Of course, in a lot of cases the first thing to hand when I reached for a solution was something that I’ve been thinking about for years. As a fantasy illustrator it’s part of my job to think about how I want my dragons and elves to look, which is admittedly a little weird. However you, dear reader, are also synthesizing a wide range of interests and preferences whenever you engage in a creative pursuit! Reflecting on what you like and why can be a good journaling exercise. It’s a little silly that this post is as long as it is, but ultimately what good are hobbies if you can’t be thoughtful and sincere about them.
To that end, I’ve assembled my “Appendix N” for 20 sessions of solo RPG session reports. I’ve limited this to things that went directly into the game, rather than being a big list of things that I like.
VIBE
Assembling this list of references was an exercise in reverse engineering. Especially in the first few sessions of the game I was trying to move fast, so I was making decisions quickly and sticking to them (for example, my six PC names established that humans have surnames and dwarves don’t). In hindsight, therefore, I can say that the tone I’ve been going for is sort of earnestly lame. Light-hearted, but not jokey. It’s vanilla fantasy, but of the type that is still sincerely in love with the basic building blocks of the genre. I don’t want to wink at dragons over the hill, meeting a wizard in a tavern, or dwarves on the road, even as I’m tossing off goofy alliterative names like “Eldred the Enchanter”. The joke, if there is one, lies in playing it all straight.
The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
I feel like this one is so obvious that I don’t need to explain it, but in case it’s not apparent I’m a big Tolkien guy. I actually came to that relatively late, having only really enjoyed the movies until my senior year of college when I discovered the audiobooks. I listen to those a few times a year, as well as the BBC Radio adaptation (you can really get your audiobook numbers up if you listen at work and while you fall asleep). I really like The One Ring rpg and the D&D 5e adaptations of both of its editions. Last year I wrangled a bunch of my friends into doing a table read of the BBC script. It’s a big influence.
The Hobbit is more D&D to me than The Lord of the Rings. The characters are treasure hunters, their adventures are episodic, and the tone is light-hearted despite having plenty of room for wonder and deep history. For a D&D game I also like to emulate Tolkien’s approach to goblins in The Hobbit more than Sauron’s orcs: the goblins in the Misty Mountains are nasty and wicked, but you can talk to them. They're unpleasant people with an outlook and habits that make them natural antagonists but they aren’t single-minded in their service to a centralized evil. That said, I’ve found that a great way to spice up any fight scene is to lift a line right out of Tolkien, and The Lord of the Rings has more fight scenes. “Gleamed in the gloom,” “In their haggard hands were swords of steel”, and so on. I feel comforted that Tolkien also loved alliteration.
The most direct Tolkien influence on my Haunted Halls game is the weapons and armor, with its lack of plate armor or Gygaxian polearms (I’m trying to figure out how I can retcon the crossbows out), but I’m sure those fingerprints are all over my setting. To name a few:
The careful accounting of days, time, and whether everybody had enough to eat that day are a good fit for older D&Ds.
It’s good to keep in mind that adventuring is very uncomfortable, and that being uncomfortable for too long can make you crabby.
One of the things I like about Ed Greenwood’s writing in The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar is how bucolic and nice the town is compared to how gross and annoying the dungeon is, which is a contrast that Tolkien loves using.
Tansybell’s home of Merry Meadow is obviously the Shire with a little bit of Redwall mixed in, while the mining town of Molehill is meant to be a scoured Shire. Tansybell’s “adventurous uncle” is clearly just Bilbo Baggins wearing glasses and a fake mustache.
Many of my dwarves are exiled from their ancestral homes.
Beorn’s house is a great RPG encounter: it’s full of descriptions that engage the senses, and you never find out exactly what his deal is.
I would also say that my tastes lean more towards so-called “high fantasy” or “vanilla fantasy” and historical fiction than they do “gonzo”, “weird fiction”, or even “sword and sorcery”. I had a big Sword & Sorcery/Sandal/Planet phase in college, but it’s not really a flavor that I look for much anymore. It’s not that I don’t appreciate aspects of the genre, but if I’m going off the top of my head then sword & sorcery is rarely my first thought.
Endless Quest, Rose Estes
Dungeon of Dread
Mountain of Mirrors
Pillars of Pentegarn
Return to Brookmere
Revolt of the Dwarves
Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons
Endless Quest was a series of pick-a-path gamebooks (technically Choose Your Own Adventure is a brand name, like Band-Aid to adhesive bandage) published by TSR. It seems to have been Estes’ brainchild, and she wrote the first several volumes. I find these books to be strange and beautiful cultural artifacts. They’re official D&D products, so they incorporate all these TSR brand objects like water weirds and character classes, but filtered through Estes’ ideas about fantasy. Those seem to have been informed by classic Disney movies and Alice In Wonderland more than Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. There’s a distinctively feminine touch here: the protagonists are mostly children, usually with a “buddy creature” like a talking animal or amulet, and Estes has a real gift for engaging the senses. Magical effects are colorful – a metal-strengthening potion (combine blue Strengthening Solution with the pink Vial of Permanence) creates beams of silvery-pink light. When wizards duel sparks fly, sheets of flame appear, and they change the seasons on each other, with driving winter storms countered by bright spring days. A magical staff is grown like a tree, carefully tended by generations of goodly wizard-kings. The titular Rainbow Dragons create nests of woven mist strewn with twinkling stars and hoard nuggets of pure color. Ice elementals mine Shannafria, the Mountain of Mirrors, for gems, which they call “earth-fire”. Dwarves live in caverns lit with crystal stars, their dome-shaped houses are decorated with window-boxes of phosphorescent fungus and decorative fountains stocked with blind cave-fish. A pixie wears a cape of cardinal feathers and carries a satchel of dandelion puffs. It’s great!
At the same time, Estes isn’t afraid to lean into child-appropriate D&D horror elements. Anyone killed by the Dark Master’s skeleton army is doomed to be reanimated as a skeleton (the same fate awaits those who try to steal his cursed gems). The victim of a dryad’s charm spell experiences a century of life as a tree, waving their branches for wild joy in storms. The same dwarves who have such charming home decor make gopher stew, pull the wings off of any pixies they catch and hunt lizardmen for sport. Mushroom men brew a stew that can turn you into one of them, and are philosophical about force-feeding it to visitors (“once they grow their gills they’ll understand”).
Lastly, some of Estes’ approach to D&D fantasy is just weird and idiosyncratic, in a way that I associate with the Basic line. Wizardry is governed by the Grand Council (led by the Great Grand Wizard), who distribute licenses and fiefdoms. The wizard who taught you is part of your reputation – the good wizard Pentegarn accepts a three-on-one duel as fair because he was taught by the Great Gump while his opponents were tutored by the lowly wizard Scrumbog. Dwarves ride horses, which they raise in hidden valleys, and are fearsome cavalry troops. Evil D&D humanoids always have names (“we Pollagers take no insults!”). Orcs smoke cigars, and giants are passionate board-game players. Elves wear suede and are expert snowball throwers. The royal elves of Brookmere kept a talking magical amulet as an advisor and bred giant weasels to hunt rats with. People swear by “Great Zorn!” The tropes of RPG fiction hadn’t fully standardized yet, and the visions of what basic D&D fantasy was feel slightly off-kilter from the modern version. I find it to be a fun and fruitful place to look for inspiration.
In my Eveningstar Gazetteer, the North borrows heavily from Endless Quest 2: The Mountain of Mirrors, with its snow elves, elf-hating ogres, and rumors of a frost giant with a tame dragon.
The B-Series of Modules & The Shady Dragon Inn
While they’re less evocative, the B series of modules give me a similar feeling of an adventure fantasy that comes from a slightly different perspective to what I’m used to. It’s funny to think of a D&D where stirges and living statues are as fundamental to the tone of the game as the humble slime is to Dragon Quest.
My NPC roster owes just as much of its inspirations to the adventurer dynamic in Ryoko Kui’s Delicious in Dungeon as it does to The Shady Dragon Inn by Carl Smith, where you can drop such NPC adventurers as Barnabas Blade-Cutter, Rolf the Wolf, or Aithne of Far Isle into your game. I even used one name right out of the book with “Idris Darkelf,” an elf who wears black clothes.
Record of Lodoss War (1990), Madhouse
Record of Lodoss War is the most basic-bitch D&D fantasy imaginable, but delivered with full sincerity (and a killer animation team). That sincerity makes playing with these building blocks of the genre fun again. It’s exciting to explore an ancient ruin and fight a fire-breathing dragon at the end of it. The occidentalist approach also makes things appealingly fresh for me. It’s cool that Ghim the dwarf has pointed ears, and that the characters’ Light and Protection from Evil spells involve invocations to spirits without feeling like they require a whole different magic system to accommodate that idea.
Dungeons & Dragons, Basic Set (Japanese edition)
The artwork in the Japanese edition of the Dungeons & Dragons basic set gives me a similar feeling. It’s fun to see this material through a different cultural lens. While the monster lineups are cool and scary, there’s something slightly un-serious about the line drawings here. You can’t lose sight of the fact that this is meant to be a game that you play for fun, but it’s not being cynical about it.
Vague Forgotten Realms Impressions
I don’t know very much about the Forgotten Realms. Drizzt lives there, and the Magic: the Gathering D&D cards are set there. The names are all over the place. Greg & Tim Hildebrandt painted at least one cover for the setting. My overall impression is of the indulgent self-seriousness AD&D 2nd edition, but my single strongest impression of the Forgotten Realms comes from 3rd edition’s Monsters of Faerun. The monster selection in that book has a real vibe to it: beholder mages. Song dragons. Bullywugs. Gemstone golems. Helmed horrors. Quaggoths. Genasi. Hybsil. Perytons. Curst. It has a higher-than-average amount of Michael Kaluta art for a D&D book. The feeling I get from that book is of a late summer evening. The module has a little bit of that quality as well, with its Valerie Valusek art and the pages describing how nice and quaint the town is, and I’ve tried to pull that feeling out of the text as much as possible.
The Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander
In my opinion Lloyd Alexander was one of the finest authors of American children’s fiction, the the Prydain books are particularly important to me. Like Tolkien, it’s difficult for me to catalog all of the influences on my fantasy output, but here are a few:
My default bucolic fantasy village is the Free Commots from Taran Wanderer.
There’s no shame in doing a riff on another author’s character if you’re good enough at it (Prydain’s Prince Gwydion is an obvious Aragorn analogue).
A sword is a type of tool, not the main thing about a character.
The Fair Folk inform my ideas about elves and dwarves.
The RPG adventuring party as a group of friends who hang out together.
It’s cool to have an annoying guy who stinks in the party.
The lightly sketched details about Fantasy Welsh warfare, with warleaders and gathered hosts.
Heroes of Might & Magic III, Jon Van Caneghem & New World Computing
Heroes 3 is another example of earnest vanilla fantasy. It has a glittery Renn Faire aesthetic to me, one that’s rich in color. The sound design, the glitter of treasure or stars in the game’s implementation of fog of war, the pages turning in the animated spellbooks of the game’s magic spell menu… it’s all very sumptuous and tactile. The act of organizing the Monster Manual creatures into factions is fun. You could do worse than using the Heroes 3 towns as kingdoms in your fantasy world – why shouldn’t Subterranea be ruled by minotaur wizards with troglodyte slaves who built treasure caves to lure black dragons into their service? It’s kind of weird that blue turbanned Disney genies live on snowy mountain peaks, but it’s pretty cool! They make golems in factories up there! The game’s list of magical items (“Artifacts”) is also a good exercise in how a cool name and description can really elevate a simple item right out of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Who doesn’t want The Centaur’s Axe, the Shield of the Yawning Dead, or the Dragonbone Greaves?
In my Eveningstar Gazetteer, the lizardfolk of Great Swamp take some inspiration from the swampy Fortress faction, where you can recruit lizardman archers from fire-lit burrows and the town’s Market building is a series of colorful stalls floating on rafts.
“HISTORICAL” TEXTURE
I’m intentionally using the word “texture” here over “accuracy”. Accuracy is sexier because it lends the speaker an air of authority, but claims of “that’s how it really was” are frequently overblown. On some level it doesn’t matter, either. I want the author to care, because I want them to care about their craft, but I’m reading a story and not researching a paper. I don’t actually know whether Richard Sharpe is correct that what makes a good soldier is the ability to fire three rounds a minute in wet weather. The important things for me to take away from that scene are that the rate of fire is low, that shooting a musket is a slow, laborious, multi-step task that has to be performed under intense pressure, and that nobody can see for shit because of all of the smoke. Those things are all distinctly different from the warfare of other eras, and are important to communicate the feeling of the Napoleonic wars. It’s that specificity of feeling that I’m interested in, and why A Song of Ice and Fire can hang out in this section despite its claims to historical *accuracy* being laughable.
Bard, Keith Taylor
I think Keith Taylor is the best writer of Sword & Sorcery fantasy by a wide margin. I’ve often described his Bard as “Conan if it was written by a guy who’d had sex”. I don’t mean that in the sense that Taylor’s writing is horny or that the titular Bard is always getting his beak wet (although he does do that a decent amount), but that Taylor writes about sex and romance with maturity. From the 2nd book onwards the main character, Felimid mac Fal, is in a committed relationship with Gudrun Blackhair, a character who seems like she was written in direct conversation with Robert E Howard’s Belit from Queen of the Black Coast. Gudrun is also a pirate queen who falls in love with the main character and is tragically doomed, but she’s like… a person. They are in a relationship, the boundaries of which they negotiate and explore at the same time they’re sailing to get magic sails from the hidden realm of the dwarves, or battling a sorcerer and his fishmen allies, or fighting demons while raiding Wendish temples, or trying to figure out how to kill Koschei the deathless.
If I were being mean to RE Howard in a different way, I could also say that Bard is “Conan if it was written by a guy who knew what he was talking about”, because Taylor knows how to leverage his historical setting very well. The texture and attitudes are really strong, like using a buried hoard of Roman silver coins to fight a werewolf or the fact that Felimid is more afraid of being blinded than of being killed. Taylor incorporates a lot of weird stuff from mythology into his adventure stories too, like a sorcerer who has power only over materials that used to be alive. The characters also get some excellent magic items. Felimid has his magic sword that will curse any wielder not of his heroic lineage with a violent death, and his harp Golden Singer. Between the harp’s powers and his skill it can produce the Three Strains of sleep, laughter, or tears in anyone who hears it, and can also change the seasons in a local area. The harp’s powers are strong but indiscriminate, which keeps Felimid from overusing them. Gudrun has her magic longboat with its dwarf-made sails, but she also gets a pair of magic shoes from a grateful rusalka that can cause bridges to appear and disappear at the stamp of her foot.
A lot of material from Taylor’s writing finds its way into my solo D&D game. Most of the combats take place between ship’s crews, which keeps the cast manageably small. The books regularly feature scenes that could be encounters in an RPG:
Pursued by vikings, Felimid leads them to the cave of a giant two-headed bear.
Oh by the way one of those vikings was a werewolf, and now he’s pissed.
After killing a giant spider, an angry fire-sorcerer rides up with his pack of half-human “hounds” and demands to know why you spoiled his hunt.
A group of bandits come to blows over who gets to keep the pelt of a giant weasel.
Camped out in a Roman ruin in a swamp, a lustful satyr attacks.
On her way somewhere else, Gudrun runs into some rusalka who want her to kill the local vodyanoi for them.
Some other bards are being huge dicks and they don’t think you’re cool enough to hang out with them. Why not enter the horse race in tomorrow’s festival and show them who’s boss?
I’ll give you this cool thing but only if you go to this other place and steal the treasure there for me.
The evil wizard’s secret weakness is protected by seven deadly traps.
Heinryk the Hero drew a lot from the berserks that appear in one of the later books, whose own allies find disgusting. The dynamic of Ivy’s warband is largely informed by Gudrun Blackhair’s pirate crew. Gudrun has to keep taking huge risks to keep her men onboard because it’s not enough to be good, she needs to be exceptional in order to counteract the inherent shame of serving a woman. She also has to work around the fact that her crew is mostly composed of men who couldn’t get good viking jobs elsewhere. This is inherently self-destructive, as she makes enemies with her bold attacks and scares her crew by constantly leading them into supernatural danger, but she’s able to keep things going for a while on the strength of her charisma, fighting skills, and magic treasures.
The Long Ships, Frans Bengtsson (with translation by Michael Meyer)
The Long Ships is a historical adventure novel about Red Orm, whose many voyages take him on a grand tour of the Viking Age and three religions. It’s a very funny book in a dry, deadpan way. Characters want the benefits of being a fearsome warrior (wealth, followers, a good reputation) but nobody is in much of a hurry to get hurt or killed.
A lot of my details about life in Eveningstar are drawn from here. The Sunbold Farm in particular is inspired by the section of the book where Orm comes home and raises a new hall, where he and his followers settle down into adventurous semi-retirement. The chapter about his first son’s baptismal feast influenced my wedding scene and attitudes around it, where parents wait to see which teenagers sneak off to have sex and then start discussing marriage terms. Orm’s relationship to his wife Ylva was one of the main things that made me want to have a wedding in the first place. Bengtsson describes their relationship in a very sweet way that still feels grounded in its cultural context (their friends remark at how Orm always takes Ylva’s opinion seriously when making decisions, and never hits her). Orm goes on several voyages after marrying, too. His calculus changes and he becomes more inclined to stay home with his family, but complications and opportunities arise and Ylva is supportive. Sometimes she gives him the equivalent of a shopping list.
Of particular relevance to D&D are the many scenes about the division of treasure. There’s a fun tension in how a man of good reputation is expected to be generous, and should be more generous the more respected and influential he is, people naturally want to hang onto their money. This leads to fun situations where one of Orm’s fellow captains is trying to offer him a bribe and Orm asks for more money by saying that he’s grateful for any gift and of course as a wealthy man he doesn’t need the money, but he’d hate for other people to think that such a fine captain was stingy. In one scene a bunch of Vikings are sitting around a fire trying to do long division in order to figure out how much weight in silver each of them would have to pay in order to help a young man settle a legal case. Somebody points out that it’s late and they’re all extremely drunk, so why don’t they figure it out in the morning? He’s shouted down on the grounds that they’ll all probably feel a lot less generous when after they’ve sobered up.
A Bride’s Story, Kaoru Mori / Habitat, Simon Roy
This is a crazy pairing, but bear with me. A Bride’s Story by Kaoru Mori tells the stories of a series of arranged marriages from different cultures of Central Asia. Basically every setup you can think of that would normally form a character’s tragic backstory is presented here as a straightforward romance: child marriage (unconsummated), bigamy, economic alliances among poor families, political alliances meant to serve military goals, etc. I want to be clear here that the tone is never titillating or exploitative, but rather a sincere attempt to understand the worldview of somebody from a different cultural context. Pretty much everybody in the story meets somebody from another culture at some point and goes “wait, doesn’t everybody do it this way?”
It’s also a story that is open about women’s desire and the importance of women’s work. Multiple characters treat their engagements like “well, I have to marry somebody, and this is a good enough reason”. Women game the rules of their culture in order to get their needs met (“you should ask Pariya to marry you, she likes you,” “you’re cute, I’ll let you beat me in the horse race,” “honey, don’t you think you’d enjoy a second wife? I really hit it off with this woman I met at the baths and…”). A young tomboy who hates embroidery doesn’t learn that her society is trying to suppress her free spirit, she learns why the embroidery matters and how to express herself through it. All of the linens and blankets and clothes she will ever own have to be made by hand, and she needs to know how to do this and to teach others to do it.
Simon Roy’s sci-fi comics are a kind of funny mirror to this tendency, where he’ll present some weird and often horrible genre concept and then treat it with the distance of a National Geographic video. The human is very much an animal in Roy’s comics – a tool-using ape whose large, calorie-intensive brain and complex social dynamics serve useful functions. Social mores and contingent and contextual. People are capable of internalizing shocking cruelty and extending incredible empathy, based on the highly porous and flexible definition of who counts as “people”. Everybody likes to eat and drink and receive social approbation while avoiding shame.
Habitat, as a representative example, is about a Star Trek spaceship that has been adrift in space for so long that Habitat Security have become cannibals, squatting in the ruins of brutalist space architecture and ritually burning themselves with 3D-printed machetes during coming-of-age ceremonies. This is treated neutrally. The main character is a nice kid. His people know that you shouldn’t eat the brains and spines, but older, poorer, and more conservative people still do. Their culture distinguishes people from “Civvies”, but desensitizing young men into being able to hunt, butcher, and eat other humans requires essentially ritualistic abuse and social reinforcement (“You don’t want to be a pussy, do ya?” / “Wow we’re so proud of you baby! The family is going to eat so well tonight!”). The main character is thrown when he meets someone that he considers fully human who also finds it contemptible that he’s a cannibal.
Trigg’s marriage to Emelda is basically a shotgun wedding that I treated romantically. Several of the details were also lifted from stories in A Bride’s Story, in addition to The Long Ships. Conversely, when I think about my orcs and goblins and so on, I think about Simon Roy’s work, and the boars in Princess Mononoke who say that the monstrous giant boar Nago could never have become a demon because “he was beautiful and strong”. “Ok, everybody thinks gnolls are bad. What cultural practices would produce that feeling? What would a gnoll hero look like?” I think this is different from creating a world where gnolls are misunderstood or secretly good, but at the same time allows for positive-sum social interactions. They’re a different type of social animal.
Daggerspell, Katherine Kerr
Daggerspell is kind of like The Witcher, if The Witcher was good. Kerr’s world borrows a lot of its shape and texture from historical Celts, so warfare is more commonly small-scale border disputes and livestock raids between tiny bands of warriors whose jobs are more about being visibly willing to fight rather than actually fighting. In that context, a single professional mercenary can turn the tide, because he is used to killing people and significantly less afraid of being hurt or killed himself.
This is the model I’ve tried to take for the role of adventurers in society and war for my Eveningstar game. A 1st level fighter is dangerous because he doesn’t have social or kinship ties to the town that he stops in, but is also interesting (because he may have traveled more widely) and useful (because he is used to discomfort and will do dangerous things for gold).
With Fire & Sword, Heinryk Sienkiewicz (with translation by W.S. Kuniczak)
A Polish historical novel that’s about a kind of romantic patriotism. My wife got me this for Christmas when we started dating, I think as a way of getting me interested in Poland and Polish history (her parents are Polish, she grew up speaking Polish at home and has dual citizenship).
The best way of summarizing this one is that it’s about 1,400 pages long and feels like it’s moving at breakneck speed that entire time. The characters all have very loud personalities, it’d make a great soap opera. The most direct influences on my solo game come from the character of Zagłoba (the accented L is pronounced more like a W) on Old Dolf. Zagłoba is a coward and huckster who has lied about being a nobleman so much that he’s half-convinced himself that it’s true. While desperately trying to stay out of danger, circumstances, luck, and his dedication to helping the good and beautiful Helena reconnect with her lover Pan Jan conspire to keep putting Zagłoba in situations that make him look heroic. There’s also a scene at a peasant wedding that I drew from for my feast scenes. Apparently dunking your head in a vodka barrel was a big thing.
The Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell
Bernard Cornwell writes military historical fiction and is probably best known for his Sharpe stories (adapted into a fun TV show starring Sean Bean). He puts charming research notes in the back of his books and is a surprisingly good romance writer considering you can really tell that he’s Divorced. The Warlord Chronicles trilogy is his version of a “historical” King Arthur (he pitches it expressly as a “what-if” rather than a “what really happened”). Here Arthur is a post-Roman warlord in Iron Age Britain, and the story is told from the perspective of an idiot jock who happened to be nearby for a lot of the big events. Cornwell writes a lot of blow-by-blow combat, and he’s good at making that exciting. There’s a lot of color about what fighting in a shield wall feels like, and about the impact of fear and morale. Protagonist Derfel Cadarn makes a big deal out of weapons and armor as tools, and how frightening a well-trained and well-armored warrior can be to less experienced or less wealthy (and therefore less armored) men. He also talks a lot about the importance of being well-groomed and displaying your wealth for your enemies to see. Arthur’s retainers are terrifying because heavy cavalry basically don’t exist in this society – nobody else has horses that big and couldn’t afford to breed them or take care of their diet and hoof problems if they did. Maintaining enough loyal warrior elites to outfight the other guy is a continual challenge for a place with limited state capacity, as Arthur and the other warlords are constantly trying to figure out what to do with their violent thugs whenever they aren’t fighting. Tax collection is a good gig for a warrior in peacetime if you know how much corruption you can get away with before your boss has to officially notice what you’re doing, for example.
I tend to think about Cornwell’s work when I’m imagining treasure (the man loves to talk about ring-givers and the patterns in a sword’s steel, he’s got a page count to hit) or trying to write fight scenes. D&D has a lot of rounds where nothing much happens, and The Lord of the Rings and The Long Ships have a more saga-inspired approach to combat writing, where it’s often enough to say for example “And many of them were killed with arrows”. It’s helpful therefore to have a Cornwell passage about how much of Dark Age fighting consisted of shoving your shield against the other guy’s shield, or how useful it is to have a unit leader who can shout “Kill them! Kill the bastards!” louder and longer than the other guys’.
The Brother Cadfael Chronicles, Edith Pargeter (as Ellis Peters)
The stories of Pargeter’s monk detective are warm and rich in historic texture. She takes the beliefs and laws of her setting seriously. They’re also a great source of color for medieval town life. There’s almost always a romantic subplot where Brother Cadfael helps another pair of star-crossed lovers into marriage, which allows Pargeter to explore a lot of different social dynamics.
I haven’t spent a lot of time with the monks of Lathander in my Eveningstar game, but the loose sketch I have of them is drawn almost entirely from the Cadfael books.
A Song of Ice and Fire, George RR Martin
A Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire are usually praised for the ways why supposedly subvert reader expectations and the fantasy genre. I think there’s some truth to this, in the sense that they are better books because Ned Stark dies and the Red Wedding happens in ways that are both shocking and which nevertheless follow logically from the events of the plot and the character of the characters. However, I think that this popular understanding (and, to be fair, Martin’s own marketing pitch) undersells how much Martin plays straight. In an attempt to signal seriousness and grime, the TV adaptations drop just how colorful Martin’s medieval fantasy is. I think that’s a shame, because he’s really good at communicating the power of heraldry, where some random background character can be elevated by describing him as Ser Beesbury of the Honeyholt in his tabard of yellow and black stripes. The Eyrie is a great castle, Heartsbane is a cool name for a sword, and the dragons. More dragons should breathe fire that matches the color of their scales! More knights should fully commit to the bit of whatever random thing is painted on their shield.
In my Eveningstar game, I try to lean in to Fantasy Stuff played straight. I’ll provide the wonder and the color, the game rules can provide the blood and danger and picaresque shaggy dog quality.
The books are also good because the Red Wedding destroys the Freys because what they and Tywin Lannister get wrong is that those cultural taboos they were so quick to discard were in fact load-bearing. After the desecration of the Red Wedding, the Freys’ enemies will conscience any act that harms them, and their allies find them so repulsive that they don’t want to help them. The actual theme of the books isn’t realism per say (again, contrary to Martin’s marketing), it’s an examination of the many, many ways that historical actors behave irrationally. Tywin is correct that logically it makes sense to assassinate your allies when they are defenseless – fewer total people will die (theoretically) at lower cost to himself (also theoretically). He forgets that he does not live in a world of perfectly rational value maximizers. Other people in the world sincerely hold the values they profess, and they do in fact believe that it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner. On a similar note, Martin doesn’t spend a million pages on feasts and songs because he’s a fat guy, as people sometimes joke – feasts serve several important social functions: display, release, obligation, and the reinforcement of social bonds.
I also try to capture some of this quality in my game. Since I’m not piloting a single character through a hostile world, I don’t have to play optimally. In fact it would be a little boring to do that all of the time, since naturally as a solo player I have all of the information. Sasaran doesn’t investigate the privy because it’s gross. Tansy isn’t an archer because she’s after glory and recognition. Trigg marries Emelda out of a mixture of affection and duty, rather than for gain. Lady Winter doesn’t pay attention to a lot of what goes on in her land because she finds it boring, and she’s confident in her personal power. Ivy has to work around the fact that her warband wants security and comfort more than they want to serve the dreams of a dead king, and there are limits to what fear and a strong sword-arm can make them do – her authority holds as long as nobody questions it.
Pop History Material Culture
How to Be A Tudor, Ruth Goodman
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, Ian Mortimer
Daily Life In the Ancient World, Robert Garland
Food: A Cultural Culinary History, Ken Albala
I find it helpful to think about the material culture of different eras. The past is a foreign country, full of people who are just like us.
MAGIC
Howl’s Moving Castle, Hayao Miyazaki & Studio Ghibli
I really love the fluidity of magic in this movie. The sigils, falling stars, and shapechanging all have a wonderful atmosphere to them. I’ve always been taken with the usage of “Wizard” as a professional title, like “Doctor” (something which originated in the novel by Diana Wynn Jones). The frequency of curses and the idea of a Waste on the borders of the kingdom populated by witches and wizards heavily informed my idea of the Stonelands. I also love the look of the inside of Howl’s house, which feels like a great place for D&D characters to explore. Treasures are piled up under the dirty dishes, the bathroom is full of powders, potions, and slime, you can mess around with the magic door, and there’s a demon in the fireplace. I don’t know what all of that stuff in Howl’s bedroom does, but some of it must be valuable.
Dark Lord of Derkholm and The Year of the Griffin, Diana Wynn Jones
You can see why Diana Wynn Jones would inspire an animator, because her writing has so much motion to it. There’s a passage in Dark Lord of Derkholm where a pack of dogs shake magical illusions off their coats because they find the feeling of the magic too uncomfortable, and that’s just such a good image. The mechanism of how they do this isn’t explained, the wizards themselves are baffled, but it feels perfect. You wouldn’t need a line in the Studio Ghibli adaptation explaining it. Similarly, in The Year of the Griffin an overbearing wizard gets turned into a bar stool and nobody can figure out how to change him back. He ends up staying like that indefinitely, but nobody likes to sit on him because the bar stool feels too smug.
My version of Lady Winter is equal parts Howl (another trans icon, according to some of the artists I follow on social media) and Wizard Dirk of Derkholm. Howl is flamboyant, moody, irresponsible, and uses his magic to make flowers grow. Dirk is constantly experimenting with new forms of magical animal (putting wings on things, mostly) and his farm is full of failed experiments like Big Hen and the evil geese. He funds all this through cultivating off-world oranges and coffee beans, which you can’t normally get in fantasy land. I like that idea of an experimental wizard who occasionally, reluctantly does something boring but useful.
Princess Arete, Sunao Katabuchi & Studio 4C
This strange, sad movie is my primary influence for the Stonelands being a dry, barren place ruled by irresponsible wizards.
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K LeGuin
I haven’t pulled the trigger on combining the Cleric and the Magic-User into a single class yet, but I’m strongly considering it and Earthsea and Gandalf are the reasons why. My little setting The Isles may or may not be in the same setting as my Eveningstar game, but the premise for that one was “What if Gondor was Earthsea”.
INSPIRATION TO START
Delvers, Sam Mameli
Delvers is a webcomic adaptation of a solo D&D game. I particularly like the comic’s breezy attitude and playful takes on dungeon staples (“gnomes love snacks,” stirges being needle-beaked birds).
Tale of the Manticore Podcast, Jon Cohen
I mean this in the most complimentary way possible, but the thing I find most inspiring about Tale of the Manticore is that it’s not that good. By that I mean something like Miranda Elkin’s quote “all D&D is hack-work” – it doesn’t have to be incredible, what matters is that you keep showing up and turn your work in on time. At the same time, the ramshackle nature of a hobbyist project provides a space for earnest self-expression. Cohen occasionally inserts little poems, short stories, or songs into the podcast, and it’s cool that he does that. Tale of the Manticore’s setting isn’t really original or groundbreaking, it’s an accumulation of small first-thought details that reflect the quirks of the person doing that thinking. For example, the dwarven city of Dwervar is pretty much what you’d expect of somebody improving on the prompt “A Dwarven City”, but the heraldic crests include mushrooms and marching ants. Dwarves sleep on stone beds and keep little fire beetles in lanterns. It’s not exactly the Generic Dwarf City that I would make, and that’s the fun part. I often think that if HP Lovecraft had been a better writer, if he hadn’t been working for pulp magazines, then he’d have had less of a cultural impact because he’d have had fewer collaborators and imitators. In some ways the ideal space to be in a participatory artform is to be good enough to inspire and bad enough to get some people in the audience thinking “I bet I could do that”.
MISCELLANEOUS WORLD DETAILS
The Periphery & The Realm
The terminology and the dynamic between my borderlands and realm are borrowed from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki, where the semi-independent kingdoms and states of the Periphery are ruled by the Tolmekian Empire. In my loose bands the Periphery is the part of the Realm that borders the northern wastes, and which still has some cultural affinity with those regions. The Realm is technically the whole kingdom, but “Realmish” as a descriptor typically refers to the core or “Heartland” areas.
Dragons
We haven’t seen much from dragons in the solo game yet, but they are lurking at the edges of the game. We know that Lady Winter goes dragon-hunting with her household knights, that dragons sometimes raid livestock or are seen flying overhead, and that the dragons of the Stonelands are “mud-brown”. There are also “sinuous crystal-scaled ice dragons” in the snowy north, who sing to the moon. Besides The Hobbit, I have three main dragon inspirations: Dragon’s Blood by Jane Yolen, The Dragons Are Singing Tonight by Jack Prelutsky and Peter Sis, and George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (especially the fictional history book Fire & Blood, which has more dragons in it). From this I get a few ideas:
I might change my mind depending on what modules I run in the future (if any) but I like when dragons are more like smart animals than they are like Smaug. I think this makes them easier to use in a D&D game, because the things that make Smaug so appealing also give him a big presence that makes him harder to work around. Including both animal and intelligent dragons in a setting is a bit of wishy-washiness that I find distasteful. Either version is interesting, but the combination suffers. You can see the point in Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon where her forum readers started pointing out that it was kinda fucked up for humans to be breeding dragons for war if they are also people, and the pivot is graceless enough that I lost interest in reading the sequels.
Dragons breathe fire. A dragon’s scale color has nothing to do with its breath weapon (except maybe changing the color of the flames to match) and dragons should be colorful.
Treasure-hoarding is a nesting behavior. If they assemble it themselves, dragon hoards contain a lot of colored glass and other shiny junk.
Dragons have external ears.
They’re big, but rarely live long enough to become titanic building-sized horrors.
Dragons sing. They are particularly vocal during the autumn breeding season. Dragons need to locate each other over wide distances, and the bulls need to signal their fitness as mates. They also stoke up their fires for this season as part of their mating displays.
Dragons have name-songs, which they use to identify themselves to each other.
Dragonfire is calorically expensive, but inter-dragon conflict is so deadly that it’s better to resolve territorial disputes through threat displays and warning songs.
Dragons are fire-resistant, but not immune to fire. A blast of dragonfire to a rival’s wings or face can drive them off.
Per Jane Yolen, a female dragon is called a “hen”. Unlike her, I prefer “bull” for males rather than “cock”.
Orcs & Goblins
Vattu, a webcomic by Evan Dahm, has a moment early on where the title character’s tribe meet with “the Dead”. The Dead are creatures like them, only they’re a bit taller, they don’t wear painted sigils on their brows, and they’re nocturnal. They’re basically just another tribe. Nevertheless, Vattu’s people treat the Dead with supernatural awe. It’s a small moment, which I think Dahm uses to show how small Vattu’s world is, before the Sahtan Empire (ruled by an entirely different species) appear as a massive out-of-context problem.
I’ve often thought that orcs and goblins being nocturnal would be enough to lead to a history of tension with other D&D races. Tolkien-style elves and dwarves can’t actually see in the dark, and despite what the dwarves tell Bilbo they clearly don’t like it (as demonstrated by their many windows and cunning lamps). Goblins, however, can see in the dark but find the sun painful. I imagine the dynamic would be kind of like I Am Legend, where it’s difficult for a human and an orc to meet and talk without one of them being uncomfortable or disadvantaged. Orc raiders come out of the night when the humans are sleeping, and men with spears storm orc caves during the day when they’re tired and weak. Add in slave-taking and the ability to eat a wider range of food and you don’t need a Dark Lord or inherent evil to explain why orcs and humans don’t get along.
Fantasy Race Relations
I like a level of integration that is somewhere between “human-centric with elves in the Elvenwood and dwarves in Dwarf Mountain, Oathmark”, and the fully cosmopolitan default world of D&D 5th edition. Something like Bree, I suppose, where different peoples live alongside each other but are still distinct. The fantasy wargame Oathmark by Joseph A. McCullough hits a mark that I like. While it has an excellent line of miniatures, Oathmark is designed to be played with whatever 28mm minis you have. Rather than using strict army lists, you build a kingdom whose “territories” determine your troop choices. It’s possible to have an elf lord ruling over dwarf and goblin vassals, which is cool.
Greyhawk’s Principality of Ulek states are another fun example of a more integrated fantasy country. The ruling prince is a dwarf, as are his elite guards, but his army relies on halfling archers and human woodsmen. One of his lords is a halfling who lives in a mansion that has been repurposed and refurnished to suit his stature from an older human building. I think that’s a lot of fun, which is why I put Molehill in the Eveningstar region, and why Toadmarket has a dwarven enclave and does regular trade with the local lizardmen.
Living Statues
I’ve always been fascinated by the Jumi from The Legend of Mana. They’re people with magical gemstone cores set into their chests, who are hunted by other people who want the cores for magical purposes. This is why my living statue variants can cast spells out of their cores. Because they don’t have damage resistance the way some other stone creatures do, I also imagine that they’re made out of that nacreous marble-like stuff that dead elves turn into in Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
