My personal “Appendix N”

Much has been made of ”Appendix N,” the appendix in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide citing influences on the development of Dungeons & Dragons.  It defines the soul of the game created by Gygax, et al.

It's also not unusual for a DM to be asked what his personal influences are that shape the campaign, so here is a list of some of my influences:

• Saturday morning cartoons from the late '70s and the early '80s like “Thundarr the Barbarian”, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Jason of Star Command”
• Monster-of-the-week syndicated TV from the '80s and early '90s
• Nineties long-arc nerd classics like “The X-Files”, “Millennium” and “Babylon 5”
• Westerns like “Gunsmoke”, “Wagon Train”, “Bonanza”, “Kung Fu” and “Rawhide”
• …I watch a lot of TV…
• Classic, horrible-special-effects “Doctor Who”
• Classic, morally-ambivalent “Blakes 7”
• Classic ST:TOS and ST:DS9; ST:TNG is great, but I don't think it informed my gaming that much
• As much as I hate that damn show, I hate to say it… Lost
• If anything has influenced my thoughts on grasping, dark characters with lots of moral ambiguity, it's definitely “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul”

• Saturday afternoon kung-fu movies on UHF channels in the '80s
• “Conan the Barbarian”, “Conan the Destroyer”, “Krull”… basically, any of those movies from that period
• The Indiana Jones franchise
• The Alien franchise
• The Blade Runner franchise
• The Planet of the Apes franchise
• “Big Trouble In Little China” is like, literally, the most old-school D&D movie I know
• …I like movies…
• Endless swaths of cross-country car chase movies of the '70s
• Any number of classic and modern horror movies, both shock and psychological

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide, which taught me that there is a lot of complexity to consider when running a game
• The Basic D&D and Expert D&D sets by Tom Moldvay and Dave Cook, respectively, taught me that you can get a lot of mileage out of something pretty simple
• Rolemaster 2
• (Almost) Anything by Judges Guild
• HGttG… well, at least the first four
• Old Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke novels
• …I (used to) read a lot…
• In retrospect, the Dragonlance novels have told me what I don't want at the gaming table
• From the Mixed-Up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (I'm not kidding; either you get it, or you don't)
• Believe it or not, Mazes and Monsters was a pretty good book
• I'm serious about that Dragonlance thing; if you come expecting Dragonlance, I'm not the guy for you

• Text adventures Interactive fiction, especially Infocom's and adventures by Scott Adams, but most-most especially the Zork and Enchanter series
• By extension, several MUDs back in the '90s when the Internet was a much different place
• The Wizardry series of games, especially the first couple
• The Ultima series
• The Bard's Tale
• Phantasie
• …I (used to) play a lot of games…
• Proving Grounds BBS
• Roguelike games, especially complicated, in-depth ones like Nethack, Angband and Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, but even some simple, trailblazing classics like Telengard or good old Temple of Apshai
• The classic Gold Box games

• Tanis (it's… complicated)
• Roleplay Rescue, which finally convinced me to put a campaign together