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<blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 9354798" data-attributes="member: 6796661">From what I've read in a number of books and articles on D&amp;D history, the number one influence Gary credited to dungeon crawling was him and his friends exploring the tunnels below a sanatarium and exploring an abandoned lunatic asylum when he was a kid. It is easy to tie these boyhood adventures to the pulp fiction he was reading at the time. Then when Arneson showed him Blackmoor it really clicked for him. The multi-level dungeon crawl was a great gamified setting where you can tie dungeon depth to character progression. So he starts with a tone or mood based on various fantasy fiction and his boyhood experiences and then turns it into a game that allows for a controlled way for player to increase the challenge as their PCs level up. I think we try too hard to tie the early D&amp;D play experience to certain books and genres, ignoring that while the dungeon dressing, monsters, PC options were an amalgamation of various fantasy tropes, much of how early setting were built were to make a game.&nbsp; It would take some time for the game to grow beyond the dungeon and wargame inspired hex crawls. Story, settings, and lore would eventually become important to the game, and these provide a richer field to go looking for literary influences. The game involved by throwing things into the mix and seeing what was fun.&nbsp; There were many influences. You can see this when they started publishing adventure modules. Everything from dinosaur island (King Kong--&gt;Isle of Dread?), Dungeon Land and Land Beyond the Magic Mirror (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass), Expedition to Barrier Peak (various sci fi), and so on. In they would just map these different adventures, inspired by different genres into Greyhawk or Mystara.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="MNblockhead, post: 9354798, member: 6796661"] From what I've read in a number of books and articles on D&D history, the number one influence Gary credited to dungeon crawling was him and his friends exploring the tunnels below a sanatarium and exploring an abandoned lunatic asylum when he was a kid. It is easy to tie these boyhood adventures to the pulp fiction he was reading at the time. Then when Arneson showed him Blackmoor it really clicked for him. The multi-level dungeon crawl was a great gamified setting where you can tie dungeon depth to character progression. So he starts with a tone or mood based on various fantasy fiction and his boyhood experiences and then turns it into a game that allows for a controlled way for player to increase the challenge as their PCs level up. I think we try too hard to tie the early D&D play experience to certain books and genres, ignoring that while the dungeon dressing, monsters, PC options were an amalgamation of various fantasy tropes, much of how early setting were built were to make a game. It would take some time for the game to grow beyond the dungeon and wargame inspired hex crawls. Story, settings, and lore would eventually become important to the game, and these provide a richer field to go looking for literary influences. The game involved by throwing things into the mix and seeing what was fun. There were many influences. You can see this when they started publishing adventure modules. Everything from dinosaur island (King Kong-->Isle of Dread?), Dungeon Land and Land Beyond the Magic Mirror (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass), Expedition to Barrier Peak (various sci fi), and so on. In they would just map these different adventures, inspired by different genres into Greyhawk or Mystara. [/QUOTE]

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