D&D General What were the true influences of "Appendix N"?

[Dioltach]

Conan is a bit of a thief as well, explicitly called so in the Tower of the Elephant story, where he is not heavily armored but does climb the sheer surface of the Tower to get inside to try and steal its jewels.

There's also a REH story where Conan finds a scroll (while he's climbing a cliff). Despite having no formal education, he's picked up a bit of learning during his adventures and can figure out some of what the scroll says. IIRC, this is also a thief skill, isn't it?

 

[ilgatto]

I think @SothFan is actually asking about how the influences made it into the game, and in what form (which is why I started with the easy one of Vancian casting).

I am actually curious about how the thief came to be and what material directly influenced its various abilities. By the time I discovered D&D in the early 80s, the thief was a staple. But it was not in the first iteration of the game so something must have inspired it.

Gygax did not come up with the Thief as a class. If memory serves someone did, their friend put a different version out in a zine and Gygax saw that and came up with his own mechanical spin in OD&D Supplement I Greyhawk.

Gygax was a huge Lieber fan and the Gray Mouser seems to match up to a ton of thief mechanical specifics and is always my first thought for an archetype of the original D&D thief's mechanics. Lightly armored but a swordsman who uses his sword and dagger a lot. In the story where GM and Fafhrd meet the two's first actions are to coincidentally strike down opponents with one shots hits from behind launched from their successful hiding in shadows. GM is a former wizard's apprentice who gave up on it and is overconfident in his magical skills, he can read a magical spell off a scroll, but gets it wrong and it misfires, just like an Oe/AD&D thief can do.

Conan is a bit of a thief as well, explicitly called so in the Tower of the Elephant story, where he is not heavily armored but does climb the sheer surface of the Tower to get inside to try and steal its jewels.

Lankhmar is a fantasy version of New York, Greyhawk City is a D&D version of Lankhmar with a bit of a Midwest Chicago Great Lakes slant. Down to the politically powerful thief and assassin guilds.

re origins Thief, the Playing at the World blog has this: Gygax's "The Thief Addition" (1974)

 

[Milieu]

I ran across this site that covers a lot of this: Literary Influences of D&D.

 

[VashVet]

This proves to have a more complicated question than you might think. Over the decades, I’ve had several surreal exchanges with Old Geezer and others from the ur-D&D scene about what it means to have something as an inspiration. They have all assured me, clearly, that it does not mean characters being able to do things protagonists in inspirational stories do, nor events like those in the inspirational stories happen. This seems so weird to me that I’ve asked for clarification in follow-ups, to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. Because when I say that Game X has story Y as an inspiration, I mean get it has made an effort to provide support for characters and events like Y. For them, so nearly as I can tell, it means that you think about it while playing, but don’t and generally shouldn’t try to make the game more like it.

I don’t get that. But I’m confident that I’m not just failing to understand that they actually mean something like I do, just in different words.

That makes sense with something else I found yesterday when I was looking at some of the other Appendix N books. For John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost, I found this quote from Wikipedia - The Face in the Frost - Wikipedia taken from Gygax’s review in Dragon 22:

THE FACE IN THE FROST is an absolute must for any D&D® player. If the author hadn’t written it several years prior to the creation of D&D, it would be suspect that he was an addict of the game. As I have not read the book until recently, there is likewise no question of it influencing the game.

So even in creating the list, there were books listed that weren’t even directly inspirational to Gygax at the time he made the game but that he thought fit the vibe so well that he included them anyways. Kinda of backs up that when he wrote that these books helped shaped the game, maybe he intended it to be taken a lot more loosely than we typically think of it today.

 

[nyvinter]

So even in creating the list, there were books listed that weren’t even directly inspirational to Gygax at the time he made the game but that he thought fit the vibe so well that he included them anyways. Kinda of backs up that when he wrote that these books helped shaped the game, maybe he intended it to be taken a lot more loosely than we typically think of it today.

Yeah. Even if some of the works on appendix n clearly has had an impact in how the game was made — Vance and Anderson the most obvious ones — as a whole the list has always felt more like a moodboard to me.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The Underdark has massive antecedents within Appendix N. You can look to Margaret St. Clair's The Shadow People and Abraham Merritt's The Moon Pool. And the drow, I think, owe a lot to ERB's A Fighting Man of Mars, specifically the cruel, spider-haunted land of Ghasta.

 

[SothFan]

don’t and generally shouldn’t try to make the game more like it.

I don’t get that. But I’m confident that I’m not just failing to understand that they actually mean something like I do, just in different words.

Do not try to be Frodo and follow his choices, but think about what you are doing as a denizen of Middle Earth. If I am understanding what you wrote.

 

[Voadam]

so he selected three spells of general application: the Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal's Mantle of Stealth, and the Spell of the Slow Hour.

Vance can also be seen in the named spells D&D tradition (Tenser's Transformation, etc.) and explicitly in the Prismatic Spray spell and its variants which have been in various editions.

 

[Voadam]

Jack Vance's Dying Earth novella Morreion was the inspiration for Ioun Stones.

Vecna is an anagram of Vance.

 

[Voadam]

I ran across this site that covers a lot of this: Literary Influences of D&D.

That's pretty good, but it gets the actual origin of the Peryton wrong.