Originally published at: Peter Bebergal's "Appendix N" in a revised, expanded edition - Boing Boing
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My thoughts on the first edition:
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I should maybe check this out. I am really really bad at reading books. Always have been. I read a lot, but it’s a lot of short form stuff. I need to be better.
I am terrible at knowing about, but not reading the material that a lot of my favorite stuff is derivative of.
There is one exception, and is Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser stories. I have actually manged to read most of the books! (Granted they are collected short stories.) For people who want an introduction to the material, I highly, highly recommend the recently released Fafhrd and Grey Mouser Omnibus.
It has the collected works from Marvel’s Epic 4 part series, drawn by Mike Mignola at what I think is his prime, just before Hellboy, with Al Williamson doing an amazing job on inks and Sherlyn van Valkenburgh’s colors bring it to life.
It also has the collected short lived DC comic Sword of Sorcery from the 70s, drawn by an early Howard Chaykin and later Walt Simonson. These are fun, but aren’t nearly as well crafted, and suffer from nearly all reprints of old comics - recreating the literal color guides, vs how the color would actually appear on a news print page.
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I really enjoyed these as well. I found Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to be very reminiscent of feel that some of the D&D settings have. Like the cities in Forgotten Realms / Baldur’s Gate.
Another one from the Appendix N list I can recommend is Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade. It is a wild and campy adventure that should be right at home among table top gamers. I won’t give away the plot, but it addresses a “what if” question that has long been on many nerd’s minds. Lot of action and good moments for fist pumping and cheering.
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I just noticed the Inspirational Reading index is missing from the 2024 Player’s Handbook. WTF WoTC.
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WotC are the top publisher of table-top RPGs. And they are the worst at doing it.
They don’t have page number cross references or useful indexes in their print books. Like you might expect from a rules reference. Their online books are missing basic click-to-go-to-page sort of features. You’re left scrubbing with search to find anything.
Indie RPGs are putting interactive features in their PDFs and have been for over a decade. Such things as simple layered maps and updating character sheets.
And don’t get me started on how bad DndBeyond is for running a game. It is good at making and leveling characters strictly according to the rules. The mapping and gaming tools are some of the worst around. Way behind all of the competition.
WotC also likes to charge us multiple times to get access to the material in books. You pay for a digital edition, a print edition, and then a license for each piece of table top software you want to use. (FoundryVTT, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, etc)
I don’t know what sort of business they are trying to run these days. But the best deal right now is to just buy an older edition made back when they knew how to publish books. Or go with any of the thousand other RPGs out there.
(sorry for the rant. D&D 2024 is a sore spot for me right now)
I always thought that Gygax (etc) took the wrong elements from a number of their sources of inspiration, but especially this bit, which has always really irritated me. The whole “forgetting a spell” thing was obviously appealing from a mechanistic point of view (not just limiting the use of magic but the abusive possibilities of any particular spell), but it makes no damn sense outside of Vance’s larger context. I suppose part of the problem was that they just didn’t have much to draw from, as many of the inspirations either have, as mentioned, wizards as villains, or where they’re inconsistent background figures/deus ex machinas that pop out to do just what’s required (Gandalf, Merlin, etc.). So they went with Vance in this respect, tried to make it generic (and failed) and didn’t provide a new context. Which is generally the same issue they had with other inspirations - they took elements but stripped them of interesting context to make them more generic.
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… looking up how to pronounce his name just leaves me more confused
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Whaaaaat?
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