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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5006268" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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