion, and Moorcock's Corum stories (honestly, not that fond of the Elric stuff, so it took me a while to get to it).
Jack Daniel
Legend
Tolkien is a strong influence on all of my campaigns. (Stronger than most, I think; I go out of my way to make my games feel like Tolkienesque epic fantasy.) Likewise for his most faithful of knockoff writers, Dennis L. McKiernan. (Few others, though. I'm not fond of Raymond E. Feist, for example.)
My fantasy sensibilities and sense of humor are most strongly informed by L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson.
Beyond that, I look to the classics: The Eddas, Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, the Kalevala, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Æneid, the Mabinogion, Morte d'Arthur, Spenser and Shakespeare, Bulfinch and Hamilton, and of course Verne and Welles.
Romantic poetry can also be surprisingly inspiring. Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Shelly... those guys. Byron and Coleridge are great. And actually, now that I think about it, Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker have to be added to the list, because, duh.
My fantasy sensibilities and sense of humor are most strongly informed by L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson.
Beyond that, I look to the classics: The Eddas, Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, the Kalevala, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Æneid, the Mabinogion, Morte d'Arthur, Spenser and Shakespeare, Bulfinch and Hamilton, and of course Verne and Welles.
Romantic poetry can also be surprisingly inspiring. Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Shelly... those guys. Byron and Coleridge are great. And actually, now that I think about it, Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker have to be added to the list, because, duh.
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Celebrim
Legend
The Lord of the Rings - Obviously. I'm particularly intrigued by the way he uses symbols in a way that is both non-allegorical, and yet deeply meaningful. Nothing in fantasy compares to this work for subtlety of thought and I strive - though I have never quite got there - to achieve something like LotR's literary value in my play whether as a player or DM.
Grim's Fairy Tales - This is what I'm going for in my fantasy at its most primal level - its creepy, its heroic, its deeply evocative.
The Collected works of H.P. Lovecraft - No one does horror and the fantastic quite like Lovecraft. Monsters ought to be scary.
Dracula - A fairly large percentage of my stories involve a victim, a haunting, the assembly of a 'PC party' to protect someone, a period of investigation where the perpetrator is unmasked (hopefully with a I-didn't-see-that-coming twist), a chase of the monster to its lair, and its eventual destruction at the combined hands of the heroes.
Edgar Rice Burroughs 'Barsoom' works, particularly 'Fighting Man of Mars' but also 'Gods of Mars' and 'Warlord of Mars' - I love the quest structure of these stories the bizarre monsters, the dungeons, the reoccuring crazy 'wizards', the traps, the puzzle solving, and unlike LotR - where violence is a sideshow for the real quest - here heroic violence is the main attraction which suits D&D better than LoTR. Really, There are individual ideas which resonate strongly in my campaign too, such as the 'Knight of the Road' which is a reoccurring figure of honest, integrity, and martial virtue.
Grim's Fairy Tales - This is what I'm going for in my fantasy at its most primal level - its creepy, its heroic, its deeply evocative.
The Collected works of H.P. Lovecraft - No one does horror and the fantastic quite like Lovecraft. Monsters ought to be scary.
Dracula - A fairly large percentage of my stories involve a victim, a haunting, the assembly of a 'PC party' to protect someone, a period of investigation where the perpetrator is unmasked (hopefully with a I-didn't-see-that-coming twist), a chase of the monster to its lair, and its eventual destruction at the combined hands of the heroes.
Edgar Rice Burroughs 'Barsoom' works, particularly 'Fighting Man of Mars' but also 'Gods of Mars' and 'Warlord of Mars' - I love the quest structure of these stories the bizarre monsters, the dungeons, the reoccuring crazy 'wizards', the traps, the puzzle solving, and unlike LotR - where violence is a sideshow for the real quest - here heroic violence is the main attraction which suits D&D better than LoTR. Really, There are individual ideas which resonate strongly in my campaign too, such as the 'Knight of the Road' which is a reoccurring figure of honest, integrity, and martial virtue.
Joseph Rossow
First Post
I'm not sure if you'd call it "literature" but I frequently use video games for both reference and inspiration. Such titles would include:
Half-Life
Halo
World of Warcraft
Dynasty Warriors
Left 4 Dead
SiN
Chrono Trigger
Half-Life
Halo
World of Warcraft
Dynasty Warriors
Left 4 Dead
SiN
Chrono Trigger
Deuce Traveler
Adventurer
I have to agree on so many on the list, most of all the Conan stories by both Robert E Howard and the Marvel graphic novels on the 70s and 80s (Savage Sword of Conan). I was also influenced most recently by Zelazny's fantasy works. I've begun to read Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books and have to say I'm pretty impressed with the works. Finally, some may be surprised by this but I'm also influenced by Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels and his American Gods series.
Herremann the Wise
First Post
This would pretty much be my favourite series above all others. I've never been able to wrangle it into game form though (D&D is the unifying game for our group). I'd love to give it a go but what game system would you use?
Best Regards
Herremann the Wise
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