Appendix J - Inspirations and Influences

Apparently the current bandwagon was started by Marcia B. and is about people writing a post with their own personal "Appendix N" style of inspirations and/or influences.

Now me, I don't really have a broader one available, as I draw from different sources for different games I want to run, but I already had one written up about the inspiration for my Zandan megadungeon that I just started, so here goes! 

• The Woodland Folks series, Tony Wolf - Broad inspiration as an artist and illustrator, as well as a taste in fantasy, full of both whimsical and yet rational interactions between things. The books also did not shy away from getting kind of dark with death and harm coming for characters. Really good children’s books overall!

 

• Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness, The Coles - Big inspiration for fantasy adventuring with a Slavic folklore theme. Again, a mixture of fun and lighthearted with dark, brooding and dangerous. Also the artistic direction for the Monastery of the Dark One in Mordavia I directly lifted in how I describe the walls of my megadungeon.

 

• The works of Ivan Bilibin, notably his illustration of Pushkin’s fairy tales - A real titan of illustration as far as I am concerned, Bilibin’s art and visual language are stunning and beautiful, instantly recognizable in their mix of bold line work and detailed and ornamented borders. 

 

• The Hill Cantons, Chris Kutalik - Channeling a lot of the same as the above - a mixture of comedic, absurd and yet serious, a genuinely earnest understanding of living in a Slavic country, rare even among the people in those countries, let alone outsiders. A huge, continual inspiration for everything OSR that I do, and also the reason why I have included War Bears in basically every game I've run, save for BSSS. (And I kind of regret not having them there too).

 

• Bulgarian Folk Traditions and Beliefs, Racho Slaveykov - A book on, well, Bulgarian folk beliefs and traditions, written over a century ago and detailing practices and ideas from a century prior to it. The language, now sounding dated and slightly comedic, also conveys the author’s occasional bafflement at his own countrymen’s archaic practices. Immensely funny in places and offering a great example of the weirdness of actual folk beliefs when not trying to be filtered by romantic nostalgia for “the good old days”. 

 

• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, The DCSS design team - Honestly traditional roguelikes in general, but DCSS in particular, have been an inspiration with their dungeon-crawling focused gameplay, immense megadungeons and outright weirdness of what can be put into a fantasy game. Hunting down the tabletop origins of this style of play is what eventually lead me to the OSR, and it was thus natural that my own megadungeon attempt would be influenced by them in turn.