The award-winning RPG blogosphere luminary
recently announced a new “blogwagon”: to create one’s personal “Appendix N”: “a list of inspirational media (books, movies, comics, video games, what have you) that impact your design.” I am not much of a designer. My Itch page contains two translations, one map-making procedure, and an RPG I made for my kids. But I don’t like feeling left out. Therefore, I will talk about the media which had the largest impact on me as a gamer, writer, and Game Master.History, Adventure, and Travel
I’ve always been an avid reader. As soon as I’d learned how to put letters together, I started spending hours upon hours devouring anything and everything I could lay my little paws on. I remember reading a lot of adventure books starting in elementary school. A couple authors made a particularly strong impression on me back then1:
Karl May’s books about the Old West. Looking back, they are certainly problematic, but they instilled in me a love of cowboy stories, and an interest in Native Americans, and lower-tech civilizations in general.
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book opened me to the wonderful world of the Indian jungle.
Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers made me appreciate politics and heists.
Being Polish, I obviously read Polish authors with stories such as the Mr Automobile series which involved travel to all kinds of exotic locations.
I loved the Nobel-prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, with novels set in various historical settings from ancient Rome, through the Middle Ages to the Swedish invasion of Poland to 19 century Egypt and Sudan.
I also read strictly historical novels such as the excellent Accursed Kings cycle.
The lasting imprint these books left on me was a somewhat romanticized image of old times, seen through the lens of mystery and adventure. A bit naive of course but I still find premodern settings much more interesting than modern ones. You’ll notice an absence of books focused on modern history, and indeed, I find it hard to get excited about anything set in World War II, for example.
I should mention one more book here: the Bible. I’ve been raised by deeply devout Catholic parents, and the Bible was a regular read. While I am no longer religious, the Bible has left a mark. It added to my love of ancient history, crazy myths, and divine magic. I love playing with religious motives in my worldbuilding and my GM-ing.
Fantasy Books
I still remember the day I came back from the library with a copy of The Lord of the Rings. I was around 10 years old, and I proceeded to devour that book. When I was finished, I read all of Tolkien’s works in a span of weeks. Ever since, I’ve been a fan of fantasy novels. I especially love deep, historical worldbuilding but I also love action and adventure. You can clearly see analogues to the previous section.
Some of my favorites include The Wheel of Time series, Sir Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld, and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea. I love the feeling of immersing myself in another world, and learning about its strange ways. (More recently, I’ve been reading the Conan novels, and they give me a similar feeling, although they’ve aged hilariously badly.)
Speaking of LeGuin, I also dabbled in sci-fi books such as her Hainish Cycle. Frank Herbert’s Dune was the first series I became so obsessed with that I stayed up night after night until I finished all of the books. I also read Asimov, Dick, Lem, and others. My preference generally remained with low-tech fantasy, however.
I’ve been reading fantasy books for 30 years now, and it is impossible to list all of them. From Salvatore’s novels about Drizzt through Pierce Anthony’s Battle Circle to the Witcher cycle to almost everything by Brandon Sanderson to The Name of the Wind, I’ve read it all. There is one particular trilogy, however, I would like to specifically call out as a standout.
It is the Gentleman Bastard series by Scott Lynch. It combines all of my favorite themes in one brilliant package: A bustling city built on top of an mythical polity made of Elderglass; dark, mysterious sorcery; action adventure and heists; an expansive fictional world we get to travel through and explore. A masterpiece.
High School Gaming
It started with board games. I was around 10 years old when we bought the Polish release of Talisman. My siblings and I got all the expansions, and we spent literal weeks walking around the fantasy lands of this game. Other board games followed but this one was definitely the seminal influence.
Actually, it had started with video games: Prince of Persia was my first experience with dungeon crawling. But the video games I really got into were turn-based strategy games, starting with the original Civilization. Its fantastical offshoots Master of Magic and Master of Orion followed. I spent thousands of hours playing various versions of these games over the years. My favorite was the Fall from Heaven II mod for Civilization IV, which featured an incredibly expansive fantasy world. As almost every Polish kid in the 90s, I also played a ton of Heroes of Might and Magic III. I confess I never really played to win in those games. What I really wanted was to tell stories. I was the kind of player who would make objectively suboptimal decisions “because my character would do that.” I may have played strategy games but what I really did was roleplay. Again, rich, interconnected worlds with politics and complicated agendas captivated me.
Finally, at a scout camp in 1993, I was introduced to tabletop RPGs. I played everything that was available on the Polish market in the 90s: the World of Darkness, AD&D 2e and Call of Cthulhu were the games my friends and I played the most.
A couple less obvious developments were:
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, having been the first western RPG to get an official Polish translation, was something I bought immediately and read cover to cover until it fell apart2. But I don’t recall ever playing a single session of it, and to this day I remain one of very few Polish grognards who have never played it. (WFRP enjoys the same status here that original D&D does in the West.)
FUDGE – at one point, I came up with an original world to GM in, and none of our existing RPG books seemed to fit it. I looked online and found FUDGE which I printed out and used for this campaign. The DIY spirit of it made a lasting impression on me, and it directly led to me discovering Fate after coming back to the hobby in 2023: when I decided to play again, I was completely out of the RPG loop, and the first thing I googled was FUDGE which I remembered being fun and free. I was promptly told I must mean Fate because nobody has played FUDGE in decades. Touche.
The Eye of Yrrhedes was the first TTRPG I ran. It was first released in a Polish TTRPG magazine Magia i Miecz as the first ruleset made available in Polish. It predated the aforementioned WFRP, and its deadliness and random character creation started me off with an arguably similar experience to OD&D. I sometimes wonder if my love for the OSR is rooted in nostalgia for my first experiences with this game.
At the same time, I got to experience some early cRPGs such as Betrayal at Krondor. But I wouldn’t get into cRPGs much until much later with Oblivion.
Soon after, I left my home town for university, and more or less abandoned TTRPGs.
Science Stuff
During my short (only 20 year long) break from RPGs, I kept reading fantasy novels. I kept playing video games. I also still felt the need to find a creative outlet for myself. This already being the online era, I got into conlanging, speculative biology, climate science, plate tectonics, and anything and everything I could think of to build more plausible, more immersive worlds. I read science articles, speculated on internet fora, and created worlds for my own amusement.
Some important books that influenced my thinking during that time, in no particular order:
That interest in realism mixed with my longstanding love for historical books and games led to a strong preference for human-centric, low-tech and low-fantasy settings. I have to confess that I find “standard D&D fantasy” a bit silly with its multiple coexisting sapient species, a hodgepodge of monsters without a real ecology, and powerful magic that still somehow doesn’t transform society. It might be one of the reasons why I have yet to pick up any new edition of D&D and strongly prefer something like Swords of the Serpentine for more heroic gaming, and OSR-ish games for most everything else.
That’s Me, Folks
So there you have it. I really enjoyed this trip through memory lane, and it made me understand myself a bit better. My interests have stayed more consistent over my life than I gave them credit for. Mysterious but logical worlds; low-tech and low-fantasy settings; morally grey characters; exploration and travel; clever plots and heists. That’s me alright.
Another thing I noticed is that it didn’t occur to me to list any movie or TV series as an influence. I do watch movies but somehow, they never fully capture my imagination the way more participative media such as books (which forces you to picture the world yourself) and games do.
What about you? What is your own “Appendix N?”
I don’t always remember which books I read when so it’s well possible I read some of those in high school, not in elementary school.
Literally… Poland in the post-communist transformation era had a lot of print quality issues.