Besides the obvious giants of fantasy like Tolkien, Robert E Howard, CS Lewis, or more modern writers like Brandon Sanderson or Patrick Rothfuss. What novels and stories have you picked up and read that has influenced your games or the characters you've played?
>>98159341>Tolkien>REHRespectable choices. >CS Lewislol. LMAO even.
>>98159341I only read mindbreak loli industrialized rape harem hentai
>>98159341>Tolkien, Robert E Howard, CS LewisRespectable choices.>Brandon SandersonLol LMAO.
>>98159426>>98159461>larping as /lit/izensMost cringe thing on this entire board.
>>98159341Not a novel but the DM for my group has been reading Elderflora, an exploration of the biological history and cultural traditions surrounding the world's oldest trees and tree species. She said it's been giving her some inspiration for our next campaign.
>>98159484Go back to your general.
>>98159588>schizomodebased
>>98159341Go back to >>>/lit/.That said, Robin Hobb and James Islington are both excellent. The latter is more uneven than the former.
>>98159428Name every single one and titles in japanese and english and links and pictures
>>98159730Me asking this to Gary Gygax when he was using Howard and Tolkien as influence for D&D
"Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, commonly known as Lord Dunsany, was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist. He published more than 90 books during his lifetime, and his output consisted of hundreds of short stories, plays, novels, and essays; further works were published posthumously. Having gained a name in the 1910s as a writer in the English-speaking world, he is best known today for the 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland's Daughter, and his first book, The Gods of Pegāna, which depicts a fictional pantheon. Many critics feel his early work laid grounds for the fantasy genre."Only reason I even know about him is because Howard Phillips Lovecraft cribbed ideas from Gods of Pegāna.
>>98159341I don't, because I don't want my games or characters influenced by the works that spawned generic D&D slop.
>>98159762Tell us about a few of your characters, anon.
>>98159341BerserkRecord of Lodoss WarFrieren: Beyond Joinery EndGoblin SlayerGrimgarAs for "old western works"the Elric saga (Moorcock)Dying Earth series (J. Vance)(Though these were heavy inspired older fantasy like Starship Troopers is for sci-fi. Still want to mention them as people forget about them even though their effects are seen EVERYWHERE.)
>>98159742Sidney Syme did some great illustrations for Dunsay's books and I think The Book of Wonder was done backwards; he got weird fantasy art from Syme and then made up stories to go with them. I'm a big believer in the methodology of "just make up evocative shit as you go, put more of whatever your players are responding to in, and go back and autism out all the connective tissue between sessions". Just channel your inner Anglo-Irish manor-born chess and pistol shooting champion.
No one here knows Patrick Rothfuss roflcopter
>>98160127I attempted to read some Patrick Rothfuss. I haven't touched a fantasy novel since except to read my son the Hobbit.
>>98160143Damn, he was so bad he made you swear off a whole genre. That's rough.
>>98160145It wasn't offensively bad like the Orc City guy, more of an overwhelming blandness.
>>98159740How much did this impact your last session?
Stephen R. DonaldsonMichael MoorcockMervyn PeakeUrsula K. Le GuinC. L. MooreClark Ashton SmithLawrence Watt-EvansWilliam BlakePhilip José FarmerPauli Kidd"Lawrence Watt-Evans (born 1954) is one of the pseudonyms of American science fiction and fantasy author Lawrence Watt Evans"Fucking Wikipedia.
>>98160280Todd Howard showed up and I sucked his chess piece
>>98159341right now im reading Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticusbefore that i read Vermis I and II
>>98159341The Death of Ivan Ilych
>>98160127Lucky them.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Yoshiyuki Tomino's Gundam novelizations are the ones I keep coming back to for science fiction. There are better SF works out there on the whole, but I feel like they have just the right balance of epic interplanetary conflict and "street level" humanity.
>>98160127I tried the name of the wind and couldn't get halfway through it out of boredomHe's painfully mediocre
>>98160342SAXOOOOOOO
>>98159341I've been running Pendragon lately, so basically just T. H. White. His telling of the story is the one modern culture kind of takes as the main Arthurian canon and I'm not enough of a nerd to try to actually read Le Mort d'Arthur.Anyone who's read it knows if I should get over myself and actually read that?
>>98160280By creating the very game genre
>>98159919I don't play any fantasy games currently. I'm also not really good at making characters IMO, even though the people I play with keep telling me to shut the fuck up because I'm wrong. This will take multiple replies. Will include pics.>Perfect Draw!He's the not!kaiba of the party. Since his mother died when he was 6, his father has been shaping him into his shadow, a copy of him, and joining the school and club for card games was his first real act of independence. Given he's been taught not to care about others by his father, his path so far has been breaking that conditioning and learning how to give a shit about people other than his sister who is stuck in hospital due to a weak constitution (his mother died giving birth to her). Currently, the party's in shambles after someone in it nearly killed an NPC (the duels use cables between the disks to shock people with more and more in tense shocks as they take damage, she used a bullshit card she took off one of the bad guys to deal like 60 damage which in perfect draw is more than 10x the amount for a signifigant duel) and blew up his disk which caught his arm in the explosion, then hid this fact from the party until the big bad rolled up and showed everyone.My character, having started to understand friendship and value the other party members + NPC allies in the card club started trying to piece the mess back together, two people (one a Turncoat, the class that means he used to be part of the evil organization but defected pre-game the other is whatever the anime protagonist class is, the resolved I think?) were really pissed and walked out when that character's friend in the party tried to get e veryone to hear her reasons before flying off the handle. With the help of the turncoat's friend (another PC), he and my character met and had a serious talk about things, and after a friendly battle which squashed their previous beef they walked away better off. Now he has to convince the other one.
>>98159919>>98163060>Digimon Digital Adventures 1.4, game 1Near-future setting with VRMMO tech (that was just sort of the start of the game, it's less important right now), sort of horror themed? My human character's a stubborn but scrawny nerd, the youngest member of the party (he turned 18 after they got out of the MMO during a timeskip), he started out rather flippant of others, and rather mean towards his digimon (who was a dokunemon and rather weak in battle), but after literally dying in the game and being revived he started to learn to not be such a dick and try to be friends with others (his first attempt set off someone's torment check but hey he tried), and ultimately he's come around and taken an NPC tamer under his wing in a manner of speaking.His partner is your typical sort of stoic autist if you understand (y'know the type who seem cool and mysterious but they're really just cringe), an OC digimon called RogueHudiemon (Ultimate/Perfect stage, evolved from Stingmon), who's the stealth expert of the party and despite her awkwardness in social situations she's a skilled tactician and deadly in a fight, she started off with a few uh... dark evos but came around eventually when the human learned to not be a dick, and now they're solidly partners. She's also the sort of comic relief through not understanding normal human things from time to time. This is a spoiler for that game so if any other players are here don't click it She's contracted to some eldrtich being of the hunt, to not take life recklessly and to understand the uniqueness she robs from the world as a condition for her access to ultimate/perfect.
>>98163088>>98163060>>98159919>Digimon Digital Adventures 2eThe premise of the game is a bunch of characters from older games (or alternate versions thereof) have been thrown into some weird in-between space void at a point in their timeline. This character is a remake of my first and arguably worst character for DDA. The human is your typical nice guy airhead pretty boy, he's good at sports and quite friendly but dumb as a sack of hammers. He was clipped into this area during a fight early in the campaign he was from (it's an alternate version, the original had twin digimon), and he's trying his best to deal with the rest of the party, his own partner, and the situations they're in though it's caused him to second-guess his own usefulness a few times.His partner is Kinkakumon in greymon colors, because she evolves from an Agumon. Don't have ultimate yet in this game, but it's SkullGreymon. She's your typical big dumb battle retard, always focused on food and fighting, and has basically no manners. She's usually got to be wrangled by her tamer because she's quick to pick a fight she can't win, but she's also - as you might expect - someone who fights for her friends, and especially to protect her tamer in this fucked up weird void world they're stuck in. She's taken a sort of mentorship with a MasterTyrannomon NPC we met who's a reference to another game the GM was part of and has shown up a few times.
>>98159919>>98163060>>98163088>>98163115>Digimon Digital Adventures 1.4, game 2It's set in the late 90s, the premise is we're trying to prevent Y2K. The game is nearly over, we have maybe 2 fights left against a fucked up mutated shoutmon who's not a digimon anymore after fucking up a digifusion/digixros with Machinedramon/Mugendramon. This is probably my weakest character I currently play, but that's because I gave her less of an intense personality because the digimon is the white mage. She's from the south so speaks with an accent and loves animals and tries to show everyone kindness, and keeps showing it to those she's friend with. She's not got much of a spine though, so that mostly falls to her partner.Her digimon is ANcientMermaimon (mega level, we all have it now), who has a low tolerrance for morons (there are a few of those in the party) or those who would be mean to her partner, but otherwise has basically become the team mom, trying to wrangle the tards and keep everyone safe with her healing and buffing abilities. She's struggled with the fact that the Digital World in this setting works in cycles, and usually as the spirit(s) of water she's either relegated to a battery to create the world via susanoomon or a minor villain. This is the first time she's had a chance to be a hero, and part of her is terrified of the future cycles.
>>98159919>>98163060>>98163088>>98163115>>98163137>Original Dragonball SystemSet in an alternate timeline during the Dragonball era, the party were sent by Cold Force (not Freeza Force) middle management to investigate earth, but crashed. We've been stranded more than a year, have trained under Roshi, and were going to participate in a tou rnament until the Red Bow (not red ribbon, AU timeline shit) attacked with a winter soldier'd Yamcha (who we'd meant to help puar find since we met him early on, he's grown close to my character). After this, we were going to Korin's tower not only to train but to find some nearby dragonballs before the army can + regrow my character's tail (presumably with senzu, it got hacked off by yamcha). The character is the one I sort of have the most information about since I wrote some short logs/stories about her backstory and from her perspective during the game recounting events. She has the same gene as broly in super, so she was sent to a moonless world by the saiyans, she got picked up by a low ranking cold force captain and brought onto the ship where the whispers about saiyans and what they are like shaped the character into the antithesis of a saiyan; intelligent, averse to battle, a mechanic who worked on cold force ships. Things went well for her for a while then she crashed out hard after her tail got cut off. She sort of... dissociated while in Ikari the first time, nearly killing the world tournament announcer, another party member, and puar ( the party member took the hit for the other two and it did almost enough damage to 1 hit him since he ate 2 full power super moves in one go) and then had a huge crashout about how dangerous she was and got told the le gend of the super saiyan by gine. We helped some porpoise people be saved from General Blue on the way to Korin's tower. Currently, she just wants to get her tail back and put all this Red Bow nonsense behind her, and maybe help Puar get his friend Yamcha back.
>>98161468You should read the wedding feast of sir gawain and dame ragnalle if you can handle some middle English. Funniest shit ever.
>>98159341So, there was a trilogy of schlock fantasy novels that I picked up during my formative years that always stuck with me called Dragon Weather. They are not actually that amazing, but as a young nerd they seemed very cool and I can point to how they've informed my sensibilities as a GM. The premise is that dragons sometimes infect humans with a combination of ingested dragon venom and blood, typically by accident. It happens only rarely, but the infected people become functionally immortal and typically end up becoming powerful and influential figures by leveraging that immortality. But what one of these dragon blooded people figured out is that this is how dragons breed. After about a thousand years of incubating, the person transforms into a baby dragon that then grows stronger with age forever.He also figured out how to kill one. Dragons are manifested fire and darkness, and as a result you need something that matches that nature to cut their hide. All other weapons fail to cut their skin. So you need to pierce their heart with obsidian to kill a dragon, which is a problem because they get big so to reach the heart you need a long spear or a harpoon fired from a balista. So this one guy knows how to kill dragons, and how dragons breed, and he basically uses this information to take the entire dragon race hostage. Turning the dragons into his own personal hit squad, because if the information he knows becomes public the dragons will go extinct. With dragons secretly at his command, he becomes immensely powerful and wealthy, riding out his thousand years before he turns into a dragon in luxury and power. The protagonist is a young dragonblooded guy looking for revenge against this one asshole and, looking for ways to bring him down, uncovers the secrets behind his influence and turns around and leverages them to take him and the entire dragon species down.
>>98159341A Canticle for LeibowitzOtoyomegatariSabers of ParadiseAgainst the Grain
>>98163060I haven't seen too much with Perfect Draw! I backed it but sadly hard to find people who want to learn and play the game. Like the card/deck creator mechanic and like how the set the card battle though explaining it is like trying to explain a card game to someone who never plays, which doesn't help get people to learn it.
>>98159341Miguel Serrano.
>>98159426CS Lewis was and is outstanding, you have no soul.
As far as stories as opposed to writers, and as far as how I play,The Gunslinger, by Stephen KingEisenhorn: Xenos, by Dan AbnettDumarest of Terra Series by E.C. TubbFoolkiller, by Steve GerberMusashi , by Eiji YoshikawaModesty Blaise, by Peter O'DonnellLes Norton Series, by Robert G. BarrettBiker, by Mike BaronEdged Weapons, by William GoldmanThe Final Programme, by Michael MoorcockStainless Steel Rat Series by Harry HarrisonWasp, by Eric Frank RussellThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas AdamsDeathworld, by Harry HarrisonThe Lure of the Basilisk, by Lawrence Watt-EvansShibumi, by TrevanianJames Bond series, by Ian FlemingThe DNA Cowboys Series, by Mick FarrenGreenwich Village Trilogy, by Chester Anderson, Michael Kurland, and T.A. WatersDestiny's Road, by Larry Niven
Don Quixote
>>98164132>Otoyomegatari
>>98165124The mental image of a Don Quixote inspired campaign, where the players are senile old men attacking windmills, has brought me joy.Thank you, Anon.
/lit/izen checking in.>Don Quixote>Arabian Nights>Moby Dick>Remains of the Day>>98167852My characters have never tilted at windmills, but one has tilted at many a "whale" deep in a forest or dungeon.
>>98165124I have this imagine now of your average isekai MC being actually a delusional rich kid wandering Tokyo, thinking his cynical maids that are there for the money are his harem retinue.
Definitely Jehreg. Some Proton/Phase. Elfquest. I can name several that I've used. Some comic stuff influenced things for epic, legendary weapons. Negative Burn. That's all I can really talk about anymore and everyone besides my d&d buddies despise me. I'm a failed to launch author. Anyone else go through that?
