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daniel_ream
2017-08-08, 03:22 AM
To paraphrase Perry White, I've been at this thirty years, man and boy; one thing that was true thirty years ago and is still true today is that gamers generally don't seem all that well-read outside of game books and licensed novels. And over time, D&D has gone from being a voracious consumer of myths, legends, fiction, movies, and any passing lore that wasn't nailed down to endlessly recycling its own tropes, looking inward instead of outward.

I'm starting this thread to act as a repository for sources of inspiration for fantasy that you can use in your games, idea mines you can strip for neat concepts, characters, spells, magic, scenes, what-have-you. A list of stuff that gets away from the D&D tropes as hard and fast as possible. I'm going to set a few rules up front to keep things focused on that goal. These rules are specific instances of a Rule Zero: Not D&D, and not something anyone can find in a five second Google search. (I can't enforce them, but do think carefully about why they're there before arguing with them; they matter).


Fantasy sources only: Let's not get into an argument about what fantasy is or isn't; let's neither nitpick grey areas nor insist that Star Wars totally counts because Jedi.
Nothing from the AD&D DMG Appendix N: The OSR has covered Appendix N in exhaustive detail. These works were once obscure, but these days you can just toss "Appendix N" into Google and get tons of commentary and links.
No anime: Similarly, anime is more ubiquitous than it's ever been. It's easy to find hundreds of anime series at the click of a button. You whippersnappers don't know what it was like when we had to smuggle laserdiscs and bootleg VHS tapes out of Japan. Also, get off my lawn. There's also the fact that pretty much all anime trad fantasy is aggressively pushing the D&D cliches, and we're looking to get away from that.
No books published after 1985: This is an arbitrary rule, but D&D pretty much swallowed the fantasy lit genre whole in the 1980's and it's been recycling the D&D tropes ever since. Three of the top selling fantasy book series are based on the author's RPG campaigns. Wait, four, I always forget Feist.

Feel free to violate these rules if your link obeys Rule Zero (Redwall was written in 1986 and I think it counts).

I'll start things off with some random bits in no particular order:

Books
Children's Literature

Earthsea (https://www.goodreads.com/series/40909-earthsea-cycle) cycle - a different look at wizards, with an emphasis on personal responsibility and some Jungian psychology for good measure
The Dark is Rising (https://www.goodreads.com/series/44420-the-dark-is-rising) sequence - short reads, as they're mostly for younger readers. Lots of Britannic folklore and a great collect quest
Monster Blood Tattoo (https://www.goodreads.com/series/42442-monster-blood-tattoo) series - I have no idea how to describe this. Edwardian magic-punk? This is hands down the most original and coherent fantasy setting I've seen in decades.


Classic Fantasy Lit

Spellsinger (https://www.goodreads.com/series/40662-spellsinger) - There's not a lot of light hearted fantasy these days. Talking anthropomorphic animals is a one-shot gag, but the magic system is worth looking at
Castle Perilous (https://www.goodreads.com/series/42982-castle-perilous) - the castle is a nexus and every door opens on a completely different fantasy universe. The castle occupants are people who found their way in and now can't find the door home. Played for laughs, but an alternative to Spelljammer if you want to do a milieu-hopping campaign
Majipoor (https://www.goodreads.com/series/50087-majipoor) - I'm cheating a bit. This is technically science fiction, but it's presented as fantasy. It has magic, strange demi-human races and a medieval technology level. And it's huge - the planet is the size of Jupiter.


Television

The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin (http://www.tv.com/shows/the-adventures-of-teddy-ruxpin/) - No, seriously. There's an airship, a dark lord with an air force of goblins flying magic-punk prop planes, a massive collect quest, weird races, and magic all over the place. This is an epic campaign.
The Adventures of Sinbad (http://www.tv.com/shows/the-adventures-of-sinbad/) - one of the many knockoffs of Hercules and Xena, if you can stomach the apocalyptically bad acting there are some great wandering band of heroes plots you can steal. Unlike Hercules & Xena, it's an ensemble cast so you don't need to rework the plots for multiple PCs
Spellbinder (http://www.tv.com/shows/spellbinder/) - good luck tracking down this Australian kids fantasy show. Pretty stock kids-from-our-world-end-up-in-fantasy-universe plot, but the setting is recognizably trad fantasy without using any of the usual D&D tropes.


Film
Everybody knows the classics like Krull, Conan, the Sword and the Sorceror, Beastmaster, The Scorpion King, etc., etc. You can Google for "top 100 fantasy movies" easy enough. Here's some lesser known stuff.

The Sinbad movies - 1 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051337/), 2 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071569/), 3 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076716/) - The special effects don't age well, but The Golden Voyage of Sinbad has an awesome treasure map, as well as the most sympathetic villain in a fantasy movie ever ("Sire! We have reached the island ahead of Sinbad!" "Excellent! Wine for all the men!")
Painted Skin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_Skin_(2008_film)) and Painted Skin: The Resurrection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_Skin:_The_Resurrection) - these used to be on Netflix, but your local Chinese bootleg store probably has them. These defy description a bit, but there's lots of neat supernatural elements that aren't your usual Western fare, and they're less all over the map tonally than most anime. Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3585004/) and Ice Fantasy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5022298/) are also worth checking out for typically over the top supernatural wu xia.
Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Kingdom:_The_Dragon_King), also seven other names - it would be nice if we had a better adaptation of Die Nibelungenlied than this, but you take what you can get. You'll recognize a lot of the elements Tolkien appropriated, but here they're in their original context. Try to find the full German version.

Altair_the_Vexed
2017-08-08, 04:34 AM
The Time Travellers' Guide to Medieval England / to Elizabethan England / to Restoration Britain (http://www.timetravellersguides.com/index.html)- well written and comprehensive "what you would do, see, smell and hear" guides, covering the real lives of ordinary and extraordinary people in these settings.

Sorry, not fantasy - but amazingly useful!

Eldan
2017-08-08, 05:03 AM
Hmm. A lot of what I'd recommend is actually covered by appendix M, now that I'm looking over it again. And 1985 is a cut-off which excludes a lot of my favourites.

(It's here, for one: http://www.digital-eel.com/blog/ADnD_reading_list.htm)

However, let's recommend some things before the 20th century, maybe?

Le Chanson de Roland: Unknown date and author, 11th century. Heroic sacrifice, battle against evil enemies (well, Muslims, but at the time...), magic swords, a hero fighting thousands alone, a magical horn that can be heard countries away... major influence on just about anything in western fantasy later. Everyone should at least read an abridged version.

The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser, 15th century. Noble knights, evil wizards, giants, demons, satyrs. Tons and tons of rather heavy-handed moral allegory, but still worth a look.

The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas the Elder, 1845. I guess everyone has seen a movie adaptation or two at this point, but I quite liked the book too as a kid. Invents or at least popularizes a lot of swashbuckler tropes.

Let's add Edgar Allan Poe, too. The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death.

I like Lord Dunsany, too. Wrote from the turn of the century to the 20s. Very influential on Lovecraft, but a lot fewer people know him. The Book of Wonder, The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Gods of Pegana.

Oh, and HAH! The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett, 1983. Just about manages to slide in. The first discworld book is a weird parody of Sword and Sorcery fantasy, featuring characters that are, let's say, inspired by Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Conan.

Oh, and my all time favourite, The Neverending Story, Michael Ende, 1979. Surprisingly few people outside of Germany have read it, but pretty much every person remotely interested in fantasy in German of my generation knows it, I'd bet. People will know the movie, which really only covers an abridged version of the first part of the book. The later films don't have anything to do with the book at all. So, one misses all the interesting parts. How Bastian gains near godlike power in Fantasia. How, as a bullied, friendless, depressed kid, it goes massively to his head. How he screws things up by creating monsters for his favourite heroes to fight. How he raises an army of monsters and tries to conquer the ivory tower to crown himself the Emperor. How he fails and has to redeem himself and learn to know himself.

daniel_ream
2017-08-08, 06:04 AM
Sorry, not fantasy - but amazingly useful!

Not D&D, not widely known, and full of good ideas. It counts.


And 1985 is a cut-off which excludes a lot of my favourites.

Feel free to break the rest of the rules if it obeys Rule Zero.


Oh, and my all time favourite, The Neverending Story, Michael Ende, 1979. Surprisingly few people outside of Germany have read it

It was one I was considering, but given that I could create a massive list of just fantasy children's lit I figured I should include more media. I get the impression that gamers tend to watch more TV/movies/anime than read books these days.

Eldan
2017-08-08, 06:28 AM
Alright. Some more recent, less D&D ish fantasy:

Temeraire. A series of short novels set in the Napoleonic wars, with the addition that most nations use dragons as an air-force and artillery. Written very much like a historical novel, with different parts leaning more on the war or more on exploration of other continents. In me, certainly, inspires ideas for historical fantasy settings, instead of the ever-same high fantasy worlds. Also, does description of exploration and hardship quite well.

Jonathan Strange and Mister Norell. A history of British magic, how it was lost in the middle ages and rediscovered in the Napoleonic wars. Features a lot of curses, pacts with fey, ancient books, magical duels and ballroom dancing. Very good for two things a DM can learn from: building the magical elements into a world in a way that feels organic and adding mystical and fairy tale tones to magic. Also, recently a TV series.

The entire genre of urban fantasy is difficult here. A lot of it still feels a bit D&D-ish, with all the classical monsters and heroes, just a different setting.

Perdido Street Station. To a lesser degree, the other books in the same world, The Scar and Iron Council. Might not fulfill the opening question quite, since it feels like it pokes a bit much fun at D&D tropes sometimes and might have element's of the author's campaign world and campaign in it.
However, this one takes all the well known tropes and turns them on their heads. The author is an outspoken socialist, and a well-read one with a PhD on marxism and international law. And it shows.
The book is set in a magical city state under a brutal, fascist government, masked secret police, torture camps, black boots, state capitalism, brutally crushed worker strikes and all. It features a lot of what D&D would feature, too. Exotic magics, weirdly inhuman races, traveling adventurers, actual devils from hell, interdimensional hyper-intelligent spider-artists.
It is about how a mostly innocent scientific experiment accidentally unleashes a monster the government wasa trying to keep under wraps. Things escalate from there, with organized crime, the military, communist rebels and a serial killer all taking an interest in a protagonist who would very much like not to be crushed by all of them.
Very bleak in tone, occasionally, but I love it. Well written. Entirely different tone of fantasy to pretty much everything else.

Of course, with later D&D editions coming round to magitech and politics in their worlds, not entirely new anymore either.

2D8HP
2017-08-08, 08:02 AM
Demon Dogs!

How can you leave out?:

Thundarr the Barbarian! (http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LhAobPugvsk)
"The year, 1994. From out of space, comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the moon, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin. Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old. A world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice. With his companions, Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword, against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!"
:wink:

(1980's Saturday Morning cartoon)

daniel_ream
2017-08-08, 08:17 AM
Jonathan Strange and Mister Norell. A history of British magic, how it was lost in the middle ages and rediscovered in the Napoleonic wars.

The Bartimaeus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartimaeus_Sequence) trilogy is similar, and has a magic system based entirely on summoning and binding spirits. Including scrying mirrors, which work by having the imp bound inside it travel to where you want to view, then come back and tell you what he saw XD


Demon Dogs!

How can you leave out?:

Thundarr the Barbarian! (http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LhAobPugvsk)

Oh, I thought about it, along with the Herculoids. But they both belong to that period when SF and fantasy were still conjoined, and I'm planning on doing an SF thread later where I think they'll fit better.

2D8HP
2017-08-08, 01:11 PM
Okay, I looked at my old DMG to make sure they're not in there, but all pre-'85, in no particular order:

Lloyd Alexander's
The Chronicles of Prydain (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheChroniclesOfPrydain)

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Slmcf9OLL._SY400_.jpg

Starting with 1964's Book of Three, and loosely based on Welsh legends.

Disney did a Black Cauldron (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Disney/TheBlackCauldron) film in 1985 based on the second book in the series.


The 1926 novel
Lud in the Mist (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lud-in-the-Mist)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/88/Lud_in_the_mist.jpg

by Hope Mirrless, reminded me a bit of some works by Lord Dunsany, and Neil Gaiman.


Starting with 1980's Shadow of the Torturer,

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51b27X2EcAL._SY400_.jpg

Gene Wolfe's
Book of the New Sun (https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/nov/23/the-book-of-the-new-sun-science-fiction-ulysses) is a "Dying Earth-ish" classic.


Clark Ashton Smith's work was inexplicably left out of "Appendix N".

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51P1CJaNQ8L._SY400_.jpg

Start with 1934 's

Seven Geases (http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2010/03/pulp-fantasy-library-seven-geases.html?m=1)



You want stories of a Swords & Sorcery heroine written in the 1930's?

Well, I suggest reading
Jirel of Joiry (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/941226.Jirel_of_Joiry)
by Catherine L. Moore, the first story of which was published in 1934.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/2b/Jirel1969.jpg/220px-Jirel1969.jpg


Stories of a Swords & Sorcery heroine that were written before most of the Forum was born? Any more?

Why yes Joanna Russ's
The Adventures of Alyx (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Alyx) fits the bill!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d2/The_Adventures_of_Alyx_%28book%29_cover.jpg

Incidentally, Joanna Russ in her 1967 short story "Bluestocking" has her heroine Alyx reminisce about Fritz Leiber's character "Fafhrd" (an old favorite of mine from Appendix N), and Leiber in his 1968 story "The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_Against_Wizardry) includes an appearance by Joanna Russ's heroine Alyx!


Get reading people!