I’m late to the party for the Appendix N blogwagon, but that’s fine.

A fair criticism can be levied at modern Dungeons & Dragons that it has become self-referential. It no longer pulls from myth or folklore, instead it has created its own worlds, and in fact, has come to inform the fantasy genre as a whole. Anytime you see dragons classified by color, or orcs and goblins being specific species rather than different names for the same thing, you’re seeing D&D’s influence.

I’m guilty of this myself, in my own way. I never read much fantasy, in large part because I temporarily lost my love of reading during school. Forcing me to read books I didn’t want to read on a deadline was a great way to get me to stop reading entirely. I picked it back up after college and regret those lost years, but here we are. Most of what I dove back into was journalism and political theory until gamebooks took over, so I still don’t have much exposure to fantasy literature, and it hardly influences my game design at all.

My D&D primarily came out of the Red Box and associated BECMI line. It left enough room for creativity that I never felt the oppressive yoke of canon there. The Forgotten Realms felt weightier and more serious when they came along. Shadowdale produced fifty thousand bushels of wheat annually from thirty thousand hectares of land, and woe unto you, dungeon master, if you didn’t read the novels to know this but one of your players did. Of course, time, and WotC’s intentional disregard of canon for the sake of the current product line, have wiped this away as well.

But that’s a topic for another time. What follows are some of the cultural ephemera that were important to making me who I am in some small way. I did not inclined music, which would really tell more of the story. I can say that 7 Seconds “Walk Together, Rock Together” really resonated with me. Left For Dead were musically important to me in that they showed it was ok to play fast again and have a sense of humor. Motörhead’s influence can’t be understated. This year has been a big return for me to early ‘90s hardcore like Killing Time, Judge, and 108. I wish we hadn’t been right about everything, but here we are. Anyway!

Alpha Flight. I like an underdog, and this off-brand X-Men spinoff fit the bill. They were really more of a Canadian Avengers, maybe? Originally organized by the government as a secret project, they got burned and struck out on their own, eventually regaining some sort of legitimacy. The original team got whittled down pretty quickly after I started reading it. Guardian was already dead, Marina, Snowbird, and Sasquatch all departed… No wait, Sasquatch became a woman. Or was found his way into a woman’s body with white fur? Man, it’s been a while. Aurora and Northstar turned out not to be mutants but elves, and they went back to elfland. Puck got big and old. Box went bonkers after Madison Jeffries’ brother tried to fix him. See, I remember something! And the team was soon down to just Vindicator, Mr. Jeffries, and Sasquatch, I think, and things got weirder and weirder before my subscription ran out.

I was also really into X-Factor. X-Men had gotten very dramatic and soap opera-y (operatish? operatic?), though I now realize how absurdly good it actually was. X-Men lost me when they moved to Australia. Give me Vindicator and Wolverine fighting off a mountain of samurai and it’s as good as it was in fourth grade.

Robotech. We had Voltron (cars and lions) on weekday mornings, but Robotech was a paradigm shift. Three separate anime series were mushed together and re-scripted to make a single narrative, though we didn’t know it at the time. Macross got the most viewing as it had the afternoon four o’clock time slot, but I woke up early to keep watching the show when it moved to six a.m.

The serialized format meant that events had real weight. I can still remember where I was in the school cafeteria when word got around that a main character had died. This wasn’t GI Joe, he wasn’t coming back! Woah!

Return to Brookmere. I got this at the library book sale in first grade and still have it, check-out stamps and all. I liked Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I was always looking for fantasy ones, and TSR’s Endless Quest books hit the nail on the head. With classic Elmore artwork on the cover and Timothy Truman illustrations throughout, you play an elf prince sent to reclaim a fallen castle, accompanied only by a magic talking amulet. I’ve always liked this sort of elf, small of stature but both a capable fighter and spellcaster.

Sorcery! An offshoot of the Fighting Fantasy line, Sorcery! was an epic pick-your-path story across four books (and an optional spell book). I got three of them and the spell book in Scotland, but I don’t think the fourth book was out yet. I picked that up after returning home so the trade dress doesn’t match, argh! There’s a pretty good video game adaptation of the series, though I wish the combat stuck with dice instead of a weird rock-paper-scissors mechanic. I actually made it through the Shamutanti Hills in that one. Three more books to go!

Sorcery! (damnedable puntuation!) served as one of my introductions to ‘80s British fantasy art, specifically the highly stylized, weird stuff from the Games Workshop scene. There were little bits of it in the Fiend Folio and the TSR UK modules, but this was all-in. Very cool.

Lord of the Rings. My best friend’s family in first grade were all about the Hobbit, and it seemed like such a mystery. Gollum, hobbits, and a ring? I read it, and the Fellowship of the Ring, but I stalled out halfway through the Two Towers. I remember telling my teacher on the first day of third grade that I’d read Fellowship (I may have exaggerated and said I read the entire trilogy) and she was unimpressed. Why did I even bother?? I’ll show you, I won’t read the Black Pony or whatever, until I got busted for not journaling about it.

Dragonlance. Moving on up to fifth grade here. I thought I read these as they were coming out, but the dates don’t line up. Dragonlance was like an RPG multimedia event. There had been nothing like it before. I picked up all the modules (up to DL16, anyway) and the first three trilogies of books (the third being the first Tales anthologies), and I still have a couple of calendars. The art, the maps! I sold it all in college except for the calendars which still have my allowance budgeting written in, complete with all the D&D stuff I hoped to buy.

D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. The Greek myths were another rare window into fantasy for me in the ‘80s, and this was my version. I picked up a copy for my kids along with the matching Norse one.

Elfquest. The big trend in fourth grade was comic books, everyone was into them, and the big Donning/Starblaze Elfquest graphic novels were traded around like treasure. Lavishly illustrated and a smidge more mature than most of the media available to us at that age, they’ve maintained their own cult following over time. Chaosium is even in the process of reissuing the original RPG. The story follows a tribe of wolf-riding elves as they search for others of their kind and the true story of their origin on the world of Two Moons. Skywise, the sly, charismatic sidekick, was my favorite as a kid. I probably identify more with Cutter now, particularly the older, anxious Cutter who feels responsible for everyone around him. There are aspects of the way the elves live and relate to each other that may have subconsciously influenced me at the time, only coming to fruition years later. The original quest still holds up well, as does a good portion of the material that followed. I keep an eye out for clean copies of this particular edition, as I greatly prefer the marker colors to the later digital repaints.

Video Games. I grew up with the 8-bit NES and was always a system behind after that, video games do not influence my tabletop game design. I’d love to see a video game like the original Legend of Zelda that had an event structure and stronghold building.